The Diamond Slipper (13 page)

Cordelia was exerting herself for Toinette, who she knew would be unable to hold her own in the conversation. The dauphine’s pallor and silence went unnoticed under her friend’s scintillating chatter.

“Now we shall have music,” the abbot announced
genially, as the second course was removed. “It aids the digestion, I find.”

Cordelia craned her neck to look from the dais where the royal party dined down into the main body of the hall. She hadn’t seen Christian when they’d first taken their seats, but now she found him sitting at one of the far tables. He looked up immediately as if he felt her gaze, and raised his glass in a salute. He looked a little lost, she thought. He’d been apprenticed to Poligny at the age of ten and had spent all the intervening years at Maria Theresa’s court. Now, like herself and Toinette, he was venturing into an unknown future in a foreign land. But unlike the girls, he had no path mapped out for him.

She glanced sideways at Leo. If she didn’t have a path mapped out for her, how much simpler this tangle of feelings would be to unravel.

A Gregorian chant rose from the rear of the hall, and the table fell into appreciative silence as the exquisite plainsong filled the vast space, rising to the high rafters. The music continued until the abbot invited his guests to attend chapel for benediction.

“I thought you didn’t practice our religion,” Cordelia observed, kneeling on the hard stone, her skirts billowing out around her. Her knees were accustomed to the discomfort, cushions being reserved at court only for the empress and the aged of the highest aristocracy.

“When in Rome,” he responded calmly, kneeling at his pew.

“I love you,” she whispered. She hadn’t meant to say any such thing, but he was so close to her that she could smell the faint lingering perfume of dried lavender and rosemary that had been stored with his linen. The air around her was imbued with his presence, so powerful that for a moment she lost all sense of her surroundings.

Leo prayed for inspiration. How was he ever going to resist her? He was aware of the blue fire in her eyes as she gazed at him from behind a hand that shielded her face,
hiding her unprayerful countenance from the rest of the congregation. He was aware of the curve of her white neck, the little ear peeking between glossy ringlets, the swift rise and fall of her breasts. He reminded himself that she was another man’s wife, but that fact hardly seemed real in the present circumstances.

When the service was over, the weary travelers were free to seek their beds.

Toinette summoned Cordelia to accompany her. “I know you’re tired, Cordelia, but will you sit with me until I’m in bed? I feel so miserable still.”

It was a royal command couched as a friend’s plea for comfort. Something else Cordelia had grown accustomed to over the years.

Leo made his way to his own apartment. His servant was waiting to undress him, but he sent him away to his bed after the man had poured him a generous cognac and removed his shoes and coat. A fire had been lit in the grate. The late April evenings were still cool, and the stone walls of the monastery retained a chill even in high summer.

Leo sat down beside the fire in his stockinged feet and shirtsleeves and drew a small table with an inlaid chessboard toward him. Frowning, he began to rearrange the pieces in a problem that had eluded him for a week. It would take his mind off his heated blood. He might not be able to untangle the confusion in his brain, but the pure, simple clarity of the chess pieces and the clean lines of a chess problem could be managed.

Cordelia sat with Toinette until the dauphine fell asleep, then, yawning deeply, she made her way to her own chamber. Mathilde was dozing by the fire and rose sleepily to her feet when Cordelia came in.

“Just unhook and unlace me, Mathilde, and I’ll manage the rest myself,” Cordelia said through another deep yawn. “You need your own bed.” She rubbed her eyes, then began
to unpin her hair while Mathilde unhooked her gown. “I’m going to ride on tomorrow’s journey. Is my habit unpacked?”

“I’ll see to it in the morning.” Mathilde shook out the scarlet dress and hung it up in the armoire. “We’ll be making an early start, I gather.” She unlaced Cordelia’s corset and untied the tapes of her panniers. Cordelia kicked off her shoes, rolled down her garters and stockings, and plumped onto the bed with a groan.

“Go to bed, Mathilde. I can manage now.”

“Well, if you’re sure.” Mathilde didn’t waste time in protest. “I’ll wake you in plenty of time in the morning.” She bent to kiss her nursling and bustled out to her own bed in the servants’ quarters.

