Laura Navarre - [The Magick Trilogy 02]

by Midsummer Magick

  “If I might have a word...” she began desperately, for she couldn’t be certain of another moment of his time all night.

  Watching him stride away to address the plunging bodice of a simpering Chastity, Linnet pushed out a frustrated sigh.

  After the masque then, she promised herself. Ye must try again, for he’s the only Dudley at court, almost the only one left. His father and brother had lost their heads to Mary Tudor, along with poor Jane Grey, the nine days’ queen his brother Guildford had wedded for ambition.

  Well before those troubled times, that long-lost summer Catriona Norwood came to court, Dudley’s father was Duke of Northumberland, a premier peer of the Tudor court. Quite possibly, he’d left correspondence or records behind. It was those Linnet sought. Any scrap of gossip about her mother, any anomaly in her lodging as the summer court moved ceaselessly from castle to keep, might yield a clue to her hidden admirer.

  Hidden in her skirts, her hands twisted together, urgency and desperation nibbling at the fragile bastion of her resolve. She’d come south on a fool’s errand, to think anyone might recall an obscure Scottish countess who joined the King’s summer progress twenty-three years ago, or the names of the admirers who paid court to her beauty. Belike Linnet would never know the truth of her father’s bitter words.

  Surely, even with the stain that blotted her good name, some gentleman would condescend to wed her for an earldom. She was chaste, she was dutiful, she was diligent—forsooth, she was Diligence personified. Surely those virtues must outweigh her scandalous past.

  Tucking herself into a corner, she lifted the jeweled Bible from her girdle and sought comfort in the familiar Latin. Once again she strove to ignore the sidelong looks the Queen’s ladies darted toward her, this odd Catholic moth in their colorful swarm of butterflies.

  A round, rosy face appeared in the doorway—Kat Ashley, the Queen’s Mistress of the Robes, the closest thing to a mother the Queen had.

  “Quick, now!” Mistress Kat bustled in, the subdued luster of navy damask rustling around her stout frame. “Her Majesty’s ready for her sport, and the gentlemen in their places.” As a tumult of excited cries arose, her kind blue eyes twinkled at Linnet.

  “There’s a fine girl,” she whispered approvingly in her Devon burr, as Linnet squeezed past into the narrow corridor. “You’ve improved so much, dearie, since that summer at Hatfield—three years past, was it nay? I’d hardly know you now, so proud and fine, for the poor bedraggled beanpole of a girl you were then—starting at shadows and all aflutter. Whatever became of those friends of yours?”

  Linnet froze, the blood in her veins congealing into dread. That summer at Hatfield was part of her problem time, the lost years of her madness. She’d dreamed of Hatfield manor and so many other places, but dared not trust the disjointed flashes of memory that surfaced from the fog.

  Four years stolen from her memory. Four years of questions she never dared ask, dreams she never dared speak of, for how could they be anything but madness?

  Her dream of the flaxen-haired beauty with moonlight pouring through her skin, her eyes like wheels of emerald fire. And the stern-faced fighting priest with his flaming sword, a halo of tawny hair gleaming against the dark shadow of wings.

  The name surfaced from nowhere, rising like an angel from the mist of those lost years.

  “Uriel,” she blurted.

  Panic clawed at her throat, the same unreasoning terror that swamped her whenever she tried to piece together these fragments of memory. She gripped her throat in a desperate hand and swallowed down the fear.

  “Mistress Kat, do ye...do ye recall...?”

  “Go on then, dearie,” the older woman urged kindly. “You make a fine Diligence, and that you may tie to.”

  Linnet realized she was standing stock-still in the corridor, blocking the way, her sister Virtues pushing past with small huffs of annoyance.

  Best to say nothing, to Mistress Kat or anyone else. Anything she said about that fevered, forgotten interval would merely heap fresh kindling on the bonfire of her rumored madness.

  Moving slowly, like a woman under enchantment, she slipped into the Great Hall and found her place.

  Lord Robert had penned the masque, drawing from an epic poem, The Castle of Good Virtue under Siege by the Evil Vices. Each Heavenly Virtue would wage a mock battle with her partner Vice. Linnet’s partner as Indolence was Sir William Pickering, a debonair diplomat with Protestant leanings, newly returned from exile—tall, handsome, gallant and utterly uninterested in a word she said. Like all men at court, he was thoroughly beguiled by their fiendishly clever Queen.

