Dark Angels (18 page)

Then, after a time, without warning, the king strode from the cot, out of the bedchamber, tears standing on his face, followed at once by all who’d come with him. In a moment the court was gone from the bedchamber, Monsieur hurrying away with them. Even with death lying in bed with his wife, he must see his brother, the king, off properly. The bedchamber seemed strangely empty, as if some essence of vitality and life, some possibility of hope, had also departed.

“Why did he leave?” whispered Richard.

“The king of France may not witness death.”

The captain of the household guard motioned for Alice to come forward, and she found herself standing at the cot.

“Thank you for your care of me,” Princesse Henriette whispered. “I’m glad to leave, I am.”

Others were being brought forward to say farewell; she was calling out last bequests, taking rings from her fingers to give to dearest friends. Alice walked into the withdrawing chamber, sat numbly in a chair. This couldn’t be happening, and yet it was. Renée and Barbara were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they’d stumbled on to bed. She would stay until the end. She moved so that she was kneeling before the chair, put her elbows on the cushion, making her own prayer stand. When she lifted her head, she saw the English ambassador, Lord Montagu. Oh, thank God, she thought. Face grim, he acknowledged no one but went directly into the bedchamber and did not reemerge.

Richard, a cat that couldn’t be still, came to tell her details every now and again. She prayed and slept and woke to pray, not knowing what was real, this time in the antechamber or the fragments of her dreams.

“Lord Montagu asked her if she’d been poisoned, but I could not hear what she said. That priest interrupted, told her to accuse no one, to offer her death up as a sacrifice.”

Black crow, thought Alice, and she dreamed of crows.

“They’ve bled her again,” she heard Richard say.

“Where are her children?” he asked her another time.

Sequestered far away…Monsieur wouldn’t allow them to see the manner of their mother’s dying, even for a good-bye. The little Lady Anne, thought Alice. Well, she had her governess, and Alice would find the woman later and see how the child was faring….

“Monsieur has left. Why wouldn’t he stay?” Richard said in the dream or perhaps in real life. Royalty may not witness death. She thought she’d told him that. She dreamed she saw a priest, his gown purple and flowing, a large cross dangling from his belt, sweep by. This must be a dream. She heard a clock chime twice and fell into a dreamless sleep in which a church bell rang three times. She felt arms on her shoulders. She lifted her head from the cushion of the chair.

“It’s over,” said Richard.

He sat on the floor by Alice, then lay on his back, gazing up at the ceiling painted with cherubs and clouds. Alice looked around her. Servants were scurrying forward from the hall; Lord Montagu walked out of the bedchamber. The door closed behind him. The public viewing of a royal dying was over; death had her to himself. The full impact of this night crashed over Alice like waves. She fell back on the floor beside Richard, keening sounds coming out of her mouth.

Lord Montagu sat in the chair she’d been using as a pillow and prayer stand, said tiredly, “A bad business, a very bad business.” And to Richard, “No sleep for you, my boy. You’re to take my letter to the king. I need paper and ink.”

“Go to the circular chamber,” said Alice, “just off the gardens.” And then, when she saw Richard didn’t know which chamber she spoke of, she wiped her eyes, sat up. “It would be my pleasure to accompany you both. Come.”

She led them downstairs to a chamber shaped like a circle, one of the most beautiful rooms in the palace, the princess’s favorite, small panes of mirrors set into faux windows one after another until they joined actual windows and handsome glass doors to the garden.

All around them the house was silent. Nothing and no one stirred, as if every man, every beast, were exhausted. Richard brought candles, and Lord Montagu sat down to write, openly crying at times, as he filled sheets of paper, demanding Richard’s or Alice’s memory when his own failed him, his frowning reflection doubling back on itself in mirror after mirror. Done, he sprinkled sand over the ink to dry its blots. Richard melted wax onto the paper once it was folded, and Montagu pressed his ring, in which his seal was carved, onto the wax.

“You are to take this at once to His Majesty, tell him I will make a further report when I am not so disordered from grief. You are to take my carriage to my house, have my aide give you coins, and fly to England, Lieutenant, for His Majesty must know, as soon as possible, what has just occurred. Tell him I follow you by a day or two at the most. I beg you your discretion should he ask you questions. She told me that if she had indeed been poisoned, King Charles must not know, he must be spared that grief, that she did not wish revenge upon King Louis, for he is not guilty. Those were her very words. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Lieutenant? There may be talk of poison, but I am to be the one to choose when and how it will be discussed—if it is at all—with His Majesty.”

“I will not lie if I am asked a question by His Majesty.”

“Nor am I asking that.” Lord Montagu was cold. “I am asking that you make certain you report only what you saw or heard, not what you conjecture or imagine.”

“I took some of the chicory water.”

Lord Montagu’s eyes widened slightly, then he gave Richard a hard glance.

“She drank it, clutched at herself, and said she was poisoned. I took some of the water.”

“Where is it?”

“I have it in safekeeping,” said Alice.

“Lord above us all, what a mess this may be. I depend on you, Lieutenant, not to make it worse.” His glance moved to Alice. “And you.”

“Sir,” said Richard, “may I have just a moment to write a letter?”

“A moment, no more.”

Richard’s hand moved swiftly over the paper. He gave the note to Alice. “You’ll see she gets this?”

“Of course.”

