“Order your guards to stand down!” she said. “Let Joscelin go, and my sisters.”
Guided by the sounds of movement, Alessandro Borgia spun into motion, staff whistling as it carved the air. The younger guard leaped to meet him. His steel pike thudded into the wooden staff. Falling back, her father deflected the blow.
Grimly, the other guard advanced toward Joscelin, pike fixed before him, and she cried out in alarm.
“For pity’s sake, Joscelin—leave me!”
“Never will I.” He swung his sword to deflect, and steel clashed against steel.
She watched in agony as the two men she loved battled for their lives. Her vision filled with whirling blows, grunts of effort, the lunge and parry of battle. Despite his infirmity, the Hand of God fought with blurring speed, anticipating every attack, twisting to avoid the blows.
Joscelin was deadly, cloak unfurling as he thrust, firelight flashing on his brilliant blade, his eyes blazing copper. Falling back from his lethal rush, a sentry knocked into the brazier and sent it flying. Burning coals scattered across the rushes. Joscelin leaped over the river of smoldering embers as choking black smoke billowed up.
“Get out, Allegra!” he shouted, ducking low as the pike whistled past. “Your sisters are below, the Constable bound as a hostage. Take them and run.”
“I’ll not abandon you, no more than you abandoned me!” She yearned for her own knife, glittering beyond reach on the table. To get it, she would have to release pressure on the don’s injury. She knew, with utter certainty, that he would bleed to death in moments if she did.
“Ah, now here’s a dilemma,” Maximo panted. “My life for your freedom.”
Smoke roiled between them, stinging her eyes and making her cough. Tongues of flame licked up from the rushes, eagerly devouring the dry fuel, while the men fought like demons in the fires of Hell.
A tendril of fire crept upward along Joscelin’s cloak. She screamed a warning and he slung it off, raining blows against the guard’s desperate parries.
“You might as well—help him.” The don’s breath came fast and shallow. “I won’t survive this—unless you’re the Messiah, raising Lazarus from the dead.”
“Don’t be sacrilegious. It’s unlike you.” She swiped at her swinging eyes. “Help me get you to the stairs, or these flames will be our funeral pyre. I, for one, would prefer not to burn.”
“You can’t save me, Allegra.” He bared his teeth in a rictus of pain. “Let me set your mind at ease—and say that I forgive you. Let my last act on this earth be one of—mercy. Perhaps God will take it into account—when he weighs my soul.”
The smoke was thickening, blocking her vision. The men appeared and vanished, shouts ringing over the hungry crackle of flames. Still pressing her blood-soaked fabric against the wound, Allegra stared down at him, feeling as though she lived in a nightmare. Surely, soon, she must waken.
“Never tell me that you, of all men, fear for your soul.” She coughed, her voice gone ragged. “You endowed a church, didn’t you? Surely your salvation is assured.”
The heavy thud of a body fell, and the pike rolled from a lifeless hand. Desperately she searched the smoke. Relief poured through her when she found Joscelin, still towering among the flames as the fire raced toward the door. He stared toward her, eyes watering in his soot-blackened features.
“Merde, Allegra—leave him and get out!”
The battling forms of Alessandro and his opponent reeled past, their clothing smoldering. Joscelin flung himself after them, away from the door, and her heart sank with despair.
A groan from Don Maximo tugged at her attention. “It won’t be long now, mi alma. Remember—I’ve forgiven you.”
“Your Excellency…”
But he stopped her, gripping her hand with fingers that had nearly lost their strength. “I forgive you,” he whispered. “And for my sins against you—of which, admittedly, there are many—will you do the same?”
Wordless, she stared down at him, sweat streaking his brow under the raven hair, a smudge of soot against one cheek, this face she’d feared and hated. The man responsible for all her torment…the man who’d saved her once from burning. Without him, she would never have come to England, never known Joscelin, never loved him.
“Be at ease,” she said. “I forgive you.”
“Ah.” The ghost of a smile curled his lips as his eyes closed. “I hated you for so long. And now, to think…I could almost…love you.”
