The Virgin Queen's Daughter - Ella March Chase (30 page)

“Do not be afraid to let yourself want me, Nell,” he urged as he lay down beside me and pulled me into his arms. “It is natural, this fire between us. Instinct that has peopled the world for thousands of years. A scientist like you must want to explore the place this craving leads us to.”

For as long as I could remember my curiosity had been both my greatest gift and my most dangerous curse. And yet, to let reason be overpowered by passion seemed a dangerous gamble. I could feel sensations already heating my veins. I did not want to notice how warm his skin was, how different from my own. I did not want to feel an unexpected freedom when he drew my shift off. I felt naked in far more than my body as he stared at me. He scooped my astrolabe from where it laid between my breasts.

“I am a skilled lover,” Gabriel said, turning the disk over in his hand.

I gave a nervous laugh. “At least you are an arrogant one.”

“It is no boast.” He let my necklace fall back against my skin, traced the slender river of chain down the slope of my breast. For a moment, I could not breathe. “I can give you great pleasure in our marriage bed if you have the courage to let me.”

“I want to resist you.”

“I know.” He looked somber for a moment, and I could not stop the fine tremor that shook me as he skimmed my nipple with the tip of his finger. “But this is not a battle one of us must lose, Nell. Stubborn as we are, in bed we can both win. Your body is willing. And mine . . .” He chuckled wryly. “My lance has been couched and aching for you a very long time. Can we not put my theory to the test?” He laid my hand on his naked flesh. Contrasts struck me, hardness, velvet skin, coarse hair tickling my palm. He groaned as my fingers explored, my curiosity racing to meet his hunger. His mouth found my throat, my cheek, my chin. We battled most sweetly in the hours that followed, and I learned these new lessons as quickly as I had any other. Before he thrust into my body he covered his lance with a pale sheath, ribbons on its open end, his voice gravelly. “ ’Twill guard you from conceiving a child.”

He settled his hips between my thighs and drove himself deep. I cried out in surprise, pain, as he tore my maidenhead. But as he began to move inside me some mystical alchemy occurred, turning pain to pleasure—tempting me to pretend the practical metal our marriage was based on glittered with just a touch of gold.

Sated and sweating, we rolled apart from each other and I faced reality once more. I still feared to trust him. The Gypsy’s Angel deceived in many things. But in one matter he told me true. We snatched pleasure out of pain that day, at least for a little while.

All too soon, he roused me, dressed me deft as any maidservant, even brushing and pinning up my hair so no one would guess what mischief we had been about. “You are as apt at this as Moll,” I jested feebly. “Where does a man learn such skills?”

“In a court full of romantic intrigue can you not guess?”

I looked away, remembering the hungry way Lettice Knollys and several of the other women had looked at him. “Oh. Well, that is in the past.”

“No it isn’t.”

His refusal struck me to the quick. I spun around. “What do you mean?”

He peered down at me with a mixture of defensiveness and regret. “My life must seem to go on exactly as it did before. Not a ripple of change for Walsingham’s spies to detect. I cannot suddenly transform into a monk.”

“But you will not be celibate at all. You will sleep with me. Your
wife.
”

“I cannot wait to bed you again, sweet, but it is too dangerous for the time being. I must visit my mistress.” Jealousy streamed through me in vivid hues.

“You tell me you are going to sleep with harlots before the sun has even set on our wedding day? It seems a strange pronouncement from a husband.”

“That depends whether you want a faithless husband or a dead one. If I suddenly forgo pleasures of the flesh I will bring suspicion down on both of us. It will be blood scent to wolves.” It was true, and yet that did not cool its sting.

“Perhaps you are the wolf I should worry about.”

“Perhaps.” Gabriel’s jaw tightened. “But I am a wolf who upholds his end of a bargain. Last night I met with a guard from the Tower prison where your nurse lies.”

My heart leapt, dashing away all thought of the other woman who would soon bed my husband. “You have news of Eppie? Tell me!”

