Kit (43 page)

This was a show. This was a statement of the glory of France, and their comfort and ease in Mantova; everything had been considered and planned, not just for the pleasure of the French officers, but for the humiliation of the Alliance. The Purcell was a part of it – many of the men would recognise the piece. Mantova was a place that had been besieged twice by the Alliance in vain, a citadel for which thousands of soldiers had died. For which Richard had died. The dark blister of his grave lay in the very copse that now sheltered the redcoats, outside the city walls, no headstone, no honour, while the counterfeit Richard lay within the walls entombed in noble marble. She could do this, she could succeed in this mission, for the sake of both of her dead husbands, and for Ross, who lived and breathed.

The guests all moored their boats and came to shore for a great feast laid out on golden boards. In the centre of the fruits and sweetmeats sat a magnificent centrepiece, a castle cunningly wrought of sugar, sitting at the bottom of a model mountain.

She turned to the
comte
. ‘Olympus again?’

The
maréchal
smirked. ‘If you will. And perhaps the temple of Olympia sits below?’

But something was wrong. The castle was a great white edifice around three sides of a sugar piazza, with a thousand sugar windows of square gold leaf. It seemed oddly familiar. Then it struck her, like a thunderbolt. She had been to that castle, that castle made of cake and confectionery. She stared at it until her eyes blurred – expecting to see a little gold leaf coach draw up before it, and for a little sugar duke to climb out and hand down a sugar countess dressed in blue. As she watched, Orléans cut the castle with a sabre, the dark cake within a death slash down the architrave of the Palazzo Reale in Turin.

She clasped De Marsin’s arm and set down her cup of punch. He turned to her, with concern. ‘Madame? Are you quite well?’

‘No.’ She looked up at him, her eyes wide with appeal. ‘I am not well.’

He looked about him. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘you must be seated.’ He led her to a low wall.

‘Have you a fan?’

She remembered the fan she had left in the Palazzo Borromeo. ‘No. Soon I will be well.’

‘I will call for your maid.’

‘No!’ Louder this time, but he was already gesturing to one of his men. ‘Fetch the
comtesse
’s woman.’

Cursing inwardly, she drew him down by her. Now she had left only the time it took for Livia to walk from the castle.

‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I will be frank with you. I am terrified for my safety. It is clear that you are to embark on some great enterprise, and I am to be caught in the midst of it.’

‘Trust me, madame,’ said the
maréchal
soothingly, ‘you will not be harmed. I give you my word.’

‘If I could tell you, sir, how many men have sworn as much to me on their word. What is a word? May not a promise be spoken, and as easily broken?’

He straightened. ‘But I think the word of a
maréchal
of France, madame, may be trusted.’

She laid a hand on his arm. ‘If you could only tell me a little of what you go to do … You have come to mean so much to me.’ She drew back her hand, as if she had said too much. ‘
All
of you brave gentlemen, so much like my dear husband.’ She pressed her black glove to her lips.

His profile, as he looked over the lake, was impassive. He had been happy to dally with her when he had been kicking his heels, but now his mind had shifted to war. If her feminine wiles were no use, what had she left? She racked her brain, rehearsing once more in that strained silence everything Ormonde had taught her of the Maréchal Ferdinand, Comte de Marsin.
Born in Liège. Moved to Paris at the age of five. Ambassador extraordinaire to Felipe V of Spain. Unmarried, but had a secret bastard daughter to whom he is peculiarly attached, with a Spanish noblewoman at the Escorial. Had the child conveyed to Paris.

A secret bastard daughter, to whom he is peculiarly attached …

‘
Maréchal
. Ferdinand.’ She gave her voice a tremor as she spoke. ‘I have lost my husband. But we both knew it might be God’s will that a soldier would die – such is a fighting man’s lot. But I have a child in Poitiers. A daughter called Christiana. She is very young, I was only just churched when my husband was commanded here to Mantova, so she stayed with my mother and wetnurse away from battle and danger.’ She gripped his arm again. ‘Please,
Maréchal
, tell me I will return home safe. Tell me I will hold my child again, and feel her little hand close about my finger as it used to do.’

It was very dark now, but she could sense that De Marsin’s head had turned towards her.

