The Diamond Slipper (50 page)

“Come along, then.” Mathilde wrapped a cloak around Cordelia’s shoulders. “You’ll be needing this. It’s nippy in the dawn air.”

The town square was packed with townsmen. Hawkers moved among them, selling pies and mulled wine against the dawn chill. Tiers of benches had been set up overnight for the court, all of whom, even the most diehard slugabeds, were present. The royal party were gathered under a velvet canopy. Cordelia drew the hood of her cloak over her head, and she and Mathilde pushed through the throng, inching into the front row below the first tier of courtiers.

Michael stood at ease in the square. Beside him two guardsmen were handling the rapiers. They wore gloves to protect themselves from the fine-honed blades and deadly points. But they didn’t know how deadly one of them was as they examined them for evenness of weight and keenness of edge.

A general shifting and murmuring ran through the crowd. Viscount Kierston stepped into the square. He had no guardsmen as escort. He came alone. He bowed to the prince, who returned the salute. Both men removed their coats, then they stepped up to the royal canopy and bowed before the king.

“May God be in the hand of the righteous,” the king declared. “And may God forgive the wrongdoer.”

Cordelia looked steadily ahead into the middle of the square. She seemed paralyzed. Unable to move so much as a muscle. Unable to blink, to move her mouth, barely able to breathe. She lost all sense of the crowd around her, seemed to be existing in a cold void.

They began slowly after the formal salutations. They moved around each other on the new-raked sand of the square, watching, assessing, biding their time. Michael was in no hurry to deliver the first cut that would ensure his final
victory. Assured of success, he could play with his opponent, entertain the crowd.

The sun was a diffused ball reddening the horizon. Leo had become the dancing point of his rapier. He was a single eye and single will focused on the flashing silver of the opposing weapon. He had no fear. He felt nothing. He knew he had to tire his enemy. The older man would tire before he did, so he must keep him on the move, play him constantly, press him but not engage too closely.

It took Michael a few minutes to realize what was happening. He thought he was controlling the dance, but suddenly he understood that he was reacting, not initiating. It had happened insidiously, but now he felt himself pressed, as if he was being backed against a wall, yet he knew that they had the entire town square for their arena. He parried, feinted, thrust. But Leo had jumped back and the rapier merely skimmed his shirt.

Leo was breathing easily. His eyes glittered like the point of his rapier. Michael came in close, too close. Leo lunged, his foot slipped, and he went down to one knee. A murmur broke the concentrated silence in the square. Michael’s rapier sliced through the sleeve of Leo’s sword arm. But Leo was up and back with the agility of a hare. He had switched his blade to his left hand almost without Michael’s being aware of it, and suddenly the prince was fighting a new opponent—a left-hander whose moves could not be easily parried.

Leo was not as quick or as sure with his left hand as with his right, but he knew it gave him an advantage, at least until Michael had become accustomed to the change. He must use those minutes.

Michael pressed forward. Had his blade sliced the skin? He could see no blood, but a nick was all that was needed. The sun seemed to be in his eyes and he blinked, feinted, backed away, trying to turn his opponent into the sun. His eyes were blurred; he wanted to wipe them with his sleeve, but he didn’t have the chance. Then he had his back
to the sun, and he blinked again to clear his vision. But the film remained. Leo was a dancing shape, his blade a flashing blur, and Michael realized he was fighting by instinct. Fear crept slowly over him. He shook his head, trying to dispel the haze, praying for the moment when Leo would falter, would slip. Surely he had nicked the skin?
Please God, let there be a bead of blood.

Then his vision miraculously cleared. But the clarity and light were almost as blinding as the haze had been. Something was the matter with his eyes. Unable to help himself, he dashed a hand across them.

Cordelia, still petrified as rock, felt Mathilde’s slight shift, her tiny exhalation of breath.

As Michael fought to banish his fear and confusion, Leo lunged, his blade at full extension. Michael, in the last minute before his vision clouded again, saw his chance. He brought his rapier in for a
froisse
, an attack that if delivered with sufficient power would disarm his opponent. But Leo moved with the agility of a gymnast, and their blades clashed ineffectively. Michael’s arm was at full extension. He had a second to recover his balance, and in that second, Leo’s riposte took his blade beneath Michael’s arm, burying itself deep between his ribs. Slowly, Leo stepped back, withdrawing his point.

