The Queen's Bastard Part 1

The Queen's b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

By C. E. Murphy.

Prologue

SANDALIA DE PHILIP DE COSTA

12 OCTOBER 1561

Lanyarch, north of Aulun

She wears a sheepskin against the wind that shrieks around cathedral walls. The skin is soft and smells surprisingly good, and its creamy warmth seems a more fitting nod to wedding colours than the tartan blues and yellowed whites that the man at her side wears. Her gown beneath the sheepskin is st.u.r.dy, not fas.h.i.+onable; it has been made for travel. Indeed, she's come from the s.h.i.+p to the carriage and thence to this lonely, wind-whipped cathedral with no time to arrange herself as suits her station. She was told it would be thus, and if she feels disappointment, she's put it away in the name of duty.

Her hair is still damp and tangled from the wind that beats grey stone into submission and whips grey clouds into hungry, gaping scars across the sky. Rain clatters against stained gla.s.s until Mary, Mother of Christ, weeps with it. No shard of sunlight streams through to bring joy to her tears. It's said that rain on a wedding day is good luck, though that seems contrived; certainly no one claims suns.h.i.+ne is ill luck.

Voices murmur beneath the violent rain, echoing within bleak stone walls. They're critical, sympathetic, disdainful, sorrowful, curious, and above all without respect.

It is not done to whisper and comment during the marriage of one royal to another. After, yes, and before most certainly, but as a priest's sonorous tones ring through the dismal cathedral there should be silence. Respect. Awe. Even when the wedding is done in haste, and with none of the pomp that might be expected, it should be an occasion for solemnity, not gossip. In time, those who chatter and mock will come to regret their loose tongues, for it will be made clear to them why their lands are forfeit; why their children are made involuntary guests; why a handful of heads roll and feet kick in the depths of serene dark forests.

But that is in time, and not a thought to be entertained on a wedding day.

Sandalia, aged fourteen years, sister to the prince of Essandia and soon to be queen of oppressed Lanyarch, lifts a warm brown gaze to the bishop who bestows her husband's name upon her, and smiles.

They're done together, the marriage and the crowning. Rough Lanyarchan rubes clamour to make oaths to the aging king and his fresh bride. He's old, too old, for a girl of her age, though he isn't yet feeble. What he is is, is too wedded to his faith. He's taken no wife until Sandalia, and that's done only under pressure from Rodrigo, Essandia's ruling prince and Sandalia's brother. Aulun, the sister country to Lanyarch's south, chokes under the Reformation Church's hold, and Ec.u.menic Lanyarch suffers for it. Should Charles, last of the house of Stewart, pa.s.s without an heir, there will be no stopping the Red b.i.t.c.h in Aulun from sweeping over Lanyarch and bending it to her rule.

Rodrigo, as in love with his faith as Charles but far more pragmatic, will not allow that to happen. Sandalia remembers his apology as they stood on an Essandian dock, in the moments before she climbed aboard a tall s.h.i.+p to sail north and meet her fate. In memory, he takes her hands in his, studying her with sad eyes. Rodrigo is twice her age, handsome and fit in the prime of his life, and he doesn't like sending a young sister away as a piece on a playing field. He murmurs words of sorrow, words that hang in Sandalia's mind even now, for all that she's tried to forget them. She is a princess of Essandia, and did not, does not, will not, need the prince's apologies: she is young, but she knows her duty, and would do anything for her brother besides.

So now, with the weight of a queen's crown on her head, she turns from the man who crowned her and holds the hand of the one she's wed, and speaks in a clear strong voice and in a language that is not her own. People will admire her mastery of the Aulunian tongue now, and later say her speech held wisdom and charm beyond her years.

"I stand before you now a queen, and beside my husband as protector of our faith. Lanyarch is like my child to me, and I will not see it fall beneath Reformation rule. I will be mother to this brave northern country and mother to its heir, standing beside my lord until G.o.d finds it fit to help us all shake off the law that has been so cruelly brought down upon us. I have received the blessing of our beloved church, but now I beg of you to share your own blessings of hearth and home with me. I come from a warm country far to the south. Let me now know the warmth that is Lanyarch!"

