Royal Blood. Rona SharonЧитать онлайн книгу.
What false promises had Long-Nose made the cardinal and why? Renée cared to know. “Mayhap it is better this way. Men can tell the millage on women. Pure-looking is good.”
“Pure!” Lady Marguerite huffed. In millage she surpassed a hackney—and knew it.
“I am chilled,” Renée clipped. “I would be of no use to you if I died of lung rot.”
“You may cover yourself,” the cardinal permitted. As she wrapped the sheet and cloak about her, he said, “The Florentine ambassador described you as a delightfully witty, educated girl of angelic beauty and grace, a replica of the queen your mother, which you are. He said you were not for the distaff and praised you for knowing the secrets of diplomacy. Has she talents, skills?”
“She declaims playwrights, philosophers, poets, and theologians from memory,” Marguerite replied curtly. “She dances and sings skillfully and accompanies her singing on the lute. She has an eye for art and is a sharp cardplayer. There is no end to her artful accomplishments.”
A direct hit! Renée could have strangled the woman she had hereto considered her doting benefactress.
“Convent-bred?” asked the cardinal.
“Fah!” Marguerite fleered. “Queen Anne refused to part with her little talisman. After Her Grace died, King Louis took an interest in the girl. He called her ‘my precocious child, created in my image.’ She became the keeper of his secrets and a shrewd dissembler. I do not know what he hoped to gain by sowing her mind with needless information. He created a most disagreeable creature no prince would have. A woman to be treated with caution, Your Grace.”
Renée seethed. She was nothing like her father! She was her mother’s daughter! “Jesu, pity! What is it you want from me? Let us speak of it and be done!”
“Pray do not expect her loyalty,” Marguerite added. “She keeps faith with no one.”
“I kept faith with you!” Renée cried bitterly. “How confoundedly imbecilic of me!”
“Her loyalty is the least of my concerns, for that can easily be bought.” The cardinal took a seat behind the table and filled a goblet with wine. “She is very young. That is my sole concern. Albeit…her purity and inexperience make her the perfect instrument, for who would suspect a fresh young thing to be anything other than what she appears to be?”
King Francis looked pleased as a swine in mud. “Sister, we should like to offer you a way to redeem yourself in our eyes and regain our favor.”
Aha! The negotiation part, at last! “Am I to be sent to a nunnery?” Renée asked tartly.
“The good Lord offers sinners countless ways to redeem themselves,” Cardinal Medici said. “A girl who wishes to atone for the sin of licentiousness takes the veil, but you are not penitent, are you? You regret getting caught.”
Renée smiled pertly. “Mayhap I should atone for my sin of incompetence.” She was already in so much trouble she doubted her insolence could exacerbate her situation.
“You shall have ample opportunities to atone for that, my dear.”
“Install you in a nunnery!” Long-Nose, as always a step behind, scoffed. “How long before you escape to your mother’s relatives in Brittany and raise an army against me, hein?”
“I would never commit treason against France!” Renée vowed, and meant it.
“Let us discuss your reward.”
“My reward?” Renée blinked in surprise at the cardinal. What had she missed?
“Should you succeed,” he clarified.
“In what?”
“I will double your annuity,” Long-Nose announced.
“As payment for doing what?” she dogged. This could not be good for her health.
“And your lover will be spared,” the cardinal interposed. “Upon your successful return.”
“My return? From England?” Her heart drummed wildly. “But Your Graces will not tell me until we have set a price and I pledged my collaboration.”
“Very good,” the cardinal praised.
“I told you she was shrewd.”
“I am not a whore!”
“This is not an office for a whore,” Cardinal Medici assured her.
“I refuse regardless.”
“Refuse now and your punishment will be as I have decreed,” Francis replied. “Soubise, the death of your lover, and the loss of your annuity and dowry, mayhap even a charge of treason.”
“Consent and you will profit. However”—Cardinal Medici’s enticing tone turned flinty—“should you accept our offer and renege at a later date, your punishment will be death.”
“You expect me to state my price and make my decision before I know the particulars?”
“Once our negotiation is concluded, we will have passed the point of no return,” Cardinal Medici emphasized. “Should you fail and try to flee…”
“I never fail,” Renée muttered dismissively, her mind feverishly weighing the pros and cons. How far would she go to secure her future? “Would I be asked to commit a mortal sin?”
“You will be asked to perform a holy duty,” Medici asserted.
“Is spying on the English a holy duty?” she countered challengingly. She was aware of the risks she was running in conducting herself in this fashion, yet they were testing her.
“We are not asking you to spy,” muttered the cardinal. “Yes or no? Decide now.”
“If I am caught, the English will execute me. If I refuse, you will execute Raphael. If I fail, you will kill me. So, in effect, my only recourse is to accept your assignment and succeed.”
“Yes!” the cardinal and the king responded cheerfully as one.
“In that case, I demand the duchy of Brittany and Raphael’s freedom as my reward.”
“You cannot have Brittany!” Francis thundered as Marguerite cried, “The nerve of this girl!”
Renée glared unflinchingly at Marguerite. “You are not the one being asked to risk her life.” She regarded the king and the cardinal. “Whatever you would have me do, I set Brittany as my prize. Once my ‘holy duty’ is performed to your satisfaction, the queen my mother’s titles and estates will be restored to me with a royal assurance that the right of succession will be passed to my issue, in female line. I will then leave your court and your realm.”
An angry muscle twitched in King Francis’s jaw. “The duchy of Brittany is within my realm, as it was within the realm of the king your father!”
“As decreed by Semi-Salic Law, the duchy of Brittany belonged to the queen my mother.” Renée listed all the arguments her mother had plagued her father with before and after they were married. Her sire, resolved to absorb the duchy into his dominion, bribed Pope Alexander VI for a dispensation to put aside his wife, Queen Joan, and bullied Anne of Brittany into marrying him. Queen Anne refused until death to sanction the marriage of Claude to Louis’s heir, pushing instead for an alliance with Luxembourg and for Brittany to go to Renée. Nevertheless, with his single-minded ruthlessness, Louis saw to it that the marriage of Claude and Francis took place in the year following Anne’s death and kept Brittany within the grasp of the French monarchy.
“You cannot have Brittany,” King Francis repeated decisively. “You shall be paid in gold.”
“One has no use for gold within a prison. I would have my independence or nothing at all.”
“This nothing includes Soubise,” he reminded her. “And the death of your lover.”