Читать книгу NOTORIOUS in the Tudor Court: A Sinful Alliance / A Notorious Woman - Amanda McCabe, Amanda McCabe - Страница 16

Marguerite slipped the thin wire into the lock and, with a quick flick of her wrist, popped it upward. She felt the give of the mechanism as it parted, and the lock fell from the box’s clasp.

Really, she thought. These Spanish are surprisingly lax. That lock was far too easy to pick. Could it be some kind of trap, a test? She glanced back over her shoulder, but the room was empty. Silent.

She had noticed this box during the card party, a plain, unadorned wooden chest of the sort often used to transport or store documents. It sat amid a welter of empty diplomatic pouches and blank sheets of parchment on a table near the window, too tempting to resist. It could not contain anything too secret; Don Carlos did not strike her as a fool. But any information at all could prove useful.

And Marguerite sorely needed a distraction from thoughts of Nicolai. When she went to lie down in her bed she could not sleep, for she kept hearing his song in her mind. And have no more pity on him that loveth thee.

Marguerite frowned as she slid the lock free and raised the lid of the box. He was a talented actor indeed, for his words, his countenance, his entire being reflected the words as he sang, as if he truly knew what love was, what it could be. As if he alone possessed the secrets to all hearts.

She could never share that knowledge, for love was only a mystery, a puzzlement, to her. She had seen it only as a lie, a game, a flirtatious song with no meaning behind it. A hollow, shining little bubble.

And that was all Nicolai’s poetry was, too. Yet his eyes imbued the sweet words with more…

“Couilles,” she cursed. The wire she still held bit into her hand as her fingers tightened over it, leaving a thin line of blood. Nicolai Ostrovsky was a distraction, and she had to forget him. Work was all that mattered.

Hastily 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,” she answered. Her heart still pounded, and she remembered pretending it was him she stabbed at, his muscled chest that met her slicing blade. “But I fear I am out of practice, with these easy days at Greenwich.”

“You? Ah, no, mademoiselle. I am sure you could never be—out of practice.”

“Perhaps not any longer.” She reached down and slid the tip of her sword beneath the blade that still lay on the ground. She caught it up, flipping it in one neat movement toward Nicolai.

He caught the hilt in his hand, reflexes sharp despite his lazy appearance. He gave her an amused half-smile.

Marguerite adjusted her stance, lifting her blade invitingly while also carefully situating her guard. “En guard, monsieur.”

Nicolai’s smile widened, and he took up his own stance. At first they circled each other warily, blades poised, trying to gauge weaknesses, techniques, strengths. Marguerite’s senses shimmered with tense awareness; it was as if time slowed around her, and she was attuned to every tiny flicker of his muscles. Every shift and movement and breath of his body.

There was a small noise outside their hidden room, the distant fall of a hammer. Nicolai did not turn, but she saw his eyes widen slightly and she took the perceived advantage. She moved in with a lunge and a low, straight thrust.

But he was not distracted. His blade came up in a smooth stop-thrust. Marguerite fell back, bringing her sword up to attack again.

She heard the echo of Signor Lunelli’s voice in her head. Remember, signorina, your male opponents will have two advantages over you—reach and strength. But you, you have speed and agility. Use them! And never lose your calm centre. That is fatal.

She rose up on the balls of her feet as if dancing, her blade flashing in delicate, swift feints, faking her line of attack. Speed and agility—he would think she was one place, as she delivered quick, small blows until she moved into compound attack.

Yet Nicolai did not fight as she expected. He parried her blows, his blade shifting as hers did, almost imperceptibly. He had a lean, easy strength she could not match, and that infuriating half-smile never left his lips.

Marguerite felt her calm centre, so essential to Signor Lunelli’s instructions, melt away under a hot flare of anger. She rushed in close to his strong side, wrapping her weaker arm about his sword arm and twirling her body around to slide her blade into place. She had to do it quickly, before he realised her impulsive plan and dropped his sword to grapple with her. Then all her agility could never stand up to that strength.

The tip of her blunted blade just touched him when he did drop his sword, his fingers closing tightly over her wrist, like an iron vise.

“Chert poberi!” he growled. “You do fight dirty.”

“Oui. But I always win.”

“Almost always.”

His grip tightened on her wrist, not painful but numbing, until the blade fell from her nerveless grasp to clatter on to the floor. Marguerite cursed herself for forgetting all her training, for getting too close to him, allowing him to gain the advantage. That speed and agility had availed her naught in the end, it was too bound up in that boiling anger.

He didn’t let go of her wrist, and she stared up at him, her breath quick. His breath, too, was hard and uneven, his pulse thrumming through his veins and into hers, their heartbeats mingling. She still stared up at him into the glow of his eyes. His face was expressionless, yet she saw the faint flush of his cheeks, beneath the sun-bronzed colour of his Italian life. A muscle ticked along his jaw. So, he was not unaffected by their nearness, by whatever this was that flowed between them so inexorably.

Marguerite stretched up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his, unable to resist for an instant longer. She had to taste him, feel him. Maybe then she could decipher this mysterious force that turned her cold, careful life tip over tail. Exorcise his spell. But she made another mistake, for his kiss only bound her tighter in the silken noose of anger, lust and painful need.

His lips opened beneath hers, and he let go of her wrist, freeing her to wrap his arms around her, to draw her closer and closer. If she was to be his prisoner, he would be hers, too, the two of them bound together as they tumbled down into the abyss. He groaned, a low, hoarse sound she felt deep inside of her. Their tongues met and clashed as their swords had, a humid blur that erased everything else. There was only Nicolai, the dark taste of him, the heavy press of his hard arousal against her skirts.

