“I must not keep you. I wait upon the Duchesse de Valentinois.”
‘Don’t go! Don’t go!’ Sheena cried out to him in her heart and knew in terror that her lips could not say anything.
‘Wait! Wait! I am here’ she called and heard with a sinking heart, the Duc’s footsteps going away down the corridor.
“Do you think he suspected?”
The Marquis spoke almost in a whisper.
“He had no idea,” the Comtesse replied. “You might be carrying anything. He will not think of it again.”
“That man always turns up when he is not wanted,” the Marquis said savagely.
“There is no need to be afraid of him. I will find him and keep him engaged for the rest of the evening. Let’s hurry. One would think people had something better to do than to walk the corridors at this time of night.”
“Especially these particular corridors,” the Marquis muttered.
They went a little further and then Sheena heard a door open and a man’s voice ask,
“Who is it?”
It must be one of the grooms of the Chamber, she thought, for most of them came from Normandy and were engaged by the Duchesse and his voice had a distinct Norman accent.
“It is a gift that the Queen has sent to His Majesty,” the Comtesse explained again, “a very special present and Her Majesty’s instructions are to leave it in the bedchamber so that he will find it later in the evening.”
The groom had obviously recognised the Comtesse for he said,
“Very good, my Lady,” and Sheena heard another door open.
Now at last she realised what was happening to her.
She felt herself carried across a large chamber and laid down on the softness of a bed and she understood that the Comtesse had told the truth.
She was, indeed, to be a present for the King, a present to be left waiting for him in his bedchamber when he would retire for the night.
The full horror of what had happened and what indeed was still happening came to her so brutally that she felt as if she might die of the shock of it.
She felt the Marquis lay her down, felt him or the Comtesse draw first the heavy shroud and then the silken one from her face and body.
Then, utterly naked, she lay in the King’s bed and was covered by the King’s sheets.
“She looks very young,” she heard the Marquis say and his voice was thick with lust.
“Let’s hope it is what he will find attractive about her,” the Comtesse said. “Old women must pall in time even on the most devoted of men and the Duchesse is old!”
She almost spat the words out.
“You hate her, do you not?” the Marquis said, as if he had realised it for the first time.
“Yes, I hate her,” the Comtesse answered. “The Duc admires her, finds her completely irresistible. Is not that enough to make me hate her? But he will be mine after tonight, I am sure of it.”
“You believe all that rubbish?” the Marquis asked.
“Rubbish?” the Comtesse queried. “Did you not feel something strong and powerful that we invoked with our prayers and the sacrifice? It was there, I know it. I could feel it hovering over me. He had come at last after so many attempts to bring him had failed.”
“I felt nothing,” the Marquis said half-angrily and yet, Sheena thought, with a touch of doubt in his voice. “The Queen is crazed to believe in it all and so are you.”
“Crazed or not tonight there was something very special there,” the Comtesse whispered.
“All I saw was a very lovely naked girl,” the Marquis replied, forcing himself, Sheena thought, to talk normally as he was half-afraid of his own thoughts. “If I thought the King was to be delayed for long, I might substitute for him. I am certain I would prove a far more ardent and far more persuasive lover.”
As he spoke, Sheena felt his hand upon the bedclothes but the Comtesse gave a little cry,
“Leave her alone! Don’t dare touch her. She is dedicated. The sacrifice has been made on her. She is for one person and one person only and I know, whatever you may say, the power within her will draw the King like a magnet will draw a piece of steel. Come away! Come away quickly. We must not be found here.”
“I am coming.”
The Marquis’s voice was sulky and Sheena heard them moving away and the door closed behind them.
She lay there in an agony that was beyond words. To know what was happening and to be unable to move. To fight against the paralysis which held her limbs rigid and her lips silent was a torture such as only some monster of cruelty could have devised.
She fought and fought on against her own weakness and frailty and then, knowing that every effort was inadequate and hopeless, resorted once more to prayer.
‘God help me! How could he have passed me by? How could the Duc have been so close and not known? Make him realise he must come to me. Let him hear this wherever he may be and whoever he is with. Turn him again in this direction.’
How long she had prayed she did not know, but, when she ceased through sheer and utter exhaustion, she realised that her eyes were open. For the first time she looked on the King’s bedchamber, seeing in the light of two small tapers that were lit in their sconces that she was lying in a great four-poster bed with embroidered hangings and carved posts.
The rest of the room was in darkness. The windows overlooked the garden and she could feel a faint breeze blowing in as the curtains were swayed by it.
‘What can I do?’ Sheena thought agonisingly.
She tried to turn from one side to the other, tried to move her feet and her fingers, but only her eyes were free. The drug was wearing off, she thought, because her brain was clearer but the darkness of unconsciousness was not very far away and she guessed it would be some time before she could really move or cry out.
Perhaps her voice would be the last thing to come to her and if it was how could she ever explain to the King why she was there or beg him not to take advantage of her? What would he think when he found her naked between his sheets with her head lying on his pillow?
