The Boleyn Deceit (24 page)

With his hand on the door to let Dominic out, Renard paused at the last minute. “Winter is coming for certain loves, you say. Is it possible that a new love has withered the old?”

Dominic met his gaze without blinking. “You would have to ask my king.”

He left the public house at once, not at all tempted to linger for a drink. It was a relief to have that done, and now he could focus on getting the women back to England. Returning Minuette to William, true, but also one step closer to ending the French game, one step closer to the decision point.

Distraction cost him dearly. He only heard the footsteps at the
last moment, just quick enough to half deflect the blow from behind. The cudgel glanced off the side of his head rather than landing full on. He stumbled and his attacker moved in once more. But Dominic was paying full attention now and stepped into the attack, which threw off the other man’s balance and allowed Dominic to slam his palm into his attacker’s nose. A crunch and a gush of blood, and then the man ran. Dominic began to give chase, but his steps were not entirely steady and he had not gone far before another man swung out of a doorway and seized his arm.

Dominic braced and prepared to elbow him in the face when a familiar voice shouted, “Don’t be a fool, Dominic!”

Only one man pronounced his name in that fashion, with the long vowels. Dominic lowered his arm and said, “Why in the devil’s name are you following me, Renaud?”

R
ENAUD WOULD NOT
answer him until they had returned to the court. They did not go to Dominic’s more public guest chamber, but to Renaud’s own small room attached to the barracks. It was a soldier’s room: ordered, precise, and, if not quite bare, certainly not domestic. Here, Renaud brought water and a cloth and began to clean the blood from Dominic’s hair.

He winced at the pressure, gentle as it was. The blow had caught him above the right ear and felt as though it had left a small crater behind.

“It is clean,” Renaud assured him. “It was not meant to kill.”

Dominic was forced to agree. He’d been distracted enough—more shame to him—that even with his last-second movement a killing blow would have done far more damage to his skull. “Why try only to knock me out?” he wondered aloud. “Robbery?”

Renaud rinsed the cloth in the water, red bleeding into the bowl, then sighed and took a seat across the small table from Dominic. “He followed you from the tavern. A tavern well-known as a gathering place for men of the Spanish embassy.”

“Which returns us to the pressing question—why were
you
following me?”

“Isn’t the pressing question why a Spaniard would strike you down after you’d met with his ambassador?”

Dominic debated denying the charge, but what was the point? Renaud had clearly figured it out. “We can both guess the answer to that: the ambassador wanted my meeting to become public without spreading the news himself. Hit me, leave me unconscious, and have me ‘discovered’ in the streets, leading the French to wonder why I was found in a notorious meeting place of the Spanish.”

“Someone does not trust England’s intentions.” Renaud shook his head, his expression deeply wary. “Dominic, what is it your king has asked of you?”

Dominic chose to meet the question with silence, knowing Renaud did not expect him to answer. Indeed, the Frenchman went on almost immediately.

“I know, you cannot answer. And I will not force your secrets into the open. But if I can be suspicious, then others are ten times more so. Even here, I have heard rumours that your king is enamoured of a young woman. There is … disquiet at the news. If only you English were not so prudish! I suppose he will not make her his mistress, and so means to upset all of Europe just as his father did.”

Dominic stood up a little more forcefully than intended, dizziness reminding him of his head wound. “Thank you for your aid tonight. I must go.”

Renaud also stood, and gripped Dominic’s arm. “Let us speak for a moment not as adversaries, but as friends. The name of this young woman has also been spoken in some circles, and it is she whom I have seen you watching at our court. You are correct—a marriage between you would be extremely complicated. But if she truly is your Nicole, my friend—”

“What?” Dominic said roughly. “What if she is?”

He almost hoped that the older man would tell him what to do, or at least point a path. Instead, Renaud said, “If she is, then you have my understanding and my sympathy. And as much reason as I to wish your king well married to my own princess. Perhaps he will listen to you.”

“William hears what he wants to hear.” It was the most damning statement Dominic could make, and as close to treasonous as he’d ever been.

“If he will not hear, then you must. I am your friend, Dominic, but my country comes first. Always. I do not want war, but where France goes, I must follow. Do you understand?”

France is suspicious and we will not let ourselves be taken by surprise.
“I understand perfectly.”

He pulled out of Renaud’s grip and walked out, sick from much more than being struck in the head.

