“You thought it.” How could she not think it? He had the face of a man who was doing all this despite himself, perplexed at his own actions. He added, more stiffly, “Don’t look so solemn, my madness is not your affair. Iamgoing to Ghent.”
“Certainly it is my affair, since it has saved all I hold dear,” said Anne. She thought, and then pulled the kerchief out of her sleeve. Herglove for Maximilien, which she gave Polhaim in Brocéliande, had been a dignified thing, a pretty favor of white kidskin. This kerchief was only one of her sillier experiments in embroidery, made because she enjoyed her needle and an evening’s gossip. It had an interlocked pattern of green hedgehogs and canary-colored pomegranates. She gave it to him. It was not grand or costly or…But a lady’s favor meant something. Could he want it? He met her eyes and hesitated.
He put the kerchief to his lips. And said, conversationally, “I think I will ask a boon after all.”
She straightened. This was easier, this was courtly business. “Name what you will, Monseigneur.”
“May I kiss you?”
She stood still, the color flooding her face.
Humor touched his. “Have I offended you?”
She was blushing hard. Stiffly, she said, “No. Not— I—don’t understand.”
“No? But you did not see yourself as I did, silver with a dragon’s blood, your hand on the horn of a unicorn.”
She answered him with a truth, every nerve taut. “I have always thought that—wanting—someone—that it would make everything worse.” She bit her tongue. Harder to be coin for the realm’s need, she meant, when she remembered she had a body that could want and be wounded. She had said marriage-vows. She hardly knew him.
“Ah,” he said. “Very well.” A little color came up in his face. But he turned away.
She caught his arm with a quick impulse, pulled him back around, then his hand came up to her face and he kissed her very suddenly. He was as warm as he’d been in the chapel, his fingers curled round her jaw. He tipped her face to his and closed the distance between them, dragged his gloved knuckles down her spine beneath her cloak, caught her gasping breath, and kissed her again.What are you doing?she asked herself, as she twisted her hands in his doublet and kissed him back.There is your sister and your court just beyond the trees, someone will come at any moment.
The thought was enough to make her stiffen and draw away, gather the pieces of her pride. His hands flexed as though he’d reach for her again, but he didn’t. “Anne—”
She had her fingers against her own lips. Her dreams of love had always been abstract ones, set at a remove from her body, which had belonged to Brittany before it belonged to her.
Perhaps he saw her confusion and guessed the reason. “Have I made everything worse?” he said.
She nodded.
“Should I apologize?”
“Never in life.”
He laughed, darkly, and took her hand and kissed it, and then he turned it and kissed her wrist where her riding-glove ended, so she made a faint sound that brought color to his face. And then he left her.
Standing, still dazed, she saw him speak to Henri. And when the cavalcade took the northern road to Rennes, he peeled off east with a half-dozen of the guard, riding fast and not looking back.
Part
III
Chapter
21
The night in the castleof the dukes of Brittany dragged in an endless blur; the walls rang with angry voices and booted feet and alarums and now and again a scream or a clash of steel. But through it all, Moreau merely stared, riveted, into his mirror as though all the secrets of Creation could be found in its depths.
Marguerite of France was not a woman who trusted easily, but when Moreau had shown her what he could do, she was dazzled, and when he told her of the trap he meant to lay for the duchess, she believed him. So she waited for Anne of Brittany to stumble, quite against her will, out of the shadows and into the waiting guard, as Moreau said she would.
Anne did not. The men of the duchess’s council had been quietly waylaid at their houses in Nantes, their persons had been secured, they had been told that they must swear oaths to France or find themselves impoverished when Charles was made duke of Brittany. Dunois, Marguerite gathered, was particularly enraged. But they had sworn. There was nothing they could do.
But they had not secured the duchess.
It was near dawn; the bells had rung for Lauds. There were dead men in the courtyard.
Moreau slipped his mirror abruptly into his sleeve. He got to hisfeet and braced one hand on the hood of the fireplace, as flushed as though he’d coursed a stag on a hot day. His eyes filled disconcertingly with sunlight, then moonlight, then the points of the fire.