Michael’s blade fell to the sand. He dropped to his knees, his hand clasped to the wound. Blood pulsed between his fingers.

There was utter silence in the square, barely a breath. Cordelia didn’t move. It had happened so fast that her terror was still mounting even as Michael fell to his knees in the sand. Leo stood over him, the point of his rapier dark with blood.

Then, as the first moment of reaction stirred the rapt crowd, she stepped into the square and ran to the two men.

“Don’t!
” Leo said as she raced toward him, her eyes wild with joy. The command was spoken softly but was so full of power it stopped her in her tracks. This business was not
done yet. She could not embrace him publicly over the body of her dying husband, however vital her need.

She stood still beside them, looking down at her husband, who remained on his knees, clutching his wound fiercely as if he believed he could staunch the blood, heal the wound. His eyes were strangely unfocused.

“Did I draw blood, Leo?” he asked softly. “Tell me I did.”

Leo glanced at his torn sleeve. The skin beneath was unmarked. As Leo looked at his arm, Michael, with one last effort, grabbed up his fallen sword and lunged at his enemy. Cordelia kicked the blade from him with a reflex action so fast her foot was a mere blur. Michael fell sideways onto the sword, his blood clotting the sand beneath him as his own blade sliced through his shirt into the flesh beneath.

Leo looked down at his fallen enemy, searing contempt in his eyes. “Die in dishonor, Prince,” he said, and it sounded like a curse. Michael’s gaze flickered away as he flinched from the dreadful derision. He could feel the poisoned blade cold against his skin, blood seeping from the cut, and his eyes closed.

And then the deadly triangle was shattered as people came running. Surgeons, officials, guardsmen surrounded the dying man, who now lay still on the ground.

Leo stepped aside, his expression cold, his eyes hard as brown stones. Cordelia stepped toward him. He stopped her with upraised hand and she fell back.

Leo walked across the sandy arena to the royal awning. He bowed before the king. His voice rang out across the square.

“Justice is done, monseigneur. I beg leave to remove myself from your court.”

“Leave is granted, Viscount Kierston.” The king rose and left the square with his family. Toinette looked over her shoulder to where Cordelia still stood, a forlorn figure, beside her husband’s body.

Cordelia had heard Leo’s words and they fell into her numbed mind like drops of frozen blood. He had formally
asked for leave to depart Versailles. Protocol demanded that a guest of the king’s could not leave the court without his permission. But was he leaving her? He seemed a stranger to her now. After what she had seen, after what had been said between them, she no longer knew what to expect of him.

He came toward her, his face suddenly younger, his eyes bright as if all shadows had been swept from their corners. He looked as he had when she’d first seen him. When she’d thrown the roses at him and he’d laughed up at her window. An eternity had passed since then—an eternity of terror and passion and confusion. An eternity in which she’d grown so far from the child she’d been as to find that person now unrecognizable as herself.

But now she waited for him to speak the words that would bring an end to that eternity and an end to her own happiness, or mark the beginning of her life.

Leo took her wrist—the one encircled by the serpent bracelet. He unclasped the bracelet and held it in the palm of his hand, looking down at it as if lay sparkling in the rays of the new-risen sun. The diamond-encrusted slipper glittered; the silver rose shimmered; the emerald swan glowed deepest green. Precious stones that for him now held only the memories of death and dishonor. It was not a jewel that his wife would wear. Not a jewel that would accompany them into their future.

“You will not wear this again,” he said. He knelt beside Michael’s body and opened his still-warm hand. He placed the bracelet in his palm and closed the dead fingers over it. “Let him take the symbol of his own dishonor to his grave.”

He stood up and took Cordelia’s cold hands in his own warm ones and smiled down at her. The smile he had first given her.

“Come with me now, Cordelia.”

She looked up into the golden eyes alight with the merry hazel glints that warmed her to the marrow of her bones.

“You do love me, then?”

“O ye of little faith,” he said. Cupping her face, he kissed
her before the entire town of Versailles and the lingering, fascinated court, and Cordelia knew that with this public affirmation, he had laid the past to rest and embraced a future that had no ties to dark vengeance and the spun-sugar court of Versailles.