Minuette stayed awake long after Carrie left her that night in her elaborate, overornamented bedchamber. Some hours after midnight, still sleepless, she considered rising and writing more in her diary simply for something to do, but at last she found herself drifting into a pleasant state of half daydreams that
revolved around Dominic and the abandoned church near Wynfield and, in the distance, the glimpse of two children, one fair and one dark. She had nearly put names to those shadowy children when a creak broke her focus.

It was very soft, so that she almost thought she’d imagined it, but Minuette was not imagining the slight change in the blackness where the door to her room opened. Before she could decide what to do, the door was pulled closed carefully and all was once more black. For a moment she panicked at the thought of someone shut in the room with her, but there was no feeling of another human, no change in breath or silence. But that moment held her frozen just long enough so when she did get out of bed and threw open her door, she saw nothing but an empty corridor.

And an object—irregular and disturbing in outline—on her chamber floor.

Minuette focused on essentials, refusing to study the object or let her mind jump ahead. She left the door open while she located the beeswax candle on the tabletop where she’d left her jewelry casket. She had to step into the corridor—avoiding the unknown object—to light it from one of the torches that was kept burning at distant intervals, and she was cross when she realized she was shaking. Candle lit, she returned to her chamber and shut the door. Only then did she allow herself to take a good look at what her unknown visitor had left.

It was a dead rat, wound in velvet as though in a grotesque parody of court dress.

There was a parchment beneath it, though it took all Minuette’s nerve—and the use of her chamber pot—to edge the rat aside enough to see it.

She immediately wished she hadn’t bothered. The page was a parody of the broadsides that had once plastered London in protest against the despised Anne Boleyn. This was a rough but
recognizable sketch of Minuette herself, bared to the waist and looming giant-sized between William on one side and Elisabeth de France on the other. Beneath her feet lay a dove, symbol of peace. One of Minuette’s heels smashed its head.

She sat down abruptly on the edge of her bed, staring dizzily at the rat as though the dead creature might come to life any second and bite her. She almost wished it would, for this was more twisted and disturbing than the straightforward threat of the adder that Fidelis had killed. So much for removing me from England to keep me safe, she thought numbly.

At least one question had been answered: her enemy was not Eleanor. Or at least, not this particular enemy—seeing as an ocean presently divided them.

There was no way she could sleep with that dead rat in her bedroom and the vulgar paper would have to be destroyed before anyone at the French court saw it, not to mention dealing with the uncomfortable knowledge that someone had opened her door only minutes ago. The culprit had no doubt thought her sound asleep and would not expect an outcry until morning. She could call for Carrie, but even as Minuette threw on a bed robe over her nightgown, she knew that wasn’t the help she wanted.

She left the candle burning in the room and, gingerly pulling it free from the rat’s body, brought the broadside with her to show Dominic.

He’ll be in bed, she thought. If he didn’t hear her knock, would she dare enter his chambers and wake him herself? The thought made her stomach clench, not unpleasantly, as she imagined leaning over him, touching his shoulder or even his face as he slept.

Think about the rat,
she commanded herself, not the image of Dominic in bed, looking up at her with those dark green eyes
that pulled her into recklessness. What did he wear to bed? And if he wanted to kiss her …

Veering between desire and discipline, Minuette came to the corridor where Dominic was quartered. His door was at the far end of the right-hand side—he had made sure she’d known that in case she needed him for just such an emergency. She had just started toward it when his door was pulled open from the inside.

Minuette froze as a woman came into the corridor, a woman who almost at once turned and embraced the man behind her.

Though she had never seen him naked, there was no mistaking Dominic for anyone else, not even with his face obscured while he kissed the woman clinging to him.

Dominic resisted sleep for a long time, but he finally fell into fitful dreams. Faces drifted before him, melting into one another: William to Renaud to the Spanish ambassador; Elizabeth to Anne Boleyn to his own mother. And finally, as a reward, Minuette herself. In his dream she was dressed for sleep, the loose gown bewitchingly light and suggestive of her shape beneath. Her hair hung over her shoulders and down her back and felt warm and heavy when he buried his hands in it. She let him pull her to him, and he could feel the outlines of her body pressed against his and the warmth of her breath on his mouth, and then she was kissing him …

He wasn’t dreaming. Long, loose hair hung around his face, a woman next to him in bed, her mouth teasing at his. “Minuette?” he said, disbelieving.

He was right to disbelieve. The woman pulled back, her face illuminated by the moonlight that came through his window. He knew every plane and angle of Minuette’s face and this one was rounder, plumper, and yet familiar. But groggy with sleep and injury-addled, it took him a heartbeat to place her.