On My Lady's Honor (Secrets of the Musketeers Book 1) Read online

  On My Lady's Honor

  Leda Swann

  Prologue

  The Camargue, in the south of France

  Autumn 1669

  “Oh, Gerard, I will miss you so.” Sophie Delamanse stood in the courtyard shivering in the early morning darkness and held tight to her twin brother’s thickly gloved hand. She fought to control the tears that threatened to spill over onto her cheeks. Well-bred young ladies don’t make a vulgar display of their emotions, she repeated to herself over and over to keep the tears at bay. That had always been one of the hardest lessons for her to learn. Just last eve her mother had scolded her for her long face and now here she was crying again.

  “You’ll break my fingers with your death grip, you silly cabbage,” Gerard said, as he drew her towards him in a bear hug. Under the cover of their embrace he whispered in her ear, his words muffled in her woolen hood. “Now that I am a soldier, I doubt I should confess as much, but I’ll miss you, too.”

  She clung tightly to her twin. They had never been separated for longer than a day since their birth. The mere thought of his absence made her feel as though an essential part of her was gone. How would she manage when he was over a week’s journey away from her, living among strangers? “Look after yourself, Gerard.”

  The bay gelding beside them stamped his feet and gave a snort of impatience, his breath misting around his head. The jingling of his harness carried clearly through the still, crisp morning air. “Look after Seafoam, too. Feed him plenty of corn and don’t ride him into the ground.” She blinked furiously to hold back her tears. “Be brave.”

  “I will be the bravest Musketeer in the King’s Guard,” he promised her. “I shall make you all proud of me.”

  Her sorrow at losing him should be tempered by pleasure at his advancement in the King’s service, she told herself. She would not spoil his last moments alone with her by indulging her grief.

  With some effort, she held him at arm’s length and gave him a saucy smile. “I already am. How could I not be proud of you, in your fine waistcoat and jacket, and leather boots polished to a shine? You look as fine as a peacock strutting around the Queen’s garden.”

  Gerard lost his manly dignity for long enough to poke his tongue out at his sister. “When I am the best swordsman in the King’s Guard, you will not dare to be so disrespectful, or I shall cut off a dozen of your precious curls with a flick of my sword.”

  Sophie smiled through the tears that would slip out, however she tried to restrain them. “You will do no such thing, younger brother…”

  “Younger by a scant ten minutes,” he reminded her, in a repeat of the game they had played ever since they could talk.

  She ignored his interruption. “…for I will equal you in swordmanship when you come home next summer.”

  He looked at her with a measure of respect. “I believe you could, too, if you put your mind to it. You have a strong will for a woman, and the courage to match.”

  Sophie glowed under her brother’s praise. He did not give compliments lightly. Kind words from him were precious, and had to be savored. “A duel, then? Next summer? The loser to pay a forfeit of the winner’s choosing?”

  “Sophie, you are a madcap and I love you dearly.” He brushed the corner of his eyes with his sleeve. Were he not a man, she would swear that he was weeping. “The sun will soon rise, and I must needs be on my way before dawn. Come with me and I shall make my farewells to Mother and Father.”

  She took his hands in hers one last time and gave them a squeeze. “Go on up alone. I will say my last goodbye to you now.”

  He bowed his head in acknowledgement of the pain he saw reflected in her eyes. “Goodbye, Sophie. God bless you.” And he was gone.

  Sophie returned to her chamber and stood at her casement window, gazing down into the courtyard below her. The sky was just lightening with the first touches of pink morning when her brother strode back again. He swung his leg over Seafoam’s back and cantered off into the lane, the flaps of his greatcoat flying behind him like a banner.

  At the gate he wheeled Seafoam around, and stopped for a moment, the gelding’s hooves kicking up the dry dust of the lane around his knees. His eyes sought the flicker of the lighted candle she had placed in her casement window. He raised his whip in a final salute before turning his head once more towards the road ahead, to Paris and the new life he would carve out for himself as a soldier and a courtier.

