Royal Blood. Rona SharonЧитать онлайн книгу.
of his baronetcy of Chartley—which his fool of a father had lost in an act of attainder—and set his sister, recently widowed, among Queen Katherine’s ladies. Meg was sweet, attractive, and clever. As a lady-in-waiting, her prospects of making a sensible match should increase tenfold. Abruptly he let go of her arm and retracted his steps to the shadows of the entryway. Concealed behind Riggs, Walter studied the so-called Michael Devereaux. He stood in line like a mannerly lad, gazing about him, hungering for every detail. Jolthead. “How now, Riggs,” Walter murmured at the man’s back.
Riggs did not lift his eyes from the ledger, though he probably knew exactly where his next lodger should be installed. Riggs enjoyed making his betters wait, plead, and break into a sweat at his scowling. It gave him a sense of power. It also lined his pockets with coin. “I give you good day, His Grace of Norfolk’s master of the horse.” Riggs snickered. “How may I serve you?”
“See the lumbering jackanapes at the end of the line, the one carrying his own trunk? He is new to this court, an Irishman. How would you like to practice pranks on him, my treat?”
His eyes still on the same page in the ledger, Riggs opened his hand behind his back.
Walter dropped a testril into it. “Good man, Riggs.” His mood improved, he returned to his sister, and together they continued toward the king’s presence chamber.
Michael was appalled. Mean was one word to describe the space he was allotted: stark brick walls blackened with soot, an earthen floor, meagerly furnished with a truckle bed covered with a rank palliasse, straw sticking out, and a three-legged stool. An anchorite cell, in the undercroft beneath the palace, where wine barrels were stored and servants quartered in public rooms.
Michael, standing at the threshold, the trunks containing his equipage stacked one atop the other beside him, his manservant and the porters pretending not to notice his discomfiture, refused to accept this was where he would be spending his nights. “But I’m on the list! Knights of the Garter are entitled to single or double lodgings at court for the duration of the chapter.”
“Oh, I beg Your Worship’s pardon! Sir Michael, was it? Or mayhap Earl Devereaux?” The sergeant perused his ledger again. “No. I have one Master Michael Devereaux.” The ledger closed with a thud. The glint of mocking triumph in the sergeant’s eyes bellied his innocent expression.
That drew blood. “While I am not yet bestowed with the cross of St. George, I act for my noble benefactor, the Earl of Tyrone, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who is a Knight Companion and a direct issue of the first lord ever to be vested Knight of the Garter by King Edward the Third!” When Riggs shrugged, maintaining the blank stare, frustration gnawed at Michael. He knew no one at court, none he could take this up with. “I am entitled to certain perquisites!”
“Your Worship is entitled to bouche of court, logs and toadstools for fire lighting, and a bed. This is a bed.” He indicated the truckle bed nestling in the gloomy shadows of the sooty room. “Pray do not take it in a snuff, sir. I shall dispatch a lad with firewood posthaste.”
In a snuff! “Wherefore should I have need of firewood, pray? I have no fireplace!”
The sergeant stuck his head inside the cell. It came out smiling. “Aren’t you the sharp-eyed jack! I reckon Your Worship will break many a lance in the tournaments. Right. Won’t be needing logs or faggots.” He penciled a line in the ledger: Master Devereaux will do without fire. No need to bother with him.
Michael was lugubriously conscious of the fact that he was not especially fear-provoking. Pretty as a girl and fights like a girl, was Ferdinand’s favorite gibe. Nevertheless, he was a grown man and a large one at that. One thing he had learned from his nemesis was that size alone had the power to intimidate. He loomed over the nasty man. “The accommodation is unacceptable to me. I would not bestow a dog in this pothole. Why should I put up with it myself?”
The sergeant stilled for a heartbeat, but when he realized the great flaxen hound was all bark and no bite, he relaxed somewhat. “If Your Worship is discontented—”
“Supremely discontented!”
