by Jane Feather
"Come, my lady, let us take a turn in the garden." Henry tucked Maude's hand beneath his arm. "I find myself overheated with all this dancing. It's far from my favorite exercise." He bore her back to the garden doors without waiting for her consent and it occurred to Maude that this suitor of hers was not accustomed to gaining anyone's consent to anything he chose to do.
Instead of annoying her, she found the idea strangely exciting. Being with the duke was like being adrift on a very strong current that would take you where it willed. The deference he was accorded by his companions had at first surprised her. They were not greatly outranked by the duke, but now it seemed perfectly natural.
In the fragrant garden, the duke led her unerringly to a secluded arbor beyond the fish pond, where a fountain played, the cascade of water catching the last rosy glow of the sunset.
"I came to London expecting to court an eligible maid, but instead I find myself in a fair way to losing my heart," Henry said, sounding both puzzled and amused. He slipped an arm around her waist, turning her toward him.
Maude felt a deep trembling in her belly as she looked into his eyes and saw the keenness of his desire and despite her inexperience read it for what it was.
When he took her face between his hands, she stood very still, feeling the warm press of his body against hers. Instinctively she moved against him and heard his sharp intake of breath, saw the smiling quirk of his mouth as he brought it down upon hers.
Her lips rested pliant beneath his as he kissed her full on the lips, then moved his mouth to the corners of her mouth with a delicate butterfly of a kiss. She didn't know what to do in response, she was too overwhelmed by the sensation. The scent of his skin, the soft prickle of his beard, the hard yet pliable pressure of his mouth.
When he raised his head and smiled down at her, she looked back at him in wondering silence, and then almost thoughtfully touched her mouth with her fingertips. Then, instinctively, she raised the same fingers and touched his mouth. Her eyes were grave and yet questioning.
"Oh, you are a delight," he said softly. "So much so that I could almost tell King Henry and Paris to go to the devil and stay here and woo you forever." "You must attend to your duty, my lord." He laughed. "Yes, my dear, I must. And a wife who reminds her husband of his duty is a wife to be prized."
He took her hands in a firm, warm clasp and kissed her again, but lightly this time. " This wife I will prize above all else, I promise you that."
Maude thought of life in a nunnery. Then with a heady surge of defiance that filled her with a delighted bubble of laughter, she thought, To hell with the nunnery. Her arms went around his neck, and her mouth against his was insistent with her own demand.
Chapter Twenty-two
Miranda rose slowly to her feet as Lord Harcourt entered the green bedchamber. Her voice was thin as she said, "I'm glad you're here, milord, for I have something to ask you."
"Aye, and I believe you need to explain why you would disappear for the entire day. Did it not occur to you that the duke might have noticed the substitution?" he demanded, as the hours of anxiety yielded to anger. "Other people have noticed it. It's a damned miracle that the duke doesn't appear to have done so."
Miranda merely shrugged, and the dismissive gesture infuriated him further. He took a step toward her. She took a step back from him and regarded him with a coldness that couldn't disguise the dreadful hurt swimming beneath the surface of her eyes. The hurt that he thought he'd banished that morning.
Her composure alarmed him. There was something so determined, so fixed, in her regard, in her posture, despite the fact that she was clad in a chamber robe, her feet bare, her hair disheveled, as if she'd been running her fingers through it.
"If the duke hasn't noticed it, milord, then I believe you should be grateful for the substitution. You can have no need of me now. Maude grows ever closer to accepting her destiny."
"Miranda- "
"No!" she interrupted fiercely. "No, milord. Answer me! Did you pay them to leave me? What did you say to make them go? Did you threaten them, first, then bribe them?"
Gareth was so taken aback for a minute he couldn't gather his thoughts for a response.
"Did you pay them, sir?" she repeated, her eyes flaring against her deathly pallor.
Gareth knew with grim resignation that he'd gone as far as he could with this deception. He still felt it was too early for Miranda to hear and accept the truth easily, but his hand was now forced. "Aye," he said quietly, "I paid them the fifty rose nobles I promised you. And for very good reason. Now, if you would just listen to me for a minute, you will understand."
"And they took it… they took your blood money," she said bitterly, turning away with a disgusted and defeated gesture.
Gareth grabbed her shoulders and swung her round to face him. "Will you listen to me, Miranda. Just hear me out and don't interrupt until I've finished. Afterward you may say what you wish, and ask whatever questions you wish. But I swear to you it's not as you think. No one has betrayed you."