  Which suited Linnet all to the good. She’d had enough masculine attention to last any woman a lifetime.

  Again she banished the ghost of Jasper, bellowing with rage as he stalked her down the steep mountain trail, the crumbling cliffs of Glencross treacherous in the rain. The Castle of Good Virtue was her place now.

  Listening for her cue, she stationed herself on the shadowy platform above the hastily erected stage. Below, a squealing Chastity fled a rampant Lust in a shocking codpiece across the stage.

  Linnet peered past the frolicking pair at the crowded hall, the courtiers in their glittering finery clustered about, laughing and calling bawdy encouragement to the players. Foremost among them she glimpsed the cold dazzle of cloth-of-silver, where a tall flame-haired woman blazed like the winter sun.

  Elizabeth Tudor herself.

  In her brief time at court, lost in the flurry of the coronation, Linnet had yet to be summoned before her sovereign. Now, as she beheld the Queen in such high spirits, Elizabeth seemed almost to glow. A flood of pure light poured through her porcelain skin. As the Queen applauded and cried encouragement to the struggling Chastity, her gray eyes were incandescent pools of silver light.

  Shivering, Linnet squeezed her eyes closed and prayed. It was happening again—her madness, these hallucinatory fancies that the Tudor Queen was more than she appeared, that she herself was somehow more.

  That the mysterious man who’d rescued her at the Maid and Minion, gone when she awoke in her hired cart at Westminster, had been something more than mortal.

  A wave of applause shattered the spell. Lust had swept Charity into his chariot and thundered from the stage—if a pair of actors encumbered with horsehair manes and tails, harnessed to a makeshift chariot, could be said to thunder. The tide had turned, and the War of the Virtues now rested on Diligence.

  There, rising in a flourish of lutes and viols from the musicians’ gallery, came her cue. Anxiety squeezed Linnet’s chest and she fought for breath. To put herself forward before this drunken, half-aroused mob...her father would have had her beaten for it.

  Sweet Jesus, she couldn’t falter now! Pushing past the suffocating, painful shyness that had plagued her all her life, she abandoned the safe concealment of the shadows and stepped into the torchlit exposure of the battlements.

  Rapt and expectant, a sea of faces lifted toward her. Linnet gripped the low parapet in trembling hands and sang.

  Knowing she’d be paralyzed with nerves, she’d begged to compose her own verse, a pastime she often enjoyed. Her uncertain girlhood voice had ripened in womanhood to a pure soprano. Now she sang from the stomach, shoulders back, chest forward, sang from the heart the words of that earnest Virtue whose sun rose and set around her duty. The words poured from her throat as though dipped in silver.

  Below her, the restless throng settled into stillness. A profound silence fell like a curtain around them, enclosing them in the womb of her private sanctuary, the fragile shelter from a violent world her fanciful verses could weave.

  Letting the music pour through her, she turned toward the gilded spinning wheel that was Diligence’s prop and took up a glittering skein of silver thread. Wrapped in music, she didn’t falter when a sinister cascade of chords announced her rival, the Vice called Indolence. Now would come Sir William Pickering, another of the Queen’s favorites, promised a leading ro
le over Lord Robert’s jealous protests.

  But Dudley had taken his revenge. He’d assigned Pickering the role least suited to his tall, stately, stiff-backed gallantry. And he’d ordered Indolence to make his entrance on the most experimental and dangerous of all the devices in this extravagant spectacle—a system of ropes and pulleys, so her rival could swoop down on her across the stage.

  She wouldn’t put it past Dudley to sabotage Sir William’s entrance, and half-expected to see the knight’s elegant frame crashing to the stage.

  From the audience, a ripple of gasps and cries arose. Below, the sea of faces turned in unison. Hearing the flutter and snap of wind in fabric, she glanced up, ready to abandon her spinning and scramble to safety from Sir William’s uncontrolled descent.

  But the figure swooping down on her, laughing with delight as he soared through the air, was no Sir William.

