The Pirate Prince (47 page)

Traitor
, she thought.

They deserved each other.

Standing in the drafty, torch-lit great hall of the convent, Domenic watched the quiet, bristling confrontation between Allegra and the Viennese princess and read in their mutual hostility the means for his escape. It was a long shot, but if Allegra pulled no weight with Fiore, as she claimed, it might well be his only hope. If Domenic Clemente knew how to do anything, he knew how to manipulate women.

He stood staring at the beautiful princess with his most tender, wonderstruck expression, heedless of the guards around him. As the ladies came mincing down the staircase, Nicolette Habsburg saw him. Lips slightly parted, he stared at her, lifted a hand vaguely over his heart, then cast down his gaze quickly, staring at the floor like a lovestruck schoolboy.

He could feel her instant curiosity, that subtle preening of feminine vanity, and he heard the ladies begin to whisper.

“What man is that?”

“He is tall.”

“He has a noble air, hasn’t he?”

“What fine, golden hair he has.”

There was giggling, and he lifted his gaze hesitantly to the princess. Their eyes met. She tilted her head, then came toward him. With a regal nod, she caused his cutthroat guards to back away. The rough, stupid men were so abashed by her beauty, you’d think they had never seen a woman before, he thought, though even Domenic had to admit Nicolette Habsburg was possibly the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

He kept his head bowed.

“Sir, what are you called?” she asked. “Are you one of the king’s men?”

“No, Your Highness.”

“Your Highness, stay back. He is a prisoner,” one of his guards started to say, but she cast him a withering look with eyes of ice-blue fury.

“Brigitta,” she said impatiently, “inform these creatures they will not speak unless spoken to.”

Domenic had to hide his fleeting amusement as Brigitta obeyed. The men around him bristled with resentment.

“Of what crime are you accused, good sir?” the royal beauty asked him.

“The king hates me,” he said softly, “for I was once the betrothed of his mistress.”

“Miss Monteverdi?” she asked with a flat curl of her pretty lip.

“Yes. He stole her from me, and all I want is to leave this place in peace with her. But he is in love with her and will not let me have her back.”

“In love,” she repeated. “With her?”

“Oh, indeed, Your Highness. He showers her with rich gifts I cannot match with my poor fortunes. I fear His Majesty will empty half Ascencion’s coffers on her.”

She folded her arms over her chest and stared frankly at him. “Well, that will not do.”

She was easy to read, he thought. He could just see her thinking to herself,
He will certainly not spend my dowry money on that woman!

Domenic’s mind raced with excitement. He was willing to bet the princess had sent Brigitta or someone of her coterie to have a look at Fiore for her and no doubt had heard the finest reports of her new husband’s dark good looks and charm. If she had one jot of female jealousy in her pretty, virginal body, he would find it and prey upon it.

“Oh, radiant lady,” he sighed, “if only I could leave this place and take Miss Monteverdi away with me, my life would be complete, but alas. Instead I will surely hang for my love.”

The ladies sighed behind her.

“Aye,” he said woefully, “the king refuses to part with her. He says Allegra Monteverdi is the most beautiful woman since Helen of Troy, with the finest mind and the sweetest temperament.”

Nicolette stared for a moment. “We’ll just see about that!” She moved closer. “I may be in a position to help you, sir,” she confided to him with all the high seriousness of her perhaps seventeen years.

He gave her an incredulous look of thanks. “Oh, gentle lady. Would you, truly? I could never repay you….”

Her perfect, creamy face took on a look of resolve. Oh, this little blue-eyed viper would make the king’s life hell, he thought gleefully.

“His Majesty must never know of this, but I believe what the poets always say—true love should never be denied,” she whispered. “Tonight while I dine with my husband, I will send my guards to conduct you and Miss Monteverdi to the coast. From there you may sail whither you may. Just don’t bring that woman back here. Ever.”

“Sweet, radiant lady,” he breathed.

Looking tremendously pleased with herself, she gave him her hand.

Domenic knelt and kissed her fingers until she blushed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Lazar stood where the priest told him to stand, sat where he was told to sit, walked at the pace that his bride, with her deliberately tiny steps could match. Candles blazed in the cathedral, and there was a party atmosphere among the others, while individually the members of the wedding party learned their places from the old royal officer of ceremonies. Even Don Pasquale was smiling, reminiscing to his Austrian counterparts about a boyhood trip to the Alps.

Lazar stood around with his hands in the pockets of dark blue breeches, an amiable enough look fastened on his face by sheer willpower. After all, he was about to get everything he supposedly wanted—Ascencion, his to cherish and protect. The restoration of Fiori rule. Two million gold ducats. Domenic Clemente taken into custody, awaiting trial for crimes against the people of Ascencion. And a wife it would be easy to keep at a polite distance.

Indeed, his eyes glazed over when he tried to listen to his bride’s vivacious chatter, which was exactly what he had wanted.

As for the royal wedding, it was to be a grand production. A lavish show, a giant, sumptuous farce.

He overheard the guests murmuring their various judgments on his quiet mood, some calling him a generally taciturn fellow; some said silence was a mark of wisdom; the courtiers decided he was either dull-witted or seized with a bout of cold feet; the ladies whispered that he was mysterious.

