Mistress of the Sun (7 page)

Françoise curtsied. “Monsieur le Marquis de Saint-Rémy, my waiting woman will take your sword and riding boots.” She signaled to Clorine. “She will polish them for you while you relax by the fire with a cup.”

The Marquis lowered himself into the best chair, the one with the tapestry footstool, as Clorine knelt to remove his muddy boots, yanking them free.

“I have noticed your fondness for vin sec and went to some effort to get in a cask,” Françoise said, taking a wide-mouthed
glass of liqueur from the field hand’s tray and handing it to her intended.

“You are sympathetic, Madame de la Vallière.” The Marquis took a sip and grimaced.

“May I introduce to you my daughter, Mademoiselle Louise?”

The Marquis craned his neck toward Petite. “That girl? I reflected her to be a domestic.”

Françoise gestured at Petite to curtsy, using a sly downward movement of her right hand at hip height.

Petite made an obedient reverence. Everyone was behaving strangely, she thought, as if on a stage.

“She is ten and has just returned from the Ursuline convent in Tours where she was well trained in needlework and comportment, but she misses her brother Jean,” Françoise chattered on nervously. “He’s a student at the Collège de Navarre—in Paris—where all the noblemen’s sons go. He gets an allowance of six sous a week and will earn even more upon graduation, no doubt.”

The Marquis cleared his throat and looked about for a spittoon, which Françoise leapt to provide. “She’s ten, you allege?” he asked, wiping the corners of his mouth with his gloved thumb and index finger.

Allege? People from Blois must speak a different language
, Petite thought.

“My daughter, you mean? Yes—she’s ten now. My son Jean is two and a half years older. He knows many noblemen’s sons, even
princes. He’s a good-looking boy, and excellent at sword fighting. It’s cold now in Paris, but he’s allowed a fire in his room for a half-hour after a meal.”

“Can your girl mend?”

“All girls mend,” Françoise said, frowning. “In the school common, my son speaks Latin with princes.”

“And does she intone? I am partial to hear singing whilst attending to epistolary matters and ledger books.”

“In fact, she sings rather well.”

“Command her to intone at present.”

Françoise looked over at Petite, who shook her head: no!

“I’m afraid my daughter is suffering an attack of…an engorgement of her throat.”

Petite breathed a sigh of relief. She would
not
sing for this awful little man who was soon to take her father’s place.

“Conceivably, it then follows, she should be quiescent in her chamber,” the Marquis said, attempting to pull Petite’s mother onto his lap.

The time dragged by. Petite lowered herself onto the occasional chair as the Marquis droned on about the staff at the Blois château: the blackguard boy who had broken three earthen drinking vessels, the marketman who took all day to buy a dram of cream, the butler who insisted that
it was not he
who had written on the ceiling with the smoke of a candle. With his fourth glass of vin sec, the Marquis began to reveal more intimate concerns: the state of
his bowels (unforthcoming), the enema and purge he took once a week to balance his humors, his hippo-tusk false teeth. “
Far
enhanced to elephant ivory,” he said proudly, slipping them out of his mouth so that Petite’s mother might admire them.

“The workmanship is excellent,” Petite’s mother said with illconcealed repugnance.

At two of the clock, the Marquis cleared his throat. “I abundantly regret forsaking your society, Madame de la Vallière,” he said, rising.

“So soon?” Françoise hid a yawn behind her chicken-feather fan.

At last the Marquis departed, strutting out the door like a bantam cock.

Françoise collapsed into a chair. “I thought he would never leave,” she said, closing her eyes and rubbing her forehead. “Don’t you ever forget what I do for your sake,” she added, her voice weary and sad.

Honor thy father and thy mother.
Petite went to her mother and knelt before her. “Don’t, Mother,” she said.
Don’t be bitter, don’t be harsh
, she thought, resting her head on her mother’s lap.

“Don’t what, Louise?” her mother asked, running her fingers through Petite’s hair.

