Sheen on the Silk - Anne Perry [138]
She staggered into her bedroom, Thomais supporting her.
“No!” she gasped as Thomais tried to help her lie down. “I have been poisoned, you fool! I must mix an emetic. Fetch me a bowl, and my herbs. Be quick! Don’t stand there like an idiot!” She heard the fear in her own voice as the room swayed and blurred around her, darkening as if the candles were burning down.
Thomais returned with a bowl and a jug of water in the other hand. She set them down and waited, gray-faced, to be told what to do next.
Zoe told her precisely which bottle and which jar to bring. Fingers shaking, she put a tiny spoonful of one in a glass, then two crushed leaves of the other, and drank them. The taste was vile, and she knew that in a few moments the pain would get worse and she would vomit terribly. But it would not last long, and her stomach would be empty. By tomorrow morning, she would begin to recover.
Damn Gregory! Damn him!
It was nearly two weeks before she saw him again. It was at the Blachernae Palace. Everyone who mattered from church or state was there, old blood or new money. A king’s ransom of jewels was worn by men and women alike, although admittedly there were few women present. Zoe could not outshine the empress, so she chose to wear no gems at all, simply to use her height and her magnificent hair to accentuate the beautiful bones of her face and thus mark herself as different. Her tunic was of bronze silk, sheened light and dark as she moved, and she wore a rope of gold in her hair like a crown.
Faces turned to stare, and the gasps told her she had succeeded.
She saw Gregory early on—his height made that inevitable—but it was over an hour before he actually spoke to her. They were briefly alone, cut off from the crowd by a row of exquisitely tiled pillars creating a separate room. He offered her a honey cake decorated with almonds.
“No, thank you,” she declined, perhaps too quickly.
A slow smile spread across his face. He made no remark, but their eyes met, and she knew exactly what he was thinking, as he knew what she thought.
His smile widened. “You look marvelous, as always, Zoe. You make every other woman in the room appear as if she is trying too hard.”
“Perhaps what they wish for can be gained by wealth,” she replied, wondering how he would interpret that.
“How tedious,” he said, still not moving his eyes from hers. “How very young. What can be bought cloys so quickly, don’t you think?”
“What can be bought by one person can also be bought by another,” she agreed. “Eventually it becomes vulgar.”
“But not revenge,” he replied. “The perfect revenge is an art, and that has to be created. It can never be satisfying if it is the work of someone else, do you agree?”
“Oh yes. Creating it is half the flavor. But of course only if it succeeds.”
He looked at her, studying her. “Of course it must, but you disappoint me if you think that it must do so immediately. That would be like pouring good wine down your throat, rather than sipping it a little at a time. And my dear, you were never a barbarian to waste your pleasures.”
So he had not meant to kill her! Not yet, anyway. He was going to play first, a cut here, a cut there, bleeding away courage a little at a time. It was the insult to his proud name that counted to Gregory, her monstrous temerity in daring to kill one of his blood—in fact, counting Georgios, two. It was war. She smiled up at him.
“I am Byzantine,” she replied. “That means that I am both sophisticated and barbaric. Whatever I do, I do it to the ultimate degree. I am surprised you need to be reminded of that.” She looked him up and down. “Is your health failing you?”
“Not at all. Nor will it. I am younger than you are.”
She laughed. “You always were younger, my dear. All men are. It is something women must learn to accept. But I am glad if you have not forgotten. To forget one’s pleasures would