Courtesan (33 page)

“Oh, how I envied and hated that man! I wanted to kill him for touching you when I could not. You are the only thing that has ever mattered to me; the only thing, and it was like watching a part of myself being torn away.” He lifted her chin from his chest, so that she would look at him. “I told you this long ago, and it is still true. I am a man with but one heart to give, and it has been given to you. You must take great care with the knowledge of that.”

She raised a finger to his lips. “Please,” she whispered. “Do not make promises that would not be possible to keep.”

“I know what I feel.”

“You are young,
chéri,
and life is long. We have each other now, here, in this place. Do not try to promise me forever.”

Henri pulled himself from her and rose onto his knees. He took her hands in his own. For the first time in his life, he sat bared to another person and yet it was as natural as if he had done it a thousand times before.

“I prayed for the day when you would want me, though it seemed an eternity. And then, through the grace of God, finally you were given to me. Without you I am nothing; I am only empty and alone. Madame. . .
m’amie,
I am your humble servant for as long as you will consent to have me.”

Diane looked into his eyes, which were no longer deep and brooding, but filled with the sensitivity she had seen in Cauterets. They blazed with the fire of new passion. Diane felt mute. He was a Prince; Duc d’Orléans, kneeling and humbled before her. It was not just, as she had led herself to believe, an adolescent infatuation. For the first time, she realized the magnitude of his passion for her. It was also now, gazing into those eyes, that she finally felt secure enough to give her own heart to him in return. As though he knew it, or could sense the change in her, he leaned toward her, still clutching her hands.

“I love you,” he said, as he parted her lips with his own and then kissed her. After a moment he added, “I love you with everything I have, and with all that I am.”

“And with all of my heart. . .I love you.”

Tears welled in his eyes and masked his surprise as he brought her to his chest and kissed her. For two years he had longed to hear her say it; imagined her saying it to him. But somehow, when it happened, it still caught him by surprise. He could not remember another human being ever telling him that he was loved. Not even his mother. Diane de Poitiers changed all of that pain, all of that loss, with the uttering of three simple words. With her in his arms like this, the shackles that had bound his life with hate and misery were now cast off as easily as silk from fresh skin. He was not a prince with her, he was just a man. A man in love. She had done more for him than she could ever know, and he would fight for the rest of his life to make her happy.

O
NE DAY PASSED
into two
,
and three became four that they were alone together in their walled garden of Chenonceaux. The rest of the world and its complications lay beyond. They spent their days riding beside one another in the woods and along the river banks. They picnicked across the river where the trees were lush and gave more shade beneath which to make love.

Like children, they scratched one another’s names into the bark of a tree. They talked for endless hours about their dreams and their hopes. They planned their future, oblivious to the realities of his responsibilities. They did not speak of the King, or of Catherine, whose images they could scarcely recall.

They found that they loved all of the same things: riding,
jeu de paume,
swimming, reading to one another. With each day, the bond they had sanctioned in the special chateau on the water deepened. He taught her how to play chess, a game she had never quite mastered. In their chamber at night, they would curl up on a thick tapestry beside the fire, with a marble board between them, and covered only in loose dressing gowns and bedding, they would play. She learned quickly under his tutelage and fast became a worthy opponent.

“You know,
m’amie,
this will not be easy for you,” he said one evening as he watched her. She was contemplating her next move, and her face was lit by the golden hues from the fire. “People are bound to think that you have corrupted me with your worldly ways, and that you have stolen my heart from my wife.”

“Well, haven’t I?” she said, capturing his bishop. He waited for her to look up at him. After a moment she did.

“Madame, that which is not possessed by one, can never be stolen by another. My soul belonged to you long before she ever set foot in France.”

Diane smiled and leaned across the board to kiss him. “But you know that this must remain a private matter between us,
chéri.
”

The corners of his mouth turned down into a pout. After a moment, he recanted. “Of course you are right. For now, at least. I shall not muddy the waters for either of us, just yet. But one day it will all come out, and then I shall want to show you off to every petty, envious courtier at François’ Court. Then it will be said that weak-willed, melancholy little Henri is not so dim, for he has won the greatest prize of all!”