‘I must do something. I must do something,’ she thought and knew in her desperation that there was nothing left for her but prayer.
Her eyes were closed and she was praying again, praying with an intensity that seemed as difficult as if she was moving a great weight from off the ground.
‘God help me! God help me!’
She heard the door of the bedchamber open and the words died in her mind. She dared not open her eyes.
There was someone in the room.
Would he see her at once, she wondered, or would he begin to undress and then realise her presence?
She still dared not open her eyes but now, for the first time, she could feel a movement in her breasts. She could feel them moving tumultuously and she could feel her breath coming quickly. Still there was no voice in her throat.
Someone was coming towards her! And now he had reached the bed and was standing there. What would he say? she wondered. Would he ask her what was her business?
She lay in a terror so agonising that she knew that if she was not paralysed she would be shaking all over. And then because she could bear it no longer, because she must face up to whatever lay waiting for her, she opened her eyes, prepared to plead, if not with her lips then with her soul, for mercy.
Slowly she looked upwards and then with a sudden leap of her heart she saw that it was not the King standing there but the Duc.
He was staring down at her, but the expression on his face was hidden in the shadow of the curtains.
‘You have come! You have come!” she wanted to cry. ‘Take me away. Take me away quickly. Hide me. Oh, thank God, you have come!’
“What are you doing here?”
She heard his voice, deep and low, as if it came from a long distance.
She struggled to answer him, but knew that her lips would not move.
“I could hardly credit it could be true,” she heard the Duc s
ay. “But your maid told me that you had gone to the Queen who had sent you a gown of white, plain and unembroidered. What has happened? Are you bewitched? Or are you here of your own free will?”
Sheena could not move. She could only stare at him, her eyes wide in her pale face.
“Do you wish me to take you away?” he asked. “Tell me or else I must leave you to do as they wish. Answer me!”
She could only feel her breasts moving beneath the silk sheets.
“What is the matter with you?” he asked her. “Why can you not tell me if they have put a spell upon you or if indeed you have merely acquiesced in their wishes?”
She looked up at him, willing him to understand.
“I suppose your silence means that you have agreed to do this thing,” he said and would have turned away.
She saw that he was going and knew that her last hope had gone. The terror and fear of it was quite unbearable and, as he moved away from the bed, she made a sound, strangled like an animal in pain, but at least a sound.
He turned back and now a tear was running from the corner of her eye down her cheek.
He stared down at her.
“Is it possible?” he muttered almost to himself.
He threw back the sheet, took her hand in his and raising her arm released it.
It fell back with an inanimate thud on the bed.
“My God!”
The words were through clenched teeth and now he stripped the sheet from the bed and wrapped it round her. Then he lifted her in his arms.
For a moment he stared down at her and in the light of the tapers she saw an expression on his face that she had not seen before.
“That they should have done this to you,” he exploded. “My God, they shall pay for it!”
His arms seemed to tighten about her.
“My love! My poor little love!” she thought she heard him saying, but she could not be certain as now she knew that she need no longer struggle and fight, she slipped away into the peace of a gentle unconsciousness where there was no terror and no evil.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Someone was shaking her and rocking her backwards and forwards and for a moment her mind caught at an echo remembering that it had happened to her before.
Then, with an effort so intense that it was actually a physical pain. Sheena came back to consciousness.
It was Maggie who was shaking her and Maggie who had her hands on her shoulders and was saying in a low insistent voice,
“Wake up, ma bairn, wake up! “Tis of import.”
“What is ‒ it, Maggie?”
Sheena tried to say the words drowsily and then heard them coming jerkily from her lips as Maggie continued to shake her into wakefulness.
“God be praised that you’re awake now and in your full senses,” Maggie said, more as if she reassured herself than because she was unduly convinced of it.
“What is the ‒ matter?” Sheena asked wonderingly.
Her head felt soft and woolly and, as she opened her eyes, she found that the candles were lit and that Maggie was wearing her shawl and bonnet.
She forced herself to sit up in bed.
“What time is it?” she asked. “And why are you dressed like that?”
“Because we are goin’ awa’,” Maggie responded briefly.
Sheena passed her fingers over her forehead and through the curls clustering around it and then, like a child, she put her knuckles in her eyes.
“I am so ‒ very sleepy, Maggie,” she complained. “So sleepy I cannot understand what you are saying.”
“Wake up!” Maggie almost hissed the words. “We have got to be awa’.”
Sheena took her hands from her face and stared at Maggie in astonishment. As she did so she suddenly remembered.
It came back to her slowly, almost as if someone opened a book page by page, the wine that she had drunk in the Queen’s Apartments, the expression on the Marquis’s face, another awakening and the intonation and chanting of those who invoked the Devil.
She gave a shiver at the thought and put her hands up to her throat. That is what they had been doing, invoking the Devil himself in a Black Mass over her naked body and then they had carried her paralysed and unable to move down to the King’s bedchamber.
In a sudden terror Sheena stretched out her arms, she could move and her legs, she could feel them. She threw back the bedclothes and stepped out onto the floor.
