first acts had been to free her
from the fortress in which, for ten years or more, the old King had kept
her. There were no prison-traces upon her when she met her son, and
fixed her son's mistress with a calculating eye. A low-browed, swarthy
woman, heavily built, with the wreck of great beauty upon her, having
fingers like the talons of a bird and a trap-mouth; it was not hard to
see that into the rocky mortice where Richard had been cast there went
some grains of flint from her. She had slow, deliberate movements of the
body, but a darting mind; she was a most passionate woman, but frugal of
her passion, eking it out to cover long designs. Whether she loved or
hated--and she could glow with either lust until she seemed
incandescent--she went slowly to work. The quicker she saw, the slower
she was reducing sight into possession. With all this, like her son
Richard, she was capable of strong revulsions. Thus she had loved, then
hated King Henry; thus she was to spurn, then to cling to Jehane.

At Rouen she did her best to crush the young girl to the pavement with
her intolerable flat-lidded eyes. When Jehane saw her stand on the steps
of the church amidst the pomp of Normandy and England--three archbishops
by her, William Marshal, William Longchamp, the earls, the baronage, the
knights, heralds, blowers of trumpets; when at her example all this
glory of Church and State bent the knee to Richard of Anjou, and he,
kneeling in turn, kissed his mother's hand, then rose and to the others
gave his to be kissed; when he, vowed to her, pledged to her, known of
her more secretly than of any, passed through the blare of horns alone
into the soaring nave--Jehane shivered and crossed herself, faltered a
little, and might have fallen. Her King was doing by her as she had
prayed him; but the scrutiny of the Queen-Mother had been a dry gloss to
the text. She had been able to bear her forsaking with a purer heart,
but for the narrow eyes that witnessed it and gleamed. One of her
ladies, Magdalene Coucy, put an arm about her; so Countess Jehane
stiffened and jerked up her head, and after that walked with no more
faltering. If she had seen, as Milo saw, Gilles de Gurdun glowering at
her from a corner, it might have gone hard with her. But she did not.

They crowned Richard Duke of Normandy, and to him came all the barons of
the duchy one by one, to do him homage. And first the Archbishop of
Rouen, in whose allegiance was that same Sir G