The Emerald Swan (3 page)

But first he would have to secure the agreement of his ward—not something that could ever be taken for granted.

When he’d yielded to his sister’s demands and sailed for France, he had carried a much more modest proposition than the one he now held. It was a proposition to the king’s advisor and close confidant, the duke of Roissy, suggesting that the duke take Maude, daughter of the duke d’Albard, and second cousin to the earl of Harcourt, as his bride. But events had taken an unexpected turn.

Gareth turned back to the water again and gazed out toward the barrier wall that protected the harbor from the encroaching waters of the Channel. It was a
beautiful, peaceful spot well deserving of its name—Paradise Harbor. Quite unlike the grim cacophonous turmoil of King Henry’s besieging camp beneath the walls of Paris …

Gareth had entered Henry’s camp on a filthy April evening, with a driving rain more suited to winter than spring. He had traveled alone, knowing he would draw less attention to himself without a retinue of servants. The entire countryside was in an uproar as their unwanted king laid siege to Paris and the city’s inhabitants battled with famine even as they refused to admit and acknowledge a sovereign they considered a heretic usurper.

Lord Harcourt’s lack of attendants and visible badges of his rank and identity had caused difficulties with the master-at-arms, but finally he had been admitted to the sprawling camp resembling a tented city. For two hours, he had kicked his heels in the antechamber to the king’s tent as officers, couriers, servants, had hurried through into the king’s presence, barely glancing at the tall man in his dark, rain-sodden cloak and muddied boots, swinging his arms and pacing the trodden-down grass of the enclosed area in an effort to keep warm.

Matters hadn’t improved much once he’d been admitted to the royal presence. King Henry had been a soldier from his fifteenth birthday and now, at thirty-eight, was a hard-bodied, passionate warrior who disdained creature comforts. His own quarters were barely warmed by a sullen brazier, his bed was a straw pallet on the cold ground. He and his advisors, still booted and spurred, huddled in thick riding cloaks.

The king had greeted Lord Harcourt with a courteous smile, but his sharp dark eyes were suspicious, his
questions keen and pointed. He was a man who had learned always to see treachery in offers of friendship after the hideous massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, when at the age of nineteen he’d married Marguerite of Valois and thus unwittingly sprung the trap that had caused the deaths of thousands of his own people in the city that he was now coldly, deliberately, starving into submission.

But Gareth’s credentials were impeccable. His own father had been at Henry’s side at that ill-fated wedding. The duke d’Albard, Maude’s father, had been one of Henry’s closest friends and had lost his wife and baby in the massacre. The murdered wife had been a Harcourt before her marriage. So, after a carefully pointed interrogation, the earl of Harcourt was accepted as friend and bidden to share the king’s frugal supper before he and Roissy discussed Lord Harcourt’s proposal.

The wine was rough, the bread coarse, the meat heavily seasoned to disguise its rankness, but the famished citizens of Paris would have found it manna. Henry for his part appeared to find nothing at fault with the fare and had eaten heartily and drunk deep, his beaklike nose reddening slightly as the wine in the leather bottles diminished. Finally, he had wiped his thin mouth with the back of his hand, shaking bread crumbs loose from his beard, and demanded to see the portrait of Lady Maude. The king must judge whether the lady was worthy to be the wife of his dear Roissy. It was said with apparent jocularity, but there was more than a strand of seriousness beneath.

Gareth had produced the miniature of his young cousin. It was a good likeness, depicting Maude pale, blue-eyed, with her air of wan ethereal fragility that in
many women passed for beauty. Her penetrating azure gaze from the pearl-encrusted frame bespoke the girl’s deeply intense temperament. Her skin was very white, unhealthily so by Gareth’s lights. Her long swanlike neck was one of her greatest claims to beauty and it was accentuated in the portrait by a turquoise pendant.

Henry had taken the miniature and his thick eyebrows had drawn together abruptly. He glanced toward Roissy, an arrested expression in his keen eyes.

