Читать книгу Royal Blood - Rona Sharon - Страница 8

Splendidly false, nobly untruthful.

—Horace: Odes III

The Royal Château in Amboise, France

“Move your feet, little whore!”

Princess Renée de Valois of France, wishing the varmint taking her by the arm ten fathoms deep, staggered out of her apartment with a sheet wrapped around her nude body. Mortification cooled her fury as she caught sight of the sea of goggling eyes, noble and common, enjoying the spectacle: the late King Louis’s youngest daughter being dragged in dishabille along the gallery like a condemned prisoner to the execution block. Bedraggled, quivering, ebony tresses tumbling in a tangle to her waist, she lacked only the crown of nettles to complete her shame.

Behind her, her beloved Raphael was being marched by the royal guards, his untidy clothes smeared with multihued paints, for he had been interrupted while creating a new masterpiece for which she provided the subject matter: Froward Renée, whom the court would henceforth dub “the wanton princess who shamed the Valois,” had been posing for a Venus.

The Duke de Soubise, her tormentor, smiled with cruel satisfaction as the crowd parted to clear a path for them toward King Francis’s apartment. Renée held her head high, deploying the majesty impressed upon her by Queen Anne of France, Duchess of Brittany, her dearly departed mother. She disregarded the leering faces marveling at her degradation; she ignored the orphaned girl inside her, desperate to crawl into a hole and weep. She had none to blame but herself.

Soubise had merely taken advantage of her foolish temerity. It never occurred to her that the besotted old lecher, whom she deemed an innocuous pest, would burst upon her with guards issued by Long-Nose. Alas, while she had been savoring her first affaire de coeur, the great love of her life, Soubise had been plotting his coup de grâce down to the last detail. She was doomed.

Renée remembered the sweet-tempered, dutiful little princess she had once been. That girl would never have conceived of taking a pauper for a lover, but she had not been herself since her mother passed away three winters hence. She loved her sweet mother, heart and soul, and would gladly have traded places with her rather than endure the pain of watching her waste away of an illness. King Louis, upon glimpsing his youngest daughter’s grief the first day of her mother’s funeral, ruthlessly commanded Renée to compose herself, muttering in her ear, “If a single tear should roll upon your cheek in the common gaze, you will cease to be a daughter of mine.”

Queen Anne’s funeral lasted forty days. Forty days of hell during which Renée mourned her mother’s demise in secret, in terror of discovery, and in absolute solitude. Afterward, in the spirit of her mother’s fiercely independent nature, she cut the reins imposed on her by a heartless sire, becoming refractory, bold, and feisty insomuch that King Louis felt hard-pressed to contract an immediate new marriage alliance for his fifteen-year-old shrew of a daughter. As her betrothed, Prince Andres of Navarre, had died in battle, her royal sire settled on the aged Duke of Lorraine, who thereupon accommodated Renée in passing away before the ink dried on the settlement. Oh, he could have married her against her will, but he knew she would be back within the month and that he would have to bear the brunt of whatever trickery and mischief she had applied to be free.

She distinctly remembered her father telling her that she would be the death of him when no other groom could be found to take her off his hands. A war had been declared between them. To wear her spirit down and convince her to seek refuge in the arms of a husband, he kept her at his side, employing her in all sorts of tedious matters of state that tested her fortitude and patience.

Two years later he had lost the battle and perished. Of exasperation, Renée presumed, albeit others claimed that his aged body expired from “overexertion in the bedchamber” while in the throes of his last desperate attempt at begetting a male heir off his third and very young wife, Lady Mary Tudor, King Henry VIII of England’s sister, who had become Renée’s bosom friend.

“Froward Renée,” King Louis called her at his deathbed, an epithet that had somehow found itself into the mouths of the court and stayed with her. “You think you take after your mother, but it is I you resemble. Were it not for Salic Law, which precludes women from ascending to the throne of France, I would see you on mine, my daughter.”

