The small page stood there solemnly looking at her.
“Are you waiting for an answer?” she asked him.
“I am waiting here, ma’mselle, to escort you to the garden,” he replied with a little bow, which made her smile because it was such a perfect imitation of his Master’s.
She suddenly felt young and gay and the troubles and anxieties of the night seemed to fall away from her.
“I will come for a few minutes,” she said, more to herself than to him and, picking up her shawl, she slipped it over her shoulders. “Show me where the Comte is waiting.”
“I will take you to him immediately, mam’selle,” the page promised.
They went down a twisting maze of corridors and staircases, which made Sheena think that she would never find her way to the ground floor, when suddenly they emerged not into the courtyard but into the garden itself by a side entrance that led directly onto the terrace and formal lawns where a fountain was playing.
There was no sign of anyone until the page led her down a twisting lavender-hedged path and through two cypress trees standing sentinel over a Herb Garden that was hidden from the windows of The Palace
It was then that she saw the Comte sitting on a marble seat by a small goldfish pool, the early sun shining on his polished dark head.
He sprang up eagerly at her approach and came towards her and then, taking her hand in his, he raised it to his lips.
“I hardly dared to hope that you would come,” he began in a low voice.
Sheena smiled at him.
“It was kind of you to ask me,” she said. “I was feeling lost and I think a little homesick. I wanted so much to talk to someone.”
“And I so wanted to talk to you,” he replied. “It was impossible while I was your escort with three of my friends listening to everything that we might say. But now it is different. You are so lovely. I have been able to think of nothing else since I first met you.”
The tone in his voice made Sheena feel embarrassed. She dropped her eyes, conscious that he was still holding her hand.
“Enchanting and an enchantress,” he smiled. “Come and sit and let me look at you.”
“Please, you must not pay me such compliments,” Sheena asked him.
“Why not?” he asked in genuine astonishment.
“I am not used to them,” she answered. “In Scotland no gentleman would think of saying such things on so short an acquaintance. And, besides, I have come into the garden because I want to talk to you on serious matters.”
The Comte laughed.
“How can we be serious?” he asked her. “And indeed why should we be? We are young and alone and I am very much in love.”
“Please – please – ” Sheena murmured, feeling with something like panic that she should not have left her room.
She made a movement, but now the Comte had both her hands in his and was covering them with kisses.
“You are adorable,” he said softly. “How can I talk to you when all I want to do is to tell you that you have set me on fire? I can think only of your hands, your eyes and your lips.”
He bent towards her as he spoke and now, really frightened she realised how stupid she had been to accept his invitation,
Sheena exerted all her strength and managed to free her hands from his. Then, lifting her skirts, she ran hastily back the way she had come, leaving him calling after her, her woollen shawl lying at his feet.
She ran helter-skelter down the garden between the cypress trees and across the terrace towards the door into The Palace which the page had led her through. She found it and pulled it open only to be confronted by a choice of several passages.
Wildly, half-afraid that the Comte would follow her, she turned left, only to realise after she had been running for a few seconds that she had chosen wrongly.
The passage broadened out into a wide hall. She then saw an open doorway, which she realised led into the courtyard and knew that she must retrace her steps.
She halted, but it was too late. Someone coming into the hall from the other direction saw her and crossed the polished floor to her side.
She tried to turn back. but he put a hand on her arm and prevented her.
“Mistress McCraggan! What are you doing here?” he asked.
She looked up at the Duc de Salvoire and saw his face, dark and unsmiling and with a stab of horror realised how she must look to him with her hair dishevelled, her cheeks flushed from running and her hands trembling.
“It is – it is a m-mistake,” she stammered. “Please let me go. I-I didn’t mean to come this way.”
“Let me show you the right staircase,” he suggested quietly.
She was too frightened to argue with him and too lost to protest her independence.
With her breath coming unevenly in gasps she was forced to move beside him down the passage, one hand creeping up to try to subdue the curls over her forehead.
“What has frightened you?” he asked gently.
“N-nothing, Your Grace. It was – just that I-I lost my way.”
She felt her cheeks burn furiously at the lie and yet, she asked herself, what else could she say? If only he would not find out how stupid she had been.
“It is very easy to do that in this Palace,” he said in his quiet bored voice. “And that is why it is wisest, until you become more accustomed to the many entrances and exits, to take your maid with you or to go with a Lady-in-Waiting of Mary Stuart. You will meet them this morning. So I hope you will find some congenial friends amongst them.”
“I think that is unlikely,” Sheena said, surprised into speaking the truth.
Her voice was low and miserable and the moment she had said the words she regretted them.
The Duc stopped walking and looked down at her.
“I always thought that the Scots were fighters,” he said. “I thought they had, if nothing else, more courage than anyone else.”
Sheena felt herself quiver at his words. They flicked her on the raw. At the same time, in all honesty, she had to admit that they were justified. Because she had no one else to ask she had to ask of him the question that had been torturing her all night.
“You do not think,” she said in a voice little above a whisper, “that it would be best if I returned home now and at once?”
