Dark Angels (61 page)

“And still I must ask. John requests me to ask. She’s waiting, Alice.”

“Our friendship is finished.”

“As easy as that you let go someone you love?”

“It wasn’t easy, Richard.”

He took her by the arm. “She didn’t do as you wanted. No one ever does. Will you love no one because of that?”

She shook his arm free. “Is this the pot calling the kettle black?”

He watched her leave. She moved down the alley of stalls gracefully and certainly, nodding here and there to different guardsmen she knew, stopping to exchange a word if she knew them well. Whom didn’t she know? Whitehall was her milieu, her world. He could imagine her nowhere else. She was a born courtier, wily, patient, steadfast in her goals. She had taught him much. I love you, she’d said. He pretended for her sake that he hadn’t heard it, but he had. It made him consider her in a whole new way, made him observe her and be curious about her. She was jealous and vengeful. He saw it in the way she treated Barbara. Yet he admired her fierceness, even if he thought it wrong. Perhaps it was the contrast to Renée, who had no fierceness.

Alice had been stalwart in this last round with Renée, guiding him, carrying letters, arranging secret meetings, but it was over now. He was in hell, but no worse a hell than that of holding Renée in his arms and hearing her loving words and being allowed to touch and explore her in new soft places, so that his desire was kept a white hot flame, and from that flame he had to watch her with the king and know that he, too, was equally exploring Renée’s sweetness. Alice wouldn’t tell him this, but everyone else did. Enough. He would bear no more. This second chance hurt more in its betrayal. It was in his mind to take leave of England. Prince Rupert, York, the great French general Condé, they had all made their way as soldiers serving foreign masters.

So might he.

He leaned his head into Pharaoh’s broad side, pulled her note out of his pocket. Dear God, he loved her, but dear God, he wanted this over. If he read it, then he let the game continue. It was so tempting to open it, read her sweet excuses, let his heart believe them. In the courtyard was a fire tended by the stable boys. He walked to it, watched the note burn, thinking, The beginning of the end. If he was steadfast, there would be the middle of the end, and then the end of the end. Advice from his father. To see you through the hard patches of life, my son, his father had said, which are always there ahead in the road.

“T
HERE SHE IS.”
Balmoral rose from a chair in Stone Gallery, held out his arm in a courtly gesture.

“It’s paradise outside,” said Alice, taking it.

“Chilly?”

“Yes, but we can fetch your cloak.”

Fondly, he watched her signal a page and give the boy instructions for fetching his cloak. She’d get her beautiful day, and he’d be warm, and the truth was it would feel good to sit in the sun, his old bones needed it. They began their walk, up and down the gallery to start. It was their habit—they had been doing this long enough for it to have become a habit.

“What news have you?” She knew so many little tidbits, and when he put them together with what he knew—with the hot-air posturings of Buckingham or Arlington in council, with the bland obtuseness of the king—he’d see the little trails, the little betrayals, before they surprised. Subtleties within the subtleties.

“Captain Saylor says he is ending his attachment.”

“Good, if it’s true. I’ll ask the king to reward him with a promotion, once we’re certain it’s not just a lovers’ quarrel. Prince Rupert’s fond of him. Perhaps we’ll move him to Rupert’s guard.”

“Or yours.”

“Or mine.”

“Her Grace the Duchess of York fell ill yesterday,” Alice continued.

“Well, Henri Ange is in the Tower of London. It cannot be blamed upon him.”

“Why not? Do you think Henri Ange can’t make poisons in the Tower?”

She was like a pit bull on this. “He can’t if he receives no visitors, is allowed no letters.”

“Does he receive no visitors? How can you ascertain that nothing is sneaked in to him?”

He was testy. “By having the best guards there are. By demanding that no one may see him except with my permission.”

“And you have given permission to…?”

“Not that it is any of your affair”—he was winter frost itself—“Arlington, Buckingham—”

“There!”