‘I have a daughter too. She is the delight of my eyes. She is why I fight.’

She said nothing, but pressed his hand now in fellow feeling.
Know when to stop
, Ormonde had said.

She heard him exhale, very quietly, and held her own breath. Here it came. ‘The mountain is the Superga hill in Piedmont,’ he said, low voiced. ‘And the castle of sugar, it is the Palazzo Reale in Turin.’

So she had been right. She turned to him, eyes wide. ‘You are to take Turin?’

‘In a sevennight, with forty thousand men.’

She swallowed.
Turin
. She had been right – the French looked to the Empire; Turin was Eugene of Savoy’s headquarters and home. It was audacious, it was brilliant. Turin stood at the gate between the Empire and France – with the taking of Savoy’s own city the Franco-Spanish would control ingress and egress to the peninsula – they could choke it at the throat and take the rest of the boot to the south at their leisure. ‘And will you prevail?’ It was a whisper.

‘We cannot fail. Please be assured. There is no danger. The Duc de Vendôme has made a counterfeit sortie south, to Castiglione, and the Alliance is pursuing him, leaving Turin defended by only one regiment of cavalry – the Scots Grey Dragoons. The city is ours for the taking.’

Kit’s head spun. Ross and his dragoons stood alone between Turin and forty thousand men. But in order to save him, she must first leave this city alive. ‘And if Mantova is no longer defended …’

‘But you will not be in Mantova,’ said the Comte de Marsin. ‘You are to be conveyed to Genova tomorrow, and from thence to Poitiers. You shall embrace your daughter again, I swear it.’

Kit dipped her head and kissed his hands, and the tears in her eyes were genuine. Relief, sheer relief.

As she raised her head she saw her lady-in-waiting approaching. Livia walked along the foreshore, the great castle rising at her back, in a halo of torchlight.

The
maréchal
rose and bowed. ‘Rest easy tonight. I will take my leave of you early tomorrow.’ He handed her to her feet; she bowed to him and walked as calmly as she could by the side of Livia Gonzaga, bursting to tell the true princess of this place that she and the ghosts of her family would soon have their city back again.

In the morning Kit looked about her apartments one last time, checking each armoire and drawer, even though Livia had packed for her. There should be no trace of her left here, nothing that remained of her mission to Mantova save the one anonymous corpse in the Santa Barbara. She glanced from the window one last time, and what she saw stopped her heart.

There, speeding across the causeway as fast as an arrow, was a tiny figure of blue and gold on the fastest horse in the French army. Jean-Jacques. The messenger. She had almost forgotten him.

Kit turned and ran down the stairs, pell-mell, through the courtyard and into the waiting coach. She took leave of the Comte de Marsin almost too swiftly for politeness, snatching her hand from his lips, and pressing it to her own, letting her eyes fill with hasty tears. ‘Forgive me,
Maréchal
; you have been so kind. It is the emotion; I think I must just leave you now – no farewells.’

He nodded and stood back, but his hand still rested on the door of the coach. ‘I understand. I wish you the joy of your reunion with Christiana.’

She looked up, confused in her hurry and panic. ‘But
I
am Christiane.’

He looked puzzled. ‘Your daughter,’ he prompted gently.

She pried his hand gently from the door. ‘My dear
Maréchal
, if you have any parental feeling, let me go now so she may be in my arms all the sooner.’

He let go of the door, and bowed his head. She kissed her hand to him as the coach turned about the courtyard, agonisingly slowly. As the four stepped out on to the drawbridge she could actually hear the hoofbeats of the messenger’s horse on the causeway, galloping towards them. She shrank back in her seat but her eyes were drawn inexorably to the carriage window; she could see Jean-Jacques now, thundering closer, closer, till the hurtling carriage actually passed him. As they swept away across the lake and she looked back at the floating city she had left, he was pounding at the gates.

Now she turned away, to the road, grim faced. The carriage had picked up speed, but it would not take Jean-Jacques long to tell De Marsin how he had been tricked. While they were on the eastern road she was in danger.

