27. Chapter 27
Chapter twenty-seven
Tristan climbed the marble steps of the Palazzo Reale alone, and Naples rose around him with indecent beauty.
The city should have satisfied him. Even half-seen beneath the evening sky, it had the sort of splendor that made men believe in reward—the bay darkening to blue glass, the lamps kindling along the waterfront, the palace facade washed in honeyed light.
Music drifted from the open doors above him. Voices spilled over balconies.
A different man might have stopped to look. A man who arrived with a wife on his arm, a brother at his shoulder, trunks following in cheerful disorder, a household waiting to be settled into rooms that opened toward the sea.
A man foolish enough to carry such weight might have felt satisfaction at the sight of it. He might have thought: Here. This city. This is where we begin.
But not him. He had only to survive the reception. After that, he would find the first tavern with good wine and bad music, and drink until the city blurred.
Boots sounded behind him, quick over marble.
“Fratello,” Lorenzo called. “If you intend to storm the throne room, could you at least allow me to catch up? I’m wearing the embroidered coat, and the embroidery deserves witnesses.”
Tristan stopped. Lorenzo came up beside him, trimmed with enough silver to ransom a small province. He looked insufferably pleased, and very much alone. Tristan looked behind him. No Marguerite.
His throat tightened. “Where is she?”
Lorenzo pressed one hand to his breast. “Good evening to you as well. I crossed half of Naples in buckled shoes, dressed like a diplomatic chandelier, and this is my reward? No admiration. No brotherly praise. Only interrogation. If this is the welcome I receive, I shall go visit lady friends who understand fabric, sacrifice, and the power of a fine calf.”
He turned as if to leave.
“Stay.” Tristan caught his arm. “Brother.”
Lorenzo’s face lit up. Tristan saw the boy who had walked into his cabin a year ago with a borrowed title, empty pockets, and too much pride to say what he had truly come to ask.
Brother.
Tristan felt Lorenzo’s arm under his hand, solid and alive, and his grip tightened before he could stop it.
“Ah,” Lorenzo said softly. “Now you remember I am your blood and meat.”
Despite everything, Tristan almost laughed. Almost. The mangled idiom should have been ridiculous. He held Lorenzo’s arm another heartbeat, because letting go too quickly would make the word look accidental. By God, he would not take it back.
“Stay,” he said again.
Lorenzo looked at him for one long second. Then he nodded. “Always, fratello. If you must know, I took our lovely passenger to her friend, the Marchesa Sanseverina. It seems the lady has all the influence in court these days, and I am sure Marguerite will accomplish everything she set out to do.”
Everything she set out to do. Tristan nodded once.
His feet began moving again because if he remained still, this feeling inside him might find a way to show on his face.
Of course she had gone to her friend. She had come to Naples for warmth, for welcome, for position, for the Italian husband who would be jealous and possessive and never dream of cutting her away. She deserved every bit of it.
Then why did his chest feel as if it were splitting open?
Tu mi manchi, Marguerite.
How you are missing from me.
The Italian words came back, but this time Tristan understood them.
Not I miss you. That was too English, too proud, too much a man standing at the center of his own wanting.
Tu mi manchi. You are missing from me. She stood at the center of the phrase.
He was merely the place where her absence had torn itself visible.
He had mistaken her for desire, then for prize, then for weight, but she was none of those things. She was ballast. The necessary weight without which a ship ceased to be steady, ceased to answer the helm, ceased to hold a true course through water. A ship without ballast listed.
Tristan stood in the royal palace of Naples, dressed in gold braid, and understood at last that Marguerite d’Ailes was missing from him not as a woman is missed by a man, but as the thing his whole construction required in order not to capsize.
He mounted the last steps and entered the palace.
High ceilings glittered with candlelight.
Mirrors multiplied the crowd until courtiers appeared in regiments.
Uniforms flashed with braid and orders, silk gowns moved like bright water, jewels winked at throats, ears, wrists.
The heat of bodies mingled with orange blossom, wax, perfume, and the faint iron smell of soldiers dressed for court instead of battle.
At the far end, beneath a canopy that managed to look both royal and theatrical, stood the throne.
The usher announced him: “The Duke of Stormhaven, newly appointed ambassador of His Britannic Majesty to the Court of Naples.”
Silence fell.
Tristan braced himself. After the greeting from the Neapolitan envoy, who had not even known his name, he knew the shape of his welcome.
Turned heads. Polite blindness. The courtly art of making a man enter a room and vanish in it.
London had done the same often enough. Admiralty dinners where men with cleaner reputations received applause while he stood with salt still in his bones and victories treated like inconveniences.
Every face turned toward him. A whisper passed through the room. Then another. His name moved low at first, then gathered speed.
Stormhaven. The Sea Wolf. The Adriatic run. The burning battery off Ragusa. That night action near Corfu. Didn’t he take the French sloop with half his guns run out? Didn’t he bring the convoy through under fog?
The whispers rose into an excited tide.
People moved toward him, not as one approached a useful barbarian, but with eagerness. Men in uniform stepped forward first, then diplomats, then courtiers with bright eyes. Questions came at him in French, English, and Italian.