Miranda heard the words, saw the conviction in his dark eyes, but nothing could stop the deep shudder of foreboding quivering in her belly, lifting the fine hairs on her nape. She looked at him in silence and he was reminded of a prisoner facing the headman. Resolutely he began with the story of Saint Bartholomew's eve…
He seemed to have been speaking for hours but when at long last he finished, the only sound in the chamber was Chip's low muttering from the window where he was swinging by one arm from the curtain rod.
When Gareth thought he could bear her silence no longer, Miranda spoke, her voice oddly dispassionate. "How can you be sure that I'm Maude's sister?"
"That little crescent mark on your hairline," he replied, keeping his tone as calm and matter-of-fact as it had been throughout the disclosure. "Maude has it. I have it. Your mother had it. It's a mark of the Harcourts."
Miranda raised her arm to feel beneath her hair. The mark was not raised in any way but she knew it was there, just as she knew that all denial of the earl's revelation was pointless. She and Maude were twins. She knew that truth in her blood, and she knew that Maude would accept it as inevitably as she did.
"Very few people knew of the missing twin," Gareth said. "On that dreadful night, there were so many murders that the loss of a ten-month-old baby became absorbed in the horror."
The grim silence fell again. Gareth grew seriously alarmed by Miranda's extreme pallor, and the strange flicker in her eyes. She wouldn't look at him directly, and when he reached out a hand to catch her chin, to turn her face toward him, she drew back as if he'd struck her.
"Do you understand what this means?" He wondered if she had really taken in what he'd said. He wouldn't be surprised if she had
n't fully absorbed all the implications of this disclosure that he knew to be premature.
"Yes," she said. "I understand that you used me and deceived me. But I already understood that when you sent my family away."
"They are not your family," he said bluntly. "And they left because they knew it was necessary. They made me promise to tell you that they hadn't abandoned you. They knew the truth and they knew that they no longer had a part in your life." Surely that was obvious to her, he thought. How could it not be?
"Who said they no longer have a part in my life?" Fury shot through her like a lightning bolt, setting her eyes on fire, bringing a flush to her pale cheeks. What was obvious to Lord Harcourt was not so self-evident to Miranda.
" You! You decided that. They are my family! They have cared for me and they belong to me as I belong to them. I'm not a Harcourt or a d'Albard… not in any meaningful way. I am what I've always been and you had no right, no right at all, ever to interfere. To ride roughshod over me, buying off my family as if they were… were of no more account than commodities you could dispose of at your will. You betrayed me, my trust, my-"
"Sweeting, hush, please." Gareth reached for her, gathering her against him, trying to silence the dreadful outpouring. "Sweeting, listen to me. You're not being reasonable. Once I realized who you are, I couldn't leave you on the streets. You must see that. I had a family obligation to return you to your birthright."
Miranda wrenched her head away from his chest. "No, milord, you saw a way to satisfy your own ambition," she stated flatly. "And you didn't… don't… care whom you used."
Gareth tried to bring her head back against him, stroking her hair as he said, "I won't deny that ambition was a powerful force. But my ambition is also
yours. Think, Miranda. Think what I've been working toward. You would be Queen of France and Navarre."
"And if I don't want that?" she demanded, pulling out of his arms. "If such a prospect merely fills me with revulsion? What then, milord?"
"You were not meant to live on the streets, you know that yourself," he said, trying to sound rational. "I've just opened the door to a new life. I know it's overwhelming at first, but I swear to you that this is where your destiny lies."
Miranda shook her head. "No, it is not," she said bitterly. " There is no place for me here." She regarded him with a pitiless clarity. "Maude will marry for the sake of Harcourt ambition. Not me."
She turned away, nauseated by the deep and dreadful ache of betrayal. Nothing he had said lessened it, indeed, it made it even worse. Never once since he'd met her had he thought of her as anything but the means to his own ends. Not even when he was loving her… not even then. Even his revelations had no impact upon her. She was still what she had always been and that couldn't be changed by mere words.
"Miranda, my love-"
"Don't call me that," she snapped." There have been enough lies between us, milord, let's not add another one. Not once have you cared a groat for me. What were you thinking when you made love to me, milord? That it would sweeten me, that it would-"
He couldn't bear it. He seized her shoulders, swung her into his body, stroking her back, running his fingers up through the glowing auburn hair, caressing the back of her head, desperate to silence the dreadful accusations. "Miranda! Stop! Making love to you had nothing to do with any of this. It was separate from-"
"This morning?" she demanded, twisting away from him with a strength she hadn't known she possessed. "Making love to me this morning had nothing to do with sweetening me, cozening me, bringing me to heel?" She stared at him with the same pitiless clarity. "Can't you bear the truth?" Then her shoulders slumped, the rigidity of anger left her. She said softly, making it sound like an accusation, "I loved you."
