Dark Angels

by Karleen Koen

  Alice watched Ange take a small vial attached to a leather cord around his neck and sprinkle it along the sword’s edge. “What is that?” she called sharply.

  “Fair Alice! What a pleasure to see you. It’s holy water, my sweet, so that my sword will cut your Richard deeply. Still in love with him? Has he guessed it yet?”

  “Ready?” called Richard.

  “En garde.”

  They walked forward, swords raised, then crossed. And then it began, dazzling, frightening swordplay, a dance of death and chance and skill, punctuated by steel meeting steel in light, zinging sounds that made the heart beat fast. They were both skilled, both driven, Ange by survival and Richard by the clearest rage he’d ever felt.

  There had been much noise and shouting before; people had gathered at windows that looked down upon the privy garden. Prince Rupert stood out on his balcony in the cold, watching. He knew he should stop this, but he didn’t want to. Their swords moved so swiftly that the eye could hardly follow. Both of them were breathing hard. There was a stamina and speed necessary for swordplay that could test the strongest man.

  Behind him, Prince Rupert heard his name. King Charles had entered his chamber, Renée on his arm.

  “Keep her back!” Prince Rupert said quickly, but they were close enough to see the figures moving in the garden.

  “What’s this, a duel?” said King Charles.

  “Who is dueling?” asked Renée.

  “Back!” growled Prince Rupert, giving his king and cousin a desperate look.

  “Go into the other room and wait for me,” King Charles told Renée as he walked out on the balcony. Renée went to a window and rubbed the moisture settled there from the cold with her sleeve so that she could see into the garden.

  “I ought to stop that,” King Charles said.

  “You’ll get Saylor killed if you distract him. Whoever he’s fighting is the best I’ve seen.”

  “Look, Saylor’s drawn blood.”

  Renée, hearing Richard’s name, came out onto the balcony before either man could stop her.

  Richard had cut Ange on the shoulder. He stepped back. “First blood,” he was saying as he heard his name screamed in a sweetly familiar voice. He looked up toward the windows surrounding the garden on two sides, and Ange, in one graceful, deadly step, stabbed him straight through his side, bringing the sword back out again, bright crimson painting it, staining Richard’s shirt, his jacket.

  Richard stared at him, stupidly, from the shock of the act and of the sword entering him.

  “It’s poisoned, my dear.” Ange stepped back formally, raised the sword to his forehead, and then let it drop to the ground; but he had not counted on Alice, who heard his words, snatched Ange’s sword from the ground, and jabbed it forward blindly, catching his arm.

  “If he dies, you die!” she said, and leaned into the sword with all her weight so that it would go deeper, as around them there was beginning pandemonium. Ange had his hand on the sword blade, trying to pull it out of his arm, and she growled in triumph at the sight of blood from the cuts on his hand as guardsmen began the attempt to pry her hands off the sword hilt. That accomplished, she’d have gone after Ange and scratched out his eyes, but someone held her back. She twisted out of that grasp and ran to Richard, who sat in the gravel of one of the walks, holding his side, rocking back and forth. She began to weep. “Richard…oh, Richard.”

  He looked at her, his face very white.

  “Oh, God, I love you, I love you,” she heard herself saying, but Richard looked past her because Renée was running full-tilt into the garden, and she threw herself at him, making him yelp in pain as she covered his face with kisses.

  “A pretty drama there,” said Prince Rupert from the balcony.

  “Goddamn it,” said King Charles.

  “That little piece with Alice stabbing that man, better than a play, I tell you!”

  “Goddamn it to hell and back again.”

  Alice was able to stop herself, to draw back. If he dies, she thought—and her thoughts could not go beyond that point. Such feelings of grief came up, she could hardly bear them. It was all she could do not to beat Ange with her fists as guardsmen surrounded him. She wept into her hands.

  Ange nodded toward Edward, who approached him carefully, his eyes practically starting from his head. Ange leaned over and whispered into Edward’s ear. Then Ange was being marched away, bleeding with every step. Richard was being helped up by his fellow guardsmen, was being led off, Renée at his side. Alice stood where she was, sobbing as if her heart were broken. Edward took her hand.