“My sister Claude is the eldest,” Renée reminded him. “She has precedence.”

“And the wits God gave a cow,” her father stated with disgust. “Claude the Cow.”

Not once did Renée miss him after his death.

Lamentably, as soon as Long-Nose inherited the crown, she had a new betrothed. A German prince, rumored to be crablike and malformed. She disposed of him easily. Well-placed whispers as regards poison effectively put him off the idea of marrying her. King Francis was outraged.

“You look fetching, Renée, a veritable goddess of love,” said the decrepit Soubise, smacking his lips. “Although I prefer you nude, as you were a moment ago. A feast to mine eyes.”

“Your eyes will be the first items I cut out, imbecile!”

“This is the Lady Marguerite’s influence. She has odd notions of a woman’s place at court. All that free thinking and free spirituality and free love…”

Renée shot Soubise a sulfurous glare. Lady Marguerite of Angoulême, King Francis’s older sister, was a patroness of the arts, of humanists and reformers, a poetess and an author of plays. Her acclaimed salon, the New Parnassus, had become Renée’s haven after losing her royal parents to God and her older sister Claude to a new husband and an elevation to the throne of France. There she had transformed from a lonely, malcontent, introverted girl to the lady she was meant to be. “I am certain His Majesty will be interested in your opinion on his lady sister, Soubise.”

“You mistake me, ma petite. I’m grateful to my king’s lady sister for delivering you into my clutches. Fear not, we’ll continue to practice her notions of love indefatigably. They would say at court, ‘The radiant young princess of the violet-blue eyes has become the loving lady wife of—’”

“An ancient wittol with maggots for brains!” She let out a cry as tentacles bit into her flesh.

“Better me than no man, for no illustrious prince would have you for a wife, Princess Lust.”

She made the mistake of glancing at him—seeing the covetous lust in his rheumy eyes, the spittle foaming in the corners of his mouth, the sagging dewlaps of his pockmarked visage—and almost retched. A more repulsive creature did not exist at court.

Her bare feet pattering along the cold stone, Renée looked back at the swarthy young man prodded onward by pikes at his back. Raphael, save us! Her eyes spoke in silent supplication. Her lover’s head wilted. Was he crying? His frailty incensed her, disgusted her. As much as she admired his artistic gentleness, at that moment she needed him to be the stronger of the two of them. Then it dawned on her that his penance would be much worse than a hair shirt, for he, a common painter, had dared to carnally know a princess of the blood.

As a rule, a lady caught with a lover who was not her husband was banished to a nunnery—a lady caught in bed with her spouse became an object of ridicule—and the lover paid his dues in a duel instigated by either the horned husband or the enraged father. As for princesses of the blood, the matter was a trifle more complicated. Certes, daughters were less welcome to their royal sires than sons, but they were useful currency in acquiring thrones and land, as in the case of Renée’s mother. A princess’s maidenhood was a valuable national asset.

Renée, an unwed princess, was setting a precedent in taking a lover, and a nonentity at that. Custom dictated that her defiler be charged with high treason and put to death. Poor Raphael. What did he know of court intrigue, power plays, and betrayed confidences? He was but a poor painter from a village in Perugia, who carved out a life for himself by the skill of his brush. She would have to defend him, but how? Would King Francis spare Raphael if she surrendered the two boons he was after—her body and a renunciation of her claims to the duchy of Brittany?

You fool, she could hear her royal sire berating her, have I taught you nothing?

“Here we are,” the Duke of Soubise announced as the royal bodyguard thrust open the doors to the king’s privy chamber. Keeping her spine ramrod straight, Renée walked in.

