Lady Merry's Dashing Champion (8 page)

Immediately upon the door closing, Meriel thought of a perfect riposte.
That may be true of new wine, sir, but I am a new woman. Hey, well, why do just the right words always seem to come too late?

The next minutes Meriel passed in cursing Lady Felice, then Chiffinch and, with a hasty look around and in a softer voice, the king. God would have been next on her list if she had not quickly quaffed another glass of brandywine. She did not need blaspheming to add to her list of crimes: being born a bastard, educating herself above her station and, finally, agreeing to this monstrous spying madness.

She had been forced to betray her master, Sir Edward, and now she was betraying the earl. His lordship. Giles. Her husband. All because her face resembled that of a traitor countess. How she wished she had been born with a wart as big as a goose egg on the tip of her chin!

"My lady?"

One of the maids was standing at her elbow.

"Does my lady wish to remove her traveling clothes? I have her favorite
robe de chambre,
if my lady expects ..."

"Inform the majordomo to admit no one. I will to bed at once." Meriel stood, a bit dizzy from too much brandy, and drew on the imperious visage of Lady Felice. She found it fit her well when she had need.

Two maids washed her hands, arms and feet in rosewater, while she berated them for using water not near warmed enough.
Hey, well, that's what a countess would do!

Another servant brushed her hair until she shivered with delight. Meriel could not help but enjoy receiving attentions she had once only given. Although service to king and country and escaping prison and death should be compensation enough for spying and impersonation, a few luxuries made it somewhat more worth living every minute on the precipice of discovery.

After dressing in the heavy silken robe, she was given a bowl of mulled spiced Spanish wine and some figs from the queen's own tree rubbed with a sugar loaf. Her head whirled with questions about the morrow, but she doubted she would stay wakeful long.... Wine laced with dread cured wake-fulness faster than Lady Judith's laudanum.

"Leave me, please," she ordered, relishing the imperious words, as she snuggled into the plump goose-down mattress and pillows so thick that her head was forced almost upright.

She had pushed all thoughts of Lord Giles from her mind, or rather she continued to push at them. There lay her worst fears. He would be the one most likely to give her away as an imposter. Or would he? Would there be anything that she could say or do that would make such a man forgive a masquerade so unforgivable?

Meriel, exhaustion creeping inside her very bones, was dozing when a secret door in the paneled wall slid open, almost but not quite soundlessly, and Chiffinch stepped into her room.

She clutched the covers to her and tried out Felice's smirk. "How dare you invade my private rooms?"

He laughed. "Excellent. You are good enough to play a countess at the Theater Royal."

"I am good enough, sir, to play a countess before the earl, my husband and the entire court."

Chiffinch laughed. "Dam'me, but your spirit will make you a good spy yet. Did his lordship accept you without question?"

"I think he believes me Felice, though he thought I looked rested."

Chiffmch laughed again, or what he thought was a laugh. Humor ill befitted the man. She allowed the thought to rule her face.

"Stay your anger, m'lady." He used that address without sarcasm for the first time. "When you are well into your work, you will learn that every man can be fooled by a woman. If not, then you would be no use to me, no use at all."

She fought the pillows to sit straighter. "I would not fool Lord Giles beyond what is necessary. I have honor of my own," she said, almost biting at the words. "You think ill of me—at your peril, sir—for taking the only door out of the Tower open to me ... when I did not belong there. You may find I have honor enough for this work or any other. Perhaps an orphan serving maid can have honor enough to save what a noble countess would betray."

"Perhaps," Chiffinch said, serious now. "Howsoever, I will rest easy when I am certain the earl accepts you as Felice. ... When I see him in your bed, madame."

"He hates his wife."

"Perhaps, but the king believes that a man is more easily fooled if his head is next to a beautiful woman's on her pillow. His Majesty is very wise in these matters." He bowed, touched a carving on the wall and disappeared through the sliding door.

Meriel heard his voice from inside the secret passage. "Get the earl into your bed, madame. Prove that he accepts you, or sleep out your last nights in prison."