Tristan stood very still. He could not make sense of the room. What had happened? How did they know all of his victories?
Lorenzo leaned close. “It seems our passenger accomplished everything she set out to do. She is certainly good at diplomacy.”
Marguerite.
Tristan turned his head slightly, but there were too many faces, too much silk, too much light.
She was nowhere and everywhere at once, in every warm look, every name repeated with admiration, every path opened before him where he had expected a wall.
She had done this for him. His throat tightened until speech became impossible.
What did a captain who had learned to cut to survive do with a woman who gave too much?
“Sir—”
A man stepped forward, then stopped himself mid-stride, color rising in his face.
“Captain—Your Grace. I served aboard the Aquila during the Ligurian patrols. We studied your Adriatic run. The turn into the shoals—how you used the soundings to force their line to break—An honor,” the young man said more quietly. “Truly.”
Before Tristan could answer, a larger presence folded around them. A man with a mane of black curls and a uniform that seemed assembled for the express purpose of being seen clamped one hand on the young officer’s shoulder, fingers heavy with rings.
“Enough, Villeneuve,” the man said, booming and amused. “Let our new ambassador breathe.”
Tristan recognized the man and bowed. “Your Majesty.”
King Joachim Murat laughed and hooked an arm through his with easy familiarity, steering him forward as if they had been allies for years and the map of Europe had merely forgotten to note it.
“I expected another stiff-lipped automaton from London,” Murat said, loud enough to be heard by half the room.
“Instead, they send me a man who has seen powder smoke up close. A warrior.” His grin widened.
“If the Emperor had secured a man like you for his admirals, perhaps history would read differently, eh?”
Tristan inclined his head. “I served where I was sent.”
“Spoken like an Englishman,” Murat said. “But with better shoulders.”
Lorenzo made a sound behind him that might have been strangled laughter. Tristan ignored him because one did not elbow one’s brother before a king, however strong the temptation.
Murat led him a few steps apart. People shifted, made room, leaned in.
Tristan answered questions. Yes, the Adriatic had taught certain lessons.
Yes, the weather off that coast could be treacherous.
No, a faster ship did not always command the engagement.
Yes, soundings mattered when pride made captains foolish.
All the while, his body remained tuned to one absence.
Marguerite.
A flash of pale gold near the far mirrors made his breath catch, but it was not her.
A laugh from behind a pillar tightened his hand around his glove, but it did not belong to her.
He heard her everywhere in the room’s sudden kindness.
She had given him this, then vanished before he could ask why kindness from her felt more intimate than any night in his bed.
Then he saw a flash of silver. At the edge of the crowd, near a column, Marguerite stood.
She wore the same gown from Brighton. Tristan stopped breathing.
He had wanted her then with the clean violence of appetite.
He had not known yet what it would mean to see that same silver now, in Naples, after she had slept in his bed, wept in his arms, and built his welcome with her own hands.
The dress was unchanged. He was not.
She was watching him. Their eyes met across the room, and everything else dimmed—the mirrors, the jewels, the king’s hand on his sleeve, the murmur of the court she had conquered for him. Her expression softened first, then steadied.
“So, Captain,” Murat said, drawing his attention back by sheer royal force. “Did you bring your family with you?”
The word struck him motionless. Family. He looked at the king, startled, then back at Marguerite.
She took a step back into the crowd. His chest ached. She meant to disappear.
He could let it happen. He knew how. He had done it all his life.
Let go before weight became fatal. Let the ship sail lighter.
Let the woman who had given too much walk away before he took the rest. In another moment, she would be gone into the glittering mass of Naples, and he could stand beside a king, accept honor, drown himself later in a tavern, and call the ache survival.
A captain survived by cutting.
Tristan looked at Marguerite.
She was too vital to cut.
The realization struck through him like the moment before impact, when a ship caught on a rock and every man aboard understood the old course had ended.
No more cutting.
“Indeed, I have this rascal of an Italian brother,” Tristan said, clapping Lorenzo on the shoulder. “And somebody else.”
Murat turned his head. “Ah?”
Tristan bowed slightly, already moving. “One moment, Your Majesty.”
He strode into the circle. The room parted because men did not step into Tristan Blackmere’s path unless they had first made peace with God. He heard Lorenzo behind him draw in one sharp breath. Heard the hiss of silk, the pause in conversation.
Marguerite’s eyes widened. Her brows lifted in a question. She took one small step back, but there was nowhere to go. The crowd had opened for him and closed behind her.
“Tristan,” she whispered when he reached her.
He took her hand. Her fingers were cold when he laced them with his. The shock of that simple joining traveled up his arm and settled in the center of his chest, steadying what no battle, no swim, no command had managed to steady.
“What are you doing?” she breathed.
“What I should have done before we reached land.”
He brought her with him to the king, their joined hands visible beneath the blaze of chandeliers.
The court quieted by degrees until even the musicians faltered. Now there was only Marguerite beside him, small and trembling and upright as a queen.
Murat’s gaze dropped to their joined hands. His brows rose with magnificent interest.
“Your Majesty,” Tristan said, his voice carrying clearly through the room. “I present to you my wife, Marguerite, Duchess of Stormhaven.”