Mistress by Magick

by Laura Navarre

  Beneath the porthole stood a desk crowded with bound volumes in a dozen languages: Plato, Pythagoras and Copernicus among them. Half-burned candles, bedizened with ribbons of melted wax, stood amid a curling sheaf of maps and charts. Nearby, a fat globe enameled in saffron and cobalt tilted on its gleaming axis like a potbellied lord in his cups.

  The corner bunk was piled high with a fortune in lush furs, a rich golden pelt dappled in black flung carelessly over all. At its foot, a sailor’s trunk overflowed with a jumble of masculine clothing and what looked like a woman’s gown, embroidered and foaming with Bruxelles lace.

  The bookcase was crowded with astrological and navigational instruments she vaguely recognized: an astrolabe, a compass, the leather-wrapped tube of a spyglass, a mechanical sphere of moons and planets circling a central sun. Evidently Lord Calyx subscribed to the controversial new theory that these celestial bodies did not, in fact, revolve around the earth.

  Intrigued, Jayne drifted toward the desk, the clear center of activity for the man who lived here. The signs of his occupancy were everywhere around her.

  A rich doublet of sapphire velvet, frogged with silver, flung carelessly over the chair.

  A goblet of blue Murano crystal, half-filled with ruby wine, balanced on a stack of star charts.

  The slim cylinder of a half-burned cigarro, carefully stubbed out, rolling in a dish of crumbling frankincense whose woody spice lingered on the air. Beneath the mingled scents of incense and tobacco lurked the rich aroma of ambergris.

  Her gaze flitted over the wealth of parchments spread across the desk. Many appeared to be mechanical diagrams or circular charts of stars and planets, naught that addressed her current need. She felt powerfully tempted to riffle through them anyway, curious about the secrets of the lively mind at work here.

  But she didn’t need the mechanical clock ticking loudly on the shelf to remind her the hour was late. Quelling her lively curiosity about the cabin’s occupant, she leafed briskly through the piles, searching for maps or military orders. Halfway through her task, she uncovered the familiar contours of an island surrounded by inked waves, the curling parchment blazoned with a spiky compass and the twining coils of a sea serpent. Across the map scrolled the word Inglaterra.

  England.

  Eagerly her eyes swept the detailed southern coast. Three black X’s along the shore leaped out at her: Portland Bill, the Isle of Wight and Sandwich.

  The word Sandwich wavered in her vision. Her head swam. Dudley kept a house near Sandwich in Kent. That was where they’d imprisoned her son.

  Ryder.

  Feeling ill, Jayne pressed a hand to her belly. Beneath the stiffened carapace of her stomacher, her heart dropped like a stone. The capitán of the Arcángel would bring the swords and cannon and bloody fanaticism of the Armada straight to her boy’s doorstep.

  Until that moment, her enmity toward Lord Calyx had been nothing personal. He seemed a worthy adversary, someone to be wary of, but she’d felt drawn to him as well. She recalled the thrust and parry of his dagger-sharp wit, the dismay and concern that darkened his mocha-colored eyes when she tore free of his touch, that odd moment of kinship when she spoke of his father and pain knotted his square jaw.

  God knew, there were times she’d dreamed of running a blade through her own father. Gifford Carey, a mild-mannered baron who owed his meager estates and status solely to his distant kinship with the Queen, had done naught but weep for his daughter’s exile. And Kinley, the brother she adored, had bundled her off in disgrace to France.

  Her mouth tightening, Jayne carefully replaced the documents as she’d found them. A powerful urge to burn the map pulled at her, but she knew it for a useless gesture. No doubt every captain in the fleet would have one.

  She was turning away when another parchment caught her eye: a wheel-shaped chart spangled with esoteric symbols, dotted with mathematical degrees and calculations, massed heavily at the zenith of the wheel.

  One of the captain’s horoscopes, she supposed. But this one was blazoned with the same word she’d seen on the map. Inglaterra.

  Had Lord Calyx cast the stars for England? She was no astronomer, but how she burned to know—

  As she puzzled over the archaic markings, the soft creak of the door barely registered. But the rumble of a masculine voice sent her spinning around with a gasp, heart lodged firmly in her throat.

