The Virgin's Spy (Tudor Legacy #2)(67)

He had forgotten that Queen Elizabeth was in the room until she said, rather drily, “You make yourself very clear.”

“Kit?” Lucie looked as though she wanted to touch him but wouldn’t because of whatever risk she imagined. “Scarlatina is not smallpox or the plague—so long as we can keep her fever controlled, she should recover just fine.”

“?‘Should’ isn’t good enough.” He whirled on his heel and left the presence chamber without making any obeisance to his queen, and stalked furiously away to bathe and change. His family should be here within two hours. He would wait that long. Then, if he had to, he would fight his way into Anabel’s room.

In the end, he didn’t have to. Surprisingly, it was not his gentle, softhearted mother who decreed he be allowed in, but his father. They were all gathered in Anabel’s presence chamber—the queen and the entire Courtenay family save Stephen.

His father took one look at Kit’s furious, fearful face and said, “Let him go in.”

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. “Do you really want three of your four children in there? Even if the girls have had scarlatina?”

“There was a night,” his father said slowly, eyes locked on the queen, “many years ago in this very chamber, where I would have cheerfully sold whatever remained of my life to be allowed into a sickroom.”

“I remember. And that is what frightens me.”

“It’s too late for that, Elizabeth.” Kit had never heard his father speak to the queen so personally; that was generally reserved for their mother. “They must find their own way.”

Elizabeth’s expression tightened as she turned away from Dominic’s burning gaze. “Go in,” she told Kit.

He didn’t trouble to decipher all the undertones of that cryptic exchange, but shot through the privy chamber with its physicians and nursing ladies and on into Anabel’s bedchamber.

At the threshold of the open door he halted. He’d never been in here before. But there was Anabel on the bed and protocol didn’t matter.

Kit ignored everyone else, including his sisters, who’d followed him, and went straight to the bed. From behind he heard Lucie say, “It’s not a good idea to touch her.”

He wasn’t afraid of infection—but he was afraid of people changing their mind and forcing him from the chamber. So he refrained from touching.

Her cheeks and forehead were covered in a bright red rash, with a ring of white skin left around her mouth. Her lips were dry and cracked, and her hands and her eyelids moved restlessly as though dreaming. Most shockingly, her hair had been shorn.

Pippa, reading him with her usual ease, murmured, “It’s to help with the fever, Kit. It will grow back.”

He had never seen Anabel vulnerable. Even as children, she’d had an innate self-possession that marked her as much as her red hair. She looked very young and very ill indeed.

Her eyelids in their fluttering opened enough to look at him. He wasn’t sure she was aware of anything until she whispered, “Kit?”

“I’m here,” he said, smiling a little, as though that would have the power to heal her.

“I always think you’re here.” She sounded deeply drugged, and profoundly weary. “But it’s just a dream. You’re not here. You left me.”

To hell with warnings. Kit leaned over and cupped her fevered cheeks in his hands. “I am here now, Anabel. It’s really me. And you’re going to be well. I promise.”

Remarkably, she managed to move her right hand and touch his arm. “You came back,” she said.

If his sisters hadn’t been standing right behind him, he might have kissed her then. Instead, he leaned closer and murmured in her ear, “I will always come back for you, mi corazon.”





The summer weeks passed for Stephen in a blur of activity, punctuated by the clarity of his time alone with Ailis. He hadn’t lost the ability to think—he knew this interlude couldn’t last, and not just because he was lying to her about his identity. From the day they’d returned from their stolen hour at the Rock of Cashel, Diarmid mac Briain had tracked their every movement with a resentment that was all the more dangerous for being swallowed. The captain of the guard only refrained from open hostility because of his own deep feelings for Ailis. But the rest of the guards were not so disciplined. With every evening that Stephen and Ailis went off alone, the restlessness of Clan Kavanaugh increased.

One mid-August night, the air cool and damp with days of rain and fog, Stephen lay stretched full-length on Ailis’s bed. Since she also used the chamber as her study, they could preserve the illusion that they were only talking strategy behind closed doors. They did talk strategy—the scattered maps and reports across the table bore witness to it—but it was never long before the bed beckoned.

Tonight, Stephen wondered aloud, “Are we taking too many chances with your household’s trust?”

“They will hold,” Ailis assured him, trailing one hand down his chest beneath the unlaced doublet and open shirt. “I have led them to successes enough over the years to have earned their trust.”

Rolling onto his side, Stephen pondered her exquisite face, framed by the black hair falling over her shoulders. She wore a sleeveless gown dyed madder red, ribbons loosely laced so the shift beneath was all that covered her in places. Stephen resisted the impulse to remove the gown completely.