Cordelia fell back on the bed in her thin linen shift and gazed up at the embroidered tester overhead, almost too tired to get under the covers. The fire crackled merrily in the hearth, and her eyelids drooped. She came to with a jerk, her heart pounding. Sitting up, she looked around the candlelit chamber for what had startled her.

A mouse scurried across the floor, disappearing into a hole in the wainscot.

She got off the bed and went to the dresser to brush her hair, knowing that if she slept on it unbrushed it would be a hopeless tangle in the morning. The silence of the room was broken only by the hiss and spit of the fire and the gentle ticking of the clock on the mantel. Cordelia realized that she was restless, almost too tired to sleep. Her mind was racing, filled with questions and speculation about the life that awaited her. What kind of man was her husband? What of his children? Were they looking forward to her arrival? Or dreading it?

She couldn’t stop the tumbling thoughts or control her growing apprehension. She told herself it was because it was late and she was tired. If she could sleep, she would be her usual cheerful self in the morning, ready and eager to face
whatever the day might bring. But for some reason, all desire to sleep had left her.

She moved restlessly around the room. One wall was lined with bookshelves. At first glance they looked to contain no volumes that might soothe a troubled soul. All very academic titles, mostly Latin and Greek. Obviously, the monks expected their guests to be of a scholarly turn of mind. Her hand drifted along the spines and alighted on a volume of Catullus’s poems. Lighter fare than Livy or Pliny.

Cordelia pulled the slender volume from the shelf. She leaned against the bookshelves, idly leafing through the pages. And the wall began to move at her back. As she leaned against it, it creaked and groaned and swung inward. It was the strangest sensation and it all happened so fast Cordelia had no time to react. The section of shelving turned inward, and Cordelia found herself on the other side in a strange chamber, staring backward at the hole in the wall.

Leo looked up from the chessboard at the creaking groan from the wall of bookshelves at his back. He turned and stared, his mouth dropping open. Cordelia, barefoot, in a thin linen shift, stood in his room, gazing up at the gaping shelves with astonishment.

“How … how … how did that happen?” She spun round, relatively unsurprised at seeing him. It would take a lot to beat the astonishment of the last minutes. “Oh, Leo. I didn’t realize you were next door. Look!” She pointed back at the wall again. “It … it just opened. I was leaning against it and abracadabra! I was only looking for something to read.” She brandished the Catullus as if she needed proof of her statement.

Leo was recovering slowly from his own astonishment. His first reaction was that Cordelia had deliberately engineered this little trick, but her amazement was clearly genuine and he couldn’t see how she could have known in advance about the mechanism. “Go back to your own chamber and I’ll try to close it from this side.”

“Oh, how tame!” She stepped farther into his room, ful
filling his every fear. “Why do you think it’s here? Isn’t it intriguing?” Her hair was cascading around her shoulders in a blue-black river, ringlets framing her face, her eyes gray now, glowing like charcoal braziers in the firelight. “What was it for, do you think?”

“Presumably, it suited someone to have secret access to the next door chamber,” he answered, trying to sound cool and in control. “Now go back to bed.”

“Do you think it was for assignations?” Her eyes gleamed wickedly, but he didn’t think she was playing her usual flirtatious games; she seemed genuinely fascinated by the situation. “In a
monastery.
How shocking.” She turned to look back at the hole in the bookshelves again. “But I suppose these are the guest apartments. But what was some monkish architect doing designing such a thing?” Laughter bubbled in her voice. “Maybe monks have their secrets too.”

“I’m sure they do. Now, will you go back the way you came, please.”

“I can’t sleep. I’m all excited and apprehensive and wrought up,” she said cheerfully. “And you’re not sleepy if you’re playing chess. Are you doing problems? I like doing them too. But since there are two of us awake, shall we have a game?” She bent over the chessboard and without further ado swept aside the pieces of his problem and began to set the board up for a game.

“Cordelia, I was doing that problem!” he protested. “How dare you sweep it away like that?”

“Oh, I do beg your pardon.” She looked up at him through her hair. “I didn’t mean to be discourteous, but I thought you agreed to play a game.” Again, he was certain that she was behaving without artifice. This was the impetuous, high-spirited Cordelia who had thrown flowers at a stranger from an upstairs window.