"You poxy pimp," she yelled after him, throwing a pillow. "I want Agnes here. I cannot bear to have no one about who knows me."

Where the pillow had lain on her bed, Meriel saw an enormous silk sachet of lavender and dissolved into helpless sneezes. She must call the good doctor for a cure, or her nose would give her away before her mouth did.

The Earl of Warborough reached his apartments swiftly after leaving his wife. He called for strong beer and a goodly haunch of venison for a late supper, waving away the other six dishes he was provided by the palace kitchens, as was due his rank. He sat long before his fire, legs stretched in front of him, scarce eating what was on his silver plate, toying with his knife, unable to answer all the questions swirling in his head. Something had changed. Felice was changed. There was now a softer face, something even mischievous. A thing more alive than he had seen for so long that he had ahnost forgotten she had once been innocent and endearing.

It had taken three years and all his strength to forget that younger Felice. He would not endure such misery again. Would not!

An hour, then two passed, and he did not move or notice that his majordomo was yawning, until the servant opened the door to a soft knock. There was a whispered conversation that Giles did not need to have repeated.

"Tell her that I cannot come tonight," he said, his voice a little rasping from ill use.

As the two servants exchanged looks of surprise, Giles stood, moving rapidly toward the door, his stride containing a slight roll from his years at sea. "Leave me and follow my orders!"

The servants backed away, bowing.

Giles snatched up his rapier and jousted furiously with his shadow and then with every piece of standing furniture in his rooms, until exhausted, he fell fully clothed into bed, his body demanding sleep.

At full light the morning after her first meeting with Giles, Meriel sat in front of her mirror while her black curls were dressed in the latest
hurluberlu
scatterbrain fashion, with two lovelocks, one draping on either shoulder. She could scarcely recognize herself for the serving maid she had been. But she did in some amazement recognize that the aristocratic woman of mode staring back at her was more the woman she had always wanted to be. Yet at what cost to the real Meriel? And to Lord Giles?

Giles was never far from her thoughts, having strode into her dreams last night carrying breeches, shirt and boots, as if he belonged naked in her bed. He'd stonned the ramparts of her sleep and plundered her body like a pirate taking a ship without firing an answering shot. Bent on taming her, and though she should have resisted such an assault, he had easily overcome her puny efforts to pretend maidenly struggle. To an alarming degree, she had surrendered, giving him all that he demanded ... and that was everything. A degree alarming, that is, for an unmarried maid. Or rather an unbed-ded wife. Or, indeed, an imposter wife, she reminded herself, having lewd dreams of a man on whom she had no claim and who, nonetheless, climbed aboard her in full and quite magnificent arousal.

'Od's bods and damn the devil! Her mind was awhirl in its attempt to describe what she had seen and felt and still felt all these hours later, her body at this moment flushing with heat and a wet prickling that was far more than memory. She was forced to admit that she wanted this dream to come again, to crawl back into her bed and repeat the thrill of Giles the pirate's body hard against hers and his ...

"My lady, please! Take some ease. Ye be all flibberty this mom."

"You take a great liberty, m'girl," Meriel replied sharply, thinking her squirming about too easily understood.

"Begging yer pardon, Lady Felice, but yer scar be scabbed and weeping," said the maid curiously, lifting a lovelock.

Quickly, Meriel pulled the long curl back into its place on her shoulder, repeating her rehearsed answer. "A careless country maid pricked it with a sharp comb. Have a care if you don't wish to receive dismissal from my service."

Another servant quickly held out a jewel chest. Meriel chose simple pearls so lustrous they looked like milk in moonlight. Fortunately, she had remembered that Lady Felice was known to wear jewels only at night, and then all of them.

Three ladies' maids circled about her as she was dressed, but she did not speak except to complain. And it worked. If there was one thing on which she needed no tutoring, it was a personal maid's duties and a mistress's imperious behavior.

She rejected, in a petulant tone so near to Lady Felice's that she could not help but silently congratulate herself, the wood-stave corset laid upon her bed. "If I am to walk for His Majesty's exercise, I must be able to breathe." She stamped her foot under the dressing table for emphasis.