  To his new life – without her.

  Chapter 1

  Twelve months later

  Sophie glared at the piece of sewing in her hands as rebellious thoughts ran through her head. Gerard would not notice whether she greeted him in a new gown she had stitched herself or not. He had been absent for a full twelve months in Paris and her anxiety to see him again almost overwhelmed her. She did not understand why she must have a new gown for the occasion. She had a baker’s dozen of gowns already that she scarcely ever wore. Her mother’s insistence on needless stitchery was wearying.

  She made three more stitches, so small and fine they could barely be seen. Gerard was lucky to have been born a boy. His future lay in adventure and excitement, guarding the young King from his enemies and keeping the peace in the turbulent streets of Paris. How she envied the life he was able to lead, while she, his elder by ten long minutes, was doomed by an accident of birth to a life of interminable sewing.

  She shifted uncomfortably on the hard wooden bench. From the open casement window she could see the tops of the trees swaying in a gentle breeze. How she longed to gallop furiously through the fields in these last few days of golden sunshine before the clouds obscured the sun and the snows of winter started to fall. There would be no such fast riding when the ground was covered with snow. A false step in the snow would break a horse’s leg and ruin the beast for good.

  Ouch. A moment’s inattention, and she had pricked her finger, a large drop of red blood welling from the tip and threatening to drip on to the precious blue silk bundled in her lap.

  With a muttered curse she flung her unfinished gown to one side and popped her injured finger in her mouth.

  “Wrap a scrap of linen around it,” her ever-vigilant mother suggested, her own needle never pausing, “so you do not ruin your gown.”

  She had not the patience for another stitch. “May I not exercise my mare? She has not been out of the stables all day and she will be getting restless.”

  Her mother smiled, more with resignation than with mirth. “Like her rider, perhaps?”

  “Or practice my archery while the light is still good enough to see the targets well?”

  “Fine stitches need good light, too. Besides, I fear the marsh is not a healthy place to be at this time of the season.” Her mother’s normally placid face bore a look of unusual worry. “There is news of an aguey fever in the village on the far side. The parish priest believes the swamp mist to be the cause and would have us all keep away from it for our safety. I would not have us all fall sick of an aguey fever while Gerard is here.”

  Sophie made an exasperated noise. Plague take the fever. Would her mother not have mercy and release her? “My legs are cramped from sitting so long in one place together and my arms ache.”

  Her mother lay her sewing aside for the moment in her lap and looked at her with a small sigh. “I will never make a competent needlewoman out of you, I fear. You have little diligence or patience.”

  Sophie bowed her head under the mild rebuke. She knew how well deserved it was when it came to needlework. If only her mother could see how well she had practiced her archery, though, she would not accuse her of being lacking in di
ligence. Her knife-throwing was improving well, too. She could hit her target eight times out of ten now when her throwing arm was in good form.

  “I suppose you may leave your new gown for the moment to rest your weary limbs…”

  She sprang to her feet. “Ah, mother, I promise I will go nowhere near the marshes, even though it is good hunting there, and I could bring back a brace of fat ducks for the table before dusk fell.”

  “…but not to practice your archery.”

  She sank back down on the stool again, her eagerness to leave less fierce now that she was forbidden her favorite pursuit. Still, if she could not hunt, she could walk or ride…

  “If you will not sew, go and help the cook with making gooseberry preserves. It is time enough you learned a woman’s duties. Your father is concerned that your education has been sadly neglected of late.”

  “I can speak a smattering of English,” Sophie protested, seeing her afternoon spent in the sunshine disappearing into the mists, “and read Italian very well. Besides which I can write and cipher, too.”

  Her mother sighed. “You know little of running a household and supervising servants, which will be more use to you as a noblewoman than all the books in Italy. Your husband will not care whether you can speak that slippery English tongue or not, but he will mind if his apartments are not kept warm and clean, with good, hot dinners served to him betimes, and the bedlinen fresh and sweet-smelling.”