Diane reached over and touched his cheek. “But until that time, we must be very, very cautious. If His Majesty were to catch wind of it, I would be most expeditiously ousted from Court, and from you.”

“I would kill him myself, if he were ever to lay a hand on you!” Henri snapped, as the image of his father, long forgotten, filled him with the old rage of his boyhood. In his anger, he reached out to her as though she were a tonic, and she willingly gave in to him. He pulled her dressing gown away and kissed her bare breasts until he could feel the nipples harden beneath his lips. He looked down at her smile, and then buried his face in the curved area between them. He pushed the chess board aside; the carved wooden pieces clattered as they fell against the marble board.

Henri held her in the powerful way a man holds a woman, and he kissed her with all of the masculine passion she could have hoped to feel; yet in his soul were the unfulfilled needs of a boy lain bare to her. She lay beneath him on the cold tile floor, surrounded by her robes and bedding, feeling his passion, and yet sensing an even deeper side of him beginning to surface. It was like the rebirth of a child who had died long ago; a rebirth for which she alone was responsible.

But his was not the only resurrection. Diane had denied her own passion for so many fallow years, that finally giving in to it was like a wellspring. The change in their relationship had meant new life for them both. She no longer cared about the difference in age between them, that he was married, or that one day he would leave her. For now she felt certain that he loved her; and that was enough. She looked over at him and wondered what it was. What was this odd, almost divine force that had propelled them so relentlessly toward one another? Deep within herself, almost to her core, she had loved him; first as a mother loves a son, now as a woman loves a man. To deny it, as she had done, was to refute her own existence. Loving meant life, new life for them both.

H
ENRI HAD BEEN
with Diane for eight days when he was forced to leave Chenonceaux. He had to return to the military camp where his brother, the Dauphin, and Grand Master Montmorency awaited him. She stood in the round alcove adjoining her bedchamber and watched him dress. First, the white silk undergarments; the stockings, then the padded trunk hose. She watched them slide over the sculpted muscles of his calves and thighs. He did not look at her. He could not. Leaving her was too painful.

Henri slid the red silk shirt over his bare back. She watched the broad muscles contract and expand as he clasped it and then covered it with a dark blue doublet embroidered with the King’s crest. He sat in a high-backed leather chair to put on his shoes. After a moment, he let them fall to the floor. He leaned back and looked up at her. Diane came to him without a word and slipped onto his lap. She clasped her arms around his neck and gently kissed each of his cheeks and they sat silently together in the chair, holding one another. Every moment was precious. They both knew there was no way of knowing what lay ahead. After a moment, he began to run his fingers over the line of her arm, recapturing her softness.

“Oh, how I wish we could just seize this moment and keep things as they are right now,” he sighed as they looked out the open window onto the river.

“But you know we cannot,” she whispered and lay her head on his shoulder. “We both must leave this place.”

“Yes; back to the real world, with all of its ugliness and deceit.”

“Nothing will ever be the same again.”

“Nothing is constant in this world of ours, but my love for you.”

“And mine for you,” she added.

Diane followed the reluctant Prince down the stone stairway and into the grand foyer. It was early and the walls still radiated the night’s chill. As they reached the bottom of the stairs, Henri was halted by the sight that lay before him. The foyer was lined with the King’s guards. Each man stood at attention with his sword drawn and his blue-plumed toque at a right angle tilt. They lined the path to the opened double doors. As Henri descended the last stair, each guardsman, in turn, reverently bowed. It was the same motion they performed in the presence of the King. Henri stopped and looked at them. His heart began to race.

“What is the meaning of this? I am not the King! Why are you here?”

When they did not reply, he charged ahead to the opened doors and out into the gravel-covered courtyard. Diane followed. Hélène flanked the door beside the royal physician. Both of their heads hung solemnly. Diane looked at her maid as she passed by, but Hélène said nothing. As she turned back to Henri, Diane saw him falter, then she looked ahead at what he had seen. Assembled before him was an army of the King’s guard on horseback. The dark horse in front bore the King’s red, blue and gold banner sewn with the image of the salamander. Another horse that stood beside it bore a banner in black, the banner of mourning. Fifty more men stood in uniform in the circular area just outside the door. When Henri came out of the chateau they bowed ceremoniously, just as the others had done.