King Francis sat at a table with his sister Lady Marguerite. Cardinal Medici lounged in the bay window. Renée’s sister, Queen Claude, was conspicuously absent. Soubise nudged Renée to the center of the luxurious chamber, genuflected fulsomely, and launched into a detailed account of the compromising scene he had come upon. Explaining about the painting would be pointless, Renée knew, for she would be subjected to a physical examination. The king and his sister wore flinty expressions. Suspicion buzzed in her head. In his peroration, the toadying, impudent duke magnanimously offered himself as her savior in marriage. King Francis dismissed Soubise with an ambiguous promise to consider his suit and ordered the guards to place Raphael under arrest. Lady Marguerite sent a page to fetch Renée a cloak and shoes, for which Renée was grateful.

Still their dignified astonishment did not ring true.

King Francis cleared the chamber of his attendants so that only Marguerite, Cardinal Medici, and Renée remained. “We are appalled!” he blasted away at her. “Your wantonness shames us in the eyes of the world! Neither maid nor wife, your name a scandal, your honor slain—we are of a mind to exercise the severest form of penalty. Henceforward your ample dowry and annuity are revoked, your defiler will be trialed for high treason, and you will marry the Duke of Soubise!”

Renée, practicing the sangfroid bequeathed to her by her royal sire, listened and wondered how Long-Nose expected to govern France when a child could see through this charade. The son of a minor French prince, Francis of Valois came to the throne by right of birth strengthened with his marriage to Claude. Though he was generally considered a humanist and a man of letters, Renée knew him to be a man of slight morals. Her father once told her that when something looked like a trap and smelled like a trap, it was a trap. Soubise’s catching her en flagrante delicto was no accident.

“Your Majesty.” She sank to her knees, head bowed penitently. “She who is undeserving of your bounty and grace kneels before you in shame, humbled by your benevolence.”

Her quiet submission threw her spectators into a confused silence. Cardinal Medici stepped away from the bay window. “Does she speak English?”

“She is fluent in English, Latin, Greek, Spanish, and Italian,” Lady Marguerite replied.

The cardinal lifted Renée’s chin. “Are you intimate with personages at the English court?”

Renée studied him charily. Pope Leo X’s first cousin and designated successor, raised by his uncle, Lorenzo Il Magnifico of Florence, the godfather of the illuminated era they lived in, was not the transparent buffoon Long-Nose was but of her sire’s ilk. “I correspond with the Dowager Queen of France, the newly remarried Duchess of Suffolk. Lady Mary and I are friends.”

The cardinal helped her to her feet. “Show me your teeth.”

Renée was taken aback. “Am I a horse—”

“Do as His Grace bids you, insolent girl!” Lady Marguerite scolded.

Renée’s amazement doubled. So, she thought, Soubise spoke the truth. Lady Marguerite had a hand in this. Sweet Jesu! Was Raphael involved as well? No, his petrifaction had been genuine. He loved her; he would never betray her. In contrast, Lady Marguerite was low and deceitful. Simmering with resentment, Renée offered the cardinal a toothy smile.

“Good, good.” He nodded. “Now remove the portmanteau….”

Her eyes narrowed into slits. “I am cold.”

“It would take a minute, no more.”

Reluctantly, she dropped the cloak.

“And the bedsheet.”

Renée felt her jaw slackening. She jutted her chin defiantly. “I refuse.”

“Then we will summon a guard to do it for you.” The Lady Marguerite snapped her fingers.

Renée flushed. She wasn’t timid—she was livid! How dare they insult a princess of France? Thoughts flew like darts through her head. She glowered scornfully at King Francis. The lustful degenerate had untiringly attempted to unclothe her for months. It galled her that he should now get his wish, leastways part of it. “By the rood, what is this about?” she demanded to know.

“None of your concern, at the moment,” the cardinal replied calmly. “The sheet.”

“Guards!” Marguerite called, jolting Renée.

“Call them off!” Renée hissed. She did not stir until she heard the doors close. If these three jades insisted on examining her as one would a broodmare, she would give them a good show of backbone. Her revenge would be all the sweeter for it in the end. They truly had no idea whom they were dealing with. She leveled a cool gaze at the cardinal, burying her humiliation in a dark place, and, with a smile of contemptuous superiority, efficiently divested herself of the sheet. It sashayed off her body to pile at her ankles. “There.” She straightened her spine unabashedly, a gesture that made her small breasts jut. She wanted to die. “Do I please Your Graces?”

