His Dark Lady by Victoria Lamb Page B

to be here, in this private garden overlooked by what must be the Queen’s own apartments? – Will sat perfectly still and gazed up at the woman who had come out on to the narrow balcony.
    The woman was turned away from him, looking back into the room . She was wearing a broad-skirted white and black gown decorated with pearls, her bearing very erect. The gloved hand that clutched the stone rail of the balcony bore a large ruby ring. Even in the gloom of dusk he could see that she was tall, stately even.
    One of the Queen’s ladies, he guessed, judging by the richness of the pearls glinting in her dark hair and on the bodice of her gown.
    Then the noblewoman turned to look down into the garden, and he saw her face for the first time.
    A shudder ran through him.
Lucy Morgan!
    Will stared hungrily up at the dark face he remembered, beautifully drawn by the hand of Nature with the high cheekbones and full lips of the African. He had seen her at the Cross Keys Inn, and now here she was again. His whole body shivered. He had chosen to come to court for this night’s work, knowing he might see her again in the Queen’s company of ladies. But this chance meeting …
    Not chance, but the hand of God. It had to be fate that Lucy Morgan had come to this very window and looked out over the garden in which he had chosen to sit. What else could she represent but his destiny, clothed in human flesh – and a gorgeous black flesh, at that?
    Lucy shifted slightly, and noticed his still figure under the willow tree.
    Fixed by the intensity of her dark, brooding gaze, Will found himself unable to move or speak. Perhaps she would think him a statue.
    ‘Who’s there?’ she demanded, shattering the illusion. When he did not respond, she drew herself up angrily, staring straight at him. ‘Speak, or I shall summon the guards.’
    Had she always been so tall?
    Will frowned, looking again at the black hair that framed her face, bound in a silver net and gleaming with tiny seeded pearls. Pearls were the Queen’s favourite adornment, too, a symbol of chastity, of untried virginity. Yet surely an exotic beauty like Lucy Morgan could not still be unmarried? Though perhaps, in the service of the Queen, she had little choice but to remain a virgin too, as her mistress claimed to have done.
    He was not tongue-tied, but dazzled. He revelled in being able to say her name for the first time in years. ‘Lucy Morgan.’
    She stared down at him through the darkness. Her voice was hesitant . Perhaps she feared he was a courtier who would be offended by her questions.
    ‘Who are you, sir? These are the Queen’s apartments and you are standing in her Privy Garden. I don’t know how you came to be there. But if you are seen, you will be arrested.’
    He let the play roll drop and came swiftly to the foot of the wall. The balcony on which she stood was two floors up, but there was a young sycamore tree immediately below it, and a high ledge to one side that he could probably stand on to speak to her. He gazed up, assessing the height. As a boy in Warwickshire, he had been for ever in and out of trees ten times the size of this. Leaving the stinking cloak behind him on the grass, Will scrabbled up into the tree, balanced along one of its slender branches – which bobbed and danced beneath his weight like an unbroken pony – and pulled himself painstakingly up on to the stone ledge.
    Flattened against the wall, Will turned his head to see Lucy hanging over the balcony, staring down at him. God, she was a beauty. He felt himself harden with desire and was shocked into silence. What had he told Laneham? That he was a happily married man?
    Since coming to London, he had seen women running about half-dressed in the streets, and had had young whores sit in his lap, offering him their bodies for little more than fourpence, and had not been moved.
    Lucy Morgan was different.
    She was shocked that he knew her name, that he had climbed up like a boy to speak to