He ought to box her ears for her impudence, but unfortunately he agreed with her, which only made him more irritable. Yet he could not deny his fellow ministers the privilege of questioning the prisoner—particularly since the imprisonment was creating problems with the kingdom of France, from whom they now had a treaty to join in war against the Dutch signed, sealed, delivered. “Are you implying Buckingham would aid our prisoner in the making of poison?”

“Since I believe it was he who brought Ange over, I am indeed. Henri Ange needs to be hanged, ought to have been hanged months ago. I don’t understand it.”

Indeed you don’t, he thought. All the wrangling, the French ambassador’s protests, King Charles receiving a special dispatch from the king of France. Louis wants him, King Charles said, allowing Balmoral to read the letter. “If this is indeed the poisoner of Madame, I demand to question him myself,” King Louis wrote in no uncertain terms. And there were questions from certain members of the House of Commons, impudent questions, asking about the imprisonment of the Frenchman, wanting details, following the wild hare of Ange’s Catholicism, suspecting a Jesuit plot. They wanted details King Charles was under no obligation to give but that raised further difficulties in a session when the king was working hard to raise money for the coming war, which he had not yet announced to his Commons. Alice’s father was stirring trouble, was among those who would not let the arrest fade. Balmoral glanced at her, at those dark eyes behind which ran that feverish and cunning brain, wondering not for the first time her part in the stirring. Did she go straight from him to her father? Those who followed her at his orders said no.

“You should have let him die,” said Alice.

My sentiments exactly, thought Balmoral. He had grown quite fond of Alice’s ruthlessness. “But then we wouldn’t have the chance to question him.”

“Have you questioned him? Hard?”

“I’ve been waiting for him to heal completely.”

“Saylor is healed. So is Ange. He’s faking if he says otherwise.”

“You’re quite bloodthirsty.”

“I watched my princess die. And he would have done the same to the queen, kill her horribly. He likes to see others suffer. He needs to be killed before he kills anybody else.”

“But not before he tells us what he knows.”

“I don’t think he’ll do that. I think he would twist truth for the sheer joy of twisting. I don’t think truth can be gotten from him.”

“I’m the one with the melancholy humors, not you. You spend too much time with me.”

They were out in St. James’s Park now. A page walked up just as Balmoral opened his mouth to complain of the cold and delivered his cloak, and as he shrugged himself into its warm folds, he watched Alice, who knew the boy and talked with him. It seemed a letter had just come to the queen from Lord Knollys to inform her that Lady Knollys was dead. Alice had fished this information from the page with just a few short questions.

Balmoral turned to look around him, to take in the smell and feel of spring.

In the distance, a large knot of people made up of the king and various courtiers wound its way toward the menagerie to see the animals. Was there a first treaty with France? One before the one Buckingham had gone to obtain? A secret before the secret, having to do with the princess’s visit? It gnawed at him. Certain signs, certain remarks, made him suspect certain fellow privy council members—and there were such tantalizing hints in the letters Richard had had copied in France. The Hollanders were suspicious, their ambassador, their spies, like Thomas Verney’s Dutch friend Lowestroft, sniffing the ground, bloodhounds, sensing something. And Ange. What did Ange know? Less than you think I do, he’d said the other day as Balmoral sat in the dank of the cell, staring at the man who was his grandson Neddie’s last lover, perhaps his killer. Neddie the catamite, Neddie the sodomite, who came to him in dreams, arms outstretched, hair long and flowing, weeping, Grandfather…

He and Alice walked over to the long landscape canal. The page was still with them and ran to bring him a chair. Gratefully, he sat down. Alice was cooing over ducklings following their mama like tiny citron ships of the line. He was content to watch her. He would invite her, in the company of her aunt, to visit him at his estate outside Newmarket this summer. She sat on the broad rim of the canal, leaning elbows against it, raising her face to the sun, which gleamed off her thick, riotous hair. She met his gaze, her expression grave. And he knew, the way one does, that they had come to the crux.

