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Royal Blood. Rona SharonЧитать онлайн книгу.

Royal Blood - Rona Sharon


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well aware that others’ secrets were one’s best currency, to be used in various enterprises to one’s own advantage. Holding her heavy skirts high above the ground, she tiptoed in Anne’s footsteps along the convoluted, torchlit tunnels and listened for sounds.

      “Anne, in here,” whispered a culture male voice, beckoning Anne into an alcove. So, Renée thought, the lady was up to her old tricks. “Did you make sure no one followed you?”

      “Hello, Ned.” Anne’s tone was sulky. “What is it you wish to discuss with me so secretly?”

      “Is this the greeting I get? No thanks for convincing your bitter-minded husband to take pity on you and let you out of the holy cage you have inhabited for the past three years?”

      “You put me there!”

      “’Twas your husband’s doing. Hastings did not appreciate the horns you put on his head.”

      “It was your bloody-minded meddling that sent me to St. Mary’s! What a nightmare! Three years of my life chafing my knees on cold stone to convince a flock of spiteful, decrepit virgins I was duly, penitently reformed! I shall never forgive you for this. Never!”

      Renée, curious as to the identity of the man, peeked into the alcove. Ha! She knew it!

      “You expect me to look the other way when you strumpet yourself in this brothel court with the usurper of my throne? He never cared for you, Anne. Making my lady sister his whore was another means wherewith to make me eat humble pie, to bring me to heel, to demonstrate to the court and to the entire world, for that matter, that we—the Lancastrians, the White Roses, the Poles, Abergavenny, progeny of purer Plantagenet blood—are nothing! That I am nothing! And now his henchman in scarlet robes, that overreaching venomous fox! That bawd! He has stolen my rightful role of chief adviser, curtails my policies, mocks and opposes everything I do on principle. He told his king that ‘certain personages’ were behaving in a manner that was not commensurate with the dignity and honor of the council. Fah! He spits in my face and is trawling for excuses to strike against me. How I disdain his ostentation, his presumptuousness. His very presence reviles me! He insults me openly, knowing his false king would protect him from my vengeance. I have sworn to rid myself—and England!—of them both, two boars in one valley.”

      “Ned!” Anne gasped, horrified. “Remember our father!”

      “Our noble sire thought to play kingmaker, Anne. That was his error. He deposed a boy to make Richard of Gloucester king, and only when the deed was done, when he heard the shouts, Verus rex, Rex Ricardus! for Dickon, did it occur to him he had as much right to succeed Ned.”

      “Hush, brother, ’tis high treason you speak, and I would fain be excluded from your plots. Your hatred is showing. You are dangerous to be around.” Anne made to leave.

      Renée jumped back and froze. Ned’s delaying his lady sister with affectionate cajolery was not what fixed her to the spot—it was the fair-haired giant leaning against the wall beam across from her on the opposite edge of the alcove. He tipped his head in greeting, grinning lopsidedly.

      Sweet Jesu, he was handsome: pleasingly proportioned, well groomed, with golden hair to his shoulders, bright eyes, and there was something very appealing about his mouth as he smiled at her. Saints, what was she thinking? She had been caught! But by whom?

      Michael could not remove his eyes from the oval face and the gemlike eyes studying him in the dimness. Lavender and ambergris, her seductive fragrance misted his brain till he no longer cared what treason was being whispered inside the niche. She was young, wispy, parceled in a décolleté gown, diamonds glittering on her collarbones, glossy dark locks cascading to her waist.

      Sweet tension gripped his body as she perused him with boldness, wariness, and calculation, trying to divine his identity and purpose in spying on the couple, as she was clearly doing.

      Would she believe he had happened upon the intriguers by mistake? Having sent Pippin to the public haunts, locked his anchoritic dwelling—if the door hadn’t had a lock, he would never have stayed—he had gotten drattedly lost navigating the stale, dim, subterranean passageways.

      “Should he die without male heir, I shall easily take the throne,” Ned was saying.

      “Queen Katherine is pregnant again. Twice the sheet has come clean. Maria de Salinas says it’s a boy. The king rejoices in secret and tomcats after Bessie Blount. Her Majesty spends every waking hour before her prie-dieu, afraid of a recurrence of the last time a prince was conceived.”

      Ned cursed venomously. “Who else knows of this?”

      “Two, mayhap three of her closest women.”

      “Then I shan’t wait. I will do it tonight, at the midnight masque, and you will help me.”

      “Me?” Anne cried in fright.

      “Yes, you, the lady sister of the future king of England. Hark, Anne, I was told by a worthy prognosticator, a Carthusian monk by the name of Nicholas Hopkins, that the stars are aligned in my favor. He prophesies that the usurper of my throne should have no son and that I will succeed him. Already, I have begun to amass armed fighting men on the Welsh border. I bribed several of the yeomen of the royal guard with bales of cloth of gold and silver to do my bidding when the time is ripe. And that time is now. I am high on the public’s mind in London and throughout my holdings. Anne, I tell you, the love this country has borne its king has been tempered by plague, taxes, and Henry’s inability to produce a male heir. Discontent is rife amongst the nobles as well as among the common folk, for how could anyone trust a sovereign who lets inferiors serve in the work of governing? Look at his minions. Charles Brandon, the son of a standard bearer with a vein of ambition a mile wide, wields more influence over the usurper than any of us, nobles of ancient ancestry, vessels of true Plantagenet blood. William Compton, another minion, an orphan of the court. Who is he to garner offices and rake a fortune? Abergavenny and the Poles have sworn their allegiance to me. We would rather die than be ordered as we are now.”

      “Ned, our sire was attainted and decapitated for rebelling against Richard the Third. I beg you, brother, reconsider!”

      High treason, Michael mouthed to his alluring cospy. She cocked an eyebrow in response, divulging none of her thoughts. Who was she? And who was this Ned, plotting to assassinate the king as if it were the solution to his quandary? The White Rose Lords were scions of the Plantagenet House of York, Michael knew, survivors of the gory civil wars that had raged between the royal houses of Lancaster and York for decades, ripping the country apart. Henry Tudor, a distant claimant to the throne on the Lancastrian side and the present king’s royal sire, had defeated the last Yorkist king, Richard III, Dickon of Gloucester, and married his niece, the best surviving Yorkist claimant, thereby uniting the two royal houses and their arms.

      “Henry Tudor will meet his Maker tonight,” Ned stated decisively, “and the Right Reverend Cardinal of York will fall with him. The council disdains his grandiloquent vanity. In the taverns they say he would destroy this realm. Once I dispatch his false king, there will be no protection for the cardinal, no absolution, no quarter given to the lowborn arriviste. He will lose all his power and authority and be left exposed to suffer the vengeful hand of my wrath.”

      “How will you do it? Nay, do not tell me. I do not care to know.”

      Anne’s arrant dismay roused Michael’s preservation instinct. Conspirators were a volatile, desperate, highly strung lot, running a most hazardous gamble. Hadn’t Brutus talked Cassius out of running his gladius through the flighty, clever, pusillanimous Cicero during a row wherein the great agitator tried to wash out of the scheme he himself had contrived to slay Julius Caesar days before the Ides of March? Yet the one thing more dangerous than eavesdropping on the traitors hatching the plot was to come into the attention of a mysterious third party. A very pretty third party, to be sure, but dangerous just the same, for she would blab on him to her masters.

      “Tonight, at the midnight masque, after the mock fighting, there will be dancing. Lure him to a dalliance in the gallery. There is a bay behind the Venus tapestry. Keep his


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