“My lord? Is there something wrong?” Roissy had looked alarmed, craning his neck to see the portrait that the king still held on the palm of his hand.

“No. No, nothing at all. The lady is quite lovely.” Henry’s voice had been curiously abstracted as he tapped the miniature with a callused fingertip. “How tragic that she should have grown up motherless. I remember Elena so clearly.” He glanced up at Gareth. “You were close to your cousin, I believe.”

Gareth merely nodded. Elena had been some years older than he, but they had had a close rapport and her murder had grieved him sorely.

Henry sucked in his bottom lip as he continued to stare down at Maude’s portrait. “It would be an impeccable connection.”

“Yes, indeed, my lord.” Roissy sounded a little impatient. “The d’Albards and the Roissys have long been allied. And the Harcourts, also.” He had thrown a quick smile at the earl of Harcourt.

“Yes, yes … a fine connection for a Roissy,” Henry said distantly. “But no bad alliance for a king … eh?” He had looked around the table at that with a grin that made him appear younger than his years. “I like the look of this cousin of yours, my lord Harcourt. And I am in sore need of a Protestant wife.”

There was a stunned silence, then Roissy had said, “But my lord king has a wife already.”

Henry had laughed. “A Catholic wife, yes. Marguerite and I are friends. We have been separated for years. She has her lovers, I have mine. She will agree to a divorce whenever I ask it of her.” He had turned his bright-eyed gaze on Gareth. “I will see your ward for myself, Harcourt. And if I find her as pleasing as her portrait, then I am afraid Roissy must look elsewhere for a wife.”

There had been objections of course. The king couldn’t leave the siege of Paris and travel to England at this juncture. But Henry was determined. His generals could continue the work for a few months without him. Starving a city into submission required no great tactical maneuvers or bloody battles. He would slip away from the field, would travel incognito—a French nobleman visiting Queen Elizabeth’s court—and he would enjoy the hospitality of the earl of Harcourt and make the acquaintance of the lovely Lady Maude. And if he believed that he and she would make a suitable match, then he would do his wooing for himself.

The medieval serpentine bracelet with its emerald swan charm had belonged to Maude’s mother. It was a unique and most precious piece of jewelry. How it had come into the king’s possession, Gareth didn’t know. He presumed Francis d’Albard had given it to his king at some point and Henry now considered it a most appropriate gift as earnest of his intent to woo d’Albard’s daughter.

And so it had come about that Gareth now carried in his doublet the proposal that would send Imogen into transports of delight and panic. And God alone knew what it would do to Maude.

He passed through the broken gateway in the crumbling town wall. The town was well protected by the castle on the clifftop and the three forts built along the seafront by Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, and had long given up maintaining its walls—they were too susceptible to a cannonade from the water to make it worthwhile anyway. He turned toward Chapel Street and the Adam and Eve Inn, where he could bespeak a bed to himself that night and be reasonably sure of getting one. Innkeepers were notorious for promising such precious privacy and then inflicting unwanted bedfellows on their patrons at an hour of the night when a man could do nothing about it.

He had ducked his head beneath the low lintel of the inn, when the unmistakable sounds of a hue and cry surged around the corner from Snargate Street. He stepped back to the narrow dirt-packed lane just as a blur of orange flashed past. The pursuing crowd bellowing “Stop, thief!” would have knocked him from his feet if he hadn’t jumped back into the doorway.

Ordinarily, the prospect of mob justice wouldn’t have concerned Gareth in the least. Beatings and stonings were a fact of life when the populace took the law into their own hands with one of their own, and no one gave them a second thought. It was more than likely that the girl was a thief. The life she led tended to engender a rather relaxed attitude to other people’s property.

He turned again to the promise of ale and a pipe of tobacco in the tavern’s taproom, and then hesitated. Suppose she wasn’t guilty? If the hue and cry caught her, innocence wouldn’t save her from their rough justice. They wouldn’t stop to ask questions. And even if
she was guilty, the thought of her being subjected to a mauling mob revolted him.

