The Fatal Fashione Read Online Free PDF Page A

queen.”
    She had the decency to look shocked and sorry. He slumped back in the chair, gripping the arms of it so hard his fingers went white.
    “I—you never tell me things anymore,” she accused. “How was I to know? I never did know half the things you were up to. Can you get more? I know you have your sources. I know you have your secret imports, too.”
    He looked up at her; their narrowed gazes met and held. His eyes, not hers, were glassy with tears. The fact that he’d once taken a mistress and had loved her utterly—still did—was what truly always lay between them. It hadn’t even helped that Anne knew the woman was dead, or that Anne deeply loved his illegitimate daughter she’d reared. She doted on the child she called Marie-Anne, as if she could pretend the child was truly hers and Gretta had never been. But she had been and seemed to stalk them yet, now not only as spirit but, lately, as flesh.
    “Are you quite sure,” he asked, trying to control his voice, “the cake of chocolata is destroyed?”
    “Gone out with the rubbish two days ago,” she said flatly—smugly, he thought, as if she were somehow now enjoying this. “My lord, I regret the mishap but cannot change it—like mistakes in life. Well, at least I admit and rue mistakes I have made.”
    He struggled to ignore that thrust. “Then I must ask you not to come in here again, even to tend or clean this chamber. And I’d best go see Marie to tell her the same, at least that she cannot enter unless I am here.”
    “Which you seldom are—never were,” Anne muttered, and swept from the room.
    He was surprised to find her waiting for him in the hall. Perhaps she wanted to be sure he did not speak sharply to Marie, but then she knew he cherished the child, too, for the girl’s sake as well as for the lovely, lost woman who had borne her thirteen long years ago.
    “Marie!” he called outside the girl’s apartments. He heard no answer, no movement within.
    “Isn’t she about?” he asked Anne, who pushed the door open and went in. “It’s nearly midday,” he went on. “Don’t you know where she is?”
    They peeked into the bedchamber together. The bed was mussed but empty. “She was here, resting because she stayed up late last night, reading, she said,” Anne explained, her voice rising. “I told her I would fetch her for midday meal when you came home. I told you we should find a young maid-companion for her, one to sleep in her room since her nurse is gone now.”
    “She’s not feeling ill?”
    “She said she was fine.”
    Fine or no, Marie was neither in her three rooms nor in the other thirty-eight on four floors of Gresham House. The parents and servants searched the central gardens, the stables, the street.
    Thomas gripped Anne’s arm when they met in their frenzy by the front entrance. Servants’ voices calling for their daughter echoed through the mansion. “I’m going to the construction site to be sure she isn’t there looking for me, though she knows better than to go out alone.” He turned away, then added, “If she’s not there, I’ll raise a force of men. We’ll search the area—the city if we must. The queen will help put out a hue and cry, I know she will.”
    “Godspeed, Thomas. Godspeed,” Anne cried after him as he painfully climbed the mounting block he always used to get onto a horse with this damned leg. He blinked back tears. Those were the very words his dear Gretta had said to him before, still cradling their tiny baby, she’d closed her eyes and died.
    In early afternoon, Queen Elizabeth walked in the walled privy palace gardens with her lord treasurer, William Paulet, the Marquess of Winchester. She’d chosen the fresh air because the old man always seemed to reek of the dust of the past. He’d served as comptroller of the royal household under her father and as lord treasurer under her brother and sister.
    Widowed now, but looking for a wife even at age eighty-one, Paulet had