Epilogue

The Fisherman’s Rest, Calais

W
HERE WERE THEY
? Christian gazed around the dim barn attached to the inn, peering into the shadowy corners. A stray ray of sun from the open door behind him was thick with dust motes from the hayloft above and the straw-littered floor.

“Girls!” he called softly. There was no one around to hear the oddity of the tutor addressing his little boy charges in such a way. “Amelia! Sylvie! Where are you? Your supper’s ready.”

He stood still, listening. A rat scuttled in the straw bales stacked at the far end of the barn.

Amelia pressed a finger to her lips, not that her sister needed the warning. They burrowed deeper into the fragrant hay in the loft, stuffing their fists into their mouths to keep the giggles in. They heard Christian’s feet stomping impatiently below, his voice calling them again in the same insistent, frustrated whisper. Then Sylvie sneezed as a wisp of hay tickled her nose.

Christian glanced up at the loft, then with a sigh climbed the ladder. He stopped at the head and examined the low-ceilinged area. They hadn’t ventured too far. The two lumps in the hay were a mere foot from where he was standing on the ladder. He stretched out a hand and grabbed. Amelia appeared from the hay, a bright-eyed, red-cheeked bundle of laughing mischief.

Christian slung her over his shoulder and reached for the second lump. Sylvie emerged in like manner, snuffling, her eyes shining.

“You wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t sneezed,” she said gleefully, unprotesting as he bundled her down the ladder ahead of him, following with Amelia.

“I don’t know why you
did
that.” Amelia declared from her upside-down position.

“I didn’t do it on purpose, silly!”

Christian set Amelia on her feet and tried to look stern, but it was not an expression that came naturally. “Madame Boucher has your supper ready,” he scolded. “It’s most impolite to keep her waiting, not to mention running me ragged looking all over for you.” He surveyed them with something akin to despair. They had lost their caps, and wisps of hay stuck out from their hair, now tumbling untidily around their dirt-streaked faces.

Their hair was the bane of his life. Cordelia had shown him how to plait it tightly, so that the braids could be hidden under the caps that formed an essential part of their disguise, but his long, sensitive musician’s fingers became all thumbs when it came to dealing with the fine, silky golden strands.

“Where are your caps?”

Amelia’s hand flew to her head. “It’s gone,” she declared unnecessarily.

“So’s mine,” her sister affirmed with a nod.

“Where
have they gone?” Christian asked.

“We must have lost ’em in the hay,” Amelia ventured.

Christian glanced back at the ladder. He’d have to go and look, since the children couldn’t appear in the inn’s parlor without them. But what was he to do with the twins while he went up to the loft? If he turned his back on them, they’d be off again.

He felt absurdly like the hapless ferryman in the old riddle who had to ferry a carrot, a rabbit, and a wolf across the river but could only take one at a time in the boat.

“Amelia, you go and look,” he said, pointing at Sylvie. He had given up even trying to guess which was which. Apart from anything else, he was convinced they switched themselves on him from time to time. Now he used their names indiscriminately except in public when he called them both
Nicolas. It seemed to serve perfectly well and the girls didn’t appear to mind in the least.

Sylvie scampered up the ladder while he stood at the bottom holding on to her twin’s hand. “Found ’em!” came the triumphant cry. In her excitement the child missed the top step and tumbled down headfirst into his waiting arms, still jubilantly clutching the two worsted caps.

“Stand still.” He wrestled with untidy plaits until he could manage to cram the caps on their small heads. In their nankeen britches and worsted jackets, with their grubby faces, sparkling eyes, and grimy hands, they were an utterly convincing pair of little boys.

He shepherded them out of the barn into the stableyard just as a pair of riders rode through the gates ahead of a carriage and four.

“It’s Monsieur Leo—”

“And Cordelia!” shrieked Sylvie, joining in her twin’s ecstatic squeal.

Christian heaved a deep sigh of relief, his shoulders sagging as the great weight of responsibility was lifted from him.

Cordelia swung off her horse a minute after Leo, who had bent to receive the two small bodies as they’d rocketed into his arms. He was as astonished as he was delighted at this uninhibited greeting. The stiffly formal, repressed behavior of the overgoverned little girls had been transformed with their costumes.

They turned swiftly from Leo to Cordelia, babbling about the excitements of their journey, the fascinating people they’d met, the boats in the harbor across the road from the inn.

“My goodness me, what a pair of chatterboxes!” Mathilde declared, stepping down carefully from the carriage on the arm of an attentive groom.

