Royal Blood. Rona Sharon
I vow I shan’t depart this life ere I see you again.”
Michael drew a breath. “My lord, any words of wisdom to see me through the games?”
“Words of caution: practice modesty, gallantry, and reserve. Invite not the probing minds to meddle in your affairs. Conceal your purpose. Let no man discover your malady, nor its remedy. Keep your own counsel. Love not. Trust your senses and do not be afeared. I have given you the best of mine, my knowledge, my strength. Use my gifts wisely, discreetly. Here, take my ring. It will be your amulet. It belonged to my great Roman forebear who came to Britannia with the Ninth Legion and conquered a future under the golden standard.”
Emotion choked Michael. He had never seen the ring leave the earl’s forefinger before. The Tyrone arms under which he would compete in the tournaments displayed a rampant red eagle with golden talons over black. The emblem etched in the gold ring was of a serpent with the head and breasts of a woman and the wings of a dragon. Reverently he removed it from the anemic hand and slid it onto his. Anticipation flavored with apprehension urged him to be on his way.
“I suggest you conceal this ring from the eyes of the court, for the pagan symbol may offend their Christian sensibilities and condemn you to suspicion and reproach. Remember, you are no fondling, Michael Devereaux, future Earl of Tyrone, though you may seem so. Appearances may deceive, words may deceive, and even actions deceive. You will see what others cannot. You will know their lies. You will taste their fears and desires. Use them, beguile them, but never let yourself be fooled. Let not idle pursuits deflect you from the course you are on. I took a fearless boy and forged him into a fearsome man. What you most desire is always within your grasp.”
“I’m your liege man. I feal to you in all things, my noble lord. Your desires are my desires.”
The earl’s dark, sunken eyes gleamed with pride and affection as he patted Michael’s head. “My golden boy. You are a good son, dutiful and clever. You know what you have to do.”
2
Splendidly false, nobly untruthful.
—Horace: Odes III
The Royal Château in Amboise, France
“Move your feet, little whore!”
Princess Renée de Valois of France, wishing the varmint taking her by the arm ten fathoms deep, staggered out of her apartment with a sheet wrapped around her nude body. Mortification cooled her fury as she caught sight of the sea of goggling eyes, noble and common, enjoying the spectacle: the late King Louis’s youngest daughter being dragged in dishabille along the gallery like a condemned prisoner to the execution block. Bedraggled, quivering, ebony tresses tumbling in a tangle to her waist, she lacked only the crown of nettles to complete her shame.
Behind her, her beloved Raphael was being marched by the royal guards, his untidy clothes smeared with multihued paints, for he had been interrupted while creating a new masterpiece for which she provided the subject matter: Froward Renée, whom the court would henceforth dub “the wanton princess who shamed the Valois,” had been posing for a Venus.
The Duke de Soubise, her tormentor, smiled with cruel satisfaction as the crowd parted to clear a path for them toward King Francis’s apartment. Renée held her head high, deploying the majesty impressed upon her by Queen Anne of France, Duchess of Brittany, her dearly departed mother. She disregarded the leering faces marveling at her degradation; she ignored the orphaned girl inside her, desperate to crawl into a hole and weep. She had none to blame but herself.
Soubise had merely taken advantage of her foolish temerity. It never occurred to her that the besotted old lecher, whom she deemed an innocuous pest, would burst upon her with guards issued by Long-Nose. Alas, while she had been savoring her first affaire de coeur, the great love of her life, Soubise had been plotting his coup de grâce down to the last detail. She was doomed.
Renée remembered the sweet-tempered, dutiful little princess she had once been. That girl would never have conceived of taking a pauper for a lover, but she had not been herself since her mother passed away three winters hence. She loved her sweet mother, heart and soul, and would gladly have traded places with her rather than endure the pain of watching her waste away of an illness. King Louis, upon glimpsing his youngest daughter’s grief the first day of her mother’s funeral, ruthlessly commanded Renée to compose herself, muttering in her ear, “If a single tear should roll upon your cheek in the common gaze, you will cease to be a daughter of mine.”
Queen Anne’s funeral lasted forty days. Forty days of hell during which Renée mourned her mother’s demise in secret, in terror of discovery, and in absolute solitude. Afterward, in the spirit of her mother’s fiercely independent nature, she cut the reins imposed on her by a heartless sire, becoming refractory, bold, and feisty insomuch that King Louis felt hard-pressed to contract an immediate new marriage alliance for his fifteen-year-old shrew of a daughter. As her betrothed, Prince Andres of Navarre, had died in battle, her royal sire settled on the aged Duke of Lorraine, who thereupon accommodated Renée in passing away before the ink dried on the settlement. Oh, he could have married her against her will, but he knew she would be back within the month and that he would have to bear the brunt of whatever trickery and mischief she had applied to be free.
She distinctly remembered her father telling her that she would be the death of him when no other groom could be found to take her off his hands. A war had been declared between them. To wear her spirit down and convince her to seek refuge in the arms of a husband, he kept her at his side, employing her in all sorts of tedious matters of state that tested her fortitude and patience.
Two years later he had lost the battle and perished. Of exasperation, Renée presumed, albeit others claimed that his aged body expired from “overexertion in the bedchamber” while in the throes of his last desperate attempt at begetting a male heir off his third and very young wife, Lady Mary Tudor, King Henry VIII of England’s sister, who had become Renée’s bosom friend.
“Froward Renée,” King Louis called her at his deathbed, an epithet that had somehow found itself into the mouths of the court and stayed with her. “You think you take after your mother, but it is I you resemble. Were it not for Salic Law, which precludes women from ascending to the throne of France, I would see you on mine, my daughter.”
“My sister Claude is the eldest,” Renée reminded him. “She has precedence.”
“And the wits God gave a cow,” her father stated with disgust. “Claude the Cow.”
Not once did Renée miss him after his death.
Lamentably, as soon as Long-Nose inherited the crown, she had a new betrothed. A German prince, rumored to be crablike and malformed. She disposed of him easily. Well-placed whispers as regards poison effectively put him off the idea of marrying her. King Francis was outraged.
“You look fetching, Renée, a veritable goddess of love,” said the decrepit Soubise, smacking his lips. “Although I prefer you nude, as you were a moment ago. A feast to mine eyes.”
“Your eyes will be the first items I cut out, imbecile!”
“This is the Lady Marguerite’s influence. She has odd notions of a woman’s place at court. All that free thinking and free spirituality and free love…”
Renée shot Soubise a sulfurous glare. Lady Marguerite of Angoulême, King Francis’s older sister, was a patroness of the arts, of humanists and reformers, a poetess and an author of plays. Her acclaimed salon, the New Parnassus, had become Renée’s haven after losing her royal parents to God and her older sister Claude to a new husband and an elevation to the throne of France. There she had transformed from a lonely, malcontent, introverted girl to the lady she was meant to be. “I am certain His Majesty will be interested in your opinion on his lady sister, Soubise.”
“You mistake me, ma petite. I’m grateful to my king’s lady sister for delivering you into my clutches. Fear not, we’ll continue to practice her notions of love indefatigably. They would say at court, ‘The radiant young princess of the violet-blue eyes has become the loving