  “Madre de Dios, there’s a God in Heaven after all. I promised Him I’d endow a church if I found you before we sailed.”

  The capitán of the Arcángel loomed in the doorway, a goblet dangling carelessly from one hand, his powerful body filling the doorframe. The dim light gleamed on the tousled spikes of his pale hair, but cast his features into shadow.

  “Now here you are, querida, in my cabin. Three questions spring to mind. First, why are you here?” Shifting into motion, he prowled into the room. One boot nudged the door carelessly shut behind him, closing them in together.

  “Second, how did you get in?”

  His voice dropped an octave. A shiver skidded through her.

  “And third, whatever shall I do with you?”

  * * *

  Calyx had always been considered lucky. His men said he sailed under a lucky star—a happy phenomenon he attributed to the unusual placement of planets in his natal chart. Now he silently thanked his guardian angels for the fool who’d jostled him and made him drop his bottle of Madeira. If he hadn’t returned to his cabin for another, he’d never have found her.

  His quarry.

  Lady Jayne Boleyn.

  The scandal of two courts, the Tudor Queen’s nemesis, the selfless benefactress of the Armada—if he believed her story.

  If his imagination wasn’t playing tricks with him, there was quite a bit more to the Comtesse de Boulaine than the polished façade she showed the world. After she fled, he’d searched his ship from bow to stern, driven by a compulsion he barely understood. If he wanted the sweet distraction of feminine company, a dozen beauties on board would be more than willing to oblige.

  Now here she stood like a miracle, her shapely silhouette glittering with gold, etched against the saffron glow of the lantern streaming through the porthole.

  Frozen in place, she still leaned over his desk, buried to the elbows in his untidy pile of astrological charts.

  His senses flared to prickling alert. Enough arcane lore—including the heretical Copernicus with his heliocentric theory—was spread across his desk to condemn him in the eyes of any orthodox Catholic. Having the King of Spain for a godfather could only protect him so far.

  Though the poor light obscured her features, he imagined her lush mouth rounded in a surprised “Oh” and her changeable turquoise eyes wide with shock.

  For a heartbeat she stared at him in a silence charged with crackling lightning, like the air on deck before that freakish wind.

  In instant later, her slender form relaxed. She perched gracefully on the edge of his desk, crimson skirts billowing around her.

  “Such a fierce barrage of questions, capitán,” she said in her perfect Spanish, husky with that trace of France. “Is this how you interrogate every woman who comes to your bedchamber?”

  Every woman who comes to your bed.

  Her implication was subtle but unmistakable, an offer to heat any man’s blood, and her voice was pure allure. Yet he sprang instantly on guard. He’d already noticed she used her fluency with language to impose distance between herself and those around her. During that fleeting reference to her marriage earlier, she’d slipped into English, her mother tongue. She wielded French, the language of seduction, with a sultry languor that implied a deceptive intimacy.

  But her would-be lover Don Alonso she’d addressed entirely in Spanish—and she’d instinctively retreated to Spanish now.

  “Most of the women I find in my bedchamber,” he parried, “are waiting in my bed.”

  Her head tilted toward the bed. But he gained the distinct sense she was playing for
time.

  “How tedious to be so predictable,” she said lightly. “In truth, capitán, I had a reason beyond the obvious for seeking you out.”

  He’d known it was too good to be true—this voluptuous, elusive beauty tumbling into his bed like a ripe peach. Yet the sour tang of disappointment stung like vinegar on his tongue.

  “Perhaps I can change your mind, Lady Jayne,” he murmured.

  In the darkness he felt her gaze upon him, coolly assessing, taking his measure.

  “Perhaps,” she whispered.

  Firing into motion, he strode toward the desk. Languidly she slid to her feet and slipped aside. He noted she moved away from the bed—a telling choice.

  He hunted in his pocket for his latest gadget, a prototype he was still tinkering with. Though the wheel-lock mechanism was unreliable at best, his signature luck was with him. When he triggered the spring, the tiny wheel spun against the pyrite striker, discharging a spray of sparks. Behind him, Jayne Boleyn gasped.

