LITMIR.BIZ

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wrapping her hand in a handkerchief so she wouldn’t leave telltale spots of blood, she began to sort through the box. The papers appeared to be personal letters to Don Carlos and his attendants, as well as an inventory of the rich gifts brought for King Henry. She had been right, there was not much here to be of help to King François. All the information she gleaned as she surveyed the missives told her only what she already knew, that the Spanish were to stop the French alliance in any way they could. That they were allied with Queen Katherine, as always.

      She quickly memorised a few useful titbits, and started to put them back carefully in the order she found them. But in the bottom she found one more letter.

      Marguerite unfolded the parchment, soft from its journey, from having been read many times, even though the date written on the back indicated it had only been delivered yesterday.

      “For the most exalted Duchess de Bernaldez—or should I say Mother? I trust your journey was safe and England all you expected. May you and Don Carlos achieve all your ends and return home to meet your new grandson, Antonio Velazquez. Julietta was safely delivered…”

      Ah, a letter from her son. For the first time, Marguerite felt she was intruding by reading those words. She started to refold the letter, when Nicolai’s name caught her eye and she glanced at it again.

      “…as I cannot be there to guard you myself, you must always continue to put your faith in Nicolai and trust him as you would me. I know I told you this before, when I sent him to you, but I will rest easier knowing he watches over you. My dearest Mother, you go into the lion’s den at Greenwich, yet Nicolai’s sword arm is strong, his mind shrewd. He saved my life, and Julietta’s, too, or there would be no Antonio crying in his cradle this morning. Listen to his counsel and stay close to him, and with God’s blessing we will all be together this summer.”

      Strong and shrewd. Truly he was both, the most formidable obstacle she had found in England. The Englishmen, like Tilney and his ilk, were blinded by her good looks and fine clothes, her sweet smiles. They did not suspect she was anything more than a French featherhead. And King Henry was too occupied by his diplomatic meetings and Mistress Boleyn to even look about him. Her face, the face she inherited from her beautiful courtesan mother, was always the best mask to hide behind.

      Yet when Nicolai looked at her with those sky-blue eyes, she sensed that he saw more than her pretty façade. That his own life of masks enabled him to peer right through hers, to all the tangled, black ugliness beneath.

      Why could he not just go away, back to Venice or Russia or—or anywhere but here?

      Marguerite put the missive back in the box and slammed the lid. In the next room, Dona Elena’s bedchamber, she heard a burst of laughter and chatter as maids came in to clean. It reminded her that she had lingered too long over the papers. She clasped the lock and dashed out of the room, silent on her tiptoes, skirts held close to her sides. Once in the corridor, she smoothed her hair and glided slowly away, as if she hadn’t a care in the world and no reason to hurry.

      It was quiet in this wing of the palace, aside from the servants airing the rooms and setting fires in the grates. The men were all in conference with the English king, and Dona Elena and her ladies walked in the gardens again. Marguerite had seen them set out from her window, and excused herself from Claudine to check this box while she had the chance. Marguerite doubted Claudine, embroidering with her attendants and snappish from morning sickness, missed her at all.

      She started to turn back toward the French apartments, but realised she had no desire to sit placidly and sew with a woman who did not like her, who thought she dallied with her husband. Marguerite had listened to the other ladies giggle over the démodé English fashions until she thought she would scream from it. Whatever had come over her in the gardens last night—that wild madness that made her long to fly away into the sky—had not left her. Not entirely.

      Rather than go to her room, she turned instead down the staircase and followed it until she was out the palace doors and into the garden once more. She did not wear a cloak or surcoat, only her black-and-gold velvet gown, but she did not feel the bite of the wind as she hurried along a gravel pathway.

      There were not so many courtiers out this morning, just a few people whispering together as they strolled along. They watched her curiously as she passed, yet no one stopped her. She feared she could not make polite conversation right now anyway.

      She hardly knew where she was going, she just walked and walked, hoping that the exercise would burn away that strange restlessness. She rounded a corner of one of the tall, sculpted hedges, and found that her steps had led her to the theatre.

      The doors stood half-open to the winter breeze, and she drifted toward them, as if compelled to move forward by some dream or spell. She didn’t want to go in there. What if Nicolai waited, luring her to him with his tightrope, with a freedom she knew was not hers? But her steps wouldn’t turn, and she soon found herself inside.

      The splendid theatre, with its elaborate painted sky, its shimmering hangings, was silent and darkened. The only sound was a faint, distant hammering as Sir Henry Guildford’s servants built new scenery. The air was chilly, smelling of new paint, sawdust, sweat and stiff satin. Like all places of night-time merriment, in the day it had a forlorn, shabby air, a deep loneliness that suited her strange mood today.

      Marguerite shut the doors quietly behind her and crept deeper inside. Soon, this space would be a castle or a meadow, Mount Olympus or a heavenly cloud. She preferred it like this, quiet and empty, all its possibilities still ahead, still intact.

      She tiptoed into Nicolai’s little room. The rope was coiled in the corner, a few travelling chests stacked against the walls. Had she not just determined to stay away from Nicolai, that he was a distraction she did not need? Yet here she was.

      He was not there, but she could vow that the smell of him lingered in the air, that clean, fresh herbal scent. The very essence of him.

      Marguerite opened one of the chests, peering inside to find thin, shining rapiers wrapped in a length of brown velvet. They were stage blades, of course, not as sharp and lethal as her own hidden sword and daggers, but dangerous enough if wielded correctly.

      She remembered one afternoon in the Piazza San Marco, when she watched Nicolai and his troupe performing for a raucous Carnival crowd. It was a scene where an adventurous wife and her lover were confronted by the buffoonish husband. Nicolai was the lover, of course, and even masked, clad in closefitting, multi-coloured motley silk, he radiated sexuality, bawdy good humour. All the comic wiles of the wife and lover did not turn away the angry husband, and Nicolai at last had to fight him. Perhaps with these very blades, he had parried and feinted, pricked and prinked, tumbling and leaping out of the increasingly clumsy husband’s way.

      At last the husband was defeated, frustrated, his black robes in rags, as the Arlecchino ran off with his wife. By then, every woman around Marguerite would have gladly shared the wife’s fate.

      Marguerite, though, now sympathised with the husband. She, too, was most thoroughly befuddled by Nicolai.

      She drew out one of the blades, balancing its gilded hilt on her hand. The thin cut still stung a bit, but the hilt was light on her palm, well balanced, shimmering in the dusty light. She lifted the blade in prima, the first guard position, with her arm high to the right, palm facing out. She moved smoothly into seconda, the second guard position, palm down, arm at shoulder height. Terza, arm at waist level, palm to left.

      Then she raised her arm again, lunging forward on the right foot, sword thrusting ahead. She imagined it plunged into Nicolai’s maddening, confusing heart. The blade was light, and whistled in the still air as she sliced it across and stepped into a reverse pass, her right foot moving back, kicking her skirts out of the way.

      “Brava, mademoiselle,” she heard Nicolai’s Slavic voice say. She whirled around to find him standing just inside the doorway, arms crossed over his chest as he watched her intently. “You are very deft.”

      “I was trained by Signor Lunelli, the famous sword master from Milan,”

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