"Miranda, dearest girl-"
"Go away!" she cried, stopping her ears with her hands in a gesture that was as futile as it was desperate.
Her distress was so overwhelming that Gareth couldn't bear to add to it by forcing his presence on her a moment longer. He'd expected difficulty, but nothing as hideous as this. He stood awkwardly, not knowing what to say, how to back away without making things even worse. "Later," he said. "We'll talk later."
He went to the door in too much distress of his own to notice that it was not properly closed. He pulled it shut quietly behind him and turned toward the haven of his own bedchamber. But that sanctuary must wait. The queen of England was still his guest.
As he strode away toward the stairs, Lady Mary Abernathy stepped out of a small closet opposite the green bedchamber. She stood still, staring at the closed door opposite, thinking bitterly of the old adage that eavesdroppers rarely heard things to their own advantage.
Making love to me this morning… So had spoken the girl who was not Maude. The girl who was Gareth's mistress. He kept his mistress under his own roof. I loved you… the girl had said.
Mary stroked her throat, trying to swallow the nut of nausea. Harcourt had foisted upon her, upon his sister, upon the queen herself, such a monumental deception, such a betrayal, that she couldn't begin to absorb it. Men had whores, even mistresses. But they kept them apart from their wives, their fianc?es, their family ties. There were no entanglements. Just a simple business arrangement. But that was not the situation here. She had never heard Gareth speak in such tones, sound so distressed, so involved, so at sea. So absolutely enmeshed in a vulgar morass that no true, self-respecting knight of Her Majesty's empire could ever so much as contemplate.
She returned downstairs to the gathering as quietly and as unobserved as she had left it.
It was an hour later when Maude peered around Miranda's door into the shadowed chamber. The queen and her retinue had finally returned to Whitehall, with the escort of the earl of Harcourt and the duke of Roissy. "Are you in bed, Miranda?"
Miranda was so raw, so adrift in this fearful confusion of loss, where her own identity was somehow disintegrating, all the parameters of her existence destroyed, that she didn't know what to say to Maude. Whether she could share the evening's disclosures with her, or whether to leave her in blissful ignorance.
"No, I'm not in bed."
"Why are you sitting in the dark?" Maude came in, closing the door behind her. Miranda was sitting on the window seat, her feet curled up beneath her, Chip sprawled indolently on his back in her lap.
"I was watching the evening star."
Maude frowned. Miranda's voice didn't sound quite the same as usual. It was scratchy as if she had a cold. Maude came over to the window seat and leaned over to tickle Chip's stomach. Her neck was bare, her hair caught smoothly into a snood of gold thread, and Miranda saw the faint crescent mark against her sister's hairline. Her hand went to the back of her own neck.
"So
, tell me what happened downstairs?"
"Oh, yes." Maude squeezed onto the window seat beside Miranda, paused to collect her thoughts, then with a deep breath poured forth her bubbling excitement and confusion.
"He kissed me," she finished. "It felt so strange and, well… well, wonderful. Do you know if that's how it's supposed to feel?"
"I believe so," Miranda said dully.
"What's the matter?" Maude reached for her hands. "You're so sad, Miranda. What is it?"
Miranda waved her hand in a brusque gesture of dismissal. "Are you prepared to agree to the betrothal now, then?"
Maude shook her head. "I don't know. Everything I believed about myself seems to have turned topsy-turvy."
Miranda almost laughed at the bitter irony. Like sister, like sister. They were both adrift now, because the earl of Harcourt had decided to play God.
"What is it, Miranda?" Maude asked insistently. "I hate it that you're sad. There must be something I can do to help."
Miranda slid off the window seat, still cradling Chip. "I'm going away," she said.
"So soon?" Maude looked aghast. "Is it because I've taken your place with the duke? Because you don't think you're needed anymore?"
"I'm not," Miranda said. "But that's not the only reason I'm going. I have to find my family before they take ship for France. There was a misunderstanding and they thought I wasn't coming back to them. So I have to leave at daybreak."
"I don't want you to go," Maude said slowly, almost wonderingly.
"Then come with me." Miranda said it without thinking but then the impossible idea became possible, and a surge of life renewed her. "One last adventure together," she urged, her voice once more vibrant. "Come with me to Folkestone, Maude. It'll give you time to think about what you really want. Time to be yourself, answering only to yourself. You'll never have that chance again."