Don’t marry that old man.
“Don’t be sad.” Her mother’s gentle touch felt strange to her.

Outside, a cow was lowing plaintively. “You have such fine hair,” Françoise said. “Our little angel, your father used to call you—did you know that?”

Petite sat back on her heels.

Her mother collected her features. “But then I’d tell him not to be fooled, that there was a devil in you,” she said with a smile, pinching Petite’s cheek.

I
T COULD HAVE BEEN
worse: it could have been a Great Wedding, a traditional two-day fete, but because both the bride and groom were widowed, and because their families were distant and the groom had responsibilities to attend to in Blois, it was felt that a simpler ceremony would be more appropriate. To Petite’s relief there was to be no wedding feast—no hogsheads of wine opened, no pigs slaughtered, no swans, cranes or herons roasted, no toasts called out, no singing “Veni, Creator Spiritus” or dancing to fiddlers.

The Marquis’s carriage pulled up the hill to the little church in Reugny as the bells rang ten of the clock. It wasn’t customary for a bride and groom to arrive in the same vehicle, but the wagon had already been loaded with trunks and furnishings in preparation for the journey to Blois that afternoon.

A few neighboring families were already at the church, among them Monsieur Bosse with his wife and nine bedraggled children, including Petite’s childhood friend Charlotte, whom she’d not seen since her father’s funeral. In a worn gown far too big for her, Charlotte grinned a gap-toothed smile.

“Don’t speak to them,” her mother warned.

Petite recognized the mayor and the owner of the apothecary, both of whom had been her father’s pallbearers.

A clerk ushered them into the church. Her mother knelt at the altar rail and the Marquis did the same on the other side of the aisle. Behind them, in the pews, were a few whispering strangers.

Curé Barouche entered, his long cassock trailing. He’d grayed since Petite had last seen him. She wondered if his donkey, Têtu, was still alive. The Curé used to ride the sorry thing out to the manor to teach Petite and her brother the catechism.

The mumbled service was thankfully short. Petite knew it was over when Curé Barouche intoned, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” and placed a gold ring on her mother’s finger. Then her mother and the Marquis kissed the altar and returned to their places for the Mass, which was offered in their name. At the offering, Petite presented the bridal candle, lowering her eyes as her mother and the Marquis kissed it. Then her mother and the Marquis knelt as Curé Barouche recited a series of long marriage prayers. “O Lord, omnipotent and eternal God, You created man and woman in Your image and blessed their union…”

On leaving the church, the Marquis discovered that the church doors had been tied shut with ribbons. Children could be heard giggling outside. The Marquis promised a coin, and the wedding party was released.

Children were leaping about. They’d put up two additional ribbon “barricades” around the coach. The Marquis once again obliged them with coins, the way was cleared, and he helped his bride into the coach.

Petite climbed in and sat facing the newlyweds.

The driver cracked his whip and the carriage lurched down the hill.

T
HE FIRST NIGHT
Petite, her mother and stepfather were forced to lodge opposite Amboise. The rain made the bridge crossing precarious and they had been advised to wait until morning. The inn had only one room to offer, but fortunately two beds, so Françoise and Petite shared one, while the Marquis de Saint-Rémy slept in the other. The staff, including an indignant Clorine, were lodged in the stables.

By the light of a single lantern, the Marquis ceremoniously said his prayers and removed his wig and hippo-tusk teeth before propping himself up in the bed to sleep upright. “For only the dead recline,” he said. Throughout the night, he belched and farted and snored.

“I will never sleep again,” Petite’s mother said wretchedly.

H
EAVY HORSES TOWED
the passenger barge from Amboise to Blois. The servants, trunks and furnishings followed behind on another. The distance was less than fifteen leagues, yet due to the rain the journey took two days. Petite and her mother stayed in the ladies’ cabin with three nuns from Bordeaux and a milliner, all of them sharing a washbowl, a towel and a comb. Meals were served in a stateroom, first the men and then the women. Françoise turned ill, so during the day Petite was content to sit and read in the stateroom, now and again looking out at the sandstone cliff, the plantations of sisal and oak, the villages and vineyards. Three times she saw a White—but one was a pony, one was spotted and the last was the stocky sort of horse bred for armor.