“It’s Mathilde!” the girls shrieked in unison. “Are we all going to England?”

“No,” Christian said a little too quickly, a touch too fervently.

“You poor love,” Cordelia said with instant comprehension. “You look worn to a frazzle. Have they been bad?”

Christian laughed as he returned her warm embrace. The children were regarding him with anxious solemnity. “No, of course not. But I’m not cut out for child minding, I’m afraid. It’s much more complicated than I thought it would be.”

“He can’t do our hair properly,” Amelia stated.

“But he tells
very
good bedtime stories,” her sister put in judiciously.

“Much better than Madame de Nevry. She just reads the Bible.”

“Yes, all about Job. And it’s
so
sad. However good he is, bad things keep happening. Do you think that’s fair?” Elvira’s eyes, twinned, swung as one pair toward Leo.

“Probably not,” he said with a smile. “Christian, I will forever stand in your debt.”

“Nonsense,” the younger man said, flushing slightly. His eyes met Leo’s over Cordelia’s dark head, and to their anxious question Leo nodded decisively.
It was over.

“I must go back to Paris,” Christian said.

“You won’t come to England with us?” Cordelia shielded her eyes from the last bright rays of the setting sun as she looked up at him. “Ah, but no. There’s Clothilde waiting for you. And your patron. Of course you must go back.”

“Is our father coming to England?”

There was a moment’s silence at Amelia’s question, then Leo knelt down beside them, taking their hands. “Your father has had an accident,” he said quietly.

“Is he dead?” The blunt question was Sylvie’s.

“Like our mother?”

“Yes.” Leo drew them into his arms and for a minute they stayed pressed to his chest, each sucking a finger as they absorbed this.

Then Sylvie said, “But you and Cordelia are coming?”

“Yes. We’re all going to be a family now.” Cordelia joined Leo on her knees on the cobbles, smiling into the two serious little faces. “You two, Leo, me, and Mathilde.”

“Not Madame de Nevry?”

“No. She’s gone back to Paris.”

There was another moment of silence, then the children leaped as one out of Leo’s arms, joined hands, and began to whirl around in a circle on the cobbles.

Cordelia stood up, regarding them with amusement. “I don’t mean to cast aspersions on your sister, Leo, but do you really think those two are Michael’s children?”

Leo, beside her, seemed to give the question due consideration as he watched the blur of the dancing children. “Highly unlikely,” he pronounced finally.

“Well, all this excitement will lead to tears before bed-time,” Mathilde declared, bustling over to the swirling girls. “Come along, now. You’ll be needing your supper.”

“Oh, it’s been ready and waiting for them in the parlor for ages,” Christian said, suddenly remembering. “Madame Boucher will be wondering what’s happened to them.”

“We’ll go and set her mind at rest.” Mathilde gathered the children in front of her and shooed them toward the inn door.

Christian, Leo, and Cordelia stood in the rosy glow of the setting sun, half smiling. “You will come and visit us?” Cordelia said, taking Christian’s hand.

“Often.” He squeezed her hand tightly. “And we’ll write.”

“Yes, of course. And you’ll marry Clothilde?”

“Yes,” he said definitely, and they both smiled.

“Be happy.” Cordelia reached up to kiss him.

“And I know that you will be.”

“Yes.” She turned to Leo, her eyes radiant. “How could I be anything else now? I can’t believe how lucky I am. I’m sure I don’t deserve it.”

“After what you’ve endured …” Christian began with sudden fierceness.

“It’s over.” She silenced him with a finger on his lips.

Leo came up behind her, slipping his arms over her shoulders, holding her against him. “Farewell, Christian. And remember that I owe you one very big favor … whenever you choose to claim it.” He held out his hand and Christian shook it fervently. Then, with an almost embarrassed smile, Christian returned to the inn.

“It is really over,” Cordelia whispered half to herself, wrapping her arms around Leo’s encircling ones.

“My love, it’s just beginning.” He kissed her ear and she shivered deliciously, turning in his embrace, reaching her arms around his neck, her mouth seeking his.

Mathilde stood at the parlor window, the children’s chatter at the supper table a faint buzz behind her, as she looked down on the stableyard with quiet satisfaction. Cordelia would not waste her life on a futile love as her mother had done. It was as it should be.