LITMIR.BIZ

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but his face gave nothing away. He was as beautiful, as cold, as the marble statues in the piazza. Her passionate lover was gone. “What do you mean?”

      “I mean, mademoiselle whatever-your-name-is, that this is not your night to die. Nor mine, though you would have had it otherwise.” The dagger arced down, but not into her heart. It sliced into her skirt, cutting away thick strips of silk. Holding the blade between his teeth like a corsair, he bound her hands and feet tightly, with expert knots.

      “What are you doing?” Marguerite cried, bewildered. This was not how the game was meant to be played! “I would have killed you! Do you mean you won’t kill me? You won’t take your revenge?”

      “Oh, I will take my revenge, mademoiselle, but not on this night.” He tied off the final knot around her wrists, so firm she could not even wriggle her fingers. “It will be some day when you least expect it.”

      Once she was trussed up like a banquet goose, he leaned down and pressed one gentle kiss to her lips. He still tasted of herbs, ale and her own waxen rouge. And he still smelled of an alluring summer day. Quel con!

      “I just can’t bring myself to destroy such rare beauty,” he whispered. “Not after your fine services, incomplete though they were. Adieu, mademoiselle—for now.”

      He tied the last strip of silk over her mouth, and opened the very window Marguerite had planned for her escape. As she stared, infuriated, he gave her a wink, and with one graceful movement leaped through the casement and was gone.

      Marguerite screamed through her gag. She arched her back and kicked her legs, all to no avail. She was bound fast, caught in her own scheme. And the cochon didn’t even have the decency to kill her! To follow the code all spies and assassins adhered to. At least French ones.

      “Have his revenge,” would he, the beautiful, arrogant Russian pig? Never! She would find him first, and finish this task, no matter what. No matter how far she had to go, even to the frozen wastes of his Russia itself.

      For the Emerald Lily never failed.

       Chapter One

       The Palace of Fontainebleau, January 1527

      Marguerite Dumas walked slowly down the corridor, gaze straight ahead, hands folded at her waist, her face carefully blank as she ignored the whispers of the courtiers loitering about. In her fingers she clutched the summons of the king.

      She had known this day would come. A new assignment. A new mission for the Emerald Lily. If only this one ended better than the last, that night in Venice!

      Marguerite paused at the end of the corridor, where a shadowed landing became a narrow staircase. Here, there was no one to see her, and she closed her eyes against the spasm of pain in her head. It was no illness, but the memory of Venice, the thought of the handsome Russian encule. The coppery, bitter taste of humiliation and failure.

      The king had said nothing when she returned to Paris with her report of the Russian’s escape. He had said nothing when he sent her back to her “legitimate” duties as fille d’honneur to Princess Madeleine, her ostensible reason for being at Court in the first place. There she had languished for months, walking with the other ladies in the gardens, reading to the princess, dancing at banquets. Fending off the advances of useless, arrogant courtiers.

      They could do her no good, those perfumed popinjays who pressed their kisses on her in the shadows. Only one man was useful here, King François himself. And he maintained his distant politeness, merely nodding to her when they happened to pass in the garden or the banquet hall.

      Marguerite knew the whispers, that she and the king had been lovers who were estranged now that he was involved with the Duchesse de Vendôme. If they only knew the truth! They would never believe it. Not of her.

      She scarcely believed it herself, in these days of quiet leisure in the princess’s apartments. Had she truly ever been sent to the far corners of Europe, to defeat the enemies of France? Had she once used her wits, her hard-learned skills, to find a secret victory over those who would defy the king? It did not seem possible.

      Yet at night, alone in her curtained bed, she knew it was true. Once, she had had adventures. She had won a place for herself in the wider world. Had one mistake, one instant’s miscalculation, cost her all she worked for?

      It had made no sense to her that she would be dismissed in only a moment, when now more than ever her special skills were needed. Since the king’s humiliating defeat against the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor at Pavia, since his two sons were sent to Madrid as hostages, dark days had descended on France. Her enemies were becoming ever bolder.

      Marguerite knew she could be of use in these new, dangerous games. Why, then, was she relegated to dancing and card playing? All because of the Russian, damn his unearthly blue eyes!

      But those days seemed to be at an end. She held the king’s note in her hand, so tightly the parchment pressed her rings into her skin. It was time for her to redeem herself.

      As she climbed the narrow, privy staircase, the sounds of hammering and sawing grew louder, more distinct, shouting of the king’s new mania for building. Since his return from Spain in defeat, François had thrown himself into a frenzy of remodelling, of making his palaces ever grander.

      Fontainebleau, one of his favourite castles thanks to the seventeen-thousand hectares of forest ripe with deer for hunting, was his latest focus. Since the Christmas festivities, so muted without the presence of the Dauphin and his brother, work was begun in earnest. The old keep of St Louis and Philipe le Beau was being demolished, replaced by something vast and modern.

      Marguerite lifted the hem of her velvet skirt as she stepped over a pile of rubbish. A shower of stone dust from above nearly coated her headdress, and she hurried to the relative safety of the great gallery.

      This was one of the few rooms in the place to be almost finished. A long, echoing expanse of polished parquet floor swept up to walls of pale stuccowork, inlaid dark wood in the panels of the boiserie. A few of the many planned flourishes of floral motifs, gods and goddesses, fat little Cupids, were in place, with blank spaces just waiting to be filled.

      At the far end of the gallery, leaning over a table covered with sketches, was King François himself. He was consulting with one of the Italian artists brought in to take charge of all this splendour, Signor Fiorentino, and for the moment did not see her. Marguerite slowed her steps, studying him carefully for any sign of his thoughts and intentions. Any hint that she was truly forgiven.

      François was very tall, towering over her own petite frame, and was all an imposing king should be, with abundant dark hair and a fashionable pointed beard. His brown eyes were sharp and clear above his hooked Valois nose, missing nothing. After Pavia and his captivity, he seemed leaner, more wary, his always athletic body thin and wiry.

      But his famous sense of fashion had not deserted him. Even on a quiet day like this, he wore a crimson velvet doublet embroidered with gold and silver and festooned with garnet buttons, a sleeveless surcoat of purple trimmed with silver fox fur to keep the chill away. A crimson cap sewn with pearls and more garnets covered his head, concealing his gaze as he bent over the drawings.

      “There will be twelve in all, your Majesty,” Fiorentino said, gesturing toward the empty spaces on the gallery walls. “All scenes from mythology, of course, to illustrate your Majesty’s enlightened governance.”

      “Hmm, yes, I see,” Francois said. Without glancing up, he called, “Ah, Mademoiselle Dumas! You surely have the finest eye for beauty of any lady in my kingdom. What do you think of Signor Fiorentino’s plans?”

      Marguerite came closer, peering down at the sketches as she tucked the king’s note into her tight undersleeve. The first drawing was a scene of Danaë, more a stylish lady of the French Court in a drapery of blue-tinted silk and an elaborate headdress than a woman of the classical world. But her surroundings—broken columns and twisted olive trees, her attendants of fat cherubs

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