All the voices that had babbled in contempt now rise in a furor, raw welcoming cheers and stamping feet, tartaned men sending ear-shattering whistles to drive back the sound of rain. They swear fealty, one after the other, while Charles stands at Sandalia's side, distant and polite. He doesn't see the ma.s.ses before him; his gaze is cast to the glorious stained gla.s.s windows that tell of Christ's suffering. He thinks not of his country's future, but of his own part in the King of Heaven's tale.

Sandalia, her absent king at her side, rides the breadth and width of Lanyarch all through the winter, chapping her fine skin and accepting dark bread and ale as her nightly meals. She sleeps before the fire in common rooms and learns, poorly, to weave a tartan, but most of all she learns the laughter of the crude Lanyarchan people, and learns to share it.

In the springtime she retreats to the capital city of Agned, insisting she can hardly be expected to bear an heir when she and Charles spend their nights crowded into common rooms with little time to themselves. The people whistle and roar and share ribald winks, all of them more than half in love with the dusky princess from the south, and grant her privacy to tend to the serious business of making a child.

Fifteen months from their wedding date, Charles's story ends in a phlegm-filled fit of coughing, leaving his wife without the rounded belly she's promised her people. Rumour whispers Charles has gone to the grave as G.o.dly and pure as he came from the womb, no woman ever breached by his sword.

Sandalia, queen of Lanyarch, beloved to her people and no longer protected by a husband whose claim to the throne is incontestable, gathers her skirts and flees her adopted northern land with the threat of the t.i.tian b.i.t.c.h at her back.

SANDALIA, QUEEN OF LANYARCH

17 October 1563

Gallin, northeast of Essandia

She wears a sheepskin, not against biting wind, but to remind her deserted country that she has not forgotten it. The skin doesn't suit a silver-shot gown encrusted with pearls, nor the mildness of the Gallic day; the sky lies against the horizon as pale and calm as it does directly overhead, autumn's suns.h.i.+ne enough to make the day bright and delightful without blinding the youthful Lanyarchan queen.

She wears a sheepskin to remind the gathered throngs who call her name as she rides through Lutetian streets in a carriage behind six matched white horses that she does not come to their king merely a princess, but as a queen in her own right. A queen in exile, to be sure, but a queen loved by her people, and a queen whose faith supports her. She has forgone a crown; such an obvious symbol of power speaks of desperation, a cra.s.sness in announcing who she is. Sandalia needs not stoop so low.

But she wears the sheepskin, and no one who sees her on her wedding day will forget it.

She rides alone that day, and when the carriage stops before the cathedral entrance, it is her brother who steps forward to offer his hand. Rodrigo, who sent her north to Lanyarch as winter came on, and who made her a queen by doing so. He had not been there to see her crowned that day, and the softness in his eyes offered apology for that now, two years later, as she goes to make another match in the name of duty.

"A new fas.h.i.+on?" he murmurs as she steps down from the carriage. "Will you set Lutetia on its ear and have them wearing sheepskins before winter has set in?"

Sandalia's laughter, easy and bright, rolls through the autumn air and reaches the cathedral ahead of her. Behind her and to all sides, voices soar in approval of the young queen's mirth. It is a good sign, the people agree, that Sandalia goes happy to their king. That she's a princess of Essandia and not one of their own Gallic-born high ladies is forgiven today, on her wedding day, in face of her delight. Laughter is an omen of the things to come, and the people will forgive her anything for her joy.

"No," she answers beneath the roar, but smiles as she says it. "Though now that you've put the idea into my head, perhaps I'll make that my legacy. A new fas.h.i.+on for every season. I'll be even more frivolous than the Red b.i.t.c.h."

Amus.e.m.e.nt quirks Rodrigo's mouth. "Be careful, Dalia. Such things legacies are made of."

Sandalia tosses her hair and laughs again. "I'm only a woman, dear brother. No one expects my legacy to be anything greater than st.u.r.dy heirs and fas.h.i.+onable clothes."

"So long as you provide the one, I can accept the other." Steel slips into Rodrigo's voice and Sandalia casts a coquettish glance at him.

"Do you doubt me in the bedroom, Rodrigo? Charles was old. Louis is not. There will be an heir." The same steel, as well-tempered if lighter in tang, comes into her own voice. "My son will be born within a year."