He looked back at Diane who stood in the arch to the doorway with the same expression of surprise. She feared the worst. The King must have discovered them, but she said nothing; she only waited. As Henri turned back around, he saw his old friend, Jacques de Saint-André, come out from the legion of guards and advance toward him. As he neared Henri, he bowed as reverently as the others had done.

“What in the devil is the meaning of all of this, Jacques?”

Diane advanced and stood beside Henri. Saint-André acknowledged her with a vacant nod and then looked back at the Prince. His face was drawn. He had not shaven and his garments were caked with dust and mud. It was clear that he had ridden hard from the camps.

“I regret, Your Highness, what I must tell you, but I do beseech you to be brave.”

“Is it the King?”

“It is your brother, the Dauphin. He is dead.”

“Dead? That is not possible. I was just with him.”

“He died two days past, Your Highness, at Tournon, where he waited for your father to join him.”

“I do not believe. . .I will not believe. . .”

“I regret that I saw it with my own eyes. The King suspects poisoning. The question of who, I am afraid, remains a mystery.”

Henri felt himself pass into a daze. Though they had not been close since they were children, François was still his older brother; the brother by which he had tried to measure himself, and by which he had always failed. Diane reached around to steady him as he faltered.

“I am so sorry, Henri,” whispered Saint-André in the voice of a friend as he lowered his head like the others.

Henri looked up again into the courtyard lined with royal guards, all lowered in bows to him. He looked again at Saint-André and then at Diane. Now, even she curtsied.

“Madame, please! Do not bow before me!”

Diane lifted her head just so that Henri could hear her, but continued her reverence in the fashion of the others.

“We show our respect because you are Dauphin now. Through the fate of so grievous a tragedy,
mon amour,
it is you now who shall next be King of France.”

T
HE WINDOWS OF
L
ES
T
OURNELLES
in Paris were draped with great strips of black silk to block out the sun. They also muffled the sound of prayers from the Mass for the Dead, chanted by the townspeople who held vigil below. A black banner stretched across the gate to the chateau where twenty years before, the boy they now mourned had been given life. His body was finally borne on a bier back to the Cathedral de Saint-Denis, where he was to be entombed with his mother.

The King was a man inconsolable. In the place of the robust Monarch who had left Chenonceaux, now only the shell of a man remained. He shuffled around the dark halls aimlessly, muttering to himself and shaking his head. He spoke to no one, save for a few words, and took only enough food to keep himself alive.

The death of his eldest son had aged the hedonistic King the way no other bloodshed or tragedy could have done. In his grief, he longed for retaliation. Within a week of his son’s entombment, formal charges were brought against Count Sebastian Montecuculi, the Dauphin’s private secretary, who had come to France in the entourage of Catherine de Medici.

Montecuculi had several points against him, which made the charges of murder that much more viable in a Court crying for revenge. He was Italian, which not only tied him to Catherine, but to a possible greater conspiracy instigated by the Emperor Charles. He had also been the unfortunate one, when it was requested, to have given the Dauphin the cup of water, by which it was believed that he had died. But most strongly against him, a book on poisons had been found among his belongings.

He was tortured mercilessly until he confessed to the crime. Though once the torture ceased, he continually tried to recant his admission, the King was convinced he was guilty. He refused to discuss with his courtiers other possible suspects of which there were many. Instead, he set out with single-minded ferocity to see the Count executed for the crime. His sentence, so that the King might once again know peace of mind, was to be tied to four horses and torn to pieces.

I
T WAS AGREED
by them both that Diane should stay on at Chenonceaux a few days longer while Henri returned to Paris. He had wanted to pay his last respects to his brother who was being interred in the Cathedral de Saint-Denis, just outside the city. He desperately wanted Diane to accompany him but both were afraid of the suspicion that such a bold move was certain to arouse.

The Grand Master, now Lieutenant-General of the French army, was at the camp on the Rhône where he had taken command of the troops against the Emperor. After his brief stop in Paris, Henri then joined his friend Montmorency in Avignon.