Because she hated him and she knew of his supreme indifference to herself, she felt his answer would be honest, perhaps more honest than anyone else’s would have been.
“No!” he replied unexpectedly abruptly. “Put your chin up and face it. Do what you have come to do.”
Instinctively they had stopped walking and now their eyes met. For a moment she gazed at him, knowing that he had said what she ought to hear and yet somehow dismayed because he had said it.
And then, even as he had commanded her, her chin went up.
“Thank you,” she said, almost beneath her breath. “You have answered my question for me. I will try not to be afraid.”
“There is nothing to be afraid of really,” he said. “You will find that most of our fears are inside ourselves and not outside.”
Sheena glanced at him quickly and then, almost as if he was sorry that he had said so much, he pointed ahead to where there was a staircase just a little to the right of the door from which he had entered the garden.
“That is the way you should have taken,” he said abruptly and uncompromisingly.
She opened her lips to thank him and then as she did so, through the open door that led to the garden, she saw coming across the terrace straight towards them the Comte de Cloude.
He was looking annoyed and he was carrying in his hand a woollen shawl that seemed to Sheena to shriek in every homemade stitch of it that it came from Scotland.
She saw the Duc glance towards the Comte, she saw his lips tighten and knew that he understood what had happened. She thought she saw an expression of contempt in his eyes. And then, because the situation was beyond her, because she felt that anything sh
e did or said would make matters worse and without another word she ran forward and up the stairs that the Duc had indicated to her.
She ran so quickly that by the time she reached the top her heart was pounding and it was hard to breathe. In fact she might have had two devils instead of one at her heels!
CHAPTER FOUR
“What must he think of me? What must he think of me?”
Sheena felt the words pounding against her brain as she ran headlong up the stairs, the colour in her cheeks due not only to the exertion of climbing up the stairs so quickly but also to humiliation.
Why had he looked at her like that? Why had the Duc’s bored, steel-grey eyes seemed to hold a reproach? Or was she mistaken and it was only condemnation and disgust?
How could she have known for one moment that the Comte was going to behave in such a manner?
Sheena, in all innocence, thought that love was something that was kept for the evening or the night. Whispered words in the moonlight or perhaps the quick pressure of a hand as a woman danced with a man who attracted her or ran as dusk fell to meet him at some secret assignation.
This was now morning in the sunlight.
And then she remembered that it was also France. Little wonder that her father and the Elders of Scotland had spoken in shocked voices of French morals and had felt that Mary Stuart might be contaminated by the looseness of French ways.
Sheena then reached the top of the narrow staircase and had to stop a moment to get her breath. She was on a landing which she vaguely recognised and then as she stood there, her small breasts heaving tumultuously, she heard a shriek of laughter, heard a door opening and saw one of the chambermaids come running into the passage followed by one of the footmen.
She tried to elude him but he caught her amid what were obviously ineffectual protests and she allowed herself to be soundly kissed before they disappeared once again into the door that they had just come through.
“Like Master, like maid – ” The old adage came to Sheena’s mind and her lip curled. This was France and she must be on her guard, not only for Mary Stuart but for herself.
Soberly she walked down the corridor, recalling now in which direction her apartment lay. She had learned her lesson, she told herself, and then unbidden the question came to her mind,
Would the Duc understand? Would he put her behaviour down to ignorance or merely to wantonness?
‘It does not matter to me what he thinks,’ she told herself defiantly.
And yet she knew that because she hated him she did not wish to give him any excuse to disparage her.
Suddenly the enormity of her task that lay ahead struck her so forcibly that she paused once again to look out on the formal gardens. How could she, so ignorant, so badly equipped for a life like this, try to understand the machinations and intrigues of this great Palace?
With something suspiciously like a sob, Sheena continued her journey towards her own bedchamber. She opened the door to find Maggie standing by the bed.
“So where have you been, you bad bairn?” she said in her scolding voice. “’Tis worried stiff I’ve been about you. No one seemed to know where you’d gone.”
“It is all right, Maggie,” Sheena said a little wearily. “I have come to no harm. I merely went for a walk in the garden.”
“At such an hour! And the little Queen herself askin’ for you.”
“Mary Stuart asking for me?” Sheena said quickly, the life coming back to her face.
“Yes indeed Her Majesty wishes you to go with her to watch the King play tennis and after that – ”
Before Maggie could say anything more Sheena interrupted her with a little cry.
“What is this? Where did it come from?” she asked, for she had seen lying on the bed a magnificent and very beautiful gown of white satin embroidered with blue jewels and small pearls caught with blue ribbons over a petticoat of exquisite lace.
It was so beautiful as to leave Sheena gasping at it in astonishment and admiration.
“You may well ask,” Maggie said triumphantly. “‘Tis a present for you.”
“A present!” Sheena’s voice sharpened. “I will not accept it.”
All too clearly she could hear again the Duc’s scornful and drawling voice as he said to the Duchesse de Valentinois, ‘you had better get the child some clothes. She needs them.”