  Pleased by her reaction and the simple fact the bloody contraption had worked on the first attempt—for once—Calyx grinned.

  Using the mechanical striker, he swiftly lit a taper and touched the tiny flame from wick to wick, until a small constellation of candles danced among the curling sea of parchment. Swiftly his eyes slid over the documents. Philip’s natal chart and transits were strewn across the top, blazoned with harbingers of doom for the coming venture. But only a student of astrology could read them.

  Yet his unexpected guest had been elbow-deep in the pile.

  Casually he turned toward her. “Were you looking for something in particular, condesa?”

  She stood in a circle of candlelight, gold-slashed sleeves gleaming like a pirate’s treasure. Somewhere she’d lost her stylish hood, revealing a gleaming coil of raven hair. The warm light danced over her elegant cheekbones and saucy chin with its shadowed cleft, and shimmered in the lapis pools of her eyes.

  She was a beauty and a conundrum, his own personal enigma. Was she the ally and benefactress the King of Spain believed her to be? Or was she a Trojan horse, a saboteur who’d slipped aboard his ship and into his cabin to work her mischief?

  Wide-eyed as a virgin, she gazed back at him. Deftly she plucked from his desk a letter crossed with feminine script that reeked with flowery fragrance.

  “I was reading your love letters, capitán,” she said smoothly. “I was curious to know whether the reality of you could possibly equal your amorous reputation. Based on what this spurned lover has written, you are a veritable Adonis.”

  He glanced at the missive dangling from her slender fingers and swallowed a groan. That particular letter was a scathing castigation from his latest diversion, the discontented wife of a local port official, who’d taken their casual dalliance far more seriously than he had.

  Calyx made it a practice neither to prevaricate nor apologize for the fleeting nature of his sexual attachments. He generally confined his adventures to women well experienced with this sort of thing and made his intentions clear at the outset.

  Tonight, for some reason, beneath the cool assessment of Jayne Boleyn’s long-lashed gaze, the tips of his ears grew warm. The reaction annoyed him. He plucked the offending missive from her and crushed it in his fist.

  “I’m a sailor,” he said curtly. “Girl in every port and all that. Besides, I doubt very much you broke into my cabin to read my personal post.”

  Her lashes fluttered and fell, as though somehow he’d disappointed her.

  “You misunderstand me, capitán.” Her voice chilled. “I had no intention of pilfering your post, nor did I force my way into your cabin. As it happened, your door was unlocked. Understandably, I preferred waiting here to lurking in the corridor.”

  Calyx frowned. He always locked his cabin—too many incriminating books, delicate gadgets, experiments in progress and dangerous weapons lying about. On the other hand, he had been a trifle distracted when he blew through after their last encounter. Perhaps he had forgotten.

  You must be slipping, muchacho. Too much time in the tabernas.

  “Forgive me for stating the obvious,” he said dryly. “After our last encounter, you hardly seemed eager to prolong our acquaintance.”

  She laughed softly in acknowledgement, a husky lilt that made him think of late-night rendezvous and private pleasures. He wondered how she would look naked, her supple limbs wrapped in a veil of midnight hair and the lush leopard pelt that adorned his bed.

  His lids dropped as his gaze roamed slowly over her. He liked the cut of her jib, no doubt of it. Her trim, slender shape hummed with hidden purpose, a contained energy that had drawn his eye the first time he saw her—if that flash of crimson garter and creamy thigh hadn’t done the trick.

  She struck him as the kind of ally a man wanted at his back in a tight spot—smart, determined, competent and quick on her feet.

  A tide of rose deepened in her cheeks. She pivoted away, bell-shaped skirts swirling around her slippers, and strolled the cabin. Hands clasped behind her back, she gazed up at the artwork that lined his walls. In turn, he studied her profile.

  Upturned nose, stubborn chin and a mouth made to drive a man straight to madness.

  “They say angels are your passion,” she said. The way her mouth shaped the word passion made his blood heat. “’Tis a curious sort of passion...for a pirate.”