Cardinal Medici perused her swiftly and looked away. “Tell me of her character.”

King Francis, who short of rape had done everything within his power to lay her and failed, scrutinized her at length. She felt his lascivious gaze slide over her breasts, belly, mons veneris, thighs, and legs like unwanted hands. “She has all the wiles and guiles of an expensive whore—”

A gasp of indignation escaped Renée’s lips. The lying cur!

“—the proud willfulness of her mother, and the deceitful practices, tricks, and stratagems of her sire,” King Francis added bitterly, his eyes on Renée’s body.

The cardinal searched her eyes. “How many lovers have you had, Renée?”

She sucked in her breath. “I am not a whore!” she ground out emphatically, not the least bit cowed yet exceedingly froward. “If you think to push me into the bed of a poxed—”

“Just the one,” Marguerite replied for her. “She fancies herself in love with the painter.”

Cardinal Medici shot Francis a glare. “Experienced in the art as a professional cortigiana?” What false promises had Long-Nose made the cardinal and why? Renée cared to know. “Mayhap it is better this way. Men can tell the millage on women. Pure-looking is good.”

“Pure!” Lady Marguerite huffed. In millage she surpassed a hackney—and knew it.

“I am chilled,” Renée clipped. “I would be of no use to you if I died of lung rot.”

“You may cover yourself,” the cardinal permitted. As she wrapped the sheet and cloak about her, he said, “The Florentine ambassador described you as a delightfully witty, educated girl of angelic beauty and grace, a replica of the queen your mother, which you are. He said you were not for the distaff and praised you for knowing the secrets of diplomacy. Has she talents, skills?”

“She declaims playwrights, philosophers, poets, and theologians from memory,” Marguerite replied curtly. “She dances and sings skillfully and accompanies her singing on the lute. She has an eye for art and is a sharp cardplayer. There is no end to her artful accomplishments.”

A direct hit! Renée could have strangled the woman she had hereto considered her doting benefactress.

“Convent-bred?” asked the cardinal.

“Fah!” Marguerite fleered. “Queen Anne refused to part with her little talisman. After Her Grace died, King Louis took an interest in the girl. He called her ‘my precocious child, created in my image.’ She became the keeper of his secrets and a shrewd dissembler. I do not know what he hoped to gain by sowing her mind with needless information. He created a most disagreeable creature no prince would have. A woman to be treated with caution, Your Grace.”

Renée seethed. She was nothing like her father! She was her mother’s daughter! “Jesu, pity! What is it you want from me? Let us speak of it and be done!”

“Pray do not expect her loyalty,” Marguerite added. “She keeps faith with no one.”

“I kept faith with you!” Renée cried bitterly. “How confoundedly imbecilic of me!”

“Her loyalty is the least of my concerns, for that can easily be bought.” The cardinal took a seat behind the table and filled a goblet with wine. “She is very young. That is my sole concern. Albeit…her purity and inexperience make her the perfect instrument, for who would suspect a fresh young thing to be anything other than what she appears to be?”

King Francis looked pleased as a swine in mud. “Sister, we should like to offer you a way to redeem yourself in our eyes and regain our favor.”

Aha! The negotiation part, at last! “Am I to be sent to a nunnery?” Renée asked tartly.

“The good Lord offers sinners countless ways to redeem themselves,” Cardinal Medici said. “A girl who wishes to atone for the sin of licentiousness takes the veil, but you are not penitent, are you? You regret getting caught.”

Renée smiled pertly. “Mayhap I should atone for my sin of incompetence.” She was already in so much trouble she doubted her insolence could exacerbate her situation.

“You shall have ample opportunities to atone for that, my dear.”

