Dark Angels (20 page)

This house, this lovely summer villa, had always been filled with people coming and going. Monsieur and Madame were famous for their dinners, their fetes, their gardens, which were open to anyone who wished to stroll in them. Now all was silent, left to its mourning. A piece of her life was over in no uncertain terms and not in the way she’d imagined at all.

Renée sat on the bottom step of the staircase, sobbing as if her heart were breaking. Alice took a little bag of coins from her pocket, placed it on Renée’s lap.

“To tide you over,” she said. “My father believes all things can be overcome, waited out, if one has some coins put by.”

“I don’t want to be left here.”

But Alice was already walking away from her, out the door, to the carriage, to her other life.

C
HAPTER 10

I
n England, the first thing Alice did was weep in her father’s arms. The second thing she did was examine the house he brought her and Barbara home to—a new one; he never stayed in one place for more than a year—from top to bottom. It was an old London mansion off the Strand made of flint and stone, many gables and chimneys, and it had its own river landing. Large, grand, and completely out of fashion, it had heavy dark wood everywhere inside, intricately beamed ceilings in a great hall, and a musicians’ gallery off in a high corner. “Archaic,” she said to Barbara. Then she fell into bed and woke the next morning, lingering awhile, which was not like her. She hadn’t expected to have to begin again. She felt dismayed. That was also not like her. The pall of the princess’s death hung over her, so unexpected, so horrid. In her dreams, she had rushed down a long hallway, calling for the princess. She had something she had to tell her, must tell her. But the corridor had no end, no beginning…. She shivered and sat up.

Time to begin whether she wished it or not.

She would begin with her father.

“D
ID YOU SPEAK
with Balmoral?”

“I can do nothing there, poppet. But we have a nice offer from Lord Mulgrave.”

She closed the cover of her jewel case with a snap and looked at herself in the mirror. She was dressing to go out. She wore her mother’s diamonds screwed in her ears and looked well enough—if dark, bright eyes and dark curls meant anything.

“Never you mind ignoring me,” her father said. “I’ve brought a handsome specimen to the table, and you’ll do me the respect of considering him. You’re twenty. It’s indecent. I thought I’d be bouncing boys of yours on my knees a good three years ago! If you’re not careful, I’ll end up marrying for the both of us and providing my own heir, and then your jointure will be cut down to a quarter of its size, and we’ll just see who lines up to have you then.”

Alice considered her father. He’d done nothing about Balmoral. He was viewing himself in a pier glass, a long and rare and very expensive mirror that Alice had had shipped to him from Venice. The only things fashionable in this house were what she’d sent him over the last two years. He drew in his stomach, puffed out his chest. Was he still flirting with that Saylor chit? she wondered.

“Where are you off to?” he asked her, suspicious, but then suspicion was his nature.

“I’m going to call on Aunt Brey. There was a note from her last night. She wants to hear about the”—Alice swallowed past a sudden lump in her throat—“the death.”

He sat down. “Tell me about the death.”

She did, but not quite everything: Her own suspicions about the poisoning and that Monsieur had taken a casket of letters from King Charles she kept to herself. The truth was she couldn’t trust him, and so she’d give him no fodder for his ambitions until she was far clearer about their direction.

“Those goddamned benighted Frenchies,” he said when she was finished. “They need to be taught a lesson. If His Majesty wants war, we’ll give him what is necessary.” The “we” was the House of Commons, which by law funded—or not—the king’s ventures. Her father ran a faction there for whatever great man he was supporting at the moment. “It was hard to see your princess die. I know that, poppet.”

“What am I to do with myself, Father? I feel as if I’ve lost a…” She groped for a word. Her mother had died when she was born, so she didn’t know what a mother was. She had no brothers and sisters, so she didn’t know that, either. Her father was a weather vane, turning first with that wind, then with this. She had only her duty to anchor her, first to Queen Catherine, then to Princesse Henriette. Now, to whom?

“We’re all still head over heels,” said her father. “The king just left his bedchamber yesterday. He’d been there since he heard the news. I thought a party of us were going to have to go to the privy council and beg them to break down the door.”

“She died so horribly, Father.” She put her hand atop his. “What was your position in the Lord Roos bill of divorcement?”

His face went blank. “Lord Roos? That was in the House of Lords. I remember little of it.”

She changed direction. “Would you see about a place for me in Queen Catherine’s court again?”

“Difficult, poppet.”

“Queen Catherine adores me, and King Charles would do whatever you asked in this. He knows my service to his sister.”

“What about the Duchess of Monmouth’s household? She’s young and lively, and her ladies cut quite a swath at court.”

“She likes me not.”

“Easily gotten around.”

“I’d like to be Queen Catherine’s maid of honor again.” Alice watched her father’s face very carefully.

“All that praying and going to mass, girl. Bah.”

“I prayed and went to mass at Princesse Henriette’s court every day. It didn’t seem to bother you.”

“That was France. This is England. Stay with me until you marry.” He dropped a kiss on her head, blew another at her from the door. “Give your aunt my continued dislike, won’t you?”

Alice went into the adjoining chamber, where Poll was just doing the last of the buttons on Barbara’s overgown. It was Alice’s gown, but she always shared with Barbara. She had much, and Barbara had little.

“I’m off to Aunt Brey’s. We’ll meet at the queen’s later.”

“Yes.”

“You look markedly happy, Ra.”