His hand fell from hers, and the spark of his life blew out.
Chapter Twenty-One
Joscelin stood over the fallen guard, hands braced on his thighs, and coughed to clear his burning lungs. The sleeping pallets had ignited in sheets of fire beside him. Tongues of flame leaped behind Allegra where she knelt, dealing somehow with the don. The man must be dying, if that spreading pool of blood was any indication. Soon they would all be engulfed.
Behind him, a grunt sounded. Knuckling tears from his eyes, Joscelin staggered around in time to see Alessandro Borgia sag to the floor. The quarterstaff clattered from his grip. Across the chamber, Allegra screamed—a sound that knifed straight through his heart.
“Padre!” To his horror, she leaped up, as if she’d run straight through the flames. But the smoke bent her double in paroxysms of coughing.
“Damn it to Hell—get out of here, Allegra!” Joscelin weaved through the flames toward the fallen Borgia. “I’ll get him.”
Now that the old man had fallen, the remaining guard stood over him, dumb as an ox, as if he didn’t know what to do next.
“Are you mad?” Joscelin hunched over the blind man. “Get out before we all burn.”
The guard glanced around the inferno, dawning horror in his eyes, then bolted for the door. Joscelin figured the lad wouldn’t stop running until he hit the Thames.
Alessandro Borgia was still breathing, despite a trickle of blood at his temple. Well, for a blind man, he’d been one hell of a fighter. Joscelin gathered the robed form, hoisted the weight over his shoulder and levered to his feet. Already weary, his thigh muscles ached from the strain.
In the thick smoke, he could no longer see the door. Disoriented, he stood in a ring of fire, the heat blistering his skin, and beat sparks from the old man’s robes with his bare hands. Was this how it ended?
Then, like a miracle, he heard Allegra calling, her voice frantic, but blessed as a holy vision. Holding the breath in his searing lungs, he staggered toward her voice. Cool air caressed his face and guided him toward the door.
Then she was flying through the smoke to hurl herself against him, eyes streaming in her soot-darkened face, sable hair falling in disarray. And she was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen. In a daze, he followed her, his fingers laced through hers. They emerged into the cool dark of the stairs and hurried downward.
Near the bottom he halted and propped the old man against the wall, gulping breaths of clean, glorious air. She spun toward him, fear and exhaustion written on her features.
“Santa Maria, let me help you. Can you make it just a bit farther?”
“I’d follow you to Hell and back,” he said hoarsely, and pulled her into his arms. Despite the fire raging upstairs and the myriad problems below, he couldn’t resist bending to claim her lush, trembling mouth with his. She was heat and light and quickening life, and he’d come too damned close to losing her.
“Joscelin.” She clung to his doublet as though her legs would fail. “I’m not a witch, I swear it.”
“Mon Dieu, can you think I doubt it?” Fiercely his arms tightened, crushing her lithe form against him.
“But why?” She pressed her brow into his doublet. “Why did you come back for me?”
“Isn’t that obvious, sweetheart? How could you not know?”
Her tear-streaked face turned up to search his as the flicker of fire played over them. “I know that you despise me, and my choices. And Mistress Carew—”
A groan from the old ma
n snapped Joscelin back to the present crisis.
“We’ll talk later.” Reluctantly, he released her. “We have to get your father and the girls away, get all of you out of London. I left your sisters below, with the Constable.”
Disbelief still blanketed her features. For once, she was easy to read—just as he’d read her upstairs, when she’d pretended to acquiesce to the don’s infernal bargain. Now she helped him lift her father, who was feebly stirring, then flitted down before them, her stiletto a glitter of cold fire in her fist.
Despite some anxious moments, Joscelin led them through the streaming chaos on the Green, with men running in every direction, shouting about fire and water and finding the Constable. He knew they would shortly locate the wretched man, whom they’d left—bound and quivering with wrath—inside the tower.
