“My father!” cried I. “Joan, I know nothing of my father, save only that he angered Queen Isabel, and for what cause wis I not.”
“For two causes: first, because the King her husband loved him, and she was of that fashion that looked on all love borne by him as so much robbed from herself. But the other was that very thing—that she was orthodox, and he was—what the priests called an heretic. There might be other causes: some men say he was proud, and covetous, and unpitiful. I know not if it be true or no. But that they writ him down an heretic, as also they did his father, and Archdeacon Baldok—so much I know.”
I felt afraid to ask more, and yet I had great longing to hear it.
“And my mother?” said I. I think I was like one that passes round and round a matter, each time a little nearer than before—wishing, and yet fearing, to come to the kernel of it.
“I have heard somewhat of her,” said Joan, “from the Lady Julian my grandmother. She was a Leybourne born, and she wedded my grandfather, Sir John de Hastings, whose stepmother was the Lady Isabel La Despenser, your father’s sister. I think, from what she told me, your mother was a little like—Sister Roberga.”
I am sorely afraid I ought not to have answered as I did, for it was—“The blessed saints forfend!”
“Not altogether,” said Joan, with a little laugh. “I never heard that she was ill-tempered. On the contrary, I imagine, she was somewhat too easy; but I meant, a little like what Mother Gaillarde calls a butterfly—with no concern for realities—frivolous, and lacking in due thought.”
“Was your grandmother, the Lady Julian, an admirer of these new doctrines?” said I.
“They were scarcely known in her day as they have been since,” said Joan; “only the first leaves, so to speak, were above the soil: but so far as I can judge from what I know, I should say, not so. She was a great stickler for old ways and the authority of the Church.”
“And your mother?” I was coming near delicate ground, I felt, now.