  “I have no husband who needs such care.”

  “Not yet. But your father would speak to you tonight on that very matter.”

  A husband? She felt a wealth of excitement and apprehension mingle in the pit of her belly. Her father had never mentioned the possibility to her before.

  Despite Sophie’s less than subtle probing, and even her outright pleas for more information, her mother would give nothing else away.

  Her father must have made a match for her, Sophie decided, as she made her way to the kitchen to help the cook.

  She said a silent prayer as she stirred the pots of simmering gooseberries that he had chosen Jean-Luc for her. Jean-Luc was young and handsome, with light brown hair that fell straight about his shoulders and a happy smile never far from his face. He could ride like leaves on the wind and outshoot her three times out of five. His father owned the manor house to the adjoining village and was well-respected in the county, and Jean-Luc was his eldest son and heir.

  Though Jean-Luc’s family was not as wealthy as her own, she hoped with all her heart that he would still be an acceptable match in her father’s eyes. None of the other likely candidates in the neighborhood were half so appealing: they were too old and dull, or too wild and vicious. If she was to get married, she would choose Jean-Luc above all others.

  Her father was in rare good humor that night when Sophie peeked through the half-open door to his private apartments, visions of Jean-Luc running through her mind.

  He beckoned her in with a smile. “Come in, Sophie, and pull a chair up to the fire. I have business matters of some importance to impart to you.”

  He never discussed such matters with her. Sophie now regretted all the deliciously sweet-tart gooseberry preserve she had gobbled that afternoon with the cook. With one grave look from her father, it suddenly lay uncomfortably heavy on her stomach, in a curdled foment of sugary acid. What if her intended was not Jean-Luc after all, but the old Marquis de la Renta? He was at least fifteen years older than her and he talked interminably of poetry.

  “Your mother tells me you have been attending well to your education today.”

  She swallowed nervously to keep the gooseberry preserve down in her stomach. “I have been helping the cook with the preserving, Sir. We have enough now for the coming winter and into spring as well.”

  “Good, good,” he said abstractedly, hardly seeming to have heard her. He steepled his fingers together and regarded her with a serious eye. “Your brother Gerard will be returning home in little over a week. You will be glad to see him, I’ve no doubt.”

  She nodded. “Yes, Sir. I have missed him.”

  “As have we all.” He held his hands out to the fire. “His good friend, the young Count Lamotte, will be joining us shortly after Gerard arrives.”

  He looked at her as if he expected an answer to this remark. “Yes, Sir.” Gerard had written to her of his friend, Ricard, Count Lamotte. He had been a musketeer in the King’s Guard for three years, and had quickly become her brother’s bosom friend. She was not overjoyed to hear that the Count would be visiting them. She had been looking forward to having her brother all to herself again after so many months of separation.

  “Lamotte is a healthy young man of good family,” her father continued, “and in high favor with the King. His estates are reputed to be well-managed, and by Gerard’s reports he is neither a gambler nor a wastrel, but a man of honor whose word can be relied upon.”

  He paused. “He is of the age to take a wife.”

  The conversation had suddenly taken a menacing turn. Sophie shivered. “A wife?”

  “Lamotte’s uncle and I have come to a satisfactory arrangement about your dowry, and the settlement that would be made upon you in the event of the young Count’s death.” He chuckled deep in his throat. “The old man is shrewd enough, I’ll warrant you, but we hammered out a fair enough deal in the end. You’ll take a good enough stack of gold and other stuffs with you into the union, and if the Count dies before you, you’ll be treated as you deserve.”

  Her head was whirling in confusion. She was not to marry Jean-Luc, nor even one of her neighbors at all, but a man she had never met? “The two of you have decided that I will marry the Count? Without his consent? Or mine?”