By the time they reached the landward gate, Alessandro Borgia was groggy but conscious. As flames leapt from the windows of the Beauchamp Tower, the gates were flung open to allow more men to fight the fire. Swiftly, they slipped into the shadowy warren of streets where the hired coach waited.
As the coach barreled through the night, leaving London and its intrigues behind, Joscelin kept returning to that moment on the stairs. He’d taken one look into Allegra’s brave, desperate face and known—with the thrill of certainty—that he would love her forever.
He loved her savage bravery in the face of danger, her fierce devotion, the clever brain that worked with such crystal clarity, even in the pitch of crisis. He loved the languid sensuality he’d helped her claim, loved her beauty and her darkness, ever reaching for the light.
She was grateful to him for helping her. She’d blessed him a thousand times as she embraced her kin, watering them all with the tears she couldn’t seem to stop shedding, once the imminent threat was past.
But never once had she told him she loved him.
The Lucky Pelican might be little more than a glorified fishing sloop, but it bounded with spirit across the sparkling waves. With a competent man at the helm, Allegra felt certain they’d shortly complete the Channel crossing. The January morning was clear as a bell, cold sun blazing over the azure sea. A few hours’ sailing would see them in Calais, where she would pawn her jewels to finance their passage to Venice.
Calais was also where she would bid farewell to Joscelin. But she wished not to think of that.
Although she’d resolved not to weep until he’d gone, stubborn tears welled up and spilled over her cheeks, freezing in the blade-sharp cold. She gripped the ship’s rail and stared over the bow, her eyes turned away as the English coast sank behind them.
In the cabin below, her sisters were comfortably settled with Alessandro—none of them the worse for their adventure. The Borgias would return to their villa on the Brenta, and she with them, free of Spanish intrigue at last.
Yet, now that danger was behind them, all the tears she’d bottled up over those bitter years seemed determined to fall, in limitless supply. Truly, couldn’t she contain herself for just a day longer—just until Joscelin said goodbye?
As if her thoughts had summoned him, the deck creaked under his feet as he came up behind her. She caught a whiff of his bracing fragrance as he wrapped his cloak around her shoulders. She closed her eyes, longing for him with a hopeless ache, loving his heat and strength behind her.
His hands rested on her shoulders. He pitched his voice above the whistling wind, the snapping sails, the groaning timbers as the ship carved through the waves.
“Before we sailed, I spent the morning in the taverns,” he said. “There’s news of the marriage trial, if you want to hear it.”
She struggled to kindle a spark of interest, for his sake, since the Boleyns’ future was bound up in the outcome.
“The queen has made a spirited defense.” Briskly, he chafed her arms for warmth. “She rejects all claims that her marriage is invalid, appeals to the king’s justice and his own conscience. Otherwise, she’s refused to acknowledge the court’s legitimacy or to return there at all. The common view is that Campeggio will be tied up for months.”
“I wish him much joy of it.” In Venice she would be free of the cardinal too, praise God. Venetian justice was a vastly different matter from the corrupt cesspools of Genoa, where her arrest had occurred. And the Doge of Venice owed her father a favor. Alessandro Borgia was confident that, with the Doge’s support, the Church’s old charges against her would be swiftly dismissed. “I suppose the queen’s defense can’t be convenient for the Boleyns?”
“Zut! Her stubbornness may delay the outcome, but it won’t dissuade them. My father is already ennobled, by the king’s own hand. And my sister has her heart set on the crown. What the Boleyns desire, they’re accustomed to getting—by fair means or foul.”
Allegra turned toward him, searching his strong features for signs of grief. He seemed resigned but untroubled by the King’s Great Matter. Yet his green-gold eyes were watchful, as though he waited for her to say or do…something. She’d already expressed, countless times, her gratitude and blessings for his efforts. She’d tried to persuade him to accept her rubies for his expenses, but of course that had only infuriated him.
Well, she must try again, though he was probably counting the minutes until they landed in Calais and he could be free of her.