  “Don’t cry, Alice, don’t.”

  “He’s going to die. He’s going to die.”

  “He said to tell you it really was holy oil. What does that mean? Is that what he put on the sword before? I saw him do it—did you? But I didn’t really think at the time; I was so excited to see a duel—”

  “Take me somewhere, Edward, where I can be alone.”

  Of course the sword was poisoned, and of course Ange would say it was holy oil, so that Richard would die. Ange had an antidote somewhere, something to counteract the poison; she’d bet her right hand on it. And Richard didn’t. What a devil Henri Ange was, even to the last. Oh, God, she’d made a great fool of herself. Was there any possibility that in his shock Richard hadn’t heard her?

  “Lean on me.”

  “Edward, you’re so sweet.”

  So are you, thought Edward. And fierce.

  CHAPTER 35

  March 1671

  Pharaoh reached out his long neck and took the corn from Alice’s hand. She rubbed his nose, then leaned her face against his neck. Outside, away from the dim of the stall, the spring sunshine was almost fierce.

  “I’m so sorry, Richard,” she said.

  He continued to brush Pharaoh, steady, long sweeps of the brush that made the horse snort in pleasure and whisk his tail.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Effriam said to Walter, “You and me, we’ll be getting water.”

  “You can let the subject drop.”

  “Yes, of course…. I bring a note from her.”

  Thin, his cheeks hollow, Richard held out his hand, put the note in a pocket.

  “Did your mother make it back to Tamworth in one piece?”

  “I haven’t heard, but I can’t imagine muddy roads stopping Mother. Sleet and ice didn’t prevent her coming here, now, did they?” His mother, upon receiving word of his wound, hearing the word poison, had traveled up to London with her servant, her books of remedies, and dried herbs and flowers from Tamworth’s woods and gardens. He should have died. She’d seen to it that he hadn’t.

  “She’s very lovely, Richard.”

  “Do you think so? Most people consider her odd, even frightening.” He laughed.

  “What?”

  “I was thinking of my sisters, Louisa and Elizabeth. They were appalled to see her. I could have died so long as she remained out of sight.”

  “That’s not true! Your sisters were on their knees in prayer for you. I think King Charles admired her very much—” Alice stopped herself, aghast at her clumsiness in speaking the king’s name to Richard.

  Richard was silent, his face grim again.

  “Well, I only wanted to give you her note. If there’s a reply, I can—”

  “There won’t be.”

  “Well, then I must go.”

  “Walking with Balmoral?”

  She smiled. “Yes.”

  Richard stepped back from the horse, hearing something in her voice. “Is that a new gown?”

  “It is.”

  “Very becoming.”

  “We can only hope His Grace thinks so.”

  “He will. Answer me this. Do you always get what you want?”

  Alice gave Pharaoh a kiss on the nose. “Not always.”

  “Do you ever give up?”

  “Not when I want something and think it possible.” I thought you would die, Richard,
but I didn’t give up on you, and here you are, alive and very well.

  “I do—I have. Go away and seduce your duke.”

  “If there’s a reply, you have only to find me—”

  “I said there won’t be.”

  “Of course you did. Good-bye, Richard.”

  “I’m a bear—” He stopped her at the stall’s door. “Misfortune in love does it, isn’t that what poets preach? Give me a good-bye kiss, Alice.”

  They kissed chastely on the lips. She had come every day to see him, couldn’t stop herself. Their friendship had grown deeper.

  “When are you going to see Barbara?” he asked.

  “You know the answer to that.”

  “And still I must ask. John requests me to ask. She’s waiting, Alice.”

  “Our friendship is finished.”

  “As easy as that you let go someone you love?”

  “It wasn’t easy, Richard.”

  He took her by the arm. “She didn’t do as you wanted. No one ever does. Will you love no one because of that?”

  She shook his arm free. “Is this the pot calling the kettle black?”