  Indeed, the stage lighting was so artful she couldn’t even see the ropes. She glimpsed a lithe figure enveloped in a silken banner of streaming raven hair and a cloak that billowed like black wings in his wake. The dark fire of garnets glittered on his blood-crimson doublet. Light gleamed on the silver stitching in his leather gauntlets and flashed blinding white on the medallion at his throat.

  An odd sense of recognition stirred within her, a voice that whispered her name. Her skin tingled with the lightning charge of awareness.

  Graceful as an angel in flight, the Vice called Indolence alighted on the platform beside her. His garments settled into stillness around him.

  Linnet stared into his fine-chiseled features, triangular as a cat’s, violet eyes dancing with madcap mischief.

  The breath spilled from her lungs. Startled thoughts swooped like birds through her brain. Was it happening again? Was she was imagining him, just as she feared she’d imagined him in the Maid and Minion?

  Panic fluttered in her belly. Dropping her spool of silver thread, one hand rose to her throat. Her pulse beat hard and rapid against her fingers.

  “Saints preserve us,” she whispered. “Is it you?”

  For an alarming moment, while she struggled to determine what was real, her erstwhile savior swept her an elegant leg—not part of his script—and flashed a grin of pure delight. While she stared in amazement, the lord named Zamiel opened his mouth. The languid verses of Indolence streamed forth.

  But how can he know Sir William’s lines? Pickering sang the last practice only this forenoon!

  However it came to pass, her savior was singing the role now. As the words poured like dark honey from his throat, she forgot to think and could only stare spellbound.

  Elizabeth Tudor reveled in her role as patron of the arts, and the finest musicians in England graced her fledgling court. Linnet herself had heard music so breathtakingly lovely in the Faerie realm—or wherever she’d been—that it set grown men weeping.

  But Zamiel’s voice transported her to the plane of Heaven. He sang as though God Himself had blessed his throat or breathed divine Breath into the man’s lungs. His range was astonishing, soaring from tenor to bass to rumbling baritone with an effortless versatility she’d never dreamed a human throat could achieve.

  His voice was balm of Gilead and syrup of Morpheus, beguiling her to the sinful realm of lassitude and languor where Indolence reigned. A seductive torpor, subtle and strong as magick, seeped through her blood. His song was hot spiced wine on a winter night, drugging her to slow derangement of the senses. Around them the entire spectacle slowed into stillness, as though they were all bewitched.

  The blissful witchcraft of his words ended with Indolence’s torrid promise to bear Diligence away to his realm of idleness. This was her cue, but she stood paralyzed, one hand gripping her forgotten spindle, the other at her throat. Wordless, she stared into the shimmering purple fire of his gaze.

  The corners of his mobile mouth curled up in the same wry, confiding smile she recalled. The intimacy of that smile drew her toward him on tiptoe, heart in her throat.

  Releasing the spindle, her hand lifted toward him. He took a single step back, staying just beyond reach.

  “I believe that was your cue, countess,” he murmured. “Cat caught your tongue?”

  One brow arched in challenge. A bracing tincture of pride flooded through her. His use of her title recalled her obligations, the importance of impeccable behavior to repair her tattered image. She couldn’t afford to falter here, before the Queen and the entire court.

  Swiftly her chin rose. Glaring at him, she launched into Diligence’s sprightly defiance with a fire and determination the stiff-necked Pickering had never inspired. She forgot her fear of the watching eyes, her sinking dread of censure and judgment, and sang as though her soul depended on it.

  Beneath the spur of pride, her voice gained volume and resonance. For the first time, as her anxiety fell away, she felt the Virtue’s righteous indignation, became her sense of outrage to find her place and duty thus imperiled. Though it wasn’t in her script, she clenched her fists, stamped her foot, poured into her voice all her ire against the world that had wronged her.

  With every breath in her body, she defied him, and saw his face change. The maddening gleam of mockery faded, until he stared at her as raptly as she did him. Her voice enclosed them in a private world where only the two of them existed—only the dark passion of Indolence and the fiery defiance she flung in his face.

  Now came the moment for her dramatic exit. With her final repudiation still ringing through the captivated hall, she whirled to flee, bell-shaped skirts and farthingale swaying around her legs.

