The Queen's Rival by Haeger Diane

Author:Haeger, Diane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2011-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Gil had been feeling ill all day, and this was certainly not helping.

Now that the queen was away on her pilgrimage, the king, predictably, was behaving like a carefree adolescent, and he was doing so in front of the entire court. Gil stood in the corner of a banquet hall heavy with candle smoke and the scent of perfume, leaning against a pillar as raucous festivities carried on around him. There, in the center of everything, Bess sat on a fringed velvet stool, her gown overly adorned and suspiciously more elegant than any of the others she had worn before. She was singing with the king, and it was their third tune together that evening. As always, the polite applause had begun to turn to gossip-laden whispers.

Bess’s hair was long and golden down her back, her head adorned with a simple cap, and his heart physically ached as he watched her, to think that he would probably never have the opportunity to touch that smooth mane of hair himself, or any other part of Bess, at least not in the way he had longed to for four years. Her embrace on holidays and after a reunion was only that of a sister for a brother. She was entirely unaware that the man she touched was someone who longed to touch her back passionately, and that he would have given anything to possess not just her body, but her heart and soul as well.

Gil thought then, as he stood watching her with the king, of the missed opportunities—the pendant, the de Troyes book. He thought as well of how awkward and certainly too late it was to let her know how he truly felt. Bess Blount was the king’s mistress, just as Jane and Elizabeth were before her. Like a coming storm, he could feel it with every fiber of his being. And, as it had been with the two previous impressionable girls, there was not a single thing he could do to stop it. She was especially lost to him now that she had matured. Though Bess understood that she was not the first girl to grace the king’s bed, still she would not be dissuaded from the dalliance in the hope that this was the first time the king’s heart was involved in the matter. If Gil tried to dissuade her now, it would seem like jealousy, and he would lose even her friendship, which was all he really had of her. That, he could not bear.

The best course left to him had gone unchanged, and his resolve had never wavered. He would be the one to pick up the pieces when it was over, since soon enough, it would be, just as it had been for Jane and Elizabeth. Jesú, Maria, what he would not give to have her look at him like that, to laugh with him like that, to touch his arm with such familiarity. Gil’s head was still throbbing as if someone were pounding him with a club.

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