Richard stepped out into the night and into the carriage, which jolted and swayed down the drive toward the road to Paris. The ferocity of the night was reverberating in him. He wished he’d choked d’Effiat. The carriage went through the elaborate iron gates, which opened to Saint Cloud, Saint Cloud sitting on its hill, stars shining down on its perfect gardens and its grand rooms and its glittering occupants. That death had touched it with one bone wing seemed impossible. He couldn’t believe he was bringing the news he was. Could he have done more? Was there something he’d missed?

A
LICE SAW THE
reflection of herself sitting near a candle, opening the note. He vowed his love and devotion, told her, no matter what, to wait for him, that he’d be back to France, back to her. He wrote very firmly, very evenly. She touched one of the letters, the R in his name, before refolding it and walking slowly, wearily, like an old woman, up the stairs to the bedchambers.

C
HAPTER 9

P
aris exploded with rumors. The Chevalier de Lorraine held Madame and poured arsenic down her throat. Monsieur commanded the poisoning. No, Monsieur knew nothing of it. The poison was in the chicory water. It wasn’t in the chicory. It was on the cup. Where was the cup?

Louis, king of France, walked a long gallery in his palace in Paris, the Louvre. He passed statues brought up from the dirt of ancient Rome, molded and shaped by other empire builders who understood the passion for empire. He passed heavy tapestries whose bright threads depicted tales of the Bible, tales of mythology, tales of his reign, which he was turning into mythology, woven by the finest artisans in the world, right here in his own kingdom, part of the industry he and his minister Colbert were creating. He passed paintings by Titian and Rubens and Correggio, a collection his forebears had begun, to which he added—some of the paintings, ironically, purchased from the Roundhead Oliver Cromwell, when England had been in its protectorate and sold off the treasures of its beheaded king, who was Louis’s uncle. The chamber was long, high ceilinged, made of marble, and cold—so that the fireplaces, big enough to roast oxen whole, never warmed it in wintertime.

Was it true? Had his brother killed Henriette? His brother embodied—in a way that even he did not—that wild Italian streak in their heritage, that of the grand gesture, prodigious art, immense intrigue. It was why he kept him hobbled, encouraging vice, encouraging greed, encouraging pettiness—keeping his brother like an overgrown child. A child was easily diverted. A man was not.

But this?

Lord Montagu, the English ambassador, had been as cold as this marble chamber, accepting an autopsy by France’s most eminent physicians, but only in his presence and the presence of English surgeons. Word had just been sent: The autopsy was done. Their findings: Her stomach was flooded with bile, the organs of her abdominal cavity in an advanced state of gangrene; a natural death from cholera morbus. It would be published in the
Gazette de France.

But Louis knew—as he knew the ambassador knew—there were poisons capable of producing any symptom. The English physician insisted there were traces of poison in the body. The French disputed. A dog had been given the chicory water. It had not died. He knew that the Marquis d’Effiat had been in the pantry where cups and glasses were kept the afternoon of her death. When questioned, as were all of his brother’s household, the marquis said he’d been thirsty after playing tennis and gone into the pantry for a sip of water. Where was the cup out of which she’d drunk? Did his brother know she was to die? Had Philippe ordered her poisoned?

No, Philippe swore. No, he wept. I regret all my sad dealings with her, he cried. If I could do it over again, I would be a saint to her. He sniveled, he sobbed, he shouted. He crawled on his hands and knees, begging Louis to believe him. I was jealous, Philippe wept. You favored her over me. I could not bear it. But I would never hurt her. You are my brother. Protect me from this vileness they whisper.

She had brought back a treaty with Charles’s signature and the signature of two of his ministers. A secret treaty to wage war on the Dutch, for which Charles would be handsomely paid; his English cousin always needed money. But the treaty was more than a contract of war, so much more than that. It was something that would assure his name lived hundreds of years beyond his span of years.

Charles of England swore to convert to Catholicism.

Not only a personal conversion, but to bring the kingdom of England back within the Mother Church’s fold. England, that rogue nation, that Protestant bastion, would once more kneel, as did all civilized nations, before His Holiness the pope. And it would be he, Louis, the fourteenth of that name, who would be revered as the warrior saint king who brought it all about.

Now Charles was distraught, unapproachable, seeing no one. And yet Louis knew a wise king recovered from disloyalty, disobedience, treason. Had he not done so himself? Had he not feelings himself? She was one of his first loves. She died a sister, a friend, an aide to grander schemes. All of thirty and two, handsome, revered, and increasingly feared, the king of France continued to walk the long gallery of his immense palace, his heart the growing stone it must be for the sake of the greater glory he pursued.

P
HYSICIANS AT
S
AINT
C
LOUD,
the princess’s body being opened and explored, sent Barbara into a state of near hysteria. Unlike Barbara, Alice lingered near the chamber in which the autopsy was being performed, then bribed the footmen to tell her when the physicians were finished with their grim work.

A footman found her sitting by herself in the circular chamber that had been Princesse Henriette’s favorite. “They’re cleaning themselves now.” The princess’s body would be touched this evening by yet another set of men—the embalmers.

Alice ran down side steps to catch the carriage of the English physician. She was wearing a mask on her face. A footman was holding a torch to light the man’s way into his carriage. Like a slim, black-gowned ghost, Alice opened the door on the other side and slipped inside. The physician stepped up and sat down with a groan, then saw her.

“Who are you?” he asked, and put his hand to the pull to stop the carriage.