Read Online The Queen's Bastard by C. E. Murphy - Free Book Online Page B

it was true. She dropped a curtsey, fingers still clenched in her skirt. “My honour, sir.”
    “That will be all.” The castellan flipped his fingers dismissively; the standing crowd stepped back, breaking apart. A girl hissed “Harlot” at Belinda’s back, and a man’s low chuckle followed it.
    “And wouldn’t you be, too, if the master bade you spread your legs,” he muttered. The girl let out a gasp of outrage, then a squeak as he slapped her on the arse, hard enough for the sound to be recognizable through layers of skirts and petticoats. “Hold your tongue,” he said. Belinda waited two breaths, then looked over her shoulder to meet the speaker’s eyes. A coachman, awake enough to have been the one who fetched the doctor, unimportant enough in the household that Belinda didn’t know his name. He gave her a wink and she inclined her head, the only thanks he’d get. She gathered her skirts, curtsying again to the castellan, and went to fetch Gregori’s breakfast and tea.
    Even knowing the doctor had been there, the count’s colour was worse than she’d expected, and made worse still by comparison to the rich brocade duvet he lay beneath. “My lord,” Belinda murmured as she set his tea tray by the bed. She’d wiped the cosmetics from her face, leaving the bruise an ugly greening mark on her cheek, and even in sickness she saw his eyes go to it, before amusement curved his mouth and he lifted a hand—thin-boned and pale, far more so than a day earlier—to curl his fingers into the high collar of her gown that hid the ring of bruises he had left.
    “I’m disappointed, Rosa. Do you always hide the marks of love?” His grip had less strength than it had the day before, but he was still strong, stronger than she was.
    “I had not thought to see you today, my lord, else I’d have taken more care in my dressing.”
    “Did you not?” His voice sharpened. “Do they tell you I’m ill, Rosa? That I must be coddled and treated like a child?”
    “That you’re ill, yes, my lord. That the doctor has been and gone, and that you’ll be well enough soon.” Belinda straightened; Gregori’s hand in her partlet pulled the fabric tight, and buttons slipped free. It was made to do so, all the easier for assignations. His mouth thinned with pleasure and he yanked hard on the fabric. Buttons flew loose, the partlet tearing away. Belinda lifted her chin half in response to the pull and half to display her necklace of bruises. “It seems to me you’re neither ill nor weak at all, my lord.” The hollowness beneath his eyes and in his cheeks gave lie to her words, but nothing in her voice or gaze did. Later, when she lay with her teeth set together against the pain of too much use, she thought that nothing in his passion gave lie to her claim, either.
    But the next day she was flush and healthy, and Gregori all the worse, and the doctor’s face had grown deadly grim. Whispers ran wild among the staff, fears for the count’s life and tales of what illness bore him down. Belinda shivered when a canker of the stomach was hinted at.
    And the word spat after her then was not whore but witch. That gave her pause, her heart seizing with the fancy that the accusation held merit, and then simply seized, a place too cold for the stillness to fill opening inside her. Witchery was a forbidden craft; an impossible one, by any rational thought. But rational thought had never ruled, and very little stood between a woman and a stake to burn her at when the word flew. Belinda’s heart lurched from one beat to another, staggered with the weight of real fear. Bitter thoughts on a midsummer morning did
not
bring on sudden illness, no matter how useful that illness might be to her. Dismayed nausea at a task interrupted did not leap from her frustration to poison a man’s body.
    It was not herself she had to convince.
    Hands relaxed, disdain and insult in her eyes, Belinda turned back to face Ilyana, petite and blond and