Amanda McCabe - NOTORIOUS in the Tudor Court - A Sinful Alliance / A Notorious Woman

Rather than go to her room, she turned instead down the staircase and followed it until she was out the palace doors and into the garden once more. She did not wear a cloak or surcoat, only her black-and-gold velvet gown, but she did not feel the bite of the wind as she hurried along a gravel pathway.

There were not so many courtiers out this morning, just a few people whispering together as they strolled along. They watched her curiously as she passed, yet no one stopped her. She feared she could not make polite conversation right now anyway.

She hardly knew where she was going, she just walked and walked, hoping that the exercise would burn away that strange restlessness. She rounded a corner of one of the tall, sculpted hedges, and found that her steps had led her to the theatre.

The doors stood half-open to the winter breeze, and she drifted toward them, as if compelled to move forward by some dream or spell. She didn’t want to go in there. What if Nicolai waited, luring her to him with his tightrope, with a freedom she knew was not hers? But her steps wouldn’t turn, and she soon found herself inside.

The splendid theatre, with its elaborate painted sky, its shimmering hangings, was silent and darkened. The only sound was a faint, distant hammering as Sir Henry Guildford’s servants built new scenery. The air was chilly, smelling of new paint, sawdust, sweat and stiff satin. Like all places of night-time merriment, in the day it had a forlorn, shabby air, a deep loneliness that suited her strange mood today.

Marguerite shut the doors quietly behind her and crept deeper inside. Soon, this space would be a castle or a meadow, Mount Olympus or a heavenly cloud. She preferred it like this, quiet and empty, all its possibilities still ahead, still intact.

She tiptoed into Nicolai’s little room. The rope was coiled in the corner, a few travelling chests stacked against the walls. Had she not just determined to stay away from Nicolai, that he was a distraction she did not need? Yet here she was.

He was not there, but she could vow that the smell of him lingered in the air, that clean, fresh herbal scent. The very essence of him.

Marguerite opened one of the chests, peering inside to find thin, shining rapiers wrapped in a length of brown velvet. They were stage blades, of course, not as sharp and lethal as her own hidden sword and daggers, but dangerous enough if wielded correctly.

She remembered one afternoon in the Piazza San Marco, when she watched Nicolai and his troupe performing for a raucous Carnival crowd. It was a scene where an adventurous wife and her lover were confronted by the buffoonish husband. Nicolai was the lover, of course, and even masked, clad in closefitting, multi-coloured motley silk, he radiated sexuality, bawdy good humour. All the comic wiles of the wife and lover did not turn away the angry husband, and Nicolai at last had to fight him. Perhaps with these very blades, he had parried and feinted, pricked and prinked, tumbling and leaping out of the increasingly clumsy husband’s way.

At last the husband was defeated, frustrated, his black robes in rags, as the Arlecchino ran off with his wife. By then, every woman around Marguerite would have gladly shared the wife’s fate.

Marguerite, though, now sympathised with the husband. She, too, was most thoroughly befuddled by Nicolai.

She drew out one of the blades, balancing its gilded hilt on her hand. The thin cut still stung a bit, but the hilt was light on her palm, well balanced, shimmering in the dusty light. She lifted the blade in prima, the first guard position, with her arm high to the right, palm facing out. She moved smoothly into seconda, the second guard position, palm down, arm at shoulder height. Terza, arm at waist level, palm to left.

Then she raised her arm again, lunging forward on the right foot, sword thrusting ahead. She imagined it plunged into Nicolai’s maddening, confusing heart. The blade was light, and whistled in the still air as she sliced it across and stepped into a reverse pass, her right foot moving back, kicking her skirts out of the way.

“ Brava, mademoiselle, ” she heard Nicolai’s Slavic voice say. She whirled around to find him standing just inside the doorway, arms crossed over his chest as he watched her intently. “You are very deft.”

“I was trained by Signor Lunelli, the famous sword master from Milan,” she answered. Her heart still pounded, and she remembered pretending it was him she stabbed at, his muscled chest that met her slicing blade. “But I fear I am out of practice, with these easy days at Greenwich.”

“You? Ah, no, mademoiselle. I am sure you could never be—out of practice.”

“Perhaps not any longer.” She reached down and slid the tip of her sword beneath the blade that still lay on the ground. She caught it up, flipping it in one neat movement toward Nicolai.

He caught the hilt in his hand, reflexes sharp despite his lazy appearance. He gave her an amused half-smile.

Marguerite adjusted her stance, lifting her blade invitingly while also carefully situating her guard. “ En guard, monsieur. ”

Nicolai’s smile widened, and he took up his own stance. At first they circled each other warily, blades poised, trying to gauge weaknesses, techniques, strengths. Marguerite’s senses shimmered with tense awareness; it was as if time slowed around her, and she was attuned to every tiny flicker of his muscles. Every shift and movement and breath of his body.

There was a small noise outside their hidden room, the distant fall of a hammer. Nicolai did not turn, but she saw his eyes widen slightly and she took the perceived advantage. She moved in with a lunge and a low, straight thrust.

But he was not distracted. His blade came up in a smooth stop-thrust. Marguerite fell back, bringing her sword up to attack again.

She heard the echo of Signor Lunelli’s voice in her head. Remember, signorina, your male opponents will have two advantages over you—reach and strength. But you, you have speed and agility. Use them! And never lose your calm centre. That is fatal.

She rose up on the balls of her feet as if dancing, her blade flashing in delicate, swift feints, faking her line of attack. Speed and agility—he would think she was one place, as she delivered quick, small blows until she moved into compound attack.

Yet Nicolai did not fight as she expected. He parried her blows, his blade shifting as hers did, almost imperceptibly. He had a lean, easy strength she could not match, and that infuriating half-smile never left his lips.

Marguerite felt her calm centre, so essential to Signor Lunelli’s instructions, melt away under a hot flare of anger. She rushed in close to his strong side, wrapping her weaker arm about his sword arm and twirling her body around to slide her blade into place. She had to do it quickly, before he realised her impulsive plan and dropped his sword to grapple with her. Then all her agility could never stand up to that strength.

The tip of her blunted blade just touched him when he did drop his sword, his fingers closing tightly over her wrist, like an iron vise.

“ Chert poberi! ” he growled. “You do fight dirty.”

“ Oui. But I always win.”

“Almost always.”

His grip tightened on her wrist, not painful but numbing, until the blade fell from her nerveless grasp to clatter on to the floor. Marguerite cursed herself for forgetting all her training, for getting too close to him, allowing him to gain the advantage. That speed and agility had availed her naught in the end, it was too bound up in that boiling anger.

He didn’t let go of her wrist, and she stared up at him, her breath quick. His breath, too, was hard and uneven, his pulse thrumming through his veins and into hers, their heartbeats mingling. She still stared up at him into the glow of his eyes. His face was expressionless, yet she saw the faint flush of his cheeks, beneath the sun-bronzed colour of his Italian life. A muscle ticked along his jaw. So, he was not unaffected by their nearness, by whatever this was that flowed between them so inexorably.