The Boleyn King (6 page)

She stared up to where Giles stood perfectly still, his right arm twisted sharply behind his back and the point of Dominic’s dagger pricking the underside of his chin.

Dominic’s voice was a purr that raised the hair on the back of her neck. “Did you not listen to me earlier? That was a mistake.”

Giles gurgled, and Minuette swallowed a laugh of pure hysteria. The dagger moved slightly, and she saw a pinprick of blood slide down its blade.

“Don’t,” she said.

Dominic turned his face to her, though she wasn’t sure he could see anything through the haze of fury in his eyes.

From behind Dominic, a voice of undoubted authority rang out. “Let him go, Dom.” William strode into view, flanked by two of his guards. He extended a hand to help Minuette up without taking his eyes off the two men locked together in a threat of violence.

At first it seemed that Dominic would not obey. When he did release Giles, it was with a shove that sent him staggering. In an instinct of violence, Giles raised a fist, but William’s voice stopped him cold. “I shouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Giles wasn’t so pompous that he didn’t recognize the danger in his sovereign’s voice. Mumbling halfhearted curses, he retreated down the corridor with less grace than speed.

William touched his hand to her cheek. “Are you all right?”

Minuette was staring at Dominic, who sheathed his dagger with an energetic thrust that frightened her—as if he imagined it to be Giles’s body. “I’m all right.”

William let his hand drop, and Minuette seized it impulsively. “He told me … he said that you’re arranging a betrothal between us.”

His lips tightened. “You needn’t worry. He’ll not come near you again.”

“But you were considering it?”

Shifting from one foot to the other, William said cautiously, “It had been mentioned. But it hadn’t gone any further than talk. I would have told you if it had.”

“Then you won’t—I won’t have to marry him?”

“No.”

Dominic had turned away as if she weren’t even there. Trying to focus on the matter at hand, Minuette wrenched her eyes back to William. “I know that I can’t marry without permission. But I should at least like to respect my husband. Promise me, William, that you won’t force me to marry against my wishes.”

His right hand came up to cup her chin. “I promise.”

Dominic refused to let Minuette out of his sight—he insisted on escorting her until she was safe behind the thick door of her quarters. But William would not let them leave until Dominic gave his word that he would not go looking for Giles Howard afterward.

“A beating is too simple,” William had said softly before sending Dominic off with Minuette. “I’ve much better ways of making a man pay.”

Dominic didn’t doubt it, though part of him still ached to smash Howard’s face. As he walked beside Minuette, he considered that he had only promised not to go looking for him. If he should happen to come across him by chance …

Had William not stopped him earlier, Dominic was in little doubt that he would have killed Giles Howard. He was less disturbed by that than he would have liked, for he was not an especially violent or impulsive man. But when he had seen Howard with hands and mouth on Minuette, Dominic had given in to a red rush of fury.

He would have been displeased to find Howard assaulting any young woman, and he tried to convince himself that his reaction would have been the same even if the woman involved had been a stranger. But he was too honest to believe it. From the moment Minuette had jumped into his arms this afternoon, a trembling, half-formed suspicion had hovered in the back of his mind.

When he had come upon her in the gardens with William, he had not known her. And in those few seconds of nonrecognition, he had found himself appraising her as if she were a stranger—tall, lithe, and with a touch of joy in her movements that was very pleasing.

And then, like a shifting prism, it was Minuette on that wall, jumping to him as if she were still ten years old. But it had been the body of a woman he’d caught and held for longer than he’d meant to. And in that brief embrace, he’d heard a voice in his mind that had thrown him out of all countenance: Giles Howard’s crude but accurate assessment—
rather like a colt, all eyes and legs and spirit
.

He’d almost forgotten that Minuette walked next to him until she said softly, “I’m sorry, Dominic.”

Startled, he said, “What on earth for?”

“You should not have had to see me like … I should never have been there. I should have known what to do. It’s so humiliating.…”

That stopped him in his tracks, horrified at how he had been brooding on his own injuries and completely ignoring Minuette’s. She would not look at him, and he wanted desperately to make her do so.

“Your only sin is too great kindness,” he said firmly, “and who can fault you for that? You would not be Minuette without it. I only hope that tonight has not driven kindness from you.”

Finally she looked at him, a liquid glance that rearranged his insides. “You are not angry with me?”

“Never with you.”

“This was not how I imagined it would be when you came back to court.”

“What did you imagine?”

He told himself that he was wrong about the hitch in her breathing, that he was tired and fanciful and the whole day was becoming increasingly unreal. He needed to sleep, he told himself firmly. And when he woke up, the world would right itself and Minuette would be—

A scream knifed through the air, abruptly cut off with a sickening thud. Some things Dominic could do by instinct; he was moving toward the sound before he knew it, Minuette on his heels. He almost told her sharply to stay behind, but he didn’t want to abandon her in an empty corridor.

A woman lay in a fatally unnatural sprawl at the bottom of a staircase, the rich red of her dress pooled around her; in the torchlight he could not tell where the blood began and the fabric ended. Dominic threw out his arm to stop Minuette, but she had already seen. More than just seen—recognized.

“Alyce!”

CHAPTER FOUR

MINUETTE WAS SOMEWHAT startled to wake up the next morning; she had been so certain that she would never be able to sleep. Still, when she opened her eyes she saw not only the narrow chamber around her but Alyce’s crumpled body and dented skull from last night.

She sat up and pressed her hands to her face, but blacking out sight didn’t change things. Alyce was dead—and it was Minuette’s fault. She should have told someone about the pregnancy, even though Alyce hadn’t wanted it. Her friend had been in despair and not thinking … why else would she have thrown herself down the stairs? And why hadn’t Minuette realized how desperate Alyce was?