He turned back to the street and walked briskly in the wake of the hue and cry. Judging by the continued baying they hadn’t caught her yet.

Chapter Two

M
IRANDA
, a gibbering Chip clinging to her neck, dived into a narrow gap between two houses. It was so small a space that, even as slight as she was, she had to stand sideways, pressed between the two walls, barely able to breathe. Judging by the cesspit stench, the space was used as a dump for household garbage and human waste and she found it easier to hold her breath anyway.

Chip babbled in soft distress, his scrawny little arms around her neck, his small body shivering with fear. She stroked his head and neck even while silently cursing his passion for small shiny objects. He hadn’t intended to steal the woman’s comb, but no one had given her a chance to explain.

Chip, fascinated by the silver glinting in the sunlight, had settled on the woman’s shoulder, sending her into a paroxysm of panic. He’d tried to reassure her with his interested chatter as he’d attempted to withdraw the comb from her elaborate coiffure. He’d only wanted to examine it more closely, but how to tell that to a hysterical burgher’s wife with prehensile fingers picking through her hair as if searching for lice?

Miranda had rushed forward to take the monkey away and immediately the excitable crowd had decided that she and the animal were in cahoots. Miranda, from a working lifetime’s familiarity with the various moods of a crowd, had judged discretion to be the better
part of valor in this case and had fled, letting loose the entire pack upon her heels.

The baying pack now hurtled in full cry past her hiding place. Chip shivered more violently and babbled his fear softly into her ear. “Shhh.” She held him more tightly, waiting until the thudding feet had faded into the distance before sliding out of the narrow space.

“I doubt they’ll give up so easily.”

She looked up with a start of alarm and saw the gentleman from the quay walking toward her, his scarlet silk cloak billowing behind him. She hadn’t paid much attention to his appearance earlier, having merely absorbed the richness of garments that marked him as a nobleman. Now she examined him with rather more care. The silver doublet, black-and-gold velvet britches, gold stockings, and silk cloak indicated a gentleman of considerable substance, as did the rings on his fingers and the silver buckles on his shoes. He wore his black hair curled and cut close to his head and his face was unfashionably clean-shaven.

Lazy brown eyes beneath hooded lids regarded her with a glint of amusement. His wide mouth quirked in a smile, revealing exceptionally strong white teeth.

She found herself smiling back, confiding, “We didn’t steal anything, milord. It’s just that Chip’s attracted to things that glitter and he doesn’t see why he shouldn’t take a closer look.”

“Ah.” Gareth nodded his understanding. “And I suppose some poor soul objected to the close examination of a monkey?”

Miranda grinned. “Yes, stupid woman. She screamed as if she was being boiled in oil. And the wretched comb was only paste anyway.”

Gareth felt a flash of compassion for the unknown hysteric. “I daresay she was unaccustomed to having monkeys on her head,” he pointed out.

“Quite possibly, but Chip is perfectly clean and very good-natured. He wasn’t going to hurt her.”

“Perhaps the object of his attention didn’t know that.” The glint of amusement grew brighter.

Miranda chuckled. Her predicament somehow seemed much less serious in the company of this lazy-eyed and clearly well-disposed gentleman. “I was about to take him away but they set on me, so I had to run, which made me look guilty.”

“Mmm, it would,” he agreed. “But I don’t see what other choice you had.”

“No, exactly so.” Miranda’s smile suddenly faded. She cocked her head, listening to the renewed sounds of a mob in full cry.

“Come, let’s get off the street.” The gentleman spoke with sudden urgency. “That orange gown is as distinctive as a beacon.”

Miranda hesitated. Her instinct was to flee again, to put as much distance as she could between herself and the approaching hue and cry, but she found her hand seized in a firm warm clasp, and without volition, Chip clinging to her neck, she was half running to keep up with the gentleman’s long stride as he returned to the Adam and Eve.