"May G.o.d's blessings be on you all." Rodrigo releases her at the doors, and she walks the aisle alone to face the man who will be her new husband.

He is slender and aesthete, blond hair loose in a manner that dictates fas.h.i.+on because of his rank, not his sense of style. That he dresses beautifully is through no deliberation of his own, heavy collar and broad padded shoulders lending him a gravitas that the youthful bloom of his cheeks doesn't support. He plucks at the collar discontentedly, actions of a man too unfamiliar with fas.h.i.+on to have it made to suit him, rather than the other way around.

Still, he makes a finer picture beside Sandalia than Charles had, the blue of his gaze sharp and strong. It is only Sandalia, standing at his side, who sees in her new prince what she also saw in the old: that the light in his eyes comes to life as he gazes piously on the windows depicting the lives and deeds of saints and disciples.

G.o.d save her, she cannot help but think, even as she speaks her vows. G.o.d save her from men whom G.o.d had saved. Is she to be d.a.m.ned by their presence all her life, wedded to those whose souls were already bound to a higher being? Even Rodrigo, now in his early thirties, seems too fond of G.o.d and not enough of flesh, though he, at least, dances in careful negotiations with the Aulunian queen, whose years are still tender enough to bear children, should she finally bow to a marriage bed. That's the hand Rodrigo wants, not for love, but for the Church: with an Ec.u.menic king the heretical country might yet be brought back into the fold. If wedding Lorraine is the price, it is one Rodrigo is willing to pay.

Louis at least comes to the bridal chamber, more than Charles ever did.

When it was clear Charles would not come to bed, Sandalia told him through gritted teeth that there would be an heir to Lanyarch if it took her dying breath to make it so. He gazed at her without apparent comprehension, and agreed that there must be a child. Sandalia, innocent, betrayed, furious, turned her eyes from the king in search of a man who could be used and discarded.

She found better in the guise of a hazel-eyed man who wore the collar of a priest. He remained apart from her court, alluring for his remoteness. She warmed to him, seeing in his sharp features and collar a creature that could be used and kept: for all her faith in the Church, she had equal faith that it desired power on the throne, or behind it. Better by far to own a priest than be owned by one. He had long hands, beautifully shaped and soft, and the virgin queen ached with unfamiliar desire at the thought of his touch.

She was trembling on her hands and knees, his soft hands stroking and exploring her s.e.x, when word came that Charles was dead.

And then she was a virgin no more, her priest's urgent weight behind her, pinning her with a desperation to couple that they both understood. For the rest of her life colour came to her cheeks when she thought of that night; of that week; of the hope to catch soon enough to call the child a king's. But her blood came, and with it the last chance of pretending a pregnancy that was her husband's. Sandalia fled Lanyarch, a failure as a woman and a queen, her priest and confessor and no-more lover at her side. She resigned herself to a convent with the memory of a few days' pa.s.sion to warm her for the rest of her days, until Rodrigo came to her and spoke quietly of the young Gallic prince and his need for a wife.

Enough time had pa.s.sed that it was clear there would be no Lanyarchan heir, save through Sandalia's claim to that throne. The Church declared her fit to be taken as Louis's bride, and when he makes a feeble, uncertain pa.s.s at her breast in the bedchambers, exasperation floods her and she unlaces his breeches and climbs atop him, more determined to be successfully bred than caring for decorum. She will not look to her priest in the days and weeks to come, though he remains at her side. Louis approves; it is well that Sandalia shows such faith, and her piousness makes him more eager to share a bed with her. They will make a G.o.dly child, he promises her, and she sets her teeth and keeps her gaze from her hazel-eyed priest.

Ten months later, his young wife pale with the first weeks of pregnancy, Louis rides east to lead a border skirmish against encroaching Reinnish troops, an ongoing dispute that goes back before Sandalia's memories.

A harried, misery-pelted courier rides back six weeks after that, just a few days ahead of the sledge that carries young Louis's body home to his devastated country.

Sandalia closes herself away when the cramping and bleeding begins, claiming shock and horror that no one doubts. She will see only her priest, whose soft hands she has not again allowed to touch her. The people whisper she commends Louis's soul to heaven so often she has no other words left to speak.