“She is alive.” He did not add “for now.” “Oxenham agreed to carry food to her, blankets. For a ruinous fee of course.”

“Will he smuggle a letter to her? Sneak me in to see her? If I am hooded and veiled no one need know who I am.”

“No.”

“Gabriel, I beg you. I won’t care how many mistresses you take if I can see Eppie.”

“I can buy food, Nell. A fire for her hearth. But if I took every piece of gold, every acre of land, every brick and jewel we both own I could not buy you passage into her cell or pass her a letter written in your hand. Not and keep either one of you safe.”

It was true. I knew it. For a moment I felt foolish, like a reckless child. “Gabriel, this guard . . . did he say . . .” I hesitated, my mind filled with horrors I had heard of, dank cells, the ropes and chains determined men once used to break the body of Anne Askew. “Have they hurt her, Gabriel?”

“She is alive. That is all he knew. Perhaps we can learn more in time.”

“You will tell me if you do. Not knowing is the most terrible thing of all.”

“I thought the same thing once,” he said. “But that was a very long time ago.”

I
N THE WEEKS
that followed fear stalked me as the hours stretched long. From the guard we learned little. Mistress Jones had been questioned, moved from a comfortable cell into a miserable one with the damp and the rats to loosen her tongue.

From the queen’s actions we learned even less. She summoned me to serve her as usual. Ordered me to read aloud. Wove tricky questions through our conversations as deftly as she pulled gold thread through the altar cloth we ladies stitched. She pricked my pride by listing Gabriel’s attentions to other women, a torment that shredded my already ragged nerves even further. Was it intentional? Her cruelty? Or was she trying to comfort me in her way? I could not be sure. I hid my heartache when she claimed I was lucky to escape him. All men were faithless in the end, the queen affirmed. I should pity the foolish woman Wyatt seduced into becoming his wife one day.

I forced myself to be careless and gay, locked in my cage of deception. Only with Gabriel could I allow real emotion to show. At first I pressed him for any news of Eppie. Later, I sought him out for other reasons as well. Jealousy when I smelled unfamiliar perfumes on his clothes. Torment at the knowledge that nearly any woman at court would be far more practiced in pleasing my husband in bed. I cannot say exactly when our private world shifted. I only know in time I sought Gabriel out because I wanted to.

He made me presents of books he collected, hoping to distract me for at least a little while. Stretched my mind with volumes of ancient wisdom from the spice countries and new discoveries from rich lands across the Atlantic where Spain, France, England, and Portugal now scrambled for power. He gave me books so poorly reasoned out he knew they would anger me, or perhaps make me laugh at their muddled logic. One day he left a coffer with a clock in pieces, daring me to try to fix it. Not since Father had anyone demanded my mind reach so far, and I was grateful for it.

One February night I caught him alone in a corridor, glimpsed the brooch pinning his cloak. Initials twined in gold, first H, then the A I had seen embroidered on the curtains of our marriage bed. “Who were they?” I asked. “The happy woman and the man with honor?” Gabriel stiffened. I wished I had said nothing.

“I suppose you must hear it soon enough. Better it come from me. The initials belong to my father, Henry Wyatt, and my mother, Alison.”

I remembered what Kat Ashley had said about his parents when first I came to court. His father a traitor, his mother a whore. It grieved me, how far they had fallen from the mottos they once held dear. I could only imagine how much their disgrace pained their son.

“You say nothing. You heard the tales people tell.”

“The court is full of tales. Not all of them are true.”

“The ones about my parents are. My father did turn traitor against Queen Mary. He would not have a Spanish king sit on the English throne. And my mother—she bedded a man named Sir Albion Ferris while my father lived.”

Ferris? Had I heard that name in some discussion between my father and his Cambridge friends? “Did not Albion Ferris help the Duke of Norfolk execute the rebels? My father said the man was as vicious as his master. Power-hungry. Vile.”