“I did not agree to anything. You didn’t give me a chance to voice an opinion,” he snapped. “Put those pieces down and go to bed at once.” He smacked the back of her hand as she placed the black king on its square.

“Ow.” Cordelia looked injured, rubbing her hand. “There was no need to do that. And why should we both sit alone and sleepless, when we can do something pleasant that will take our minds off the things that are making it difficult to sleep?”

She sounded so rational, her expression radiating bewildered hurt, that Leo felt the now familiar bubble of inconvenient laughter forming in his chest. Laughter and the equally familiar surge of desire at the lines of her body beneath the thin shift. While he was struggling for composure, Cordelia took advantage of his momentary disadvantage. She hooked a stool with her toe and plunked herself down before the chessboard. Removing a black and a white pawn, she held them in clenched fists behind her back, juggling them, before stretching her hands out to him.

“Which hand do you chose, my lord?”

It seemed that short of bodily removing her, he was destined to play chess with her. Harmless enough, surely? Resigned, he tapped her closed right hand.

“You drew black!” she declared with a note of triumph that he recognized from the afternoon’s dicing. “That means I have the first move.” She turned the chess table so that the white pieces were in front of her and moved pawn to king four. Then she sat back, regarding him expectantly.

“Unusual move,” he commented ironically, playing the countermove.

“I like to play safe openings,” she confided, bringing out her queen’s pawn. “Then when the board opens up, I can become unconventional.”

“Good God! You mean there’s one activity you actually choose to play by the book! You astound me, Cordelia!”

Cordelia merely grinned and brought out her queen’s knight in response to his pawn challenge.

They played in silence and Leo was sufficiently absorbed in the game to be able to close his mind to her scantily clad presence across from him. She played a good game, but he
had the edge, mainly because she took risks with a degree of abandon.

Cordelia frowned over the board, chewing her bottom lip. Her last gamble had been a mistake, and she could see serious danger in the next several moves if she couldn’t place her queen out of harm’s way. If only she could intercept with a pawn, but none of her pawns were in the proper position, unless …

“What was that noise?”

“What noise?” Leo looked up, startled at the sound of her voice breaking the long silence.

“Over there. In the corner. A sort of scrabbling.” She gestured to the far corner of the room. Leo turned to look. When he looked back at the board, her pawn had been neatly diverted and now protected her queen.

Leo didn’t notice immediately. “Probably a mouse,” he said. “The woodwork’s alive with them.”

“I hope it’s not a rat,” she said with an exaggerated shiver, and conspicuously united her rooks. “Let’s see if that will help.”

It was Leo’s turn to frown now. Something had changed on the board in front of him. It didn’t look the way he remembered it, but he couldn’t see … and then he did.

Slowly, he reached out and picked up the deviated pawn. He raised his eyes and looked across at her. Cordelia was flushing, so transparently guilty he wanted to laugh again.

“If you must cheat, why don’t you do it properly,” he said conversationally, returning the pawn to its original position. “You insult my intelligence to imagine that I wouldn’t notice. Do you think I’m blind?”

Cordelia shook her head, her cheeks still pink. “It’s not really possible to cheat at chess, but I do so hate to lose. I can’t seem to help it.”

“Well, I have news for you. You are going to learn to help it.” He replaced her rooks in their previous position. “We are going to play this game to the bitter end and you are
going to lose it. It’s your move, and as I see it, you can’t help but sacrifice your queen.”

Cordelia stared furiously at the pieces. She couldn’t bring herself to make the only move she had, the one that would mean surrendering her queen. Without it she would be helpless; besides, it was a symbolic piece. She would be acknowledging she’d lost once she gave it up. “Oh, very well,” she said crossly. “I suppose you win. There’s no need to play further.”

Leo shook his head. He could read her thoughts as if they were written in black ink. Cordelia was the worst kind of loser. She couldn’t bear to play to a loss. “There’s every need. Now make your move.”

Her hand moved to take the queen and then she withdrew it. “But there’s no point.”

“The point, my dear Cordelia, is that you are going to play this game to its conclusion. Right up to the moment when you topple your king and acknowledge defeat. Now
move.
”