  But Indolence leaped forward to stay her. One arm wrapped around her corseted waist to spin her back toward him, as the lord named Zamiel abandoned Lord Robert Dudley’s carefully choreographed script.

  Gasping, she flung her hands up, desperate to maintain some shred of decorum before the court’s riveted eyes. Her palms spread across his chest, sinking deep into the plush velvet that sheathed the hard flat plane of his chest.

  “What in blazes are ye about?” she hissed beneath the music, flaming up at him with righteous outrage. “I’m supposed to flee!”

  “Hell’s Bells, I hope not.” He laughed down into her angry face—actually laughed, the fiend! Obviously reveling in the chaos he was causing, entertained by her chagrin.

  In the wings, Dudley must have been seething.

  Only her keen awareness of their fascinated audience restrained her from an open struggle. “Ye’ll give Lord Robert apoplexy!”

  “Dancing with rage, no doubt.” His own eyes danced as he grinned at the prospect.

  “Ye’ll shame us both. Let go!”

  Unmoved by this argument, Indolence surrounded her, inescapable, one arm wrapped around her waist. Now he drew her hard against his lean length, spilling a fresh gasp from her lips. He stood half a head taller, no more, their faces merely a hand span apart.

  His nearness assaulted her senses—the lithe sinewed strength of his frame beneath garments whose lush opulence must violate half the sumptuary laws in England, the dizzying aroma of vice rising from his hair and clothes to fill her nostrils, his low chuckle a sinful melody in her ear.

  “Wrap your sweet arms around me,” he whispered, a flicker of breath like a flame kissing her cheek.

  “I won’t!” She flung back her head. “Ye wicked devil, ye’ll make us both laughingstocks.”

  “Only if you keep fighting me,” he murmured, long lashes sweeping down to hood his gaze, which lowered to her parted lips. A coil of heat unfurled in her belly, making her suddenly breathless. “Trust me this once. You’re safe with me.”

  “Only this once?” she asked on a scrap of breath.

  His gaze darkened to indigo. Close as they stood, he seemed scrupulous not to touch her skin to skin, his cloak and gauntlets an impermeable layer between them.

  She wondered what would happen if she raised her hand to brush the high slant of his cheekbone, where diamond beads of perspiration glittered blue-white under
the hot smoking lights.

  “Embrace me, my beauty,” he whispered. “Before Dudley comes boiling out here and causes a real spectacle.”

  This was sheer, bloody lunacy! Yet what else could she do, having utterly missed her exit? Like a woman trapped in a spell, her arms slid slowly around his neck. His high ruff and the lined fabric of her sleeves buffered them from contact.

  She embraced him like a lover or a swooning maid, head tilted back to gaze up at him, half-fainting over the steady strength of his arm around her waist.

  Pride sprang to her rescue, the straight-backed pride of Glencross.

  She glared straight into his hooded gaze and told him, low and fierce, “Ye can go to the Devil.”

  Something flickered in his sharp-planed, mobile face. A low, bitter laugh escaped his lips. “Very likely. Now hold tight!”

  Both arms closed around her, stealing what little remained of her breath. Suddenly sensing his intentions, she gasped, “Nay!”

  But the scoundrel ignored her protest. She barely had time to tighten her grip before he launched them from the battlements. For a heartbeat they were plummeting, the ground rushing toward them at terrifying speed. Linnet filled her lungs to scream.

  Then the harness beneath his cloak caught and held the weight of their entwined bodies. Suspended by the rope-and-pulley apparatus, they swooped across the stage. A chorus of cries rose from their audience.

  Beneath them she glimpsed the upturned faces of Temperance and Greed gaping up at them, their roles momentarily forgotten. Her skirts and petticoats unfurled like a sail behind them, Zamiel’s black cloak spreading like wings in their wake. The wind tugged her cap free and sent it spinning away. A cloud of dark ringlets spilled loose to flutter around her face as the bright stage flashed past.

  With dizzying speed, the floor rushed up at them. Helplessly, she tightened her grip around Zamiel’s neck, certain they would both be dashed to pieces.

  Then they plummeted into the concealing shadows of the wings. Somehow he gathered his legs beneath him, barely staggering as he caught their weight. The spinning world jerked to a halt, though the dim outlines of props and apparatus still swirled in her dazed vision.