LITMIR.BIZ

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however, for René’s peace of mind she had fallen in love. For the first time in her whole life her heart took precedence over her head. She loved the strange cynical young man who she now suspected had taken her as his mistress merely because several of his friends had been competing for the honour and it had amused him to win far too easily what they coveted.

      René might be shallow, but she was certainly not stupid. She was a Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen and had contrived to make herself so useful that, if Catherine did know about her indiscretions, she turned a blind eye to them.

      René’s love for the Duc made her not so subtle in dealing with him as she would have been if her emotions had not been involved.

      “You have not answered my question,” she insisted. “Why were you so long with the ‘divine Diane’? Is it perhaps that you too find her divine?”

      “We seem to have had this very same argument before,” the Duc said, surprisingly good-humouredly. “I admire Madame La Duchesse enormously, as you well know, but I do not yet contemplate suicide by rivalling His Majesty for her attention.”

      René laughed again.

      “I am being stupid, I know that, but I am jealous – jealous of all the time you spend away from me. I cannot think why you cannot take me to your estates in the country. Who would know if we went there by different roads? Oh, Jarnac, let’s be alone for a little while.”

      She pressed herself close against him and laid her head on his shoulder. He put his arms around her but almost perfunctorily as if his mind was elsewhere.

      “You have been with the Duchesse at Anet all the week,” she pouted, “and yet when you come back to Paris you spend the evening with her while I wait alone and think that you will never come to me. Are you surprised that I feel hurt and a little resentful?”

      “There is no need for either,” the Duc replied. “The Duchesse had asked me to be present when she received Mistress Sheena McCraggan, the Scots girl who has arrived to take the place of Madame de Paroy, to whom Mary Stuart had taken a violent dislike.”

      The Comtesse drew herself out of his arms.

      “So the new Gouvernante has arrived!” she exclaimed. “I thought she was not due until tomorrow. What is she like? Is she pretty?”

      “Small, attractive – yes, I think you would say distinctly pretty,” the Duc answered.

      “The Queen will be pleased,” the Comtesse murmured.

      “The Queen! Why should she be interested?”

      The question was sharp.

      “Have you forgotten Lady Fleming?” the Comtesse enquired with a little sidelong glance of her eyes.

      The Duc looked puzzled for a moment.

      “Lady Fleming!” he repeated. “Oh, you mean the previous Governess who attracted the King for those few months when the Duchesse was ill and away from the Court.”

      “So you do remember,” René smiled.

      “A nasty scandal and one that should never have happened to anyone connected with Mary Stuart,” the Duc said almost harshly. Then added slowly, “Do you mean that the Queen was pleased about that?”

      René shrugged her almost naked shoulders.

      “Pourquoi pas? The King’s attention was then diverted from the hated Diane. Even her witchcraft did not work when she was indisposed.”

      “By all that is Holy!” the Duc exclaimed. “I have never heard such a monstrous idea, that the Queen should be pleased at her husband’s indiscretion with some strange woman simply because it made him unfaithful to the woman he has adored since he was a young boy.”

      “And who is eighteen years older than he is!” the Comtesse said sharply. “If that is not witchcraft I should like to know what is.”

      “I will not discuss it,” the Duc retorted angrily. “It is the Duchesse de Valentinois who has taught the King how to rule. Without her France would be in a sorry state today.

      If he loves her to the exclusion of all else it is not surprising. But, if the Queen or anyone else imagines that his devotion is likely to be forgotten or diverted by any little foreigner who comes tripping into The Palace on one pretext or another, they are very much mistaken.”

      “How fortunate the Duchesse is to have such a champion,” René said softly with a little edge on her voice which told all too clearly that she was piqued and annoyed by the turn the conversation had taken.

      “What you have just suggested is disgusting and indecent,” the Duc asserted.

      He walked across the room away from the Comtesse and then turned to look back at her. Her robe had slipped from one white shoulder and a long slim thigh was revealed by the swift movement of her body.

      She was enticing and seductive and they both knew it. And yet it seemed to him that for a moment the vision of another small face with angry flashing blue eyes and a trembling mouth came between him and the woman seated at the end of the chaise-longue.

      It was a face haloed by unruly golden curls a face with skin so white and so unblemished that it seemed almost transparent.

      He had not noticed until now, he thought suddenly, that René’s skin was indeed not her strongest point. It was rather pock-marked and, although she was just twenty-four, there were already small lines at the corners of her eyes, which were the toll of late nights and too much of the heady wine in golden goblets at the banquets given nightly at The Palace.

      For a moment he felt almost repulsed by the thought of his lips on her red expectant mouth. Then somehow the heat and the perfume of the room made him feel that any effort to escape from the inevitable was hardly worthwhile.

      And so he stood looking at her as she rose very slowly to her feet and she swept back the rustling robe from her shimmering body and moved swiftly towards him.

      He felt her arms going around his neck and drawing his head down to hers, felt her lips searching for his and heard her whisper,

      “Why are we talking? It is such a waste of time. Oh, Jarnac! Jarnac! I have missed you so much – ”

      *

      In another part of The Palace, Sheena, too tired to sleep, tossed from side to side on the most comfortable bed she had ever known. There was so much to think about and so much for her to consider.

      And yet she was conscious that her overriding emotion was one of fear.

      She had expected to feel small, insignificant and apprehensive in any Royal Palace. She had even expected that she would feel afraid in the presence of the King and the Queen. But what she had not anticipated was this feeling of being an utter failure, of having to return to those who had sent her and tell them that there was nothing she could do, nothing she could say as everything was completely and absolutely different from what they had imagined.

      She had thought to find Mary Stuart a child. But she found her a woman and, what was more, a very educated young woman.

      “It is really time that I should finish with lessons,” Mary Stuart had said. “I am proficient now in Latin, Greek, Spanish and Italian. When I insisted that Madame de Paroy should be dismissed, I had not thought that they would send me anyone from Scotland.”

      “I do not think that your Statesmen meant to impose another Teacher upon you,” Sheena commented humbly. They sent me more as a – a companion.”

      “I have many of those,” Mary Stuart replied a little wearily and then with that engaging easy Stuart charm she added,

      “But it is nice to have you here. A new face is always a divertissement. Come, you must meet the others.”

      “No, no,” Sheena protested hastily. “Not at this moment, please, ma’am. Let’s be alone

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