  He watched her leave. She moved down the alley of stalls gracefully and certainly, nodding here and there to different guardsmen she knew, stopping to exchange a word if she knew them well. Whom didn’t she know? Whitehall was her milieu, her world. He could imagine her nowhere else. She was a born courtier, wily, patient, steadfast in her goals. She had taught him much. I love you, she’d said. He pretended for her sake that he hadn’t heard it, but he had. It made him consider her in a whole new way, made him observe her and be curious about her. She was jealous and vengeful. He saw it in the way she treated Barbara. Yet he admired her fierceness, even if he thought it wrong. Perhaps it was the contrast to Renée, who had no fierceness.

  Alice had been stalwart in this last round with Renée, guiding him, carrying letters, arranging secret meetings, but it was over now. He was in hell, but no worse a hell than that of holding Renée in his arms and hearing her loving words and being allowed to touch and explore her in new soft places, so that his desire was kept a white hot flame, and from that flame he had to watch her with the king and know that he, too, was equally exploring Renée’s sweetness. Alice wouldn’t tell him this, but everyone else did. Enough. He would bear no more. This second chance hurt more in its betrayal. It was in his mind to take leave of England. Prince Rupert, York, the great French general Condé, they had all made their way as soldiers serving foreign masters.

  So might he.

  He leaned his head into Pharaoh’s broad side, pulled her note out of his pocket. Dear God, he loved her, but dear God, he wanted this over. If he read it, then he let the game continue. It was so tempting to open it, read her sweet excuses, let his heart believe them. In the courtyard was a fire tended by the stable boys. He walked to it, watched the note burn, thinking, The beginning of the end. If he was steadfast, there would be the middle of the end, and then the end of the end. Advice from his father. To see you through the hard patches of life, my son, his father had said, which are always there ahead in the road.

  “THERE SHE IS.” Balmoral rose from a chair in Stone Gallery, held out his arm in a courtly gesture.

  “It’s paradise outside,” said Alice, taking it.

  “Chilly?”

  “Yes, but we can fetch your cloak.”

  Fondly, he watched her signal a page and give the boy instructions for fetching his cloak. She’d get her beautiful day, and he’d be warm, and the truth was it would feel good to sit in the sun, his old bones needed it. They began their walk, up and down the gallery to start. It was their habit—they had been doing this long enough for it to have become a habit.

  “What news have you?” She knew so many little tidbits, and when he put them together with what he knew—with the hot-air posturings of Buckingham or Arlington in council, with the bland obtuseness of the king—he’d see the little trails, the little betrayals, before they surprised. Subtleties within the subtleties.

  “Captain Saylor says he is ending his attachment.”

  “Good, if it’s true. I’ll ask the king to reward him with a promotion, once we’re certain it’s not just a lovers’ quarrel. Prince Rupert’s fond of him. Perhaps we’ll move him to Rupert’s guard.”

  “Or yours.”

  “Or mine.”

  “Her Grace the Duchess of York fell ill yesterday,” Alice continued.

  “Well, Henri Ange is in the Tower of London. It cannot be blamed upon him.”

  “Why not? Do you think Henri Ange can’t make poisons in the Tower?”

  She was like a pit bull on this. “He can’t if he receives no visitors, is allowed no letters.”

  “Does he receive no visitors? How can you ascertain that nothing is sneaked in to him?”

  He was testy. “By having the best guards there are. By demanding that no one may see him except with my permission.”

  “And you have given permission to…?”

  “Not that it is any of your affair”—he was winter frost itself—“Arlington, Buckingham—”

  “There!”

  He ought to box her ears for her impudence, but unfortunately he agreed with her, which only made him more irritable. Yet he could not deny his fellow ministers the privilege of questioning the prisoner—particularly since the imprisonment was creating problems with the kingdom of France, from whom they now had a treaty to join in war against the Dutch signed, sealed, delivered. “Are you implying Buckingham would aid our prisoner in the making of poison?”

  “Since I believe it was he who brought Ange over, I am indeed. Henri Ange needs to be hanged, ought to have been hanged months ago. I don’t understand it.”