For a moment she swayed because her head felt strange and because her limbs would not obey her.
“I can move! Maggie, I can move again.”
Her relief was like a paean of thanksgiving, but Maggie was not listening. She had turned to the chair and was bringing Sheena her shift.
“Get dressed, Mistress, for the love of Heaven. There’s no time to be lost.”
‘I am saved! I am saved!’ Sheena wanted to cry aloud and then she remembered who had saved her and a sudden joy shot straight through her, clearing her mind and sweeping away the feeling of faintness and inertia,
“Hurry! Hurry!” Maggie’s voice intruded so that she was forced to pay attention.
“What is it, Maggie?” she asked. “Surely it is not time to rise.”
Without waiting for an answer she moved across the room and pulled back the curtains. Outside there was only the dark sable of the sky and the stars were twinkling overhead.
“It is still night!” Sheena exclaimed.
“We have to leave,” Maggie answered. “The Lord have mercy on us, but can I not get it into your head that we’re in danger? ‘Terrible danger’ was what His Grace said.”
“His Grace?” Sheena asked the question sharply.
Maggie nodded.
“He brought you here more dead than alive,” she answered. “He gave me his orders and, because I know he was a-speakin’ the truth, I’m goin’ to carry them out. Get your clothes on, bairn, there be no more time for talkin’.”
Danger!
That was a word Sheena understood only too well by now.
Quickly she slipped on the clothes that Maggie handed her, washed her face and hands in cold water and took her bonnet from Maggie’s ever-ready hand.
It was then for the first time that she noticed that the trunks were strapped ready in the centre of the room.
“You have packed,” she exclaimed.
“A fine muddle everythin’ is in,” Maggie retorted, “but I wasna leavin’ anythin’ behind.”
“And where are we going?” Sheena asked her, as she pulled a fur-lined cloak around her shoulders. It was only as she did so that she remembered who had made her a present of such a magnificent garment, but even as the thought flashed through her mind Maggie answered her question and drove everything else from it.
“Home,” she said. “Home to Scotland. Does that make you happy?”
“Going home,” Sheena repeated stupidly.
“Aye, and the carriage be waitin’ there for us downstairs. Wait while I call the footmen who are outside to collect our trunks.”
“Maggie, what – I don’t understand – ”
Sheena’s voice died away as Maggie, without waiting for all that she was about to say, hurried to the door. Two footmen entered and one glance at them was enough for Sheena to know by their Livery who was their Master.
It was the Duc who had arranged all this, the Duc, who had rescued her last night and he was sending her away to safety and then sending her home. She should have been delighted and thrilled, she knew that.
Had this not been just what she wanted ever since she came to France? To go back to Scotland, to be in her own land amongst things and people who were familiar and a part of her life.
And yet now that the moment had come, there was something else that swept away all gladness and all joy, at the thought.
It was then with a little sob she realised that if she went now she would leave her heart behind.
“Maggie, Maggie, I cannot – ” she began to say in a trembling voice, but already i
t was too late. The footmen had carried her trunks from the room and Maggie, snatching up a shawl that had been forgotten and with a glance round, took her by the hand and drew her forward to follow them.
“But, Maggie, I cannot go – ” she expostulated again only to be hushed into silence.
“Dinna speak,” Maggie commanded in a whisper. “No one must know you are leavin’, do you not understand? You’re in danger, bairn, terrible danger is what he said.”
As Maggie repeated the Duc’s words, the full import of them sank into Sheena’s brain. Of course she was in danger, she could see that now. She had been chosen by the Queen for a special purpose and because her project had not succeeded Her Majesty would have no mercy on the person who had failed her.
Besides, she knew too much. Sheena had lived long enough at Court to realise that those with an unhealthy knowledge of persons more powerful than themselves were invariably in grave danger. Sometimes they fell sick and died of some mysterious disease.
Sometimes they were accused of peculiar and unsubstantiated crimes and were taken to prison never to return.
Whatever the course adopted, the offending person was skilfully and cleverly eliminated. What chance had she, knowing what she did, having seen all that she had seen and having, through the Duc’s intervention, escaped at the last moment unscathed from the King’s bed?
She was silent, therefore, as Maggie led her swiftly along the passages, many of them almost in darkness as the last tapers flickered.
The Palace was now sleeping and yet Sheena fancied that there were a thousand strange noises she had never heard before, the creak of floorboards, the muffled sounds behind closed doors, the whisper of the wind at the windows and above it all the thumping of her heart.
There was the smell too of something acrid and frightening, as if she could breathe in her own fear and know that it permeated all the rest of the party with her. Every moment Sheena expected someone to burst out of one of the doors they passed and come hurrying after them down the long corridors, calling them to stop, demanding in the Queen’s name that she return to her room and then waiting there for the sentence of death to be passed on her.
And would death from the Queen and those who served her be a quick and merciful one? Sheena doubted it. She could see again the glint of evil in their eyes as she raised that goblet of wine to her lips. That was what it had been and yet at the time she had not recognised it.
The Hidden Evil Page 18