  “Lamotte has consented to the match, and I have accepted on your behalf. You will be betrothed when he arrives, and wed as soon as the banns have been called. When he returns to Paris, it has been agreed that you shall be sent to manage his household in Burgundy. Paris, and the court of Louis XIV in particular, is no place for a young, country-bred woman."

  She shook her head in an attempt to clear her thoughts. “I thought I would wed Jean-Luc,” she said, speaking to more to herself than to her father. The full import of her father’s news overwhelmed her powers of rational thought.

  “I had been considering an overture from Jean-Luc’s father, it is true,” her father answered. “But the Count has far more exciting prospects. You will be much better off as his wife than as the wife of a simple country squire.”

  Sheer panic assailed her, and she swallowed twice before she could manage to utter a single word. “I am to wed the Count and be sent away from here? Far away from you and mother and Gerard and the village and everything that I know?” Her voice rose dangerously high as she sought to keep back her tears.

  Her father placed his hands, palms upwards, on the table, as if offering her up an explanation for his decision. “Your mother misliked that you would live so far away in Burgundy, but every woman must some day leave her parents’ household and cleave to that of her husband.”

  Burgundy, she murmured to herself. The word rolled off her tongue with a strange flavor. She had never been further than the village in all her life before, and now she was to travel across France to live a new life as a married woman – wed to a man she had never met.

  When she had thought about marriage at all, which was seldom, she had imagined herself married to Jean-Luc. She had hoped that one day he would ask for her hand and allow her to settle into a comfortable life close to her family.

  But to be wed to a stranger! She could not, would not bear it.

  Gerard. She clutched onto the thought of her brother like a lifeline. He was returning home in a sennight. He would save her.

  Surely her twin would see how repugnant this marriage was to her soul. Their father would listen to his son’s objections where he would ignore those of a mere daughter. She must win him over to her cause before it was too late. “Does Gerard know yet of my betrothal?”
/>   “Indeed. He was the first to propose the match.”

  The words hit her ears with the force of a hammer striking an anvil. Gerard, her beloved twin, had betrothed her to a man she had never met? He knew how much she wanted adventure in her life – how she envied him his life in Paris. He even knew how fond she was of Jean-Luc. He could not be responsible for having her sent away to some far away county, to manage the household of an absent stranger. He had never breathed a word of this marriage to her. She shook her head in denial. “No, I cannot believe it.”

  The gooseberry preserves roiled around in her insides once more, and her stomach finally revolted. “Excuse me, Sir,” was all she managed to stammer as she stumbled white-faced out of the door.

  She barely made it to the privy before she sank to the floor and was violently ill. Retching convulsions racked her body until at last her stomach was emptied of everything but bile.

  She did not sleep that night, her mind turning over and over with a sense of utter rejection and betrayal. As the first fingers of daylight began to appear over the horizon, she finally gave up on her attempt to rest.

  The stableboy was snoring in the corner in a bundle of hay when she crept quietly into the stables. She saddled Firedancer as quietly as she could, unwilling to disturb the young lad’s rest.

  The early autumn air on her face made her shiver, and she wrapped her heavy coat around her more tightly. She felt strangely lightheaded – from lack of sleep she supposed. She hadn’t broken her fast that morning either, but the memory of the gooseberries was still too recent for her to feel hungry.

  She could leave now, she supposed, if she had anywhere to run. She could not go to Jean-Luc and ask for his help. Marriages were made by fathers – never by the parties involved themselves. Jean-Luc was as powerless as she in this matter.

  For a brief moment she flirted with the idea of riding to Paris and throwing herself on the mercy of the King, begging him to forbid the marriage, until the practicalities of such a flight intruded into her despair. She had no food either for her or for Firedancer, and no money with which to buy any. She did not even know the right road to take to get to Paris. And even if, by some miracle, she were able to get to Paris without losing her way or dying of starvation or being robbed and murdered by brigands on the road, the King might not be there, or more probably he would refuse to see her, or, most likely of all, he would tell her to cease her disobedience and to honor her father’s wishes in the matter.