Dark Angels (22 page)

“Spoken like a true horsewoman,” said Balmoral, and he smiled.

Alice closed her eyes again, allowed herself to be picked up and carried into the house, upstairs to a bedchamber, people bustling all about, Edward holding her hand, the duke walking behind with the queen.

“What hurts you?” Balmoral questioned once she was laid down in a bed.

“My leg.” And badly.

“We’ll send for a physician.”

“One is with us.” Queen Catherine sat on the bed, took Alice’s hand, and held it as a housekeeper bustled to put her leg on a pillow. “Edward, fetch him. I pray you have not the leg broken, Verney.” The queen’s English was lilting and prettily said but fractured.

“Your Majesty,” said Balmoral, “let us leave Mistress Verney to rest. I’ve refreshments prepared for you.” He led her away.

Alone, Alice moved herself to the edge of the bed, gingerly, carefully, stood, putting her weight on her good leg. Then she tried to walk to the window. It hurt horribly, but she could do it. Thank goodness the filly hadn’t stepped on her. She sat in the window seat made of warm, almost golden oak. It’s begun, it’s begun, it’s begun, she sang silently. He wished to talk with her about the letter she’d sent. She wished to empty her heart of its suspicions to the one person she could trust, and in the doing so, courtship might begin. A shame she would miss the meal and talk and walk in the gardens. But she wouldn’t be able to go on to Newmarket with the others, either, would she? She smiled. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I
N THE LATE
afternoon, a butterfly sunned itself on the opened windowsill of the bedchamber. Her leg wrapped tightly with cloth from knee to ankle, Alice lay still as Queen Catherine, Dorothy Brownwell, the mother of the maids, the queen’s physician, and Balmoral discussed her.

“It’s a bad sprain,” said the queen’s physician.

“She must stay here. I insist,” Balmoral said.

“It was an awful fall,” said Dorothy, her mouth trembling at the very memory of it. She looked ready to weep. Everyone loved Brownie, as the girls called her; she was kind and disorganized and incapable of running a firm household, which made all the maids of honor quite happy. Before Alice had left for France, she’d been running the maids as much as Brownie. “I thought my heart would stop,” she said to Alice.

“She cannot ride a horse. You haven’t room in your coach, Your Majesty. Mine has a broken wheel but will be up tomorrow. She’s to stay here, and I will send her to you tomorrow. Nothing could be simpler.” Balmoral spoke with such authority that everyone was silenced.

Queen Catherine leaned over. Warm brown eyes met snappish dark ones. “You rest, Verney. I send the maidservant to you attend, and I tell your papa.”

“I am so dismayed to be of such trouble,” Alice said happily.

Queen Catherine smiled. At first glance, she failed in beauty in any number of ways. She wasn’t fashionably pale; her nose wasn’t small; her mouth wasn’t well shaped. At best, her stature was childish, slight, whip thin; she could be as darting and nervous as a bird. But her smile was fresh, pure, kind, like her heart.

Dorothy leaned over and kissed Alice; then the maids of honor came in to say good-bye. “Might Mistress Bragge stay with me?” Alice asked the queen.

“Mistress Bragge and I are to sing for the king tonight,” Gracen said quickly.

“You and Mistress Wells sing,” said Queen Catherine. “Bragge stays to see for Verney.”

Alice had Barbara help her to the window to see the good-byes. In the forecourt, the duke helped the queen into the carriage. I’ve done it, she thought. She turned to Barbara. “Let’s leave this bedchamber. If I lean on you and you walk slowly, I can hop.”

A hall led to a grand sweep of stairway. They began a halting descent. Balmoral, walking into his great vestibule, looked up. “Whatever are you doing out of bed, Mistress Verney?”

“I will die of boredom in that bedchamber, Your Grace. Mistress Bragge is helping me to the gardens. I know you must have charming gardens.”

“I do.” Balmoral walked up the stairs. “There’s a rolling chair somewhere about for when I have the gout. We’ll find it.” He offered his arm to Barbara. “Mistress…?”