Stamping her foot Sheena turned away from the gown and walked across the room as if to get away from it.
“I will not accept it,” she said again. “Take it back.”
“Take it back?” Maggie echoed in a bewildered voice. “But for why?”
“Because I say so,” Sheena snapped. “I will wear my own clothes that were good enough for Scotland, but are not good enough for me here. Well, I will not be the first to complain.”
“But, Mistress Sheena, ’tis crazy!” Maggie expostulated. “When they asked last night for your measurements I was that happy, for I knew even before we left home that your clothes were not right. Och, I’m not sayin’ that your father didna fork from his pocket as much as he could afford or that Mistress Macleod didna sew to the very best of her ability. But one look at the ladies that you see here must have told you that you look a rare scarecrow with your narrow skirts and thick woollen shawls.”
“Nevertheless, that is what I shall wear,” Sheena said sharply. “Take the gown back and tell Madame La Duchesse that I do not accept gifts from strangers.”
“Madame La Duchesse!” Maggie exclaimed. “But ’tis not she who has sent this gown.”
“Not the Duchesse.” Sheena repeated the words in astonishment. “Well, who then?”
“The Queen herself!” Maggie replied. “Nay, not Her wee Majesty, from all accounts she finds it hard to scrape enough money together for her own gowns. Nay, ’tis Queen Catherine who has sent you this magnificent gown and with a promise of more to come.”
“Queen Catherine!”
Sheena could hardly say the words aloud, she was so surprised.
She had not expected that the Queen would have even heard of her arrival let alone be considerate for her well-being.
Impulsively she rushed across the room to the bed, fingering the gown and holding it up against her, then seeking a mirror so she could see her reflection.
“But how kind! How very very kind of Her Majesty,” she said. “How could she know I needed such gowns and I have not even met her yet?”
“They say that the Queen has her own ways of knowin’ everythin’ that goes on in The Palace,” Maggie said, “for all that she’s ever so meek and quiet and appears to mind nothin’ not even being forgotten and ignored at times.”
“She must mind that,” Sheena murmured.
“Nay, for she makes a great fuss of Madame La Duchesse in public and when she is in childbirth they say ’tis the Duchesse herself who ministers to her and even brings the wee bairn into the world.”
Sheena turned round.
“Maggie, how do you know all this?”
“Know it!’ Maggie snorted. “’Tis very little I dinna know by now. Never have I heard such a lot of gossips as there be below stairs.”
“But how can you understand them?” Sheena asked her. “You have never learned the language.”
“Och, that’s no barrier in this place,” Maggie replied. “Why, there are plenty of Scots to be found and you can be sure they made a beeline for me when I we arrived to hear the latest news from home.”
Sheena looked incredulous and Maggie went on,
“’Twere the maids who came with Her wee Majesty and who stayed here ever since and there are valets who crossed the sea with visitors from the North, then found it convenient not to return home. There’s good money here, Mistress Sheena. Good money, good food and a deal more comfort than we are used to at home.”
“So you have found friends,” Sheena said quietly and with a note of envy in her voice.
“Aye, that I have,” Maggie answered. “And talk! You’d think they wanted
to tell me the whole history of France in a single night.”
“You say the Queen accepts the Duchesse de Valentinois?”
“Indeed she does! But there are whispers that her meekness is but a mask and underneath she longs to destroy her and her power over the King.”
“It would be more human if she felt like that,” Sheena remarked.
Maggie shrugged her shoulders, a gesture Sheena noticed with amusement, thinking it would be a newly acquired trick that she had adopted from her Frenchified countrymen.
But she could not worry very much about Maggie. The gown that she held in her hands was so magnificent that it drew her eyes to the exclusion of all else.
“If the Queen has sent me this,” she said in tones of joy, “I can accept it and gratefully.”
“It is indeed kind of Her Majesty,” Maggie said. “What is more, she wishes to see you.”
“She has asked for me too?”
“That she has,” Maggie replied. “And when I told the maid that Her wee Majesty was waitin’ for you, she said that Mary Stuart herself would take you there after you had watched the King at tennis.”
Sheena forgot to be worried and anxious and let out a little whoop.
“Then help me into this gown, Maggie. Never, never did I think to possess anything so magnificent or so beautiful. Pray Heaven it becomes me.”
She need not have worried. With her fair skin and red-gold hair the white gown with its blue and pearl embroidery made her look so entrancing that she could hardly believe it was herself that she saw in the silver mirror.
Maggie tried to dress her hair a little formally and, although soft tendrils of curls would escape, the result when she had finished made Sheena feel Regal as well as enchanting.
She could not help the thought flashing through her mind that, if the Comte had found her desirable this morning, what would he think of her now?
She could still hear his impassioned voice and feel the imprint of his hot lips on her hand.
She had been afraid and flustered, but now she told herself that she had been ridiculous. Only a country bumpkin would have been unable to cope with the situation. She should have rebuked him, told him to behave himself and talked seriously and quietly, which should have calmed his passion.
The Hidden Evil Page 5