“Install you in a nunnery!” Long-Nose, as always a step behind, scoffed. “How long before you escape to your mother’s relatives in Brittany and raise an army against me, hein?”

“I would never commit treason against France!” Renée vowed, and meant it.

“Let us discuss your reward.”

“My reward?” Renée blinked in surprise at the cardinal. What had she missed?

“Should you succeed,” he clarified.

“In what?”

“I will double your annuity,” Long-Nose announced.

“As payment for doing what?” she dogged. This could not be good for her health.

“And your lover will be spared,” the cardinal interposed. “Upon your successful return.”

“My return? From England?” Her heart drummed wildly. “But Your Graces will not tell me until we have set a price and I pledged my collaboration.”

“Very good,” the cardinal praised.

“I told you she was shrewd.”

“I am not a whore!”

“This is not an office for a whore,” Cardinal Medici assured her.

“I refuse regardless.”

“Refuse now and your punishment will be as I have decreed,” Francis replied. “Soubise, the death of your lover, and the loss of your annuity and dowry, mayhap even a charge of treason.”

“Consent and you will profit. However”—Cardinal Medici’s enticing tone turned flinty—“should you accept our offer and renege at a later date, your punishment will be death.”

“You expect me to state my price and make my decision before I know the particulars?”

“Once our negotiation is concluded, we will have passed the point of no return,” Cardinal Medici emphasized. “Should you fail and try to flee…”

“I never fail,” Renée muttered dismissively, her mind feverishly weighing the pros and cons. How far would she go to secure her future? “Would I be asked to commit a mortal sin?”

“You will be asked to perform a holy duty,” Medici asserted.

“Is spying on the English a holy duty?” she countered challengingly. She was aware of the risks she was running in conducting herself in this fashion, yet they were testing her.

“We are not asking you to spy,” muttered the cardinal. “Yes or no? Decide now.”

“If I am caught, the English will execute me. If I refuse, you will execute Raphael. If I fail, you will kill me. So, in effect, my only recourse is to accept your assignment and succeed.”

“Yes!” the cardinal and the king responded cheerfully as one.

“In that case, I demand the duchy of Brittany and Raphael’s freedom as my reward.”

“You cannot have Brittany!” Francis thundered as Marguerite cried, “The nerve of this girl!”

Renée glared unflinchingly at Marguerite. “You are not the one being asked to risk her life.” She regarded the king and the cardinal. “Whatever you would have me do, I set Brittany as my prize. Once my ‘holy duty’ is performed to your satisfaction, the queen my mother’s titles and estates will be restored to me with a royal assurance that the right of succession will be passed to my issue, in female line. I will then leave your court and your realm.”

An angry muscle twitched in King Francis’s jaw. “The duchy of Brittany is within my realm, as it was within the realm of the king your father!”

“As decreed by Semi-Salic Law, the duchy of Brittany belonged to the queen my mother.” Renée listed all the arguments her mother had plagued her father with before and after they were married. Her sire, resolved to absorb the duchy into his dominion, bribed Pope Alexander VI for a dispensation to put aside his wife, Queen Joan, and bullied Anne of Brittany into marrying him. Queen Anne refused until death to sanction the marriage of Claude to Louis’s heir, pushing instead for an alliance with Luxembourg and for Brittany to go to Renée. Nevertheless, with his single-minded ruthlessness, Louis saw to it that the marriage of Claude and Francis took place in the year following Anne’s death and kept Brittany within the grasp of the French monarchy.

“You cannot have Brittany,” King Francis repeated decisively. “You shall be paid in gold.”

“One has no use for gold within a prison. I would have my independence or nothing at all.”

“This nothing includes Soubise,” he reminded her. “And the death of your lover.”

“So be it.” Renée fixed him with her notoriously stubborn glare.