“Bragge.”

“Come with me to command it found. Mistress Verney, you sit here on the stairs while I send for a footman to carry you. I want that leg healed so I may have the pleasure of watching you dance again.”

T
HE ROLLING CHAIR
was found, and Alice was rolled into the gardens, a footman pushing her, Balmoral and Barbara walking ahead, as he gave them a tour. There was something she’d never seen before, a maze, a labyrinth of concentric circles, made by turf grown thick as carpet and cut short to form circles within circles within circles. Dirt paths intersected every so often to bring he who walked the maze ever closer to the center.

“I’m told it was created by monks.” Balmoral gestured back toward the house. “This was an abbey before Great Harry had them destroyed. Look at the end wall there, and you see where once a great stained-glass window was. It’s said you must walk this maze on your knees, praying, and the guidance you need will come to you by the time you reach the center.”

“Have you done it?” asked Alice.

“I have.”

“And did you get your answer?”

“I did.” He smiled, wrinkles seaming his face into a hundred furrows. “That’s why King Charles sits upon the throne.”

They walked on. There was a long, smooth lawn cut into squares, gravel paths making their borders. There was a walled orchard, trees espaliered onto the wall as well as standing in neat rows, apples visible among the leaves, baby apples, not yet ripe. It would take the hotter month of August to perfect them. There was an herb garden and a kitchen garden, heads of lettuce unfurled in the sun, beans wrapping tendrils around reed support poles. At the wall that separated his woods from the house, small, quaint garden houses, a single high-ceilinged chamber in them, had been built into the wall’s corner ends, so that one might spend the day there, reading, or supping, or dreaming.

“This is delightful,” said Alice, who made the footman carry her inside. There were arched openings on every side of the garden house, and the interior had been painted with trees and birds and flowers.

“I never come here,” Balmoral said.

Back at the house, on a square of lawn, servants brought out chairs and a rug, and there was a footstool for Alice to prop her foot upon. Barbara sat on the rug, tucking in her skirts, leaning against Alice’s chair. The sun was soft on them, the sky blue. Birds sang as if summoned to choir.

“What you must see, Your Grace,” said Alice, “is Versailles, and all King Louis is doing there. Acres of land are becoming his park and walking gardens. His orangery is finished, a huge hothouse for hundreds of trees, and its roof is the terrace for the first floor of the palace. Great steps connect them on the outside. There are fountains and statues to be found everywhere. There is to be one of Apollo rising in his chariot, the heads and shoulders of his horses just out of the water. It will go in a huge circular fountain. The sketches for it are quite magnificent. I saw them at Madame’s.” She looked around. “You might, if you desired, put in such a fountain, if you took down your garden wall.” She pointed, and Balmoral rose and walked to the edge of a garden wall to see.

“So I might,” he said. “The trick would be living to see it finished.”

The sun moved into twilight, and a servant appeared to tell them a supper was ready.

“Your Grace, might we have supper here?” His gardens were lovely in this long July twilight. The beautiful thing about summer was that the sun hung in the sky for hours at this time of evening, so there was this long, pleasant lingering time.

Balmoral smiled. “I will go inside and arrange it at once.”

Alone with Barbara, Alice leaned forward. “It hurts me that you will talk of John Sidney to Gracen and not to me.”

“Let’s not talk of it now.”

Servants were carrying out tables, and on the tables they were placing heavy silver candelabra. One of the servants, a tall man with a saber scar along the side of his face, kept glancing at Alice as he lit candles, but she didn’t notice. Barbara rose.

“Where are you going?” Alice asked her.

“My head aches. I thought I’d lie down.”

“Oh, Ra. Stay here, please. I don’t want you to go. Supper will be no fun without your presence.” Never before had she had to beg for Barbara’s company, and the newness of it was sharply painful, but then Balmoral was with them, and there was wine to drink if they wished it, though Balmoral refused any, and it seemed he had a musician under his roof, and the man came to softly play a guitar, and the duke’s majordomo was brought forward to be introduced to them, one Will Riggs, a tall man with an old saber scar that ran along one side of his face into his hair, dressed not in livery, as was the fashion, but in plain clothes, as were the rest of the servants. Livery on servants was the newest, smartest fashion from France. The duke didn’t follow fashion, it seemed.

