Royal Blood. Rona Sharon
me than no man, for no illustrious prince would have you for a wife, Princess Lust.”
She made the mistake of glancing at him—seeing the covetous lust in his rheumy eyes, the spittle foaming in the corners of his mouth, the sagging dewlaps of his pockmarked visage—and almost retched. A more repulsive creature did not exist at court.
Her bare feet pattering along the cold stone, Renée looked back at the swarthy young man prodded onward by pikes at his back. Raphael, save us! Her eyes spoke in silent supplication. Her lover’s head wilted. Was he crying? His frailty incensed her, disgusted her. As much as she admired his artistic gentleness, at that moment she needed him to be the stronger of the two of them. Then it dawned on her that his penance would be much worse than a hair shirt, for he, a common painter, had dared to carnally know a princess of the blood.
As a rule, a lady caught with a lover who was not her husband was banished to a nunnery—a lady caught in bed with her spouse became an object of ridicule—and the lover paid his dues in a duel instigated by either the horned husband or the enraged father. As for princesses of the blood, the matter was a trifle more complicated. Certes, daughters were less welcome to their royal sires than sons, but they were useful currency in acquiring thrones and land, as in the case of Renée’s mother. A princess’s maidenhood was a valuable national asset.
Renée, an unwed princess, was setting a precedent in taking a lover, and a nonentity at that. Custom dictated that her defiler be charged with high treason and put to death. Poor Raphael. What did he know of court intrigue, power plays, and betrayed confidences? He was but a poor painter from a village in Perugia, who carved out a life for himself by the skill of his brush. She would have to defend him, but how? Would King Francis spare Raphael if she surrendered the two boons he was after—her body and a renunciation of her claims to the duchy of Brittany?
You fool, she could hear her royal sire berating her, have I taught you nothing?
“Here we are,” the Duke of Soubise announced as the royal bodyguard thrust open the doors to the king’s privy chamber. Keeping her spine ramrod straight, Renée walked in.
King Francis sat at a table with his sister Lady Marguerite. Cardinal Medici lounged in the bay window. Renée’s sister, Queen Claude, was conspicuously absent. Soubise nudged Renée to the center of the luxurious chamber, genuflected fulsomely, and launched into a detailed account of the compromising scene he had come upon. Explaining about the painting would be pointless, Renée knew, for she would be subjected to a physical examination. The king and his sister wore flinty expressions. Suspicion buzzed in her head. In his peroration, the toadying, impudent duke magnanimously offered himself as her savior in marriage. King Francis dismissed Soubise with an ambiguous promise to consider his suit and ordered the guards to place Raphael under arrest. Lady Marguerite sent a page to fetch Renée a cloak and shoes, for which Renée was grateful.
Still their dignified astonishment did not ring true.
King Francis cleared the chamber of his attendants so that only Marguerite, Cardinal Medici, and Renée remained. “We are appalled!” he blasted away at her. “Your wantonness shames us in the eyes of the world! Neither maid nor wife, your name a scandal, your honor slain—we are of a mind to exercise the severest form of penalty. Henceforward your ample dowry and annuity are revoked, your defiler will be trialed for high treason, and you will marry the Duke of Soubise!”
Renée, practicing the sangfroid bequeathed to her by her royal sire, listened and wondered how Long-Nose expected to govern France when a child could see through this charade. The son of a minor French prince, Francis of Valois came to the throne by right of birth strengthened with his marriage to Claude. Though he was generally considered a humanist and a man of letters, Renée knew him to be a man of slight morals. Her father once told her that when something looked like a trap and smelled like a trap, it was a trap. Soubise’s catching her en flagrante delicto was no accident.
“Your Majesty.” She sank to her knees, head bowed penitently. “She who is undeserving of your bounty and grace kneels before you in shame, humbled by your benevolence.”
Her quiet submission threw her spectators into a confused silence. Cardinal Medici stepped away from the bay window. “Does she speak English?”
“She is fluent in English, Latin, Greek, Spanish, and Italian,” Lady Marguerite replied.
The cardinal lifted Renée’s chin. “Are you intimate with personages at the English court?”
Renée studied him charily. Pope Leo X’s first cousin and designated successor, raised by his uncle, Lorenzo Il Magnifico of Florence, the godfather of the illuminated era they lived in, was not the transparent buffoon Long-Nose was but of her sire’s ilk. “I correspond with the Dowager Queen of France, the newly remarried Duchess of Suffolk. Lady Mary and I are friends.”
The cardinal helped her to her feet. “Show me your teeth.”
Renée was taken aback. “Am I a horse—”
“Do as His Grace bids you, insolent girl!” Lady Marguerite scolded.
Renée’s amazement doubled. So, she thought, Soubise spoke the truth. Lady Marguerite had a hand in this. Sweet Jesu! Was Raphael involved as well? No, his petrifaction had been genuine. He loved her; he would never betray her. In contrast, Lady Marguerite was low and deceitful. Simmering with resentment, Renée offered the cardinal a toothy smile.
“Good, good.” He nodded. “Now remove the portmanteau….”
Her eyes narrowed into slits. “I am cold.”
“It would take a minute, no more.”
Reluctantly, she dropped the cloak.
“And the bedsheet.”
Renée felt her jaw slackening. She jutted her chin defiantly. “I refuse.”
“Then we will summon a guard to do it for you.” The Lady Marguerite snapped her fingers.
Renée flushed. She wasn’t timid—she was livid! How dare they insult a princess of France? Thoughts flew like darts through her head. She glowered scornfully at King Francis. The lustful degenerate had untiringly attempted to unclothe her for months. It galled her that he should now get his wish, leastways part of it. “By the rood, what is this about?” she demanded to know.
“None of your concern, at the moment,” the cardinal replied calmly. “The sheet.”
“Guards!” Marguerite called, jolting Renée.
“Call them off!” Renée hissed. She did not stir until she heard the doors close. If these three jades insisted on examining her as one would a broodmare, she would give them a good show of backbone. Her revenge would be all the sweeter for it in the end. They truly had no idea whom they were dealing with. She leveled a cool gaze at the cardinal, burying her humiliation in a dark place, and, with a smile of contemptuous superiority, efficiently divested herself of the sheet. It sashayed off her body to pile at her ankles. “There.” She straightened her spine unabashedly, a gesture that made her small breasts jut. She wanted to die. “Do I please Your Graces?”
Cardinal Medici perused her swiftly and looked away. “Tell me of her character.”
King Francis, who short of rape had done everything within his power to lay her and failed, scrutinized her at length. She felt his lascivious gaze slide over her breasts, belly, mons veneris, thighs, and legs like unwanted hands. “She has all the wiles and guiles of an expensive whore—”
A gasp of indignation escaped Renée’s lips. The lying cur!
“—the proud willfulness of her mother, and the deceitful practices, tricks, and stratagems of her sire,” King Francis added bitterly, his eyes on Renée’s body.
The cardinal searched her eyes. “How many lovers have you had, Renée?”
She sucked in her breath. “I am not a whore!” she ground out emphatically, not the least bit cowed yet exceedingly froward. “If you