Behind locked doors, she claws her fingers in her man's throat and demands, raw-voiced and full of rage, that a child be found to replace the one her body rejects. It is too well known how far along she is, too long a recovery from a child lost to a new one made, to risk her priest's long slim body again. If she has regrets they are buried beneath the fury of orders given: a child must be found; a boy, born six months hence. Kill its parents, she says, and because the priest is no fool, he will vanish the same night he brings the child to her. She has given orders for his death; she trusts that his disappearance and that death are one and the same.

At seventeen, widowed twice, exiled queen of one country, young regent to a second, princess to a third, Sandalia de Costa will have her heir.

At any cost, she will have her heir.

1

BELINDA PRIMROSE

15 March 1565 Brittany, north of Gallin

"It cannot be found out."

She knew the words as if they'd come down to her through the blood, in the first moments of awareness. There was darkness, red-tinged and warm, a battlefield of sound filling it: explosions and grumbles that came so steadily they were comforting rather than cause for alarm. There were voices, both low, but one more distant than the other. The first voice, closer, tickled through her to the very centre of her being, becoming a part of her that could never be cut away. It was that voice that carried fear into her, intense and sharp: "It cannot be found out."

In the first moments of cold, with the air screaming all around her, she heard the voice again, high and distorted. She grasped with tiny fingers at a blurred, weary face that retreated before her wide, tearless gaze. She was pressed against a different warmth, scratchy and soft and scented. She would come to know the scent as chypre, and a.s.sociate it with safety for the rest of her life. She was enclosed in strong arms, the world s.h.i.+fting perspective dizzily as she was taken from the first, the last, glimpse she would have of her mother for twelve years.

Behind her, from the breadth of a man's chest, the less familiar voice echoed the words that seemed to define her, even at mere minutes of age: "It cannot be found out."

Then he spoke again with more clarity, the certainty and strength of love colouring his words with richness: "I know. It will not be found out, my lady. Have faith. I'll return by dawn, and by the ninth bell you must be dressed for court. You must be seen well, or their hearts will fail. Attend her." The last words were spoken to someone else, somewhere else; a murmur of reply in a deep voice came, and then the woman spoke again: "Yes. Go. Go, Robert. And be seen with a woman in the small hours of the morning." Weariness is left behind by command. "There are too many who see you dance attendance on us already. We demand they find nothing of import. We shall be furious with you when we learn of your dalliances. Now go!"

A single image, burned into a newly made memory: slender shoulders, a proud straight spine. Linens clutched over milk-heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s and wrinkling over a still-swollen belly, contracting with afterbirth labors. Thin grey eyes, a high forehead, and a proud chin, lifted in expectation.

t.i.tian hair worn loose, b.l.o.o.d.y curls against translucent skin.

Enormous hands enveloped Belinda's head, turning her away from her mother, into the warmth of her father's body.

BELINDA PRIMROSE

8 February 1577 Aulun, isolated by the sea

Memory, from what others said, did not stretch so far back.

The dream came often, sharp enough to take her breath on waking, but no one remembered the moment of her birth, not with clarity; not at all. It was only a dream, nothing more. Belinda crawled from her bed, pulling a duvet, down-filled and heavy, with her: the keep fires were long since banked for the night, the comparative heat of the winter day left behind. Her first steps were warm, onto a tapestry rug that told the story of hunting a white deer. The next steps were icy, nimbly taken on tiptoe before she scrambled into the velvet-cus.h.i.+oned window seat. The duvet hissed across unheated stone as she hauled it up.

Frost spread across the windows, spiked fingers growing up from the lead lining between the sheets of thin, undistorted gla.s.s. Belinda pressed a fingertip against the thickening frost, melting through to the cold gla.s.s below. Water beaded and spilled over the lead, a glistening black line picked out by the half-moon's light. She put her finger in her mouth and pulled the duvet farther up, hunching and squirming her shoulders until the warm comforter slid between her back and the chilly stone wall. Her breath fogged on the window, mixing with scattered clouds to obscure the moon for a few moments before winter proved stronger than one girl-child's exhalations and clarity crept back over the middle of the pane.

Memories she trusted more than the dreams reached back to her second Yule. The pageantry of Yule, she was told, was less than the Christ Ma.s.s whose date and name had been set aside by the Reformation Church as it schismed from the Ec.u.menists. Still, call it Yule or Christ Ma.s.s, gifts were exchanged in the shortest day of the year, just as they had been for what seemed to Belinda to be uncountable centuries past.