“Joscelin.” The words burst out, fired by remorse. “I’m so sorry about what happened with your father. You strove so long to win his regard. And then to be robbed of your reward…”
“I could have had them all—wealth, power, my father’s respect.” He squinted into the bright glitter of sunlight on the sea. “But when I saw the true price, it came too dear. Certainement, I’m grateful I learned that lesson before it was too late. I’ve regained my honor and self-respect, which are worth far more than gold. Honor, and—”
“What will you do now?” Her brittle control would shatter if he started talking about marrying Mistress Carew. No doubt she’d sob all over his doublet and beg him not to leave her. But a man of his mettle deserved a better woman.
“I thought of returning to the French court, where I’m known.” He frowned into the wind. “But I have no more taste for court intrigues and deceptions. Perhaps I’ll travel for a while, see the world—have a few more adventures, oui?”
Let him go, her conscience counseled. He has more than earned his freedom.
Yet it seemed her tongue had a will of its own.
“You could come to Venice.” Her secret hope burst out, fueled by a flame of longing she couldn’t smother. “My father has many connections there, from the common folk to the very greatest. And…you know something about horticulture and wine-growing, don’t you? We have a rather substantial farm. It would be the least we could do—”
Again he searched her features, as if hunting for clues to a mystery. But the mask she’d once donned so easily no longer suited her. Her eyes embraced him—confident, good-natured, fired by a finer integrity than any man she’d ever known. Her heart skipped a beat, and her belly quivered with the same weakness she’d felt from the first.
“What will you do in Venice?” he asked. “Since you’ve given up your former profession.”
“I’ll help with my father’s villa and reopen the perfumery.” She struggled to seem only cheerful. “We still own a building near Piazza San Marco, and we have funds invested with the bankers there. ’Tis enough to make a good start, anyway.” She hesitated, then plunged ahead. “I won’t revert to—what I did before. I have sworn—”
“Allegra.” He pressed his fingers against her trembling lips. When the flood of words ceased, his thumb traced her lower lip. Then his warm hand cupped her chin. Helpless to resist the aching tide of longing, she leaned into him, soaking in the quiet strength and tenderness she had always loved.
“I know you’ll not return to the old ways,” he said. “I’ve never doubted that.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if…damn these wretched tears!” She dashed a hand across her eyes.
“Mon Dieu, don’t apologize. You’ve had more cause to weep than any person I’ve ever known. Allegra…” His shoulders stiffened, as though he braced against a blow. “You’ve been weeping for him—for Maximo, since the night he died in your arms. And you’ve been very careful with me, very distant…as though I’d force myself on you while you grieved. But you needn’t fear that. I’d be a fool not to know.”
“Know what?” She scrambled to follow his tangled speech. Why did he raise Don Maximo now?
Joscelin sucked in a breath. “I know you were in love with him, despite all that passed between you. I’d never force myself on you, even if I am in love with you. If you consider Maximo—”
“Wait.” Her hands flew up to stop him. Her skin tingled as his words raced through her blood. She must have misunderstood him. “I can’t have heard you properly,” she whispered. “Mistress Carew—”
“A plague take Mistress Carew! I’m not marrying the creature.” He caught her shoulders in a fierce grip. “I’ve loved you, Allegra Nerezza Grimaldi, since the first time I saw you. Though I was a bloody idiot to take so long telling you.” She stared in disbelief, and his brow furrowed. “Can you possibly be surprised? Why else would I come thundering after you whenever you left me behind? Why would I follow you to the Tower and support your insane schemes—?”
“Joscelin, you can’t love me.” She was struggling to convince herself, but stubborn shoots of hope were unfurling in her chest and threading all through her. They squeezed her heart until she thought it would burst. “Even if you’ve refused Mistress Carew, you can’t possibly love me, of all women!”
“Merde! Why the Hell can’t I?” He squeezed her shoulders as if he’d like to shake her. “You’re brave, brilliant, bold, beautiful. Oui, you’re all these things, and so much more. Maximo—”
“Oh, Joscelin.” Wildly, she began to laugh. His words were still too incredible to absorb. “How could you possibly believe I was in love with him? Or with any other man, when I had you before me?”
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