Time was of the essence. She knew there was a heavily wooded copse between the lake and Castellucchio, the little town where she had been given her counterfeit husband. Once the carriage fell dark with the cover of trees she sprang up. Fumbling with the lacings at her waist with shaking hands, she freed herself from her voluminous skirts and petticoats and shed them like a skin. She clambered out of the window in her stockings and bodice; the rushing wind tore down her hair and blasted the powder from her face in little white puffs. Grabbing a handful of the coachman’s coat she pulled him from the driver’s box, and he fell tumbling to the ground with a cry and a sickening crunch. Clambering into his place, she tugged on the tangled reins with all her strength. She had never driven a four before, and it took her some time to rein the team to a jog, then to a stop, and she tied the reins hurriedly – too many reins – to the pommel. She jumped down and ran back to the unconscious coachman and stripped him as quickly as she could, struggling with his dead weight. He was a burly fellow, but his clothes would have to do. She stripped in the freezing forest down to her pantaloons, and pulled on the coachman’s shirt and breeches and coat, her frozen fingers remembering the male buckles and ties and fastenings. Then she reached up to her hair, tearing the horsehair pads from her coiffure, flattening down her own locks stiff with powder, and scraping them back as she’d used to. She crammed the coachman’s tricorn on her head and ran back to the coach, clambering up on to the driver’s box and gathering the reins again.

She had no idea what to do. What if the horses would not go for her? What if they stood here, grazing, till the
maréchal
and his men came? Heart thudding, she raised the heavy leather straps and brought them down on the back pair’s rumps, shouting, ‘Yar!’ The four stallions took off like racehorses, and she nearly toppled back over the box. Gradually, muscles straining, she steered them to Castellucchio. Then, instead of taking the road to Genova, she drove the horses on to the Brenner Pass, the lakes and the Palazzo Borromeo.

And bade it a tedious returnin’ …

‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

‘Turin? When?’

Kit stood before the Duke of Ormonde, in the great marble hall of the Palazzo Borromeo.

The palace seemed different now to its summer self – the lake outside was grey as pewter, the mountains silvered with the first snows. No pleasure trippers tacked on the rilling water, and even the peacocks in the gardens were mute with autumn sullenness.

Only Ormonde was unchanged. He sat in his gilded chair like a king, Kit before him in her coachman’s coat and tricorn like a lowly supplicant.

She calculated. It had been three days since the Maréchal Comte de Marsin had told her the French would besiege Turin in a week. ‘In four short days they will begin the attack. But perhaps sooner.’

Ormonde stroked his chin. ‘Why sooner?’

‘A messenger came from France as I was leaving, bringing information that would unmask me as a spy. They know I know, so they may mobilise sooner.’

Ormonde shrugged. ‘It is no small thing to mobilise an army. They need time.’

‘But they need the currency of surprise.’

‘Yes,’ he said, measuredly. ‘Yes, they do.’

She stood, awkwardly, shaking out her aching arms. This was not at all how she had imagined this interview. Would she be rewarded now, and dismissed? Would she be offered safe passage to Dublin, or given leave to go where she wanted? Would she be free to find Ross and reveal herself?

She had expected congratulations, perhaps even an embrace. She had expected a flurry of activity, of dispatches, of summonses for Panton, Tichborne or even Marlborough. But Ormonde stretched like a cat. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘And now I imagine you would like to bathe, eat, and take your ease. Change into some pretty clothes. Coachman to countess, what?’ He laughed but the laugh did not chime true. She was unsettled by his ease.

‘What will you do? Tell Marlborough?’ She could imagine how Ormonde would enjoy it – bringing the duke here, telling him that he had managed to discover with the aid of one woman what Marlborough’s ten thousand men had not.

He tapped his teeth with his fingernail. ‘I will consider.’

‘Do not consider overmuch. It will not take them long to find the owner of these clothes in the woods.’

‘Leave it with me,’ said Ormonde, dismissively.

‘But …’

‘Kit. Leave it with me.’ She was jolted by the use of her true name.

She raised her chin. ‘So I am to be Kit Kavanagh once more?’

‘Oh, I think so. I think the Countess Christiane has served her purpose, don’t you?’

At dinner she felt a little better. She had bathed, dressed in a copper brocade gown and eaten her fill. She also sported the diamonds that had once belonged to Anne of Austria, to remind Ormonde of what was due to her, now she had done as he’d asked.