“The Prince de Condé has a fine orchestra. He takes a portion of them even to the battlefield to entertain him in his tent. He says it soothes him and makes his mind clearer,” Alice happened to say.

Balmoral leaned forward, his eyes sharp with interest. “He does, does he?”

And Alice thought, Of course, he’s a soldier. Where is my mind? He is the captain general of His Majesty’s army. It was he who negotiated with our exiled king to bring him back. Balmoral was a kingmaker.

“Have you met this Louvois?” he asked. Louvois was King Louis’s minister of war.

“I can tell you only gossip.”

“Tell it to me, then.”

“Well, there is rivalry between him and Monsieur Colbert. Each wishes to be of the most use to the king. Louvois does not forget that it is his father who gave Colbert the opportunity to rise, and Colbert has risen high enough that he does not wish to be reminded of such. Louvois, who is the king’s age, mocks Colbert.” She almost said “who is older” but managed to swallow the words.

Balmoral laughed. His teeth were long and yellow in the candlelight. “The two ministers don’t get along, do they? Well, I’m gratified to see His Majesty of France’s council is no better than His Majesty of England’s.”

The sun had lowered and set itself, and candles flickered in the dark while music played. Barbara remained silent, and Alice glanced down and saw that her friend was dozing, lying on the rug with her arm as a pillow.

“Your friend sleeps,” said Balmoral. “Your fall is a most happy accident. I was wondering how I would detach you from the queen to talk with you, for I’ve thought again and again of the letter you wrote me.”

“You have no idea how much I’ve been longing to speak of it.”

“Speak, then. Begin by telling me, even if you wrote it in the letter, everything you remember of the death.”

And so she plunged in, telling it all, the writhing, the sweating, the screams, the horrid priest hushing the princess, the visit from King Louis, his tears, Condé and Lord Montagu staying until the end, Monsieur’s odd dignity at times, his hysteria at others, the way the princess’s dogs huddled under her bed, the way no one brought her daughters, the way she seemed to shrink into her bones before their eyes, the weeping, the confusion, the fact that the princess spoke many times of poison, Lieutenant Saylor’s search for the cup, its disappearance, the autopsy, her words with the English surgeon. Finally she stopped, emptied at last.

“Lord Montagu. I was most interested in his instructions to you.”

“He said he must be the one to speak of poison to the king, he and no other. Lieutenant Saylor and I were not to conjecture, he said.”

“But, of course, you did. Do you think Monsieur killed her?”

“I think the poisoning began on her return.”

“Ah, yes. The mysterious Henri Ange. Tell me about King Louis’s regard for Madame.”

“It was high, very high. The fact that she was sister to King Charles meant much to him. And would not her closeness to King Charles make friendship between the two kingdoms more likely? Things might be said by her to King Charles, I would think, that no one would know of.”

“How true.”

“Lord Montagu told Lieutenant Saylor and me that her dying wish was that the manner of her dying not hurt the friendship between the kings. That is why he asked for our discretion.”

“Oh, that was the reason, was it?”

Something in his voice caught her ear. “Do you think my conjectures too wild? I swear I’ve told no one else of them.”

“I think only that Lord Montagu has been a very busy man,” he said dryly. “Monsieur did not come to Dover, did he?”

“No, and he forbade her to go without him, but King Louis somehow arranged it.”

“And so you’ve told no one else these thoughts you share with me. I’m flattered.”

Alice could feel her face growing warm. He referred to her father. Did he think her an undutiful daughter? Which, of course, she was. Her father wasn’t trustworthy, but those weren’t words she wished to say to the duke, no matter their truth.

“M-my father’s concern was more with whether there was a treaty—”