The Hidden Evil. Barbara CartlandЧитать онлайн книгу.
morning and start the day fresh.”
“I have no need of rest,” Sheena replied grimly.
Already she was beginning to see the magnitude of the task ahead of her. How could she on her own undo the harm that must have been done to the little Queen by this evil woman?
Perhaps she had been kept shut up with her alone, having no one decent and respectable around her to whom she could turn to learn the truth or to weigh in the balance all the wrong and twisted things they were putting before her under the guise of ‘education’.
“Your Queen is extremely busy at the moment,” the Duchesse was saying. “She has been learning her part for the play she and the Royal children are to act before the King next week. It will be a very gay evening. Perhaps you will be able to help with the final details.”
Sheena felt herself shiver. Play-acting! What would her father say to that? She could see his hands raised in horror, hear the anger in his voice if she told him that Mary Stuart was to strut the boards and to perform as if she was a common actress. The audience might consist of a King and his Court, but the wrong was still there.
They had reached the end of a passage hung with wonderful pictures and carpeted so that it seemed as if one’s feet walked on velvet. They turned and another great corridor lay ahead of them.
“This part of The Palace,” the Duchesse was saying, “is given over to the Royal children. Some of them are very young, as you may well know, but the Dauphin and Queen Mary are almost the same age and they have many interests in common. There are other companions for your Queen as well. Thirty-seven children of the Nobility of our land share her studies and her sports.”
“Thirty-seven!”
Sheena repeated the words in absolute astonishment.
The Duchesse smiled her beautiful glorious smile, which revealed the whiteness of her teeth and made her exquisite eyes twinkle a little.
“Yes, thirty-seven. I hope you did not think we left our little Scottish visitor without any interests or amusements.”
“No – no, of course not,” Sheena stammered.
“At first her four little friends, the four Marys who came with her from Scotland, were sent away, but only so that she should learn French. It is very difficult to learn any language when one is talking one’s own all the time. But now they are constantly with her, although just at the moment they are still in the country for a special rout that they had promised to attend some time ago. Only Mary Stuart has come back to Paris especially to greet you.”
“That is most gracious of her,” Sheena said quickly.
“And here I think we shall find her,” the Duchesse smiled.
The door she indicated was flung open for them by a footman resplendent in gold lace and Sheena eagerly followed the Duchesse into the room.
It seemed to her that all this had been a wearisome preparation for the moment when she would see her own Queen and when she would start on the work she had come to do and for which she had travelled so many miles.
And then as the chandeliers, pale-grey walls, carpets covered in roses and great hangings of exquisite embroidery swam before her eyes in a kaleidoscope of colour and movement and steadied into being only a frame for the person who stood waiting at the far end of the salon.
Sheena saw Mary Stuart.
She had expected a child. She saw instead a young woman who appeared far older than herself.
Her hair was that strange liquid gold that the poets had written about since the beginning of time. It was not unlike Sheena’s own hair and yet there the resemblance between them ended.
Mary Stuart was taller than Sheena and her full oval face had a beauty that was almost classical in its conception. There was no flaw to be found in it and, perhaps because it was so cool, so flawless, so smooth and clear-cut, the face was a little lacking in expression.
And yet Mary Stuart’s beauty lay in her skin, in her hands, long, slim and pale as snow, and in the way she held herself. There was nothing that was not beautiful about her and yet somehow Sheena felt a little stab at her heart as if she had expected far too much and found something lacking.
Her feet carried her forward without her being conscious that she had moved. Then, as she reached the Queen of Scotland and sank down before her in a deep curtsey that was not only a greeting but a reverence, the Queen spoke,
“So you are Sheena McCraggan! I thought I should remember you but I don’t.”
She sounded disappointed and Sheena said hastily,
“It is many, many years ago, Your Majesty. You were little more than a babe.”
“I thought you had dark hair,” Mary Stuart said a little petulantly. “So I must have been thinking of someone else.”
Sheena then rose from her curtsey. Never had she expected her first conversation with the Queen of Scotland to be like this. She had planned so often the things she would say, the greetings she would bring her and now she could only stand tongue-tied, something cold and unhappy crushing at her heart.
“I wonder who it was I found myself thinking about?” Mary Stuart persisted, looking not at Sheena but turning her head a little to address someone who was standing in the further corner of the room and who now came forward.
Sheena glanced upwards and felt herself stiffen. It was the man to whom she had spoken in the inn, the man who had insulted Scotland by his cynical and rude remarks, the man she had hated all the way from the coast to Paris and thought that she would never see again.
She had forced herself, when he had gone, not to ask any of her escort who he was and not to speak of him. Now she regretted that she had had no idea of his identity. If he was in attendance on Mary Stuart, he was an enemy and she must beware of him.
“You have not welcomed Mistress McCraggan to France,” the Duchesse said quietly to Mary Stuart, and to Sheena’s surprise the young Queen flushed slightly at the rebuke.
“Forgive me, madame,” she said to the Duchesse and, turning to Sheena, held out her hand. “I do welcome you, I do truly,” she said. “It must have been a long and tiring journey and it was very gracious of you to come to me.”
Sheena felt the young Queen’s hands touch hers and in that moment she knew the full and fatal fascination of the Stuarts, which could so cleverly and so skilfully charm all with whom they came into contact and make them in an instant their abject and adoring slaves.
She found herself holding on to the Queen’s hand and stammering the few words she had intended to speak and which had been in her mind when she first left Scotland.
“I have – come, ma’am, to – to bring you the greetings, the love and – the devotion of all those who look on you as their – rightful Queen and to tell you that they are holding your Kingdom for you if it means that – that every man in Scotland must die to do so.”
She spoke passionately, forgetting for a moment everything around her and seeing only the bare heads of the Clansmen, the wind and rain in their faces, as her ship drew away from the quay.
“Thank you! Thank you!” Mary Stuart said. “Tell them that my heart is with them.”
It was beautifully said and, as Sheena felt the tears gathering in her eyes, the voice of the man she so disliked intruded upon them.
“Well done,” she heard him say and it seemed to Sheena that he broke the poignant spell between herself and Mary Stuart.
“I have not introduced you,” the Duchesse said. “Mistress McCraggan, this is the Duc de Salvoire. Your Queen will tell you that there is no one in the whole of France who is cleverer at assessing the worth and performance of any horse. In fact none of us buy our horseflesh without his advice. Is that not so?”
The Duc bowed as Sheena dropped him a curtsey.