As Fra Tomasso chatted with him, Daoud watched de Gobignon and Sophia stroll across the brightly candlelit hall to the door leading to the inner galleria.
De Gobignon spoke to me in the language of my parents.
Sire Geoffrey and Dame Evelyn Langmuir, he knew, were of English stock. But Daoud's father had once told him that all the English nobility spoke French.
Tonight was the first time since Daoud landed in Italy that he had heard French or had spoken it. When he first heard himself addressed in French, he had experienced a strange and frightening sensation, as if his dead father were speaking to him. He hated de Gobignon for doing that to him.
And I hate him because he will enjoy the woman I want for myself.
The voice of Fra Tomasso faded away. Black rage filled Daoud's skull, deafening and blinding him. He pictured Sophia naked in Simon de Gobignon's arms, and his body trembled.
And when he did become Sophia's lover, the puppy would have no understanding of how much of a woman he was possessing. To him she would be the sweet Sicilian niece of a cardinal. He would have no idea of the woman behind that mask.
Sophia, Daoud had come to realize, had known suffering and loss. She had survived at the very bottom of the world, and she had risen to be the intimate of an emperor and a king.
She occupied his thoughts, Daoud sensed with some uneasiness, far more often than did Blossoming Reed back in El Kahira.