The maids jumped to tie her petticoat ribbons about her waist and her silk hosen to her drawer ties. Next came all the fastenings on her gown.

"My lady," whispered the forward maid in all amazement, "your bosom is high and full without the corset. Be you with child?"

It was an impertinent question, but Meriel did not dare to chastise her further. She was too busy suppressing sneezes. Besides, there was no way of knowing which maids, if not all, were also in the pay of the Dutch. Chiffinch had warned her that spies were everywhere in the court, and those not with the Dutch were paid by the French ambassador. Or the Spanish. "I have been using Wyndham's Infallible Miracle Salve prepared for me by that royal physician." She smiled at each of them and pointed to the black lacquer box on her mirrored table. "You may make reasonable use of it as well."

They curtsied, murmuring thanks, and from their longing looks at the salve, Meriel knew they would strip to their skin as soon as the door to her apartment closed behind her.

"By the by, I would see that good doctor."

"Now?" questioned a maid.

"Immediately!"

Dr. Wyndham was ushered in as soon as Meriel was completely gowned and her shoulders and bosom powdered.

He bowed low and waited for her to speak.

Meriel dismissed her women, and took the little physician's hands. "Doctor, I need your help most desperately, or I will be discovered."

"Anything to assist you ... m'lady. My skills are at your command, but first allow me to examine your burn." He did so and nodded. "Healing slowly, but that is the way of such wounds. Continue with my Infallible Salve. Now, how may I serve anew?"

Meriel explained her problem with lavender and indeed, many flowers, especially in the springtime, the doctor nodding sagely as she spoke.

He opened his kit and after searching its contents withdrew a small stoppered bottle, which he gave into her hands. "Distillation of onion flowers, m'lady, a sovereign cure much used at the University of Padua. To make it yourself in future, allow the flowers of onions to sit in a bowl of water in the sun for several hours, then mix with half brandy and take four drops beneath your tongue once each hour when in gardens or fields and—
et voila!
as we said at the University of Paris—your sneezes vanish."

"Doctor, I am mightily obliged. You are a genius."

"Perhaps I am," Wyndham said with a grin.

Meriel answered with her own amusement. "Surely, there is nothing you do not know."

"There may be something ... possibly," the doctor answered, looking up at her, his eyes very merry.

Without hesitation, she placed four drops of the tincture under her tongue and stored the bottle in her concealed pocket.

"And my mint lozenges to sweeten the breath," the doctor said, handing a paper packet to her.

"Good doctor, you think of everything."

"Indeed, a genius must," Wyndham agreed, and they both laughed.

She waited for the doctor to open her bedchamber door, marveling how easily she had transformed from servant to highborn lady, who expected to do nothing but take in air for herself. No doubt it would be much more difficult to reverse the roles, though she was determined, somehow, never to return to her former servant state, even to so kind a master as Sir Cheatham.

Meriel found Giles standing before the fire in the anteroom, as if he'd never left. He wore a wonderful black velvet suit with silver embroidery and silver hose, with the longer coat that was the new mode. She curtsied, and he bowed handsomely. She searched her mind for a proper greeting, since she could hardly remark that he'd spent the night in her dreams.

Hey, well,
spent
is quite the proper word, since in my dream Giles was no milksop!

"Are you ill, Felice?" Giles asked after he watched the doctor bow to him and be ushered out. What other explanation was there, since his wife's face flushed when she saw him, as if in a fever or embarrassed, which was all the more puzzling since Felice never suffered from shame.

Meriel shook her head, took a deep breath, and said the wrong thing. "Good morrow, my lord, I see by your own high color that you have already been at tennis with His Majesty."

Giles stiffened, damning bis high color, which he knew was from honest early exercise. Was Felice hinting that he had been at some libertine act, as she no doubt had? He need feel no shame for sleeping with a mistress when bis wife had whored with most of the peers of the realm. Yet there it was, deny it as he would.... The warmth of shame was upon his face, and he had only
thought
of visiting his mistress last night. Cock's life! He would stop this new nonsense about Felice if he had to exercise his cod day and night.