Cardinal Medici seemed displeased with King Francis’s maladroit handling of the matter. “I should like to remind Your Majesty that his contract…with the Medici Bank—”

“My dear Cardinal Protector of France!” cried Francis. “I won’t pay for your triple tiara with civil war. For all her false vows of loyalty, once this malapert has Brittany, she will recoup her mother’s sovereignty and break from France. I will lose a considerable share of my taxes and have a Franco-Breton war on my hands. No amount of Florentine gold is worth the trouble.”

Renée smiled. Medici gold in exchange for trebucheting Medici into the chair of St. Peter’s. She was eager to see which one of them would cave in first. Her purse was on the buffoon.

“You may have the duchy of Chartres,” Long-Nose relented, as expected.

Pedantically she replied, “His Majesty has already dowered me with Chartres.”

“Revoked! But, if you are satisfactorily obedient, we shall let you keep it.”

“May I be excused?” Renée stared him in the eye. “Soubise is waiting.”

The cardinal glared at Francis, who grudgingly offered, “Chartres and lands near Nantes.”

Was it his last ditch-stand, Renée wondered, or would the millions in gold the Medici Bank of Florence was willing to pay to instate another Medici pope after Pope Leo X moved to higher pastures prove too tempting to refuse? “Your Graces, I fear me you have placed too great a store in my capabilities. I am but a woman—frail, docile, meek, ignorant of the world—”

“Fah!” said Marguerite. “A headstrong trickster is what you are!”

“What if I were to disappear somewhere between France and England and never return?”

“You could, but then you will have forfeited Brittany, as well as your lover, and be forever on the run,” the cardinal reasoned softly.

Renée plunged on. “If I refuse, I die. If I fail, I die. If I succeed, I shall be in mortal danger. Your Graces leave me with little to lose. Anything short of Brittany is not worth the trouble.”

Long-Nose addressed the cardinal. “How will you compensate me for Brittany?”

“Double the figure we agreed upon.”

“Treble it.”

“Done.” The cardinal beamed. “My dear girl, you will travel to England, perform your holy duty, and upon your return, you shall be vested Duchess of Brittany.”

“And Chartres,” Renée amended. “I require this in writing, validated with Your Graces’ seals, and I will be vested before my departure.” She smiled prettily. “If it please Your Graces.”

Marguerite’s face turned beet red. “You…impudent, insubordinate, froward girl!”

Yes, always froward. Renée sighed, dreading to hear what precisely she had agreed to.

Cardinal Medici offered her a wine cup. “Here’s to the success of your mission, Your Grace!”

Renée forced herself to sip, not gulp the calming rosé and prayed she would not become the shortest-living duchess in the history of Brittany and Chartres. “Your Graces, now that all is settled between us, I should like to know the particulars of my assignment. Surely you would not be so generous were I to merely spy on the English, for I am confident you have ambassadors aplenty.”

“All in good time,” said the cardinal, and sent for one Lieutenant Armado Baglioni.

What could it be? Renée’s brain spun with possibilities. “Am I to steal the queen’s jewels? The Great Seal of England, perchance?”

“I would send a thief for that.”

“Poison the Lord Chancellor?”

The cardinal laughed. “I would send a poisoner. Ah, Lieutenant Armado. Madame, meet the commander of your personal bodyguard.”

The Italian officer bowed. A pendant dangled from his neck. It was a gold cross over black. Renée eyed it with interest. “Your family emblem, Lieutenant?”

“No, madame. The insignia—” A hiss from Cardinal Medici hushed him.

She snorted. “If the emblem is so secretive, I suggest you leave it behind, Lieutenant.”

“Sound advice,” the cardinal agreed. “I have made ready special quarters for Your Grace at my chateau. I suggest you depart now.”

“Who is to be my official escort to England?” she queried. “I must arrive with an embassy.”

The overlords of her universe exchanged baffled looks. They had not considered this detail.

“Choose whomever you want,” the king granted peevishly.

“The Marquis de Rougé, with a caveat.”

“What caveat?” the king, the cardinal, and the king’s lady sister demanded in unison.

“A little one.”