“I’m glad to be home again. And glad the court is at Whitehall. I thought they’d be at Hampton Court, which would make it harder for us to…to see everyone we would wish to see.”

John Sidney, thought Alice.

Poll curtsied. “Ready, miss.” She and Poppy, Alice’s groom, would accompany her since young unmarried women of quality were not supposed to venture out alone, not so much for safety, but to ensure there was no question they came to their marriages virginal.

Barbara went to a window, waited until she saw Alice and her little entourage walking away, before going to the bedchamber, and standing before the pier glass where Sir Thomas had been admiring himself only moments ago. She looked well, very well. Her heart began to sound in her ears, the beat quick like a small bird’s. Silly not to tell Alice she was meeting John. Yet what else could she do? Not since the black plague five years ago had she seen death so closely. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. She understood the motto of the rogues of court in a new way. We did all die. And it was tomorrow. And she was going to live to the fullest this day.

H
ER AUNT TURNED
her cheek, and obediently Alice kissed it.

“Go stand there and turn around slowly.”

Alice went to the middle of chamber and slowly turned around. Her time in France stood her well. There was no one, no one, as fashionable as she at this moment. The band of black mourning around her arm for the princess detracted from nothing, and the band of black around her throat was genius, sheer genius. Her hair was curled a new way, the way the mistress Madame de Montespan had just taken to wearing hers. There was a new, sharper V cut in Alice’s gown at the waist—de Montespan again—and jeweled clasps holding back her overskirt. It was all new, expensive, and what she needed to give her some edge over her return.

“You’ve improved. I’d heard you had. It was among the gossip from Dover,” said her aunt, Alice-Hester, Lady Brey. “Those brows of yours—you’ve been plucking them. They’re less fearsome; in fact, one might say they give character to your face now. The influence of Princesse Henriette, God rest her soul. And this would be…?” She pointed with her fan to an elaborate silver box that Alice had placed in her lap.

“Open it.”

Her aunt did so. Inside the box were tiny black shapes.

“Patches, Aunt Brey. You can no longer afford not to wear them. La Montespan has made them necessary.”

“How do they stay on the face?”

“They’re gummed.” Alice pointed to the various stars, hearts, quarter-moons, even a carriage and four horses.

“It will be the rage, I suppose.”

“It is the rage. Every lady in Dover patched, and no Frenchwoman would be caught without at least one on her face. Come, wearing one won’t kill you. Only a woman of the streets wears more than four. You must, Aunt, or you’ll look dreadfully old-fashioned.”

Her aunt’s severe face relaxed into a smile. “You imagine I care. You’re too thin; that’s not fashionable, is it? But you remind me suddenly, I must say to you, of your mother.”

Behind her aunt was an enormous portrait of her aunt and Alice’s mother; at her aunt’s breast was pinned a cameo, a profile of Alice’s mother. They’d been beauties. If it hadn’t been for the war, her aunt always said, we’d have married dukes at the very least. But there was no court in which to marry dukes. The king was imprisoned, his queen remained in France. And Alice did not resemble her mother. Changeling, her aunt had said on their first meeting, when Alice was ten and far thinner than now. In the portrait, two smooth-faced beauties, their arms wrapped around each other, looked down on the world, very alike, except for their eyes. One had eyes of deep blue, one almost violet. Alice’s eyes met the painted ones of violet blue. Hello, Mother, she thought. When she’d first seen the portrait, she’d fallen to the ground and wept. It was the first time she’d ever seen what her mother looked like. Her aunt had promised that after she died, the portrait would be Alice’s.

Her aunt motioned for her to sit, and Alice obeyed, looking around herself. The style from France was to have chambers filled with things, vases from China, huge candlesticks the size of boys, small tables, great armchairs, pier glasses on walls. Her aunt’s house seemed sparsely furnished after the abundance she was used to seeing.

“They’re painting chambers white and cream and green the color of spring grass now,” said Alice.

“Are they?”

“And the princess was having a chamber at Saint Cloud painted a butter yellow.”

“Was she? A bad business there. The talk at court is horrid, this poisoning. The ballads sung in the streets frighten me. We could go to war. The king is still holed away, I hear, his council becoming quite fretful in his absence.”

“‘A penny’s worth of bread to feed the pope,’” sang Alice, mimicking right down to the gestures a street balladeer she’d heard on the walk over. “‘A penny’s worth of cheese to choke him, a penny’s worth of beer to wash it down, and a good old bag of sticks to burn him.’”

“Don’t be vulgar.”

“King Charles is out in the world again, Aunt. My father told me this morning.”

“Well, your uncle will be pleased to hear that. So, my dear, what are you going to do with yourself? I hear the Mulgraves are looking in your direction. Your uncle Brey thinks it a good match.”

“A whim of Father’s. Aunt, I need you to talk with me about Queen Catherine, about what occurred this spring. I want to go back into service to her.”

“You’re old for a maid of honor.”

Stung—because it was true—Alice said quickly, “It’s just until I marry. Otherwise I have to live with Father.”

Aunt Brey’s nostrils pinched in. She and Alice’s father were never on good terms. “I had not thought of that. You could stay with me.”

“If I were Barbara, that would be a wonderful thing. You know you love her more than you do me. I fear, Aunt, you and I would quarrel.”

“Yes, we would. He’s let you off the reins too often, and it’s gone to your head. I’ve always said so.”