“Then I heartily recommend the Greyhound Inn. Howbeit”—he scratched his capped pate—“it may be overcharged and overcrowded, filled to capacity with foreign lords and ambassadors. It is the same everywhere this time of year. Every room snatched up by His Majesty’s illustrious knights. Perhaps after the tournaments. The games are quite brutal, for some.” He considered the men shuffling their feet nearby. “Your servants may sleep in the public chambers on this level, sir, and if the public haunts are overstuffed, you had best bestow them at the wharf.”
Michael considered relocating to a public room or to the wharf, himself. There, however, privacy would be nonexistent. How would he protect his bottles or excuse his fever fits at dawn? King Henry was reputedly terrified of death and disease. If word got out that Michael was ailing and dependent on dubious medicine, he would find himself in worse places than this room.
“Personages wishing to participate in this even’s masque may see Sir Thomas Carwarden, master of the revels. The feast of the Garter is at nightfall, the masque at midnight. Godgigoden.” Riggs fled, leaving Michael, his manservant, the porters, and a mountain of oaken trunks in the rat-infested corridor in the vaulted undercroft, standing under a smoking wall sconce.
There must be someone he could take this up with, Michael reflected in indignation. He had no intention of residing underground like a troll. Moreover, there would be no amusing dalliances in these woeful conditions. This and the fact that cleanliness would be nigh on impossible—was he expected to buck in the conduit in the courtyard?—rankled him. This being his first venture to court did not imply he was a churl and therefore undeserving of decent quarters. His attendance at the annual chapter was approved months ago. He was the legal heir to an earldom, the future de facto ruler of a country. His noble lord’s primogenitor had been King Edward’s most trusted ally in an overthrow of a usurper centuries ago, and in recognition of his invaluable contribution, his steadfastness and valor, King Edward had rewarded his friend the earldom of Tyrone and the first knighthood of the Garter. Michael’s pride rebelled at the indignity. The dark fetid cell was unfit for a servant, let alone a future earl. Evading Pippin’s gaze, he paid the porters. He was sourly tempted to try his luck at the overstuffed Greyhound Inn. Yet living at court was still in his best interest. He could hear Tyrone say: The baser the beginning, the more praiseworthy the ascent to glory shall be. So be it, Michael thought. From here the only way was up.
The downward stone steps, meanly lit and infested with rodents, spiraled hazardously under Renée’s soft leather slippers as she furtively flew after Lady Anne Hastings’s moving shadow. A truly pious lady-in-waiting who cleaved to her beads with perpetual Aves and Paternosters on her breath did not sneak into palace undercrofts like a thief in the night. Then again, according to the gossipmongers, Lady Anne had not always been a paragon of saintliness. The tattle on her was the stuff that kept tongues clacking for years. Apparently, when Anne came to court as the young bride of Sir George Hastings, she efficiently secured a position among the highest-ranking ladies in the queen’s service and wormed her way into the king’s bed. When her sister, Lady Elizabeth Stafford, a favorite of Queen Katherine’s, discovered the love intrigue, she confided the truth to their brother, the mightiest lord and high steward of England. The Duke of Buckingham, proud, cantankerous, and feudally pugnacious, spewed his profane wrath on Sir William Compton, the king’s erstwhile page and groom of the bedchamber who had negotiated the illicit assignations and had since risen to become one of the king’s minions. Compton then hastened to find refuge under the wing of his royal master. The king, one leman short and out of favor with his indignant wife over the affair, chased off the irascible Buckingham with a flea in his ear and banished Lady Elizabeth from court very harshly, with scabs on her nose, labeling her an insidious spy. The horned Sir George Hastings installed his faithless wife in a nunnery and left court thereafter.
The affair had occurred three years ago. Now Lady Anne was back from her spiritual exile, using her newfangled godliness to play up to the devout queen, and skulking in murky cellars. It was Anne’s furtive escape from the queen’s grace