Not breaking their kiss, Marguerite snatched at his clothes, tearing the fastenings of his doublet, the thin linen of his shirt until her touch met naked, smooth, hot skin.

Nicolai dragged his lips from hers, pressing a kiss to her temple, her cheek. “Marguerite,” he groaned. “Dorogaya. What are we doing?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered, her fingers playing lightly over his bare chest, the uneven pounding of his heart. She traced a circle over the flat disc of his nipple, and felt his breath suck in. “I tried to fight it, deny it. But you have some strange spell, you beautiful demon, some magic…”

He gave a harsh laugh, and took her hand to drag it down over his hard penis, sheathed in the rough cloth of his hose. “Is this magic?”

She laughed, too, running her touch over his throbbing erection, feeling it strain for her caress. “Do you not think so?”

“You are the one with the spell, vedma!”

“What does that word mean?”

“It means you are a witch. A sorceress, come from the dark fairy realms to torment us poor mortals. You tried to kill me once in the midst of passion.”

Marguerite swallowed hard, remembering Venice, her dagger arcing toward that heartbeat. The thought of his lifeblood spilling out, of the warm flesh she now caressed turning ice-cold, made her shiver.

She stepped back from him, reaching up to unlace her sleeves and draw them off, dropping them at her feet in a black velvet puddle. “I have no hidden daggers today,” she said, loosening the thin sleeves of her chemise. “Not there—not here.”

She clasped the hem of her overskirt and petticoat, drawing the heavy fabric up, up, until his narrowed gaze could take in the length of her legs, clad in silk stockings and jewelled garters. She drew it up farther until he could see the shadow of her womanhood, damp with desire.

Still holding her skirts with one hand, she reached up with the other to free her hair from its gilded veil, shaking the silvery length free over her shoulders.

“I will not try to kill you this day, Nicolai,” she said. “I give you my word. Now, will you kiss me again?”

In answer, Nicolai gave a low growl, and lunged forward to catch her around her waist. As their lips met again, he lifted her high, twirling her around to press her up against the wall. Marguerite wrapped her legs tightly about his hips, drawing him into the curve of her body. His hose abraded the soft skin of her thighs, but she didn’t care or even notice. She just wanted him closer, closer.

He trailed a ribbon of kisses to her throat, biting and licking at the curve where her neck met her shoulder, the hollow where her pulse pounded. She let her head fall back against the wall, offering him all she had, all she was.

He tugged her low-cut French bodice down to bare her breasts. Her nipples strained for his kiss, aching.

“You are so beautiful,” he murmured. “So very beautiful.”

She had heard those words so often, but never, not until this moment, had she believed them to be true. Perhaps she was beautiful—in his eyes.

He could not see her black-spotted soul. “Not as lovely as you, mon ange,” she whispered.

He captured her nipple between his lips, rolling it, biting gently, teasingly, before he at last gave her what she craved, longed for, and drew it deep into his mouth.

Marguerite found she could stand the intense need, the fire, no longer. She pushed him back until her breast was free of his kiss, until she could touch her feet to the earth. Then she clasped him by the shoulders, moving his unresisting body to the floor.

He watched her closely in the dim light as she straddled him, reaching out with desperate hands to strip him of his doublet and shirt, to tug at the lacings of his hose.

“Marguerite…” he said roughly.

“Non!” she answered. “Don’t say anything, Nicolai, not now.” Words would just break the witch’s spell, and she did not want to awaken. Not yet.

He lay back, his hair pooling around him like the golden allure of the sun. His eyes glowed as he stared up at her, wary and lustful in equal measure.

Marguerite wanted to erase that wariness, to find only passion, a deep need to match her own. She swooped down on him, like a little, lethal kestrel after her prey, trailing her mouth over his throat and naked chest, tasting the clean salt of his skin. Breathing in all his heat and life until she found her own soul stir.

As she kissed him, his fingers moved through her hair, wrapping the strands over his chest, binding them together. Marguerite smiled against his shoulder, and reached down to free the heavy, throbbing length of his erect penis into her hand. It was weighty under her gentle touch, and he shuddered as she ran her fingers up and down its iron-satin, veined shaft. She carefully balanced his balls on her palm, her embrace tightening with a threat—or promise.

In answer, Nicolai grasped her waist, rolling her beneath him in one quick, smooth movement. He pulled her skirts out of his way, parting her legs as his thumb slipped inside her wet, welcoming folds.

“Oui, oui,” she groaned. She would surely burst into flame at his touch! She spread her legs farther, urging him over her, into her, urging him to make her his. Her eyes closed as her head fell back, her body tense as a bowstring as he eased himself into the very core of her.

Their joining was not slow or gentle. They came together with the force of a summer storm, fast, violent, desperate. He thrust into her, and Marguerite wrapped her legs about his back, keeping him inside her as the delicious friction, the heat, built and built. The world turned red and bright orange around her, and a high-pitched sound grew in her ears. Greater and greater, higher and higher.

She exploded in climax, a shower of bits of the sun and stars, too bright. Too much.

Above her, around her, Nicolai shouted out, “Moya dorogaya!” Marguerite grasped his hair, clutching at the tangled strands as his back arched. At the very last instant, he drew out of her body, spilling his seed on the floor. Then he collapsed beside her, their limbs entwined.

Marguerite still held on to him, running her trembling fingers through the bright strands of his hair, smoothing them, spreading them over her breasts and throat. How heavy she felt, as if she could sink down into the earth itself and never be seen again. She was weighted, replete.

And not at all sorry. Remorse would surely come later. At this moment, she felt something she had never known before.

Contentment.