In the evenings, as he sat idle, the new Dauphin wrote to Diane. A profound loneliness and despair marked the tone of his letters. By the time she rejoined the King’s Court, now moved out to Fontainebleau, the communiqués had became desperate. They were long, impassioned letters begging her to write to him, pleading with her to profess her love to him, just as he continually did to her.

But she could not. A letter was a record. It need only fall into the hands of one disgruntled or ambitious courtier to spell her complete ruin and the possibility of their permanent separation. She could not take that risk. Not yet. Still the letters came, sometimes three a day by personal courier.

M’amie,

I do beseech you kindly to respond. Give me please just a sign that I have not so quickly lost favor with you. I promise an exchange of but one word from you would give me the strength to continue until we are reunited. You are always my life and my love. I commend myself to your good graces.

Your humble
servant,
H

Diane tossed the letter into the fire in the privacy of her bedchamber and watched it surrender to the bright blue flames. When it curled into a black ball of ashes and fell into bits around the burning log, she rose and walked back into her receiving room. The Dauphin’s personal messenger stood at attention near the door, his hands behind his back and his head held high at attention. Hélène sat by the window and looked up the moment Diane returned to the room.

“Will there be a reply, Madame?” asked the guard in a proper monotone.

“No, Monsieur. No reply.”

I
N THE INTERVENING WEEKS,
the marriage plans for Diane’s eldest daughter, Françoise, to Robert de La Marck progressed and she was required to return home to Anet to complete the contract. But even from her own home she did not feel safe in returning the Dauphin’s ardent letters.

Ma Bien-aimée,

I fear the worst. It will soon be Christmas; four month’s since you swore your love to me, and yet I receive not a single word from you. I know that you are not ill, for the messenger who returns to me says that you appear fit and well. He, however, says further that you give him no instructions with which to return. I promise you that if I were to perish in the flames of hell, it could be no worse a fate than the pain of your indifference.

Diane folded the letter neatly in the same two places in which it had been received. Then, as she had done with all the others, she surrendered the royal parchment to the flames of her chamber fire and waited there until it had turned to ashes. She came out of the door moments later, and before he had an opportunity to ask, she said, “No, Monsieur, there will be no reply.”

Hélène waited for the messenger to leave before she rose from her chair by the window and rushed up behind Diane.

“Madame, please forgive me, but that is the third letter in two days. His Highness must be desperate for word from you.”

“I cannot risk it, Hélène,” she whispered. “A letter might fall into the hands of the King’s men. If that were to happen, I would be ruined. No. There is no one here who can be trusted.” Diane looked into the deep, expressive eyes of her maid and at the simple fawnlike beauty of a woman who had become her friend. “What am I to do?”

“Perhaps you could send him just a sign; something to put his mind at rest while he is so far away.”

“But would that be wise? We both risk so much.”

“I think, Madame, it would be far less wise not to reply. His Highness shall be plagued with worry.”

Diane thought back to one of Henri’s first impassioned letters which now lay in ashes at the bottom the hearth. He had asked for
one word.
He wanted only a sign of their love to assure him, but what could she possibly risk? Diane walked to her writing desk. She pulled out a small sheet of parchment and said a prayer to the Virgin Mother to help her find the inspiration to allay her lover’s fear. She sat down and gazed at the blank page. Hélène hovered near her, trying not to look. Diane dipped the long quill into the silver inkwell and put the wetted tip to paper. She drew an H to begin. It lay there alone on the page; alone as he was; away with an entire army of French troops, and yet, with no one. Here was she at Anet, with her family and Hélène, and yet equally as alone.

When she imagined them together, the idea came to her. She would not give him a word at all, but a cypher. She crumpled up the piece of parchment and took another from the shelf on top of the writing desk. Slowly she drew a D. Beside it, she intertwined with it another D, only she reversed it. She connected the two letters, forming the letter H. It was what he craved; a sign of their union. D and H interlaced, to symbolize their love. He would understand. She blew lightly at the paper to help the ink dry and then folded it. Hélène sealed the wax over the opening as Diane looked up.

“What is between the Prince and myself,” she began in a somber tone, “is a sin against God. Yet you do not judge me.”

“Madame, I believe the greatest sin against God is to be false. If one is not true to one’s self, then it is impossible to be true to God. I bear you no ill will for following your heart.”