by Jane Feather
"Miranda!" The voice emanating from this spectacle suited the grandeur of its appearance. It was a massive, heavily accented, throaty bellow that was promptly repeated. "Miranda!"
"Ohhhh, Lord," the girl muttered again in a long-drawn-out sibilant moan. The monkey took off, still
chattering, and the girl dodged behind Gareth. She whispered urgently, "You would do me the most amazing service, milord, if you would just stand perfectly still until she's gone past."
Gareth was hard-pressed to keep a straight face but obligingly remained still, then he inhaled sharply as he felt a warm body slip inside his cloak behind him and plaster itself against his back. It was as if he had grown a corporeal shadow, thin enough to cause barely a crease in the folds of his scarlet silk cloak, but substantial enough to make his skin lift in a sensual ripple.
The monkey leaped in front of the large woman and began to dance and jabber in a manner radiating insult and challenge. The woman bellowed again and raised a fist the size of a ham hock wrapped around a very knotty stick. Chip laughed at her, showing yellow teeth and sparkling eyes, then plunged into the crowd; the woman followed, still bellowing, still flourishing her stick.
Her chances of catching the monkey were so remote as to be laughable, Gareth reflected, but Chip had clearly achieved his object in drawing her away from his mistress.
"My thanks, milord." The girl slithered out from his cloak, giving him a relieved smile. "I have no desire to be caught by Mama Gertrude at the moment. She's the sweetest person in the world, but she's absolutely determined I shall become her son's partner in the end. Luke is a dear, but he's quite daft at everything but managing Fred. I couldn't possibly marry him, let alone share an act with him."
"I'm delighted to be of assistance," Gareth murmured dryly, none the wiser for her explanation. Neither could he understand why he'd found the proximity of such a dab of a creature so unnervingly sensual, but the skin of his back was still humming like a tuning fork.
Miranda looked around. The crowd were growing restless and the musicians and jugglers, taking their cue, bowed themselves off to be replaced by a rather witless-looking youth in a multicolored doublet, accompanied by a frisky terrier.
"That's Luke and Fred," Miranda informed the owner of the convenient cloak. "You see, it's a very good act and he can get Fred to do anything. Watch him jump through the ring of fire… But poor Luke doesn't have a brain in his head. I know it's not my destiny to marry him and be his partner."
Gareth glanced from the young man's vacuous expression to the girl's bright eyes shining with lively intelligence and saw her point.
"I must go and find Chip. Mama Gertrude won't be able to catch him, but he might get up to mischief." The girl gave him a cheerful wave and dived into the crowd, her orange skirt a glow of color until she disappeared from view.
Gareth felt slightly bemused but he found himself smiling nevertheless. He glanced back at the stage to where the boy on his stool gazed disconsolately into the audience after his departed dance partner. The child looked as bereft as if he'd been left alone in the dark.
The woman she'd called Mama Gertrude was pushing her way back through the crowd, her expression grimly disgruntled. She was muttering to herself. "That girl… Like a firefly she is with her darting about. Here one minute and gone the next. What's wrong with my Luke, I ask you?" She looked directly at Gareth on this fierce question. "A good, hard worker, he is. A fine-looking boy. What's wrong with him? Any normal girl would be glad of such a mate."
She glared at Gareth as if he were somehow responsible for Miranda's ingratitude. Then with a shrug and another mutter she sailed away on a cloud of puce, her enormous bosom jutting like the prow of a ship above the swaying circle of her farthingale.
Luke had just finished his act and was bowing to the crowd, the terrier strutting on his hind legs along the edge of the stage, but the audience was already moving away.
Gertrude was galvanized. She jumped onto the stage with extraordinary agility for one so cumbersome. "You haven't sent the cap around!" she bellowed. "Daft as a brush, you are, Luke. Get down there and get your fee." She belabored the hapless youth with the knob of her stick. "Standing there bowing and cavorting while the crowd goes away! You don't see Miranda doing that, you dolt!"
The lad jumped off the stage and began weaving his way through the departing crowd, his cap outstretched, an expression of eager supplication on his face as he begged for coins, his little dog trotting at his heels. But he'd missed the moment and most of his audience shoved past him, ignoring his cap and his pleas. Gareth dropped a shilling into the cap and the young man's jaw dropped.
"Thank you, milord," he stammered. "Thank you kindly, milord."
"Where do you come from?" Gareth gestured to the stage, already being dismantled by a pair of laborers.
