Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [36]
Ashes
Even a young prince can be jaded. I had endured countless receptions and balls, had watched an endless parade of aristocratic beauties present themselves for my approval—and for secret embraces in shadowed chambers or damp-walled gardens (giggling, rustling skirts, and then the sun too bright on a painted cheek). But this lost, thin-waisted nymphet was different. My mother noticed it first.
"Did you see that girl?" The queen stood beside me at the top of the stairs and studied the ballroom below us. "The one with Sir Lewis." Only a second before she had dismissed the gaggle of dancers, turned her back on the view from the balcony, and snapped open a perfumed fan pulled from her sleeve. Now, though, her eyes narrowed with interest, and she leaned over the railing. Like colorful gems spilled from a purse, men and women in velvet and satin moved across the marble tiles, each couple following the pattern of the pair in front of them.
"Look! She's charmed the old fool into a gavotte. It's a wonder he can hoist that monstrous frame out of bed in the morning, much less drag it about to a jig."
I glanced idly at the ragged chain of dancers beneath me. It was hard to miss chubby Lewis—bobbing up and down to his own private music while the others kept proper time—but once I had spotted the old fellow, I could not take my eyes from his partner. It was not the blue dress or the crystal slippers that shed rainbows as she twirled. It was not the lace gloves or the tiny jeweled bows that winked from her train. It was the way she carried herself—or, more accurately, the way she didn't. Instead of posing, dolblike, she floated, spinning and turning like a leaf, from hand to hand.
The queen, still focused on the great hall spread below us, must have noticed my interest. "I am glad," she told me, without taking her eyes from the pageant of the dance, "you are not like some, mongrels led here and there, driven only by their base appetites." I barely listened, already dizzied by the whirling fairy below me. "Perhaps your refusal to wed has been well advised, my son. Perhaps it will secure you now a bride of a different sort."
After I had kissed my mother's cheek and worked my way to the bottom of the stairs, the fairy dancer was my reward. As glowing and impartial as the sun, she took my arm for the next carole with the same smile she gave poor Lewis in farewell. She seemed, in fact, to have no idea who I was.
"You make the old dances seem new," I told her. "How has grace and beauty like yours stayed hidden from our court?" Something in her countenance unmanned me. The blaze of sconces twinkled behind her, and my flattery seemed empty and foolish.
"I have never been to court," she told me, training curious, unblinking eyes on mine. "Or danced like this, or met anyone like you."
"Surely I am not so different from other men." I laughed, more confident now. This was a game I had played before, over and over until I knew the script by heart, all the blushes, every whispered lie.
"Perhaps not," she replied. "But except for my father and the kind gentleman who danced with me just now, you are the only man I have ever spoken to." She cocked her head like a pretty sparrow and studied me while we spun. "You are so tall and fair, you quite take my breath away!"
She should have colored and curtsied; she should have lowered her gaze from mine. But her eyes, wide and greedy, devoured my face, and she laughed like a man, her head held back, her mouth unhidden by her hands.
I searched the weary catalogue of women I had known. Not one of them had looked like this, had danced like this, had stirred to life an open rush of affection I thought had died years before.
I learned the games early, you see. My first memory is of the endless carpet, the long trail along which my nurse led me to the tall, lovely woman who sat with her maids and laughed like music, "Mother, look what I have made for you," I cried, dropping my chain of dandelions in her lap, trying