Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [84]
I had forgotten the red dress; His Majesty halted directly in front of me and bowed extravagantly, hand over his waist.
“Chère Madame!” he said. “We are enchanted!”
I heard a deep intake of breath from Jamie, and then he stepped forward and bowed to the King.
“May I present my wife, Your Majesty—my lady Broch Tuarach.” He rose and stepped back. Attracted by a quick flutter of Jamie’s fingers, I stared at him for a moment of incomprehension, before suddenly realizing that he was signaling me to curtsy.
I dipped automatically, struggling to keep my eyes on the floor and wondering where I would look when I bobbed up again. Madame Nesle de la Tourelle was standing just behind Louis, watching the introduction with a slightly bored look on her face. Gossip said that “Nesle” was Louis’s current favorite. She was, in current vogue, wearing a gown cut below both breasts, with a bit of supercedent gauze which was clearly meant for the sake of fashion, as it couldn’t possibly function for either warmth or concealment.
It was neither the gown nor the prospect it revealed that had rattled me, though. The breasts of “Nesle,” while reasonably adequate in size, pleasant in proportion, and tipped with large brownish areolae, were further adorned with a pair of nipple jewels that caused their settings to recede into insignificance. A pair of diamond-encrusted swans with ruby eyes stretched their necks toward each other, swinging precariously in their gold-hooped perches. The workmanship was superb and the materials stunning, but it was the fact that each gold hoop passed through her nipple that made me feel rather faint. The nipples themselves were rather seriously inverted, but this fact was disguised by the large pearl that covered each one, dangling on a thin gold chain that looped from side to side of the main hoop.
I rose, red-faced and coughing, and managed to excuse myself, hacking politely into a handkerchief as I backed away. I felt a presence in my rear and stopped just in time to avoid backing into Jamie, who was watching the King’s mistress with no pretense whatever of tactful obliviousness.
“She told Marie d’Arbanville that Master Raymond did the piercing for her,” I remarked under my breath. His fascinated gaze didn’t waver.
“Shall I make an appointment?” I asked. “I imagine he’d do it for me if I gave him the recipe for caraway tonic.”
Jamie glanced down at me at last. Taking my elbow, he steered me toward a refreshment alcove.
“If you so much as speak to Master Raymond again,” he said, out of the corner of his mouth, “I’ll pierce them for ye myself—wi’ my teeth.”
The King had by now wandered off toward the Salon of Apollo, the space left by his passage quickly filled by others coming from the supper room. Seeing Jamie distracted into conversation with a Monsieur Genet, head of a wealthy shipping family, I looked surreptitiously about for a place in which to remove my shoes for a moment.
One of the alcoves was at hand and, from the sounds of it, unoccupied. I sent a lingering admirer off to fetch some more wine, then, with a quick glance round, slid into the alcove.
It was furnished rather suggestively with a couch, a small table, and a pair of chairs—more suitable for laying aside garments than for sitting upon, I thought critically. I sat down nonetheless, pried my shoes off, and with a sigh of relief, propped my feet up on the other chair.
A faint jingling of curtain rings behind me announced the fact that my departure had not been unnoticed after all.
“Madame! At last we are alone!”
“Yes, more’s the pity,” I said, sighing. It was one of the countless Comtes, I