"France, milord." Luke stood awkwardly, his eyes on his rapidly disappearing income. He was clearly torn between the need to pursue any last groats that might be forthcoming from the crowd and the obligation to answer the questions of the noble lord who had rewarded his act with such largesse. "We're catching the afternoon tide for Calais," he volunteered.
The earl of Harcourt nodded in dismissal and Luke dived after the retreating audience. The earl idly watched the dismantling process for a few more minutes, then turned back to the town nestling at the foot of the sheer white cliffs rising from the English Channel.
He had landed from France himself at dawn after a gale-blown crossing and had decided to stay overnight in Dover and start out for his house on the Strand just outside the city walls of London the next morning.
His decision had more to do with his reluctance to reenter the maelstrom of his sister's frenetic battles with the recalcitrant Maude than anything else. In truth, he'd enjoyed the elemental battle with the storm, working beside the frantic sailors, who'd welcomed another pair of hands in their struggles to keep the frail craft afloat. He suspected that the sailors had been much more afraid than he had been, but then mariners were a more than usually superstitious breed who lived in perpetual dread of a watery grave.
Gareth slipped a hand inside his doublet of richly embroidered silver silk, his fingers encountering the little velvet pouch containing the bracelet, Henry's gift to a prospective bride. The parchment in its waxed envelope lay against his breast and he traced the raised seal of King Henry IV of France beneath his fingers. Henry of Navarre was king of France only in name and birthright at present. French Catholics would not willingly accept a Huguenot monarch, but once he had succeeded in subduing his recalcitrant subjects, he would rule an immense territor
y infinitely more powerful than his native land. King of Navarre was a mere bagatelle beside king of France.
And beneath that royal seal of France lay the road back to the power and lands once enjoyed by the Harcourt family.
It was a road of such dizzying splendor that not even Imogen, Gareth's power-hungry sister, would have dared to contemplate it.
A sardonic smile touched Gareth's fine mouth as he imagined how Imogen would react to the proposition he carried in his breast. Since Charlotte's death, very little outside his own pursuits had roused Gareth from his lethargic indifference to the wider world, but this golden stroke of fortune had set his juices running, reviving the old political hungers that had once enriched his daily life.
But first he would have to secure the agreement of his ward-not something that could ever be taken for granted.
When he'd yielded to his sister's demands and sailed for France, he had carried a much more modest proposition than the one he now held. It was a proposition to the king's advisor and close confidant, the duke of Roissy, suggesting that the duke take Maude, daughter of the duke d'Albard, and second cousin to the earl of Harcourt, as his bride. But events had taken an unexpected turn.
Gareth turned back to the water again and gazed out toward the barrier wall that protected the harbor from the encroaching waters of the Channel. It was a beautiful, peaceful spot well deserving of its name- Paradise Harbor. Quite unlike the grim cacophonous turmoil of King Henry's besieging camp beneath the walls of Paris…
Gareth had entered Henry's camp on a filthy April evening, with a driving rain more suited to winter than spring. He had traveled alone, knowing he would draw less attention to himself without a retinue of servants. The entire countryside was in an uproar as their unwanted king laid siege to Paris and the city's inhabitants battled with famine even as they refused to admit and acknowledge a sovereign they considered a heretic usurper.
Lord Harcourt's lack of attendants and visible badges of his rank and identity had caused difficulties with the master-at-arms, but finally he had been admitted to the sprawling camp resembling a tented city. For two hours, he had kicked his heels in the antechamber to the king's tent as officers, couriers, servants, had hurried through into the king's presence, barely glancing at the tall man in his dark, rain-sodden cloak and muddied boots, swinging his arms and pacing the trodden-down grass of the enclosed area in an effort to keep warm.
Matters hadn't improved much once he'd been admitted to the royal-presence. King Henry had been a soldier from his fifteenth birthday and now, at thirty-eight, was a hard-bodied, passionate warrior who disdained creature comforts. His own quarters were barely warmed by a sullen brazier, his bed was a straw pallet on the cold ground. He and his advisors, still booted and spurred, huddled in thick riding cloaks.
The king had greeted Lord Harcourt with a courteous smile, but his sharp dark eyes were suspicious, his questions keen and pointed. He was a man who had learned always to see treachery in offers of friendship after the hideous massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day, when at the age of nineteen he'd married Marguerite of Valois and thus unwittingly sprung the trap that had caused the deaths of thousands of his own people in the city that he was now coldly, deliberately, starving into submission.
