The only drop of comfort vouchsafed to Joan during all those weary hours of agonizing anxiety came from Bertrand d’Artois, who had been led, somehow, to suspect the agency of the Duke of Durazzo in respect to Maria’s disappearance; a drop, however, that Joan refused to accept, saying that such a thing was beyond the bounds of probability. For no one, even of Duke Charles’s household, let alone the Duke himself, had so much as set foot within the castle precincts since the day when he had left the place in anger. No stranger, even, had set foot, that morning of Maria’s disappearance, inside the gates, except Nicholas of Melazzo, for whose integrity Tommaso Pace, Prince Andrew’s own body-servant, was willing to answer on his life.
In this manner a month went by, bringing to Joan despair of ever seeing her sister again, until on April 30, 1343, there occurred an event so amazing as to deprive her at first of every other sensation; until her astonishment turned to fury at the insolent daring of it. On first learning of it, she refused to believe it, and then, as the certainty of it took the place of incredulity, her indignation knew no bounds.
For, on the stroke of noon on that day, she learned that her sister had become the legal wife of Charles of Durazzo, having been publicly married to him at an altar erected in the open air and in sight of all the people before the church of Saint John by the Sea, not a bowshot distant from the great gates of the Palazzo Durazzo. The marriage had been solemnized by Duke Charles’s chaplain, the necessary dispensation for the marriage of cousins, one of them being a minor, having been received from Rome the day before; and, at its conclusion, the newly-wedded pair had faced the spectators hand in hand, and had solemnly declared that they took one another as husband and wife, calling upon God and the people to bear witness to it. Their announcement had been acclaimed with tumultuous vociferations of applause and delight; after which the Duke and Duchess of Durazzo received the Papal benediction, prior to being escorted in procession round the city by their men-at-arms and the sympathetic populace to the beating of drums and the blowing of trumpets.
So that Charles of Durazzo was now the husband—and, it need hardly be said, the master—of the thirteen-year-old heir to the throne. And when, after curbing the useless rage in her heart, Joan summoned the pair to receive her congratulations, she realized her folly in quarrelling with that all-daring and remorseless man; also she understood that nothing short of the throne itself—let the price be what it might—would ever satisfy his lust of power and glory and hate.
Thenceforth the temptation of Joan to be in very truth at once the real ruler of her own dominions and at the same time the arbiter of her own destiny increased and grew to terrific powers; the desire to satisfy her wishes absolutely in everything became a kind of diabolical possession, sweeping away every consideration of virtue and of mere worldly prudence; save only when, in rare intervals of reaction, she would fall upon her knees in the solitude of her chamber, her face in her hands, sobbing as though her heart would break with the horror of her situation.
CHAPTER XII A MEDIÆVAL NIGHTMARE
To judge from the sequence of events, it would appear almost certain that, in his amazing marriage with Princess Maria, Charles of Durazzo must have had the assistance—or, at least, the tacit approval—of Andrew of Hungary; and that, in return for this, Charles had promised Andrew that he would take his part and support him against the faction of the Queen. Certain it is, at all events, that, immediately after the marriage of Charles and Maria, the party of Andrew, his Hungarian barons and soldiers, redoubled in arrogance towards the Neapolitans, and their excesses of violence and rapine which, erstwhile, had been subjected to an intermittent restraint, now became such as to evoke not only complaints but threats as well on the part of the unfortunate people. Andrew, himself, however, took no notice of such protests, but appeared, rather, to approve the outrages committed by his underlings.
And as certain was it in the opinion of his enemies that the time was come when they might strike him with propriety as well as with impunity.
On August 31, 1344, Queen Joan came, surrounded by her friends, to the Church of Santa Chiara, there to do homage for her crown to the Papal legate, Cardinal San Martino de Monti; for the Kingdom of Naples, having been bestowed by the Pope upon the House of Anjou after the deposition by them of that of the Hohenstaufen, was considered as a fief of the Church.