by Jane Feather
"What is it?" he asked quietly. His face was pale, his eyes steady, his voice even.
Cordelia twisted her hands into impossible knots. However hard she'd tried, she hadn't been able to come up with the words. "Michael poisoned Elvira," she blurted finally. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say it like that."
His face was a dreadful mask, his eyes lightless caverns, the planes and contours of his skull suddenly standing out in harsh relief. "What did you say?"
Cordelia moistened her lips. She reached for his hands, but he jerked them away with an impatient rejection that hurt even though she understood it. "Last night I read Michael's journals. He is meticulous in his daily entries. I think there's a volume for every year of his adult life. I read about Elvira…" She stopped, her hands outstretched, palms up in a gesture of helplessness.
"Tell me," he rasped. "Everything you can remember."
"I can remember everything," she said painfully. "I have one of those memories that retains everything I read on a page. It… it… it's very useful for studying." She swallowed, realizing how stupid such burble sounded.
"Get on with it." He began to pace the narrow aisle between the high laurel bushes as she recited word for word the pages from Michael's journal. And when she fell silent, he continued to pace, and the profound quiet seemed a black chasm into which they slowly slid.
"Could… could Elvira have been unfaithful?" Cordelia could bear the silence no longer.
Leo's dead eyes sprang into life. "Possibly," he said curtly. "But what has that to do with murder?"
"Nothing… nothing, of course. I'm sorry."
"Poison!" he spat suddenly. "Of all the vile instruments, A weak, cowardly, woman's weapon!"
Cordelia had no urge to defend her sex at this point. She didn't know what to do or say. Leo was completely unapproachable. Every line of his body held her away. She was the bearer of ill tidings, and messengers always suffered. But her heart ached for him and she longed to touch him, to offer him some comfort, but she knew there was nothing she had that was strong enough to overcome his grief and anger. Not even the power of her love.
"Leave me!" It was a curt order and he didn't look at her as he issued it.
Cordelia melted away, down the hill, blending with the glittering butterflies of the court strolling under the sun, between the fountains.
Leo spun on his heel, his eyes blinded with tears as he retreated into the cool seclusion of the maze. He wanted to scream his rage and grief to the skies but instead he paced the narrow alleys between the high laurel hedges, slamming one hand into the palm of the other in a futile expression of his despair.
He blamed himself. He should have known. All their lives, he and his twin had been inextricably bound together. They had understood each other's thoughts before they were spoken. As small children, even when apart they had occasionally had uncanny flashes of knowledge about the other's doings or feelings. When Elvira had been sick of scarlet fever, Leo had been at school, but the night when the fever hit its peak, the moment when his twin had hovered between life and death, he had woken and found himself staring into a strange internal landscape. A dark tunnel with a soft warm light at the end. He had struggled, finding it hard to breathe, as he'd fought to refuse the invitation of that light. His whole body seemed to be at war, wrenched from side to side by opposing forces, and then the light had receded and he'd woken fully, drenched in sweat, as exhausted as if he'd been fighting a pitched battle for many
hours. He had fought that battle against death hand in hand with Elvira across the distance that separated them. But when she lay dying at her husband's hands, he'd been frolicking in Rome and had experienced not a twitch of unease.
How could he have abandoned her? How had it happened, when had it happened, that the spiritual tie between them had loosened and flown apart?
Tears poured unrestrained down his face as he moved deeper and deeper into the maze. Tears of guilt and of unspeakable grief. They had both known that they were drawing apart, that the connections of twinship were giving way to the independence of their separate lives. They had accepted it, acknowledged it. But now Leo felt again, for the first time since Elvira's death, that old spiritual connection. Now he knew that he had truly lost a part of himself, and he felt that loss in his blood, in his bone, in his sinew.
Chapter Twenty-one
At the first birdsong of the dawn chorus, as the king's hunting party were leaving for the boar hunt, Amelia had nudged her sister awake. Sylvie opened her eyes and sat up all in the same movement. "Where are we?" She gazed bemused at the strange bedchamber with its blue velvet hangings and gilded ceiling. A fresh, fragrant breeze blew through the long open windows.
"In the palace, stupid," her sister whispered, sitting up beside her. "We're going to meet the king."
Sylvie's mouth opened on a round O as memory flooded back. "With Cordelia." Only in the presence of others did they give their stepmother the courtesy title of Madame.