But Gareth's credentials were impeccable. His own father had been at Henry's side at that ill-fated wedding. The duke d'Albard, Maude's father, had been one of Henry's closest friends and had lost his wife and baby in the massacre. The murdered wife had been a Harcourt before her marriage. So, after a carefully pointed interrogation, the earl of Harcourt was accepted as friend and bidden to share the king's frugal supper before he and Roissy discussed Lord Harcourt's proposal.
The wine was rough, the bread coarse, the meat heavily seasoned to disguise its rankness, but the famished citizens of Paris would have found it manna. Henry for his part appeared to find nothing at fault with the fare and had eaten heartily and drunk deep, his beaklike nose reddening slightly as the wine in the leather bottles diminished. Finally, he had wiped his thin mouth with the back of his hand, shaking bread crumbs loose from his beard, and demanded to see the portrait of Lady Maude. The king must judge whether the lady was worthy to be the wife of his dear Roissy. It was said with apparent jocularity, but there was more than a strand of seriousness beneath.
Gareth had produced the miniature of his young cousin. It was a good likeness, depicting Maude pale, blue-eyed, with her air of wan ethereal fragility that in many women passed for beauty. Her penetrating azure gaze from the pearl-encrusted frame bespoke the girl's deeply intense temperament. Her skin was very white, unhealthily so by Gareth's lights. Her long swanlike neck was one of her greatest claims to beauty and it was accentuated in the portrait by a turquoise pendant.
Henry had taken the miniature and his thick eyebrows had drawn together abruptly. He glanced toward Roissy, an arrested expression in his keen eyes.
"My lord? Is there something wrong?" Roissy had looked alarmed, craning his neck to see the portrait that the king still held on the palm of his hand.
"No. No, nothing at all. The lady is quite lovely." Henry's voice had been curiously abstracted as he tapped the miniature with a callused fingertip. "How tragic that she should have grown up motherless. I remember Elena so clearly." He glanced up at Gareth. "You were close to your cousin, I believe."
Gareth merely nodded. Elena had been some years older than he, but they had had a close rapport and her murder had grieved him sorely.
Henry sucked in his bottom lip as he continued to stare down at Maude's portrait. "It would be an impeccable connection."
"Yes, indeed, my lord." Roissy sounded a little impatient. "The d'Albards and the Roissys have long been allied. And the Harcourts, also." He had thrown a quick smile at the earl of Harcourt.
"Yes, yes… a fine connection for a Roissy," Henry said distantly. "But no bad alliance for a king… eh?" He had looked around the table at that with a grin that made him appear younger than his years. "I like the look of this cousin of yours, my lord Harcourt. And I am in sore need of a Protestant wife."
There was a stunned silence, then Roissy had said, "But my lord king has a wife already."
Henry had laughed. "A Catholic wife, yes. Marguerite and I are friends. We have been separated for years. She has her lovers, I have mine. She will agree to a divorce whenever I ask it of her." He had turned his bright-eyed gaze on Gareth. "I will see your ward for myself, Harcourt. And if I find her as pleasing as her portrait, then I am afraid Roissy must
look elsewhere for a wife."
There had been objections of course. The king couldn't leave the siege of Paris and travel to England at this juncture. But Henry was determined. His generals could continue the work for a few months without him. Starving a city into submission required no great tactical maneuvers or bloody battles. He would slip away from the field, would travel incognito-a French nobleman visiting Queen Elizabeth's court-and he would enjoy the hospitality of the earl of Harcourt and make the acquaintance of the lovely Lady Maude. And if he believed that he and she would make a suitable match, then he would do his wooing for himself.
The medieval serpentine bracelet with its emerald swan charm had belonged to Maude's mother. It was a unique and most precious piece of jewelry. How it had come into the king's possession, Gareth didn't know. He presumed Francis d'Albard had given it to his king at some point and Henry now considered it a most appropriate gift as earnest of his intent to woo d'Albard's daughter.
And so it had come about that Gareth now carried in his doublet the proposal that would send Imogen into transports of delight and panic. And God alone knew what it would do to Maude.
He passed through the broken gateway in the crumbling town wall. The town was well protected by the castle on the clifftop and the three forts built along the seafront by Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, and had long given up maintaining its walls-they were too susceptible to a cannonade from the water to make it worthwhile anyway. He turned toward Chapel Street and the Adam and Eve Inn, where he could bespeak a bed to himself that night and be reasonably sure of getting one. Innkeepers were notorious for promising such precious privacy and then inflicting unwanted bedfellows on their patrons at an hour of the night when a man could do nothing about it.