An accident, Dominic had soothed her last night. No light at the top of those steps, and so easy for a woman to stumble with the heels and the skirts …

Minuette didn’t believe that for an instant. Court women were accustomed to their heels and skirts; otherwise, there would be tripping in corridors and slipping on steps every day. Alyce had not stumbled last night, except on purpose. Maybe she had not even meant to kill herself. Maybe she had only been trying to lose the baby.

Then why did she scream?
a little voice niggled.
If she did it on purpose …

She opened her eyes and brought herself back to the now. It was her first day in Elizabeth’s service, and she could not begin by being late.

Swinging out of bed, she almost hit the opposite wall with her knees. The chamber she had been allotted was tiny, but for the first time in her life it was all hers—a rare luxury for any nonroyal lady, and a mark of how high she stood in Elizabeth’s household. Minuette might hold no objective power, but she would be a gatekeeper to the princess.

She stood up, already making a list of things to do: choose a dress, find someone to help with her hair (she might be more important now, but that didn’t mean she had any more money to hire a maid of her own), pretend that she had not watched Dominic nearly kill a man last night (
for your sake
, a little voice whispered).

Giles Howard was vile and dangerous, true. But Dominic had stopped him with an intensity that had penetrated her own fear, and William … William had promised he would let her marry whom she chose. She still felt a jolt of triumph that she held that kind of sway with the King of England—a jolt that turned uneasy at the memory of Alyce speaking to William last night. Surely that meant something; she could not recall Alyce ever speaking with him before. And that she had died soon after … Minuette shoved the thought aside.

She chose her simplest gown of white underdress and blue linen overdress embroidered with ivory leaves along the hem. As she tied her hair back with a silver ribbon, someone knocked on the door. She opened it to a young page, expecting to hear that Elizabeth had summoned her, but instead the page said, “Mistress Wyatt? I have a letter for you.”

He handed over a thick sheaf of paper—it was more a small book than a mere letter—and she looked at the plain wax seal. “From whom?” she asked.

“Mistress de Clare.” He bowed himself away in the moment of Minuette’s shock.

Alyce de Clare. Alyce—who was dead. But apparently still sending letters.

She broke the wax and read the first page, dated yesterday.

Minuette,You are right, of course. I am in trouble, though I do not think you could begin to imagine what sort. I believe I can find my way clear. But in spite of my protestations, I find I need your help. Will you keep the enclosed for me and not tell anyone? They are my assurance. When I am clear of this trouble, I will let you know and you may burn the enclosed. Alyce

Postscript: Thank you for the loan of Petrarch. If I forget to return the volume, you may retrieve it yourself from my chest. Unnerved, Minuette sank onto her bed. What did Alyce mean, that Minuette could not guess her trouble? She was only too clearly with child. And what were these assurances of safety? Love letters, perhaps, meant to force a man to take responsibility and help his lover? But then why throw herself down a staircase if she thought she knew her way clear?

Scanning the enclosed sheets, her bewilderment grew. There were eleven in all, but they were completely unreadable. There weren’t any words, just strings of nonsense letters in short blocks of text. Ciphered? Her confusion gave way to fear. Alyce had been right: Minuette could not begin to guess what sort of trouble her friend had been in.

She folded the ciphered pages together with Alyce’s covering letter and put them inside her sparsely tenanted jewelry casket. She was in over her head and needed to think about who best to help her. Her first thought was Dominic—probably because he had been with her last night when Alyce had died. Also because he was the steadiest man she knew and she needed someone steady to tell her what to do.

But first she had a princess to report to.

William prowled the perimeter of the council chamber, empty except for Dominic, who said, “Don’t you ever sit still?”

“I think better when I move.”

“Any chance you’re thinking about Alyce de Clare?”

William drew a momentary blank, then remembered and shrugged it off. “You’re overreacting. So she spoke to me last night. So I agreed to meet with her today about whatever she wanted to talk about. No doubt it was about something trivial like taking a leave from court.”

“Then she would have been speaking to your mother, not you. Are you sure you’ve never spoken with her before?” He asked it casually, but William heard the unspoken accusation and resented it, the more so because it came from Dominic.

“I will swear it on my throne, if you like. I do remember women’s faces, if not always their names.”

“Still,” Dominic pressed—and this time the casualness was overdone, making William’s nerves twitch—“I think there is something more to this.”

“The girl fell down the stairs … and that’s the charitable version. I’ve already heard from four people this morning that she was pregnant. For her family’s sake we should leave it alone. Why give the gossips more to talk about?”

“Why would she ask to speak with you and then throw herself down a staircase?”

William stopped prowling and stared at his friend. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Dominic hesitated, and in that moment the door was thrown open and the regency council entered by twos and threes, only Lord Rochford keeping to himself amidst the babble of male voices. William braced himself to argue with his uncle about Dominic’s presence at today’s meeting. Dominic was staying—William would make him a secretary or clerk on the spot if he had to; hell, he’d make Dominic a bishop if necessary to keep him in the room. But Rochford merely went to his customary seat to the right of William’s and waited for his nephew to take his place. In the flurry of the eight councilors arranging themselves at the long table, Dominic quietly sat against the wall behind Rochford as though he had always belonged there.

So his uncle had anticipated him. William couldn’t wait to hear what that was all about. He would have to ask Dominic—at least if he wanted more of an answer than “I think it’s best for the kingdom.”

Not
the
kingdom
, William always wanted to retort. My
kingdom
.