Chapter 10: Receptive to His Attentions

The Midsummer banquet ran gold with candlelight and wine. Hampton Court's great hall was dressed for excess: gilded plates heavy with roasted swan and spiced pears, pyramids of sugared fruit, the royal musicians in the gallery tuning lutes and rebecs for the dancing. The long table glittered. Margot sat third from the head, three places lower than she would have sat if her father held favor, and precisely where her family meant her to sit: visible to the Spanish embassy, invisible to the queen.

Don Miguel de Vargas was impossible to miss. He had arrived at court two weeks prior with the ambassador's party, a man of perhaps thirty-eight, with the ease of someone born to rooms like this. He wore black velvet with silver buttons, and he smiled often. At the feast, he asked the lady beside him about the gilding on the plates, and she answered him at length. He asked the man across from him about hunting in Sussex, and the man became animated. He was a gift to ambassadors, this man: he made people feel noticed.

Then he looked at Margot.

It was direct. He caught her eye across the table, held it for a moment longer than courtesy required, and inclined his head slightly. When she returned the attention with a polite nod, he smiled. Later, when the roasted meats were cleared, he rose and walked the length of the table and bowed and asked her to dance.

Her family had sent a letter. She had read it standing in the garden courtyard three days before the banquet, the parchment thin and expensive in her hands. It was from her father, written in his brief style: Don Miguel de Vargas came with considerable standing in Madrid. The family interests in Portugal might benefit from a marriage negotiation. She should be "receptive to his attentions and pleasant in her management of them." The letter was pragmatic. Her father did not ask if she wished it. He had informed her that she did.

She took Don Miguel's hand and let him lead her to the floor.

The musicians began a galliard, and the dance was all swift stepping and height — the kind of dance that made courtiers breathless. Don Miguel danced well, with precise footwork and the kind of attention that meant he watched her, not his feet. The lady on her other side during the feast had been a poor dancer; Margot remembered noticing his polite restraint with her. With Margot, he did not restrain. He held her gaze through the turns. When the dance ended and they stood flushed and breathless, he offered to bring her wine.

She accepted. She was skilled at this. Accepting attention was not the same as granting permission for it to deepen. She could be pleasant and interested and still keep the distance her careful life required. She had learned it very young: smile, listen, appear to flourish, remain untouched.

When the dancing resumed, he asked her for a pavane, the slower dance, the one where partners walked close and spoke in undertones. They moved through the figures, and he told her about riding in the Sierra de Guadarrama in winter, about the cold air at altitude, about a hawk he had trained in his youth. His voice was warm. He was kind in the way of men who could afford to be kind, who had never needed to question whether they belonged in rooms.

She replied that she had never seen mountains, only hills. She asked how long a hawk took to train. She made her voice interested without being eager. When the dance finished, she thanked him, and was careful not to promise him another.

But his attentions had been observed. She saw them register in the calculation of faces around the table. By the time the banquet ended, everyone at court would know that the Spanish embassy was considering her. By morning, she would understand it as a fact: she was no longer her own private property.

Two days after the banquet, she met Francis in the garden.

It was their usual method: a garden walk, a path that led toward the tilt yard but turned back before it reached the working parts of the palace. A groundskeeper had been bribed to maintain a gap in the hedge where they could speak privately. She arrived first and waited among the lavender, which was high and fragrant.

He came without guards, wearing his usual dark doublet and the posture of a man attending to business.

"The letter you filed on Lady Cecily concerns the ambassador," he said. "She has been meeting with Portuguese merchants, not Spanish. The contacts are benign. You can disregard the anxiety."

He had walked beside her for a dozen paces. His voice was precise, the words arranged with the efficiency of men who counted their speech as currency. Usually, there was more to these meetings. Usually, he asked her what she had observed beyond the letter. There had always been latitude between them.

"That is all?" she asked.

"That is all," he said.

They walked in silence through the gardens. The path bent around a bed of roses, and she found herself noticing the way his jaw moved when he didn't speak, the slight tightness at the corner of his mouth. He was not quite looking at her. That, more than anything, was the signal. Francis looked at things precisely. To not quite look was a form of deliberation.

"You observed the banquet," she said.

"I observe all official functions."

"You observed Don Miguel speaking with me at length. You observed me dancing with him twice. You observed that my family has positioned me for his attention." She turned slightly, so that she was walking almost directly beside him. "And you have decided to be cold with me."

He was quiet for a moment. The path ahead was empty. The roses smelled of honey and summer.

"I have not been cold," he said.

"You have become more efficient. You have reduced the scope of our usual exchange. The personal substance of our meetings has been withdrawn. That is a form of coldness, and we are both of us truthful enough to acknowledge it."

He walked three more paces before he answered.

"Your private affairs are not my business," he said.

"No," she agreed. "They are not. Nor have you ever suggested they were. Yet you are treating the proof of them as though they are now disqualifying information about my reliability."

He stopped walking. They were at the turn in the path, where the hedge grew thicker and the palace fell away from view. He turned to face her directly, and she saw something she rarely saw in his face: the edge of effort beneath the control. Usually, the control came naturally to him. Usually, it cost nothing.

"Is there something you need to tell me?" he asked.

"No," she said. "And even if there were, I owe you no accounting of it. You have made that clear by maintaining professional distance." She paused. "But if you had asked, I would have told you that Don Miguel is courteous and entirely appropriate, and that I find him exhausting, and that I have no intention of deepening his attentions."

An expression crossed his face, minute and gone before she could name it.

"I am glad to know that," he said.

"Are you," she said. It was not a question.

He began walking again. "I am. It means our continued work together will not be complicated."

She wanted to ask him why her work with him would have been complicated if she had chosen to accept Don Miguel's attentions. She wanted him to say something true. But they stood in a garden in full daylight, and the intelligence chief of England could not afford to say what was true, and she could not afford to ask.

So instead she said, "Good," and they walked back toward the palace in a silence that was entirely professional and entirely false.

When she returned to her chambers, she sat at her small desk and took up quill and parchment. The words came with surprising ease, as though they had been waiting in her fingers.

"Don Miguel," she wrote. "I have been honored by your attentions at the banquet and in the gardens. Your courtesy and the warmth of your conversation have not been unnoticed. But I find myself unable to encourage expectations that I cannot meet with honest feeling. I am not a woman who can marry for alliance while harboring... I am not a woman who can do this. You deserve someone whose whole heart is available. I have written this only to speak truth to myself, and I am not sending it. But I wish you to understand, if understanding were possible without speaking, that the fault is entirely mine, and the warmth of your regard does you credit."

She set down the quill. The letter lay on the parchment, ink still wet and glistening. She reread it once, from the first word to the last.

Then she reached for the edge of the parchment.