Читать книгу The King’s Daughter - Christie Dickason - Страница 6

Today, I learned what I am for. I think that the information has always been there, but I’ve chosen to ignore it. Then, this morning, when the Duc de Bouillon looked me up and down and allowed that I was indeed ‘handsome enough’, my grip on wilful ignorance began to slip.

I felt a tide of unbecoming red begin to rise from the top of my bodice. I tried to imagine that I had turned into a tortoise so that I could pull my head inside my shell and close the flap.

I was standing in the Great Presence Chamber on show as a prospective bride, weighed down by a pearl-crusted blue satin gown, with a chain of bright little enamelled gold flowers draped across my (still-improving) breasts. My hair had been savagely disciplined. My finest pearl and sapphire ear-drops knocked at my jawbones. Ten pairs of adult male eyes, including my father’s chilly gaze, stared at me as if I were a greyhound or horse for sale.

‘Good breeding,’ I imagined them saying. ‘Shame about the cow hocks.’ ‘Nice deep chest, not certain about the set of the ears…’

‘Handsome enough,’ the duke had said. I tried to think what had made me so uneasy.

Such guarded praise might have squashed my vanity, if I had any. I know how I look—tall and skinny with wild amber-red hair and fair Scottish skin. I may not be beautiful, like Frances Howard or fair, dainty Lucy, Countess of Bedford, but I’m not a trowie crept from under a stone, neither. But there was more to my sudden unease than hurt feelings.

Since I can remember, I’ve known that my father will marry me off, when and where he pleases. Marriage meant exile. I would be forced to leave my brother, to go, again, to a strange country to live among foreigners, with a man I didn’t know, to be his queen. Just as my poor mother had to leave her home in Denmark for Scotland to live with my father. And then had to follow him here to England.

I know that my brother Henry has no more choice in his fate than I, but at least he knows where he will be when he becomes king. He can let himself learn to love England. It’s his country now. My heart must not settle here.

That is the price of escaping from my father.

‘She’s tall for her tender years,’ said the Duc de Bouillon. The marriage broker for the German state of the Palatine slid his probing eyes over me again with a private adult male gleam that made me squirm and look away. My chest and face burned. My grip on wilful ignorance slipped a little further.

My father, a smallish man, moved his mouth as if chewing and scratched his neck. He didn’t trouble himself to reply. He knows that his wits are quicker than those of most men. And he’s the king, so he can play the fool if he wants to.

‘Of course, there’s no harm if the wife is taller than her husband,’ de Bouillon added quickly.

My mother is taller than my father.

My father still said nothing. He was behaving well, for him.

I rested my hands on the shelf of my farthingale and looked at the floor. The white ostrich plumes of my fan trembled in my fist. I felt a secret meaning in the duke’s words, which I did not yet grasp. I saw secret understanding gleam in other male eyes.

I know that I would be married even if I had tiny eyes like a badger and the stumpy legs of those German hounds they send down the badger’s hole—which I don’t. I am the First Daughter of England. Whoever marries me marries England. ‘Handsome’ has nothing to do with it.

The Dauphin of France, the most likely of my possible husbands according to my old nurse Mrs Hay, is a sulky, big-nosed boy not handsome enough for any purpose that I can think of. And yet his mother means to arrange a good marriage for him, in spite of his nose and absence of chin, like a trout—although I wrong the trout, which is a beautiful creature, all polished pewter-brown and speckled silver with the flush of dawn lining its gills. Also, its wits are sharper than his from what I hear. And its temper is less haughty, irritable and melancholy.

Handsome enough for what, then? I glanced up.

The duke’s eyes were now unlacing me, searching under the pearl-crusted silk for the swelling curves of my breasts. They lifted up my petticoats. They rested on my mouth. They dug through the layers of silk and linen looking for my most secret parts.

‘His highness will be pleased,’ he said.

He didn’t care that I could read his eyes. With a private smile, he nodded to himself. She will do, said his eyes. With her amber hair and blue eyes, which are much larger than those of a badger, and long legs under those petticoats. She will do very well.

For…

The cold edge of understanding slid into my heart. My thoughts scattered. I struggled for breath like a fish cast-up on the rocks. But I could no longer blind myself to what I hadn’t wanted to see.

I’m no looby. Of course I’ve known. I listen to gossip. I have observed dogs locked together and the noisy, terrifying breeding of horses. I can draw conclusions. But I never thought it might happen to me. To my flesh and skin and heart beat, to this thing that lives behind my eyes and breathes and fears and is me. Here is what I saw slithering through the duke’s eyes and let myself understand at last:

I am no more than a greyhound bitch or a mare to be bred. Marriage is not mere exile and strangeness. Marriage means that I must serve my country with my body. On my wedding night, Spain, or France or some German state—as our father chooses—like a dog or stallion, will push its designated cock into my private parts to plant an infant treaty.

Into that prim, closed mussel shell with its new amber fur, mysterious even to me. Closed like a book, even to me. Closed like a peach. Closed like a dark eye, still blind.

That is what I am for. How will I bear it?