"Yes, and not with Madame de Nevry." Amelia stuffed the pillow against her mouth to stifle the excited giggles bubbling irrepressibly from her chest. "Change places, Sylvie." She wriggled over her sister.
"We can't do that here," Sylvie protested. "What about the king?"
"He won't know," Amelia said matter-of-factly. "No one ever does." She shoved against her sister, pushing her over to the other side of the bed.
Sylvie continued to look doubtful. The trick they played in the nursery and schoolroom at home was all very well, even when their father was their dupe, but to play it in the king's palace, in front of the king, was very different. "What about Cordelia?"
"She won't know either," Amelia stated, hiding her own doubts now under a show of bravado. "No one will know, 'cept us. Like always."
Had Sylvie been able to persevere in her doubts, she would have won over her sister; however, the door opened to admit their governess, still in dishabille, and the nursery maid.
Louise brandished the two hair ribbons and without so much as a morning greeting had labeled each twin while they were still in bed and she thought she could be certain which was which. She gave orders to the nursery maid through compressed lips and communicated with the children with little pushes and pinches, lacing them into their gowns as if they were insensate dolls, scraping back their hair, thrusting pins into the tight braids, retying the ribbons until they both felt as if their scalps were about to split.
When their little corsetted bodies were clothed in the formal, heavy brocaded gowns over stiff damask petticoats and wide swinging hoops, their governess shooed them ahead of her into the small salon next to the bedroom. She sat them side by side on a slippery chintz sofa, their fe
et on footstools so that they were in no danger of sliding off, and told them dourly not to move a muscle. They were to wait there until the princess came to fetch them for their state visit to the dauphine.
Amelia glanced at her sister, whose mouth turned down with dismay. The hands on the pretty gilded clock on the mantel meant nothing to them, but they knew it was still very early and Cordelia had said the previous day that she would come for them at eleven in the morning. The dauphine was not an early riser.
Louise instructed the nursery maid to watch them and make sure they didn't ruffle so much as a hair, and went off to her own chamber to dress.
"Are we to have no breakfast?" Sylvie asked timidly as her stomach grumbled beneath the stiff panel of her bodice.
"I don't know, madame," the nursery maid said. She too was hungry and lost in this vast palace. There was no kitchen attached to the children's apartments, and she slept on a thin mattress in a small closet in the corridor outside. She didn't know how to order food or fuel or water and felt as powerless to look after her own wants as any prisoner in the Bastille.
Louise returned in half an hour, a suspicious pink tinge to her cheekbones, her pale watery eyes as usual slightly yellow and bloodshot. She glared at the little girls.
"Are we to have no breakfast, madame?" Amelia this time inquired.
"We're very hungry," Sylvie added.
Madame was hungry too, but she was no more au fait with the workings of Versailles than the nursery maid. Supper had been brought to them the previous evening without any effort on her part. But how to initiate the production of a meal was beyond her. She wasn't about to admit that to her charges, however, let alone to the anxious nursery maid.
"You will wait," she declared loftily. "A little self-denial is good for the soul."
The children's dismay increased as they understood that their governess hadn't the faintest idea how to feed them. For four interminable hours, they sat side by side on the sofa, not daring to move a muscle, while their governess took nips from her silver flask to subdue her own hunger pangs, and dozed in between whiles. The nursery maid tidied the salon and the bedchambers, then stood miserably by the door. From beyond the closed double doors came sounds of life: hurrying footsteps, murmured voices, the occasional shout. There were smells too, food smells. In the courtyard below their window, horses clattered over cobbles, iron wheels clanged, military voices bellowed, trumpets sounded. Everyone, it seemed, in this vast place, was oblivious of the four newcomers huddling in a small salon on an outside staircase.
Until the door opened to admit Cordelia in her gray gown and heather pink petticoat, her hair cascading in loose ringlets as black as night to her creamy shoulders. "I give you good morning," she declared, bending to take the girls' hands in both of hers and kissing their smooth round cheeks. Her eyes were haunted but her smile was as warm as apprehension and anxiety would permit.
"Oh, but you're so cold!" she exclaimed. "How can you be cold on such a beautiful day?" She looked almost accusingly at the governess, who had. risen, blinking, from her chair. "They're frozen, poor darlings. They must have some tea or something to warm them."
"We're hungry!" they announced in unison.
"Hungry? But have you had no breakfast?"
Louise sniffed audibly. "The prince believes his children should exercise self-discipline on occasion."