Oh, the joys of public life, Lazar thought dully. It was all coming back to him.

He wanted to leave.

At each round of congratulations he forced a smile, wondering how he was going to endure a lifetime of this without one soul nearby who really knew him and wouldn’t make these arbitrary judgments on his every tiny gesture and word. He told himself it would fade. He was merely a novelty to them at this point. Work would be his salvation. God knew there was enough of it to be done.

Upon finishing the rehearsal for the next day’s performance, they all piled into the ornate carriages to go take a late supper at the sprawling winter villa of the Duke of Milan. While Lazar waited in irritation for the princess and her ladies to get into the carriage, he glanced up at the cathedral and wondered if lightning would strike him when he stood at the altar and made such hollow vows before God.

He found it difficult to listen to the girls’ chatter in the carriage, so he sat, gazing out the window at the dark landscape, missing Allegra so completely his whole body ached for her. This unselfishness business was a great deal harder than it looked.

As he eased out of his melancholia back to the present, the landscape, though dark, took on a sinister familiarity.

“Where are we?” he asked, chills crawling down his forearms.

Just as they reached D’Orofio Pass, Mama gathered little Anna, sleeping, on her lap and sat back against the velvet squabs. “My!” she said. “How that sea tossed! Thank heavens we all are safe
.”

He slammed his fist against the carriage door. “Driver, halt, damn it!”

The ladies gasped at his obscenity, but the vehicle rolled to a stop.

Heart pounding, Lazar sprang out of the carriage, drawing Excelsior. He looked around wildly, but there were no masked men, no stomping horses or screams, no lightning. Just him, the gleaming royal sword, and the night breeze moving gently through the trees like the sighs of mournful ghosts.

“What is it, sire?” someone asked behind him.

“Let him be,” Don Pasquale sagely replied.

The girls whispered nonsense together.

Lazar walked a few steps away. Heart welling, he stared about him at the empty place along the road where his family had been slaughtered. It looked like an ordinary place, but here death twined like a black snake amid the violets. The tiny path through the roadside woods caught his eye as it had almost sixteen years ago, drawing him once more.

Survive, and hold the line
.

Dried leaves crunched under his feet as he entered the woods where once a boy had fled, frightened out of his mind. Before long he stood at the edge of a cliff two hundred feet high, the edges of his frock coat billowing in the breeze. He stared down at the swirling, churning waters below.

You poor little bastard
, he said to the boy he had been.
Bloody miracle you survived at all
.

He searched the dark, distant waters with the stirrings of a profound realization taking shape in the back of his mind. He felt some twisting emotion he could not name, a bittersweet, exquisite anguish. All he could think was that at last he had kept his promise to his father.

But now he had broken another kind of vow, he thought heavily, one that reached beyond words, branded upon the very ether of his soul.

In my heart I am your wife
, she’d said.
That is enough for me
.

Ah
, chérie.
What am I going to do with you?

He looked up at the stars helplessly. Allegra was his compass, the star above his storm who had guided him home. She had saved his soul. She had given him everything, and he had thrown her away. He’d had no choice, for Vicar’s death had proved the curse was real.

But how could it be real? he thought achingly. There was a time he would never have dared believe he could have his kingdom back, but his love for Allegra and hers for him had made real the impossible. Perhaps he was equally wrong now to believe he could not have her by his side.
But what if—?

What if. Always, what if.

Life was a dangerous proposition however you looked at it.

Aye, he thought, one could go stark, raving mad if one dwelt on the mind-boggling fragility of one’s own mortality too long, let alone the mortality of one’s beloved. Life was so closely braided with death that avoiding one meant avoiding the other; the only way to escape the looming fear of death, he thought, was to embrace death itself, and he had cast away that option once and for all the night he had hurled his silver bullet out to sea.

But to embrace life? He was not sure he had that kind of courage.

For instance, even if he kept Allegra safe from traitors and murderers and such, women died in childbirth half the time, he mused, a bloody affair—the very process of life itself was laced with death. If he gathered her back into his life, children would come sooner or later. He was sure to love his children to distraction, and what if they were taken from him? Babies were more fragile than tiny rosebuds. How could he bear it?

Then there was the fact that Allegra loved to work among the poor, with their filth and their diseases. She had to die sometime. Even if there was no real curse, a day would come when he would have to put her in the ground, for he doubted that God in his munificent cruelty would allow him to be taken first.

Are you really protecting her, or are you trying to spare yourself the pain—running away again to save your own skin?

The waters below and the stars above seemed to hold an answer he was too much of a clod to grasp, one he sensed should be obvious but he just couldn’t find it. He searched sea and sky until he grew dizzy there by the cliffside. He knelt on one knee on the windswept rock, steadying himself.

Resting his elbow on his bent leg, the king lowered his face in one hand.

I am damned either way, he thought with a feeling of such despair he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
We are all damned one way or the other, and such is life. Might as well be happy
.

He began to laugh softly with infinite sadness at his own patchwork philosophy, a peasant’s creed, such wisdom as could have come to him from the mouth of any Ascencion grandmother standing before her stove, frying up her garlic in
olio
.