“Ferris was all those things and more. He never forgot a slight and would plot his whole life to seek revenge.”

Katherine Ashley claimed Gabriel followed a similar code. I shoved the thought away, then asked: “Ferris had a grudge against your father?”

“No. It was my mother Ferris loathed. When she was a maid, presented at court, they called her Alison the Virtuous. Which meant, of course, that all King Henry’s favorites were eager to debauch her. Charles Brandon wagered that Ferris could not deflower her. Unfortunately Brandon did not specify it must be with her consent.” Gabriel’s mouth crooked up, even though his face looked grim.

“You smile at that?” I asked, confused.

“My mother had been raised with a pack of brothers who liked to fight as much as I do. When Ferris attempted to rape her, she wrenched the man’s own dagger out of its sheath. It was a long while before the knave could use his offensive parts again.”

“I am glad of it.”

Gabriel braced one arm upon the wall. “I could imagine you doing the same thing. In fact, I considered having Tyrell line my codpiece with lead the day you came to wed me.” Gabriel’s smile did not reach his eyes. “Brandon guessed my mother was responsible for Ferris’s injury, though he had no proof. The suspicion was humiliation enough. Ferris waited his chance for years, patient as any spider. Then he struck.”

“What happened?”

“He made a devil’s bargain. My mother was to be his whore before all the court for as long as my father was alive. And she was to make certain my father knew it.”

“She should have killed him.”

“Ferris used a pretty weapon to force her to his will. If she complied with his wishes, he promised to secure a pardon for me from the Duke of Norfolk. My brothers had died during the first clash of Wyatt’s rebels against Queen Mary’s soldiers. My father was merely awaiting his execution. I was all my mother had left.”

I thought of my own mother, her courage, her fierce protectiveness. “Of course she did what Ferris commanded. She must have loved you very much.”

“She did. I was her favorite, you see. Reminded her of her brothers, forever spoiling for a fight. But I did not love her after I was let loose from the Tower. I accepted the reprieve she gained me because I wished so much to live. But I hated her for shaming Father. Shaming me. I did not learn she had done so to save me until months later, after Father’s head was on a pike on London Bridge.”

I shuddered, my childhood curiosity about those grisly warnings haunting me even further. The Lieutenant had told me the reason they lasted so long. They boiled the heads in tar so it took longer for the flesh to fall away. What would it be like to see someone you loved hoisted high in shame? Ravens plucking at his eyes?

“My mother sickened in the months after, poisoned by my hate and by the weight of Ferris’s bastard in her belly. Had her brother not come three days before she died, I might never have known why she did the things she did. She confided in him and he carried the truth to me as she lay in her bed, her body bloated with that monster’s child.”

Gabriel arched his head back, shut his eyes tight. I stole up behind him, put my arms about his waist, giving what little comfort I could. Gabriel sucked in a slow, deep breath. “I begged her for forgiveness. But she could not grant me absolution, no matter what she said. I had believed such horrible things of her, Nell. Despised her and let her see it. But she smiled at me, so tender. Said she would forget all if I would swear one vow to grant her peace. I would have promised her anything.”

“What did she ask?”

“That I not kill the man who raped my mother, tortured my father with tales of her unfaithfulness. If I cut Ferris down I would pay with my life. Her sacrifice would have been in vain.”

“Your promise must have given her some comfort.”

“I cannot imagine why. I broke it three months later. Bribed a Fleet Street whore to lure him into an alley, where I killed him one tiny cut at a time. The way my father must have suffered. The way my mother . . . so you see I am a devil, not to be trusted. I broke a deathbed vow to my own mother.”

“I do not blame you. I could not have borne seeing that beast going about his life, gloating over his triumph.”

“I vowed no other man would slight any Wyatt again without paying at the point of my sword. You once told me not knowing is the most horrible thing imaginable. I tell you there is something worse. Knowing someone you love surrendered all for you. And you did not deserve it.”