The Ruins of Lace by Iris Anthony Read Free Book Online Page B

supporters. He ought to have been no different from the dozens of nobles who had stopped at Souboscq on their way through the countryside. It would have been the very definition of ungraciousness to have turned him away.
    And so we had suffered his airs and his affectations. We had suffered the attentions he paid to the companion he had brought along with him. We were suffering from him still. As many times as I had told Lisette what had happened was not her fault, she had refused to believe me. As many times as her father had tried to draw her close, she had refused him the solace of her touch.
    But she had been right in her claims of culpability.
    And she was also dreadfully wrong.
    She had destroyed the lace, but she had not been responsible for the count’s extortion. And it was not she who had persuaded her father to take part in the Marquis of Chalais’s conspiracy to assassinate the King’s chief minister, Richelieu. In our great naiveté of ten years before, the plot had seemed destined to succeed.
    If only it had not failed!
    If it had worked, then nobles like my cousin the viscount, Lisette’s father, would have maintained some control within the kingdom. As it was, the failure of the plot had allowed Richelieu to strip all power from the nobility and then tax them for his trouble. And the cardinal had spies everywhere. Had we known of them then as we knew of them now, my cousin would never have been tempted to join such folly.
    He was neither noble enough nor powerful enough to depend upon the King’s mercy. The Queen and the King’s own brother had been privy to Chalais’s plans…and yet they had been able to reconcile with both the King and the cardinal. ’Twas only those without power and influence who had been executed for their part in the plot. If Richelieu ever discovered my cousin’s involvement, there was no doubt he would share the unlucky conspirators’ fate: a dishonorable death in prison or the horror of an executioner’s block.
    It was not safe even to think an untoward thought about the cardinal.
    Yet not all of the estate’s woes were the fault of the count. These poor harvests had taken a toll, as had the King’s policies of taxation and my cousin’s unwillingness to let the peasants suffer from the King’s levies. Though the Count of Montreau came every year for payment on his lace, and though he seemed to squeeze it from us one hard-won coin at a time, as long as we were not required to forfeit the land, there was hope that one day we would reap harvests sufficient to pay the debt.
    As my cousin’s heir, I clung to that hope.
    I was not, by birth, a Lefort. I was a Girard. I would not inherit my cousin’s title, but as his closest kin, I was inheritor of the estate. In taking his name as my own, in becoming Alexandre Lefort, I guaranteed I would never again be known as the son of one of the King’s most celebrated warriors. At one time, that might have been a boon, but my father had been struck down in his prime by leprosy. A disease so terrible and shameful no one could avoid being tainted by proximity. The Viscount of Souboscq’s heir had every opportunity open to him; the leprous warrior’s son had none.
    I put a hand to the dagger I wore at my waist. My father’s dagger. With Souboscq’s fields so stunted and withered, it might prove my only legacy. I fingered the jewels set into its hasp. The dagger was cruciform in shape, and its short, slender blade was designed to finish off the mortally wounded, to offer a sort of mercy to those not expected to survive. There had only ever been one other like it.
    Find its match, fiston . Therein lies your destiny.
    Those were the words my father had babbled toward the end of his life. That I had been able to decipher them at all had been a miracle, for the disease had eaten away at his lips as well as his tongue. Those words had often been in my thoughts of late, but they were a cryptic and useless legacy. To admit to the