  Indeed you don’t, he thought. All the wrangling, the French ambassador’s protests, King Charles receiving a special dispatch from the king of France. Louis wants him, King Charles said, allowing Balmoral to read the letter. “If this is indeed the poisoner of Madame, I demand to question him myself,” King Louis wrote in no uncertain terms. And there were questions from certain members of the House of Commons, impudent questions, asking about the imprisonment of the Frenchman, wanting details, following the wild hare of Ange’s Catholicism, suspecting a Jesuit plot. They wanted details King Charles was under no obligation to give but that raised further difficulties in a session when the king was working hard to raise money for the coming war, which he had not yet announced to his Commons. Alice’s father was stirring trouble, was among those who would not let the arrest fade. Balmoral glanced at her, at those dark eyes behind which ran that feverish and cunning brain, wondering not for the first time her part in the stirring. Did she go straight from him to her father? Those who followed her at his orders said no.

  “You should have let him die,” said Alice.

  My sentiments exactly, thought Balmoral. He had grown quite fond of Alice’s ruthlessness. “But then we wouldn’t have the chance to question him.”

  “Have you questioned him? Hard?”

  “I’ve been waiting for him to heal completely.”

  “Saylor is healed. So is Ange. He’s faking if he says otherwise.”

  “You’re quite bloodthirsty.”

  “I watched my princess die. And he would have done the same to the queen, kill her horribly. He likes to see others suffer. He needs to be killed before he kills anybody else.”

  “But not before he tells us what he knows.”

  “I don’t think he’ll do that. I think he would twist truth for the sheer joy of twisting. I don’t think truth can be gotten from him.”

  “I’m the one with the melancholy humors, not you. You spend too much time with me.”

  They were out in St. James’s Park now. A page walked up just as Balmoral opened his mouth to complain of the cold and delivered his cloak, and as he shrugged himself into its warm folds, he watched Alice, who knew the boy and talked with him. It seemed a letter had just come to the queen from Lord Knollys to inform her
that Lady Knollys was dead. Alice had fished this information from the page with just a few short questions.

  Balmoral turned to look around him, to take in the smell and feel of spring.

  In the distance, a large knot of people made up of the king and various courtiers wound its way toward the menagerie to see the animals. Was there a first treaty with France? One before the one Buckingham had gone to obtain? A secret before the secret, having to do with the princess’s visit? It gnawed at him. Certain signs, certain remarks, made him suspect certain fellow privy council members—and there were such tantalizing hints in the letters Richard had had copied in France. The Hollanders were suspicious, their ambassador, their spies, like Thomas Verney’s Dutch friend Lowestroft, sniffing the ground, bloodhounds, sensing something. And Ange. What did Ange know? Less than you think I do, he’d said the other day as Balmoral sat in the dank of the cell, staring at the man who was his grandson Neddie’s last lover, perhaps his killer. Neddie the catamite, Neddie the sodomite, who came to him in dreams, arms outstretched, hair long and flowing, weeping, Grandfather…

  He and Alice walked over to the long landscape canal. The page was still with them and ran to bring him a chair. Gratefully, he sat down. Alice was cooing over ducklings following their mama like tiny citron ships of the line. He was content to watch her. He would invite her, in the company of her aunt, to visit him at his estate outside Newmarket this summer. She sat on the broad rim of the canal, leaning elbows against it, raising her face to the sun, which gleamed off her thick, riotous hair. She met his gaze, her expression grave. And he knew, the way one does, that they had come to the crux.

  “My father has received another offer from the Earl of Mulgrave.”

  He chewed on that, leaned his chin on his cane.

  “I think this time, I must consider it most seriously.”

  “Why must you consider Mulgrave seriously?”

  “I am not getting any younger. I have been a maid of honor since I was twelve.” Caro is gone, she thought. Barbara is gone. Gracen does not return. Renée is increasingly the queen of us. Kit and Luce are fools, Brownie is distracted, melancholy, the queen pale and sad…My little family is changed beyond repair. Time to go. “It is past time I had my own household. Mulgrave has waited most patiently. The queen’s household is most unhappy these days, and I am at my wits’ end.”