"I'm sure that's very laudable," Cordelia said acidly. "But I cannot believe he would expect them to starve." She examined the woman in frowning silence for a minute, then cast a swift glance at the pale nursery maid. "Could it be that you didn't know how to order breakfast?" she murmured wonderingly. She whirled around to pull the bell rope by the door. "This bell rings in our own apartments. It will bring Frederick from our own household. You may order whatever you wish from him."
"I am aware, madame," the governess said, pursing her lips. "But as I said, it's good for children to-"
"It is not good for children to face the day on empty bellies," Cordelia interrupted vigorously. "They have a long and tiring day ahead of them, and they look like ghosts. How long have they been sitting there?"
"Since early morning, madame," the nursery maid put in, emboldened both by her own hunger and the governess's clear discomfiture.
Cordelia spun round on Louise. "You exceed your authority, madame." Her voice was ice, her eyes were blue flame. "As I understand it, you are paid to care for the prince's children, not to torture them!" She turned back to the opening door in a gray and pink swirl of skirts. "Frederick, bring chocolate and brioche and jam for the children, and show the nursery maid where she may break her own fast."
Silence fell in the wake of the footman's departure with the maid. The governess fulminated, her chest swelling like an outraged bullfrog's. The children, eyes bright with curiosity and excitement, still sat on the sofa, but their gaze never left Cordelia's face. Cordelia paced the small salon, her brain working furiously. She had broken one of her rules in this new life and declared war on the governess, instead of offering an alliance. But the woman was so odious, how could she bear to court her?
She paused in her pacing for a minute, her eyes resting on the children. Something wasn't right with their appearance. But what could possibly be wrong?
"Princess, I must protest your tone." The governess finally gave voice to her anger. "My kinsman, Prince Michael, has entrusted his children to my care and authority since their infancy and-"
"Ah, here's Frederick." Cordelia brusquely interrupted this seething beginning. "Frederick, set the tray down there." Having thus reduced the governess to the status of a piece of furniture, she issued a stream of orders to the returning footman, who set his laden tray down and scurried around, placing two chairs with extra cushions, lifting Amelia and Sylvie onto the chairs, pouring hot chocolate, shaking out napkins, passing a basket of brioches.
Cordelia hovered over the table, breaking the brioches, spreading jam, encouraging the children, who required little encouragement, to eat their fill of this succulent feast, so vastly different from their usual fare of weak tea and bread and butter.
When Louise realized that she was excluded from this meal, she stalked out of the room to her own chamber, banging the door behind her. Cordelia stuck her tongue out at the door and the twins choked on their hot chocolate, splattering drips across the table.
"I've spilled it on my dress!" Amelia wailed, rubbing fiercely at a spot of chocolate on her bodice, all desire to laugh vanished at this disaster.
"Oh, it's nothing much." Cordelia spat on the corner of a napkin and dabbed at the mark. "No one will notice." She sto�
�od back to examine the tiny stain, and that same puzzled frown drew her arched brows together.
"But… but… we're to see the dauphine," Sylvie breathed, shocked at this insouciance.
"Toinette knows how easy it is to spill something," Cordelia reassured, shaking off the moment of puzzlement.
"But… but what of the king?" Their eyes, twinned, gazed at her across the table.
"What of the king?" came a voice from the door.
"It's Monsieur Leo!" they squealed in unison. "Did you find us?"
"It certainly looks that way," he said solemnly, closing the door behind him. "I am sent by the king, who wishes to make the acquaintance of my nieces." This last was directed more at Cordelia than at the girls.
His expression was calm, his manner easy. Leo was a past master at the courtly art of dissembling. Only in his eyes could the truth be seen. They were no longer lightless, but they burned with a dreadful rage, akin to despair, and Cordelia's scalp lifted with cold dread. He was blaming himself. She had known that would be his first response, and she had no idea how to reach him in that bitter slough of self-denunciation. Even to attempt ordinary words of comfort would be insulting, especially since she had not known Elvira.
Michael was presumably still keeping to his bed, but he knew that she would be escorting the children to Toinette, so there was no danger of falling foul of him at this point. He could hardly expect her to refuse to obey a royal summons while she waited for him to recover.
"Then we should not delay," she said neutrally. She didn't look at Leo, because she knew that her eyes were filled with compassion and her own fear, and to see that would only add to his burdens. She wiped chocolate from one child's mouth and turned to the jam on the other's fingers.