  “It was my mother’s passion.” The words came readily, surprising him. He was used to fending off questions about his uncommon interests. He’d made an ironclad rule never to speak of his family. But in the soft flicker of candlelight, with the elusive perfume of moonflowers floating on the air, a strange intimacy enveloped them.

  Fingering a tapestry he’d pilfered from a ransacked church, she cast him a sidelong glance. “They say your mother was English, oui?”

  French again, which meant she was relaxing in his presence—or wanted him to think so.

  “Oui.” He followed her lead. “From one of the old Catholic families. She was a favorite of Mary Tudor’s in the old Queen’s time. Mary and Philip made a short wretched marriage, but a handful of her ladies took Spanish husbands.”

  “So I have heard.” She gazed up at the woven image—the Archangel Uriel, Flame of God, guarding the Gates of Eden with his fiery sword. “Did your parents fall in love?”

  The old bitterness curdled like bad milk in his gut.

  “Hardly,” he clipped out. “Theirs was an arranged marriage. My mother never laid eyes on the Conde until the day she arrived at Zamorra for their wedding. No one who ever saw them would mistake that marriage for a love match.”

  Sympathy softened her spirited features. “I am sorry.”

  “We were all sorry. My father made certain of that.” With an effort, he unclenched his fists and tossed the crushed letter onto his desk. “My mother was lonely on our rural finca, with only her infant son and the servants for company. The Conde had duties at court and was rarely home. She turned to her Catholic faith for consolation. Confiding her girlish secrets to her guardian angels became her favorite pastime—in truth, her obsession. Instead of bedtime Faerie tales, she told me Bible lore and angel stories.”

  He forced a stiff shrug. “I suppose they stuck.”

  As if sensing his need for distance, she drifted farther along the wall. Light fingers traced the ornate frame of an oil painting acquired when he sacked an English carrack. She studied the black-winged figure soaring over the crowded streets of Pharaoh’s Egypt, his sword dripping with blood.

  “Which one is this?” she asked.

  “Sammael, the Angel of Death. They call him the Severity of God.”

  She seemed willing not to press him about the nightmare of his family history. For some perverse reason, he returned to the topic.

  “I was eleven years old when my father summoned me from the finca to join him at court. By then, even I could see my mother was half mad. She’d taken to calling me Michael—after the Archangel, si? As you can imag
ine, I was more than willing to leave.”

  “A natural impulse for a boy on the edge of manhood,” she murmured.

  “So I told her, when I left her behind with her precious angels. As it turned out, I never saw her again.”

  This was as close as he ever came to the forbidden topic of his mother’s death. He battled the burn of grief and rage that churned in his gut when he thought of his sweet-faced mother—Catarina de Zamorra, born Catherine Knyvett—and the way she’d died.

  Calyx should have gone back for her when he ran away from court, a heedless boy fleeing the blind humiliation of a fool’s first heartbreak and his father’s harsh judgment. But crawling back home to the finca in disgrace had seemed no escape at all. Instead he’d fled south and booked passage on the Serafín, a Portuguese galleass bound for Constantinople.

  Days later, his life of fancy-free adventure ended when Mediterranean corsairs captured the ill-fated Serafín. His first sight of Constantinople came from the slave block when the Conde’s son and heir was sold at auction.

  Chained to an oar in a corsair’s galley, he’d commenced his new life.

  With effort, he surfaced from the ugly sea of memory to find Jayne Boleyn gazing at him, her shimmering eyes liquid with compassion.

  “’Tis a very hard thing,” she said softly in her native tongue, “to lose a mother. I lost mine when I was ten. Sometimes I think she’s the only person on earth who truly loved me.”

  A lifetime of buried pain trembled in her voice. He stared at her downturned face, pure and perfect as a Madonna, and wondered what the hell he was doing, sharing childhood secrets with this enigmatic beauty whose presence in his cabin was still unexplained. He distrusted this fragile sense of shared connection. What sort of magick did she possess, to lull him into such complacence?

  Again he recalled that uncanny moment on deck, the way her skin seemed to glow as that rogue wind snapped and fluttered around them. Was he losing his mind, or merely drunk?