NOTORIOUS in the Tudor Court: A Sinful Alliance / A Notorious Woman

“If I wanted to kill you, you would be dead tonight, Muscovite!” she said, kicking back at him. “Remember, I had your most precious organ balanced right in my hand.”

He laughed, spinning her in his arms until her head rested on his shoulder. “How could I forget?”

Marguerite propped herself on her elbow, gazing down at his face in the sputtering candlelight. He was relaxed, laughing, so young. “I will not kill you in bed. I will face you fairly on a dueling field.”

“Would you indeed, dorogaya?” He took her hand, kissing each fingertip in turn. He sucked her littlest finger into his mouth, laving it lightly until she shivered. “Well, you will not have to search for me very hard for our duel. I intend to stay in one place for a good long while once this errand is done, and Dona Elena safely on her way back to Spain.”

“But you are a travelling player!”

“And so I’ve been nearly all my life, since I was nine years old, and I am twenty-seven now. I grow weary now, too old for this life. Too old to don motley and walk the tightrope.”

Too old to spy? Surely she did know how he felt. She was barely twenty-one years of age herself, and yet there were times she felt so very ancient. “What will you do instead?”

“I fear you would laugh at me, my sophisticated mademoiselle. My worldly fairy queen.”

“I could never laugh at you. Unless you play the Arlecchino. Then you are diverting beyond measure!”

“Ah, so you have seen my Arlecchino, then?”

“Once, in the Piazza San Marco, when you and your pretty young lover outwitted her sour old husband.”

“Then you know what I mean. I would soon be more likely to play the husband.”

“Au contraire, monsieur!” She traced a light, teasing caress along his chest, his taut abdomen. “There can be no player in all Europe who would look finer in those tight silks.”

“Lecherous lady! Now I know why you came to me—your lust for Arlecchino.”

“Can you blame me?” She rested her head on his shoulder, listening to the steady thrum of his heartbeat, the pulse of his very life. “So, if you will be a player no more, what will you do?”

“I will turn farmer.”

“Farmer? You? In Russia?”

“Nay. I have lost my taste for bitter winters. I bought some land from my friend Marc’s wife Julietta, on the mainland near Venice. It is an overgrown tangle right now, and the villa burned. I will build a new house, though, one that is entirely mine. And I will tend my grapevines and fields of barley, will learn to make wine and press olive oil. I’ll grow old in peace there, under the warm sun.”

Marguerite closed her eyes, picturing it all in her mind. The house, glistening white stucco crowned with a rust-red tiled roof, shimmering under that bright light. White curtains fluttering at the open windows; tables spread with bread, cheese, olives, and the vineyard’s own wines on the warm terrace, shaded by cypress trees. The twisting, beautiful vines, spread out as far as the eye could see, plump grapes ripening happily, full of sugar, until they could be gathered and turned carefully, painstakingly, into that magical elixir—wine.

“My father, he had one passion in life besides the memory of my mother, and that was wine,” she said dreamily, looping one satin strand of his hair around her finger.

His finger traced a lazy pattern on her shoulder. “Do you mean to say you had parents, Marguerite?” he teased. “Human beings? That you were not left on their doorstep as a changeling?”

She laughed. “Of course I had real, human parents! I do not remember my mother, but my father used to carry me through his vineyard when I was a child, talking about his hopes for the grapes, his plans to improve the harvests. New methods for producing the wine, which he read about in agricultural treatises from Spain or Italy.”

“Your father’s vineyards did well under his care?”

She shook her head. “Not at all, yet he never ceased to try. We lived in Champagne, you see, in the north of France where the winters are cold and come early. But the soil was good for grapes, or should have been—chalky, so it drains well and doesn’t dry out quickly. Loose, so the vines could penetrate deep and retain the precious heat of the day. My father, he was working on pressing the red grapes without much skin contact, producing a white wine with only a faint colour, a vin gris, much desired at Court.”

“Was he successful?”

“Nay, there was a blight on the fields. It nearly ruined harvest after harvest when I was a child. But he never ceased to study, to try to find which vines would best flourish, how to best handle and mature the grapes.”

Nicolai’s fingertips moved lightly up and down her spine, until she laughed at the soft, tickling feeling. “It sounds like he passed his knowledge on to his daughter.”

“A bit. I don’t have time now to study as I would like, to experiment. But one day…”

“One day what?”

She shook her head. She could not say it aloud, could not give voice to longings she only half-understood herself, and dared not hope for. She shouldn’t have spoken about her father and the vineyards at all, but Nicolai’s plans had brought them out. The white villa, the fields under a sky as blue and endless as his eyes…