The first remembered gift from her rarely seen, beloved papa: a tiny dagger, sharp for all that she was not yet two years of age. Had her nurse-a dour-faced, dull woman with a grim sense of propriety and little in the way of imagination-not been so shocked, so very determined to remove the toy from her determined grip, Belinda thought she might not remember it at all. As it was, she carried it even now: a soft length of string, clipped from a chemise, held it around her waist. The tiny dagger and its soft leather sheath made an impression against her spine when she leaned harder against the wall. By day it was tucked against skin, held tight by corsets and layers of fabric, inaccessible but rea.s.suring. The blade had dulled with time, leaving it barely more dangerous than a b.u.t.ter knife. Yet, without it, Belinda felt naked. Vulnerable.

There were dancing shoes the next Yule. Now, more than nine years later, she still remembered the tangy flat taste of disappointment in the back of her throat, although she smiled and put the shoes on her toddler feet and danced with the tall, brown-eyed man called Lord Drake by the others, and Papa by herself. Standing on his feet, she learned the steps to the dances of the Old Measures: the Quadran Pavan and the Tinternell were her favourites, for the fun of saying their names more than the dances themselves. At her third birthday her nurse dressed her in the costume of a grown-up lady, rich cream that brought out highlights in her brown hair, and with farthingaled skirts that allowed her small size to manage the weight of the dress without stumbling. That night she danced each of the eight Old Measures with Lord Drake, solemn and determined to do her papa proud.

And the back of her mind repeated: it cannot be found out it cannot be found out.

Those were the words Papa had whispered to her that morning, when he gave her the second blade of her short life. A rapier, he called it, weighted and sized for a child, but only young gentlemen learned fencing. "So," he told her, with the air of a conspirator, "we must be secret, and never let Nurse know. You have learned your dances with great patience," he teased, "and this is your reward, my girl. The grace learned on the dance floor stands anyone, man or girl, well in the art of fencing."

Belinda threw herself into her dance lessons with an enthusiasm entirely unexpected by the long-nosed man who tutored her.

By the time she was five she understood she was spoilt; within a year, she understood why. Her real father was dead in a war, and Rosemary, her mother, had lived only long enough to bear the child her husband had gotten on her before joining him in the next world. Robert, Lord Drake, was the only relative Belinda had, and properly he was uncle, not papa. He called her Primrose, in remembrance of the sister who had died, and those who thought of it at all admired his fort.i.tude in taking on the child's well-being. Drake was a favourite of Lorraine the queen, and her jealousies would fain to include even a girl of Belinda's tender years.

Belinda listened hard, and understood the words not said: she was a forgotten child, her birth parents of no particular import, her adopted papa's n.o.bility a gift from a fond queen. It was enough to make a good marriage of, if she were charming and healthy enough to bear strong children. Robert was easy with money, but his visits were rare, and bittersweet. He had little time for her, and so her drive to accomplish all the things he might expect of her filled her hours, in hopes of making him proud.

That the things he expected were unusual for a girl-child pa.s.sed by Belinda without note; the only other children she knew were the sons and daughters of the serving cla.s.s, and they, of course, would be expected to learn and do different things. So Belinda learned reading and developed a fair hand at writing; studied history and politics, and when her nurse objected, the old woman found herself left with a pension to see her to the end of her days and no more girl-child to meddle with. Released from that stifling watch, Belinda became adept at horseback riding and swordplay, and learned to stay out of the way when Robert visited with other n.o.bles, understanding she would be called for when and if she were necessary.

She never was.

Colour rushed along Belinda's jaw, crawling upward until her cheekbones felt scarred from the heat. Her reflection, faint in the frosty window, darkened perceptibly. She pressed her forehead against the gla.s.s, listening hard for a hiss, like water striking hot metal. Ice melted against her skin, silent, a bead trailing down between her closed eyes. It tickled, pus.h.i.+ng the blush back down with an itch. Belinda relaxed her jaw, keeping her eyes closed, determined not to rub the tiny blot of water away. It slid down her nose, the itch subsiding, and she let out a puff of air. Frost steamed, melted, and crystallized again under her breath.