Chapter 17: The Lodging

They did not go to her chamber.

Margot's rooms were in the women's quarter, attended by Lady Helen and two maids who reported to the Mother of the Maids. A man entering there would be known within the hour. Instead Francis led her through corridors she had never used, down a narrow stair, and into a small suite of rooms near the Wardrobe that had been assigned to him since his return.

The rooms were spare and orderly: a desk, a chair, a bed, a chest. A single candle burned on the mantel. The window overlooked a courtyard where servants crossed with armloads of wood and linen, but the glass was thick enough to muffle their voices.

Francis closed the door and bolted it.

For a moment they simply looked at each other across the small space. The gallery had allowed urgency; here, in the quiet, Margot became aware of how much the weeks had changed him. He was thinner. There was a scar above his left eyebrow that had not been there before, pale and new. His hands, when he removed his gloves, were marked with small cuts and the roughness of cold weather.

"You're hurt," she said.

"I'm returned."

"Those are not the same thing."

He smiled faintly. "No. They are not."

She crossed to him and took his right hand, turning it palm-up. The cuts were clean, healing, the kind a man acquired from riding hard and handling gear in bad conditions. She touched the newest one, running along the base of his thumb.

"This one?"

"A saddle strap. York."

"And this?"

"A door latch. Durham. Someone had jammed it."

"And the scar?"

His expression flickered—something she could not quite read. "A disagreement. It ended."

Margot looked up at him. "You don't have to tell me."

"I know." He lifted his other hand and brushed a strand of hair from her face. "I want to. But not tonight. Tonight I want—" He stopped, his throat moving. "I want to be here. With you. In a room that is not a corridor and not a gallery and not anywhere someone might pass."

"Then be here."

She felt his hand settle at her waist, tentative at first, then firmer. The weeks of waiting had built a hunger in her that she had refused to name, and now, with him before her, it rose like a tide she could not have stopped if she had wanted to.

She did not want to.

"Margot." His voice was low. "If this is not what you want—"

"It is what I want." She reached up and began to unpin her hood, setting it on the chest beside her. "I have spent eight weeks wanting it. I am not inclined to stop now."

"You have a gift for making decisions sound final."

"They usually are." She set her hands on his chest. "Francis. I want you to stay. I want you to be here, in this room, with me, until morning. If that is not what you want, tell me now, and we will drink wine and talk about ciphers until we are both too tired to be disappointed."

His answer was to kiss her.

The kiss was deliberate—Francis's kind of deliberate—but with a looseness he hadn't allowed before, not the urgency of the gallery or the danger of the dark corridor. His mouth moved over hers, learning her again, a willingness to take time. His hands slid from her waist to her back, pressing her closer.

When they broke apart, his forehead rested against hers. "I have thought about this," he said, "more than is reasonable for a man with a commission to complete."

"And what did you conclude?"

"That I was not built for wanting someone this much. That it compromises things I once thought essential." He kissed her jaw. "That I do not care."

Margot closed her eyes. His mouth was at her throat now, warm and deliberate, and she felt every careful thought she had assembled over the weeks dissolve.

"The bed," she managed.

"Yes."

He led her the few steps to it. The coverlet was plain wool, the pillows thin, but Margot did not care. She sat on the edge and pulled him down beside her. The candlelight caught the lines of his face, the new scar, the exhaustion in his eyes that had not yet faded.

"Tell me what you need," he said.

"You." She reached for the fastenings of his coat. "Only you."

He helped her. The coat came off, then the doublet beneath it, then the shirt. Margot had seen men's bodies before—in paintings, in accidental encounters at country houses, in the marble statuary that lined the great houses of the realm—but she had never seen one she had permission to touch. She touched him now: the ridge of his collarbone, the plane of his chest, the scar just below his ribs that he had not mentioned.

"This one?"

"Older. Before I knew you."

She kissed it. He made a sound—low, involuntary—and his hand came to rest in her hair.

"Margot."

"Let me look at you." She pulled back. "You spent eight weeks being unseen by everyone who matters. Let me see you."

His eyes held hers. Then, slowly, he nodded.

She undressed him the rest of the way, and then he undressed her, both of them fumbling with laces and hooks and the complicated fastenings of court dress. They laughed once when a sleeve refused to cooperate. The laughter made it easier. It made it real.

When she was finally bare, Francis went still. He looked at her as he looked at important documents—as if memorizing every detail.

"You are beautiful," he said.

"You are exhausted."

"Both can be true."

She pulled him down onto the bed. The linen was cool against her back. His body was warm above her. For a long moment they lay like that, skin to skin, breathing the same air.

"I should tell you," he said quietly, "that I have no practice at tenderness."

"Then we will practice." She traced the line of his shoulder. "I am not afraid of awkwardness, Francis. I am only afraid of never having this."

He kissed her then, deeply, and the last of his reserve broke. His hands moved over her with increasing certainty—her breasts, her hips, the inside of her thigh. She arched into his touch, making small sounds she could not have controlled if she had tried. Everywhere he touched, she came alive.

"Is this—" he asked.

"Yes."

"And this?"

"Yes."

"Margot—"

"Francis." She caught his face in her hands. "Stop asking permission for every inch. I am here. I want you. I trust you."

He went very still. Then he kissed her with something like reverence.

What followed was better than perfect—it was theirs. There was a moment of discomfort, quickly softened by his care. There was laughter at an awkward angle. Then a long, breathless stretch where nothing existed but the movement of his body and the response of hers, where she learned that precision in other things could translate into precision here, into attention, into patience.

Afterward, they lay tangled in the thin blankets, her head on his shoulder, his hand tracing slow patterns along her arm.

"I did not know," she said into the darkness.

"What?"

"That it could be like that. That I could be there, entirely, and not be performing something."

His hand stilled. "You have performed a great deal, haven't you?"

"We all perform." She turned her head to look at him. "But with you, I do not want to."

"Then don't." He kissed her hair. "With me, you never have to."

She lay awake for a while, listening to his breathing slow into sleep. The candle burned down to a stub and went out. The courtyard outside grew quiet. Margot thought about the court, the Queen, the spies, the letters, the danger that had brought him home. All of it existed beyond this room. In here, there was only this—his warmth, his hand in hers, the private language they had built word by word and touch by touch.

She had spent her life encoding things. She had thought that safety lay in translation, in hiding meaning where others would not think to look. But lying beside Francis in the dark, she understood that some things could simply be said. Some things could simply be held.

She pressed closer to him and closed her eyes.

In the morning, there would be arrangements to consider. Reputations. The Queen's awareness. The fact that she had not returned to her own chamber.

In the morning, they would be careful again.

But for this night, they were only themselves. It was enough. It was more than enough.