And whose wife I would be quietly enjoying, in my little apartment above Chancellery Road.
I returned to my rooms and found a messenger from Amalie saying that Mistress Freeman could come that afternoon. She was always careful with her messengers, and used no-one from her husband’s household, and never used her own name. Instead, she would venture in the morning to court or to visit a friend, and from there choose a messenger from the various hangers-on always to be found in the street. Then she would hire a litter to carry her to my apartment, and when it was time for her to leave, I would find another litter to take her home.
I gave a crown to the messenger and readied myself for Amalie’s visit, building a fire, bringing out two of my silver cups, and filling them with moscatto. She arrived after half an hour, having come straight from court. When I helped her free of the cloak and hood she had worn to remain unrecognized, I saw that her court gown was scarlet satin, frogged across the front in her personal style, and she wore a collar of rubies about her throat and strands of pearls in her tawny hair. I kissed her just below the ear, and she smiled with her little white teeth.
“Much ado at court this morning,” she said. “It was announced that the new Master of the Hunt would arrange a great hunting party for the first week in November, at the Queen’s lodge in Kingsmere.”
I dropped the bar on my door, and checked that the pollaxe was where I had left it—I had no intention of my afternoon being interrupted again. Then I hung Amalie’s cloak from a hook.
“Will you go to this party?” I asked.
“I shall now. For no sooner had the announcement been made, and the Queen publicly congratulated Viscount Broughton on his arrangements, than Broughton’s wife appeared along with her father. She’d been kept out of the way at Hart Ness, but her father must have ridden there to let her know of the Queen’s interest in her husband, for she came fully armed to the battle in a gown painted with serpents. She walked to where her husband stood by the throne, and kissed him full on the lips before turning to acknowledge the Queen.”
“Did the Queen send her to a dungeon, or hack off her head?”
A smile tugged at the corners of Amalie’s languid long eyes. “No, she did not.”
“We have a civilized monarch, to be sure. What did her majesty do?”
“Sat in that cold way of hers, nodded to the viscountess and her father, and then turned away to speak with her mother.”
“Who was laughing and cackling in obscene triumph?” For Leonora hated Broughton and was thought to favor the Loretto alliance, or so Amalie had told me.
“She managed,” Amalie said, “to screw her face into something like an attitude of sympathy.”
“That must have taken great strength of will.” I picked up the wine-cups and sighed. “Yet I want the lovers to find happiness—want all lovers to find happiness.” I kissed Amalie and offered her a cup. She took it.
“All lovers may find some happiness,” she said. Her hand played with the laces of my doublet. “But we must know the proper moment to take it.”
* * *
At times, she seemed much older than seventeen. Perhaps carrying a child did that, or it was simply her upbringing, brought up in a house full of servants and treasures and the political schemes of her family.
Or so it seemed an hour later, reclining on a pillow with Amalie’s head on my shoulder, and my senses aswim with the scent of her hair and the wine and our coupling. The pearls she wore in her hair had come partly undone, and lay across my arm. She was telling me her latest efforts to raise Stayne’s ransom.
“Do you truly want him back?” I asked.
She gave a serious frown. “I must do some things, and be seen to do them,” she said.
“You do not speak of him with any great affection.”
Again she frowned. “I’ve known him all my life. I do not despise him.” Her long, lazy-lidded eyes gazed up at the beams of the ceiling. “My expectations of marriage were never sanguine. My mother told me that in service to my family, I would be expected to lie with a man I did not like, and have children by that man, and that I would love the children if not the man, and provided there were children, I could then do what I liked.” She kissed my cheek. “So, I will have a child, and in the meantime I am doing what I like.”
For the first time, I felt sadness for the glittering noblewomen who paraded through the court in their glittering satins. Sadness for Amalie, sadness for the Queen and the viscountess, victims alike to the ambitions of one pretty man.
Butchers’ daughters, I believe, are permitted to marry for love, if only because there is so very little at stake; but for the daughters of the wealthy, there is too much money and influence in the business for affection to overrule calculation.
“I fear what might happen if you are discovered here,” I said.
Again amusement creased her long eyes. “Very little will happen to me, I think. I am concerned more for you—your birth does not give you the kind of immunity my own confers upon me.”
I tried to shift the conversation away from the implications of this. Her husband, I remembered, had raised half a troop from among his friends, well-armed and well-disposed to violence. I wondered how vengeful he might be.
“Your husband will not lock you in a tower?”
“He is notoriously careless with his possessions—I don’t think he cares enough for me to do such a thing. After all, he rode off to war and rebellion and stranded me here among his enemies.”
I picked up the pearls that draped my arm, dandled them from my fingers. “I have wondered about King Stilwell’s death, coming at a moment that seemed so propitious for his bastard son.”
“You imagine a plot?” She gave a little shake of her head. “Were there a scheme to do away with the King and put Clayborne on the throne, my husband and father would have been neck-deep in it. Yet they were as surprised as everyone else when the King died, and were away from court when it happened, with the salt sea between them and Clayborne. I think the plot was hatched when Stilwell fell ill, and thrown together in great haste with as many conspirators as were already at hand.”
Amalie took the strand of pearls from my hand, and twirled it lazily in the air.
“The light gives the pearls a rosy cast,” I observed. “As if they were blushing.”
She was amused by that. “Let them blush for me, then,” she said. “For I do not blush.”
“I have seen the color rise in your cheeks,” I said, and caressed her cheek with the backs of my fingers. She ran her jaw along my fingers, like a cat. My hand sought her breast. “And I have seen you blush elsewhere,” I said.
Amalie turned to me, her body warm and languorous in my arms. She draped the pearls carelessly across her throat, an act that made her throat more desirable than ever it had been.
“I do not believe that I blush,” she said. “And I do not believe that you can make me.”
I felt myself smile. “Hardly a challenge I can resist.”
She gave me her lazy smile and stretched her arms above her head, as might an athlete readying herself for a contest.
“Sir,” she said, “you have my leave to try.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN