“Aye. Mistress Celia Sutton.” Even saying her name, feeling it on his tongue, twisted something deep inside him. Those tender feelings he had once had for her haunted him now.
“Celia Sutton?” Marcus said, his eyes widening. “She could freeze a man’s balls off just with a look.”
John gave a harsh laugh as he remembered the erection that had only just subsided. An almost painful hardness just from her look, her touch. The smell of her skin. “She is to be the Queen’s own emissary—a representative to show Elizabeth’s affections to her cousin.”
“She might as well have sent a poisoned ring, then,” Marcus scoffed. “Though there is something about Mistress Sutton that seems …”
His voice trailed away, and his eyes sharpened with speculation as he looked at John.
John held up his hand. “Do not even say it.”
They had been friends so long that Marcus obviously saw the warning in John’s face. He shrugged and pushed himself to his feet.
“Your passions are your own business, John,” he said, “no matter how strange. Just as mine are. And now I must go and dress for the Queen’s ball. I have little time left to woo Lady Felicity before we leave for hell.”
Marcus strode from the room, leaving John alone to his brooding thoughts again. He looked back outside, to where the cold winter night was quickly closing in. Torches flickered along the banks of the river, the only light in the cloud-covered city.
It felt as if he was already in hell. He had been for three years—ever since he’d betrayed Celia and thus lost her for ever. The only woman he could have dared to envisage a future with had been her.
Celia stared at her reflection in the small looking glass as the maidservant brushed and plaited her hair before pinning it up in a tightly wound knot. She was even gladder now that the Queen had given her a rare, precious private chamber, away from anyone else’s prying eyes and gossiping tongues. Anyone looking at her now would surely see the agitation in her eyes, the way she could not keep her hands still.
She twisted them harder in her lap, buried them in the fur trim of her robe. She had to go down to the ball soon, and there she would have to smile and talk as if nothing was amiss. She would have to listen and watch, to learn all she could about the hidden reasons for this sudden journey to Edinburgh. She had to be wary and cautious as always, careful of every step.
She closed her eyes, suddenly so weary. She had been cautious every day, every minute, for three years. Would the rest of her life be like this? She was very much afraid it would. Thomas Sutton was dead, but the taut wariness was still there. The certainty of pain.
In an unconscious gesture she rubbed at her shoulder. It was long healed, but sometimes she could vow she still felt it. She had fought so hard for control. She would not lose it now. Not because of him.
Behind her closed eyes she saw John Brandon’s face, half in mysterious shadow as he held her to the wall, his blue eyes piercing through her like a touch, as if he saw past her careful armour to everything she kept hidden. His hands on her had roused so much within her—things she’d thought long-dead and buried, things she’d thought she could never feel again because her marriage had killed them in her.
One look from John scared her more than any of Thomas’s blows ever could. Because Thomas had not known her, had never possessed her. Not really. She had always hidden her true self from him even as he’d tried to beat it from her. But John had once possessed all of her, everything she had to offer, and because of him it was gone now.
“Are you quite well, Mistress Sutton?” she heard the maid ask, bringing her back to the present moment.
Celia opened her eyes and gave the girl a polite smile. “Just a bit of a headache. It will soon pass.”
“Shall I loosen your hair a bit, then? A style of loose curls here and here is quite fashionable.”
Celia studied herself in the looking glass. Her hair was already dressed as it always was, the heavy black waves tightly plaited and pinned in a knot at the nape of her neck. Since it was a ball, a beaded black caul covered the knot, but that was its only decoration. It was all part of the armour.
“Nay, this will do,” she said, slipping on her jet and pearl earrings. “I will dress now.”
She eased out of her robe and let the maid help her into her gown: a bodice and overskirt of black velvet with a stomacher and petticoat of glossy purple brocade trimmed with jet beads. Her sleeves were also black, tied with purple ribbons. Even her shoes and the garters that bound her white silk stockings were black.
Thomas had been dead for many months. She could put aside mourning and wear colours again, the blues and greens she had once loved, but she liked the reminder of where she had been. Where she vowed never to be again. The half-world of mourning suited her.
Celia held up her arm for the maid to lace on the tight sleeves and pluck bits of the white chemise between the ribbons. As she stared at the fireplace she let herself drift away, just for a moment, and remember when she first met John.
She’d been just a silly girl then, who had never been to Court, never away from her family and their country gentry neighbours. John Brandon had been sent to stay with his uncle at a nearby estate, exiled from Court for some unknown scandal. He’d been meant to rusticate until he had learned his lesson and repented.
That dark hint of some roguish secret had made her cousins all afire with speculation even before they’d met him, and Celia had not been immune to it. She’d liked to sit by the fire of a winter evening and listen to romantic tales as much as any young lady, and a handsome rake from London seemed a perfect part of such stories. Then, when she had seen him at last, a glimpse across his uncle’s hall at a banquet …
It had been as if the whole world tipped upside down and everything looked completely different. His eyes, his smile, the way he strode through the crowd right to her side and kissed her hand—she’d been dazzled.
Celia shook her head hard now as she remembered. Foolish, foolish girl.
And now foolish woman. For hadn’t she almost melted all over again when he touched her today?
But the next time they met, touched, she would be the one in control. She had to be.
As soon as the maid had finished adjusting her gown she fastened a black feather fan and a silver pomander to the chain girdle at her waist. As she had no sword, they would have to do.
But when the maid turned away she bent and gathered up her skirts to tuck a small dagger in the sheath at her garter. She could not go down there completely unarmed.
As she made her way down the many staircases and along the twisting corridors of the palace the crowd grew thicker the closer she came to the great hall. After the nightly revels of Christmas Celia would have thought the courtiers would be weary of Queen Elizabeth’s glittering displays, but there was a hum of excitement in the air, in the buzz of laughter and chatter around her as she was swept along.
She
