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Page 47
lent with downcast eyes, biting her lips to control the laughter that bubbled in her throat, Joanna was really better suited temperamentally to settle than Alinor. She had the patience to soothe the ruffled feathers of the contestantsinstead of publicly calling them idiotsand satisfy one group's wounded pride without offending the other.
Courtesy demanded that gravity be maintained while the judge and her escort were refreshed in the mayor's house and received the ladies of the town worthies. Joanna and Geoffrey were both well and rigidly trained. There were many nobles who would have scorned an invitation from a common tradesman; there were many who would have laughed at the devouring interest in the eyes of the tradesmen's wives and daughters. Geoffrey patiently and softly answered questions about his accoutrements and ability that no noblewoman would have asked, and Joanna spoke freely on matters less romantic but of more immediate interest, like the problems of managing a household ten or twenty times larger than their own.
Training keeps the face grave and the voice steady, but it does not put old hearts into young bodies. Geoffrey and Joanna laughed all the way back to the keep, gasping out the naive remarks they had needed to endure and answer to each other until Geoffrey nearly dropped Joanna as he lifted her from her mare. She called him a clumsy lout; he slapped her on the buttock as freely as when they were children, and they staggered back into the keep together, to trip over Brian, laugh a little more, and finally rid themselves of armor and elaborate garments.
They were quieter at dinner. Joanna was a little tired with the heat and her past anxiety, and she listened quietly to Geoffrey's description of the arrangement Ian had made for mustering the troops. It dawned upon her while he spoke that the muster was for war, and that war in Wales was no tame matter. The thought brought Joanna's eyes from the clumsy behavior of a maidservant, which she had been watching with disapproval while Geoffrey spoke, to Geoffrey just beside her. The sweat-damp linen shirt he wore

 
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