“Too beastly to please your wife, Sauvage?”
The man who says this is a marquis. His stuffed doublet gives his chest and shoulders a breadth that looks almost comical paired with his legs, long and slim and knobble-kneed as a stork’s. He speaks loudly enough to be heard above the music, the chatter, in the long, high-ceilinged hall; even the king, sunk a moment earlier with his cheek upon his fist, ennui covering his face like a mask, glances up at the sound. The queen mother as well, frowning. The marquis, who came up behind Petrus at his table in the feasting hall, gestures with his chin, and Petrus looks.
His wife, who rose from their table a little earlier without a word to him, stands against a wall. She is smiling, truly smiling—he thinks, with a jolt, that he has never seen her smile so before—and speaking to someone. She is too far away for him to hear her words. He shifts his gaze to her companion and experiences another jolt: it is Ludovico.
The pain that comes with the sight is strange, simmering. The upward arch of her neck, his friend’s familiar half-smile. He has seen them speak before—quick snatches of conversation, witnessed between the bodies of his fellow courtiers, their words lost to the hum of gossip, of political chatter—but always briefly. This conversation seems a settled thing, a wall sunk gently into the earth. Her hands behind her back, lightly clasped; how she leans her shoulder blades against the wall. His sudden burst of laughter.
It is not an unusual thing, for married men, and even, sometimes, married women, to take lovers at court. Ludovico is circumspect, but Petrus has no doubt he is unfaithful to his wife.
But he would not—he would never—
He is taking her hand, now. Taking Petrus’s wife’s hand. His, of course, as smooth as hers. He is leading her toward a space beyond the feasting tables, the space cleared for dancing. Petrus watches, sick, the simmering moving outward like a flame from the center of a paper, as they join the ring of dancers, the music bright and cheering. They step side to side. The sway of their hips, the kick of their feet. The circle of dancers opens, spirals in upon itself like a shell. His wife’s mouth open, laughing. She looks very young, lovely, free.
“What say you, Sauvage?” It is the king calling now, the king risen from his apathy. “Is this to be allowed? If that were my wife—”
A sharp chorus of laughter; the king’s wife is well known to be a pious woman, reclusive from court. His mistress, seated to the side of him not occupied by his mother, smiles, though she stops when His Majesty’s own laughter turns to wet coughing.
When he has regained his breath, the music is trailing away, the dance ending, and the dancers clearing the floor. He calls, “Madame! Madame Sauvage!” Petrus sees his wife’s head go up like a hunted doe’s, her hand fall away from Ludovico’s. His friend frowns, glances at Petrus.
“You choose to dance with the man your husband bested only days ago in a fight?” he says. “You witnessed his triumph, I believe—did he not fight well?”
The quiet in the hall is such that Petrus can hear the harsh susurration of her breathing. “Very well, Your Majesty,” she says, her voice small as a child’s.
The queen mother shifts in her chair beside the king. “Surely,” she says, “he deserves a better reward from his wife than such cold praise.”
Muffled laughter. Petrus’s wife looks at him, and to him she seems uncertain, all the loveliness of her face and figure eclipsed, all at once, by her obvious terror. “You fought so very well, Monsieur,” she says, sounding as if she is trying to infuse the words with feeling, as herbs infuse vinegar with their flavor.
His own voice is very dull when he says, “Thank you, Madame.”
“A kiss!” someone calls, and then other voices, laughing, wine sodden. “A kiss, a kiss!”
“Yes,” says the king, smiling a crooked, sickly smile. “A kiss for our victor, from his lovely, returned bride.”
Roots seem to have grown over Petrus’s feet, twining, trapping them. When he does not move, his wife does, walking stiffly until she is standing before him. She looks up at him with her pale brown eyes, her pink mouth flattened at the corners, her cheeks rosy with humiliation.
And suddenly, the simmering reaches the edges of the paper and catches on something else, and something else, and something else, until the whole of him is aflame with anger, with a humiliation so bright it must eclipse hers as the sun eclipses the moon before dusk. Years upon years of humiliation. He rips his feet from the roots that hold him, steps forward, catches her arms in his two hands.
“May I?” he says, just as he does at night in their bed; but this time she hasn’t the chance to say no, not with the king and queen watching them, and there is a terrible, shameful satisfaction in that. She nods once, clipped, eyes wide.
He bends to her. Her mouth is warm; he puts one arm about her waist and pulls her forward until their chests are touching. Her hands come up, tentative, to his shoulders; he thinks, just for a moment, of the woman with the wine-mark, how she touched him without fear or horror. Air passes between their mouths like wine from a shared cup; and then he presses harder, hard enough that she makes a startled sound and her hands fist in the fabric of his sleeves. He wants to nip, to lick, to devour; he feels her tongue suddenly against his and his arm tightens around her waist, a crook of root itself, ancient and immovable.
And then—
“Sauvage!” someone calls again, and he pulls away, her hands dropping from his shoulders, her lips folding in upon themselves, her chin red and abraded from his hair.