“My father has received another offer from the Earl of Mulgrave.”

He chewed on that, leaned his chin on his cane.

“I think this time, I must consider it most seriously.”

“Why must you consider Mulgrave seriously?”

“I am not getting any younger. I have been a maid of honor since I was twelve.” Caro is gone, she thought. Barbara is gone. Gracen does not return. Renée is increasingly the queen of us. Kit and Luce are fools, Brownie is distracted, melancholy, the queen pale and sad…My little family is changed beyond repair. Time to go. “It is past time I had my own household. Mulgrave has waited most patiently. The queen’s household is most unhappy these days, and I am at my wits’ end.”

There is no end to your wit, thought Balmoral.

“You are a dear and trusted friend, and I wanted to discuss it with you before I made a reply. What do you advise me?”

“It’s true you’ve become quite old.” He smiled at her sudden smile. “I advise you to wait.”

“I have no other offers, Your Grace. Must I go and live as companion to my aunt, or move back to my father’s house? I cannot continue as a maid of honor, do not, in matter of fact, wish to. Only my love for the queen has kept me there as long as it has.”

She’d thrown down the gauntlet, as he’d known inevitably she would. What he had not known, however, was precisely what he would say. They stared at each other, knowing they’d come to the crossroads of their friendship.

“I am very old, I am very ill. I may not live out the year.”

Alice didn’t answer, and her eyes didn’t leave his face.

“I am far too old for you. But”—he took a breath, and so did Alice—“I ask for your hand in marriage—”

He held out his hand to stop her as she moved toward him.

“With this proviso: that you may at any moment, until the wedding itself, draw back and there will be no imprecations from me.”

She knelt before him, flung her arms around him, put her head on his lap. He touched her hair, vibrant with life, and soft, soft for so many curls, as he continued. “We shall marry at the beginning of summer—”

“So long a wait—”

“I want you to have time to consider what you do.”

“I won’t change my mind. It’s you who will.”

“I will call upon your father in the next day or so.”

She caught the expression on his face. “You believe you ally yourself with a rogue. You do, but a useful one. My father will be your faithful servant. I guarantee it. Within a week, he will be spilling every plot from Buckingham’s cabal.”

“That will be useful. I will ask that you speak of my proposal to no one until I have spoken with your father and he and I are agreed on terms.”

“Yes.”

“Well then.”

“Well then.” She stood, pulled herself up on the wide ledge of the canal, pulled her skirts up enough to show off her stockinged ankles, and began to dance. She leapt and tapped her toes and heels to the stone and sang an old rhyme: “‘Little maid, pretty maid, whither goest thou? Down in the forest to milk my cow. Shall I go with thee? No, not now. When I send for thee, then come thou.’” She clapped her hands and turned round and round, keeping her balance when three times he thought she might fall. Finally, she leaped down to dance around his chair, before falling again in a bell of skirts at his feet.

“Pretty behavior for the Duchess of Balmoral.”

She saw he was cross. “I am not the Duchess of Balmoral yet. It was a jest, a joy, only for you. May the Duchess of Balmoral not dance before her husband?”

“I’m going to regret this.”

She laughed and pulled his age-spotted hand to her mouth to kiss it. “Only every now and again.”

“I already regret it.”

She let go his hand. “Pretty behavior for the Duke of Balmoral. You’ve said nothing to my father. I give you leave to change your mind.”

“No, no, Alice.” He would not draw back now. That would not be honorable, but he didn’t say such to her. He’d upset her enough. “It’s only that I’m much too old for you.” Her zestful dance made him see it too clearly.

She stood up, shook out her skirts. “You hurt me. Until my father comes to talk to me of this, I will not consider you serious in your proposal, nor will I consider us affianced. If I’ve not heard from my father in three days, I will accept the offer of the Earl of Mulgrave, and you may consider that this conversation between us never took place. Good day, Your Grace.”