Petite stood at the rail of the barge as they approached the ancient city of Blois. She had never seen so many houses in one place, so many gables and turrets. Tours was a grand city, and Amboise even grander, but neither could compare to Blois, where, the Marquis had informed them (several times over), there was a stone bridge of many arches, thirty-two racket courts, an aqueduct from antiquity, a clock and even an academy of riding (“a conservatory of traverse”). At Blois, he claimed, the language was spoken to perfection (“uttered to excellence”). Petite looked for the castle, but it could not be seen from the water.

The boatman let them off at the busy river landing. The Marquis hired a coach to pull them through the narrow streets and up a steep hill to the château, which appeared to have been
built on a cliff. They wound around and up until they were on a high terrace overlooking the great river Loire, the clustered houses below and the castle before them.

“We have arrived,” the Marquis announced with an air of grandeur as they entered a courtyard. The château was irregular in shape, and each of its many sides had been built in a different style. There appeared to be no symmetry or order. Heaps of construction stone and timber edged one of the wings, which seemed to be under construction.

“Do up your bonnet ties,” Petites mother told her, clutching her casket of jewelry.

The carriage rolled to a stop and a footman with few teeth appeared with a ladder. Petite was the first to climb down.
This
was where King Louis XII was born, where King Francis I and Charles IX had lived. Queen Catherine de Médicis had brewed poisons in this castle, and it was here that the Duc de Guise had been stabbed to death, assassinated by King Henry III, whose ghost was known to wander the dark passages with a parrot on his shoulder.

Petite followed her mother and the Marquis around the piles of stone and across a manure-covered courtyard to a small house on the château grounds, a humble wood and plaster cottage with a slate roof. “It is not extensive, but the rental is barely two hundred per annum,” the Marquis said, pushing open the plank door.

“Two hundred
livres?
” Petite’s mother ducked as a bat flew out.
“But it’s so small.” Outside, the servants could be heard unloading their trunks and furniture.

“The bedstead can go at this juncture, by the flue,” the Marquis said. “Your daughter and the servants may avail themselves of the upper compartment.”

Petite climbed the narrow stairs to the loft, a dark, low space. Pushing away cobwebs, she pried open the shutter. Far below she could see the silver ribbon of the river and, in the distance, the towers of what appeared to be another castle. To the right were the château stables. She stood for a time looking out over the high and low gardens, the paddocks of horses, searching out of habit for a White.

C
LORINE PUT THE
curling tongs down beside the charcoal brazier and stepped back, appraising her creation. Petite stood sullenly before her, her hair in wax-stiffened ringlets, silk ribbons at the roots, heavy false pearl ear pendants pulling at her earlobes.

“You look highborn,” the maid said proudly. “Truly ladified.”

Petite heard pounding on the door below. “I feel like a circus monkey,” she said.

“Petite!” her mother called up, her voice tremulous. “The Duke and Duchess will receive us now.”

“Zut!” Clorine whispered.

The north-facing room below was frigid in spite of the season. Warming herself in front of the smoking chimney, Petite’s mother
fussed with her side curls, which dangled from wire frames secured to her ears.

The Marquis coughed into his white-gloved hand. “Ready?”

Petite followed her mother and the Marquis as they traced their way across the cobbled yard to a spiral staircase, the grand entrance into the King François wing. “Proceed this way,” the Marquis said, already out of breath.

They wound up and up, emerging into a room that smelled of tobacco—the guard room. Four men in uniform were sitting at a table playing cards. The fire in the ornate fireplace at one end was blazing, the room overly warm. Windows of fine horn let in a milky light. Every surface had been ornamented with design, but was blackened by smoke.

“This way,” the Marquis said, leading them into an enormous bedchamber, empty of furnishings but for a curtained bed and a wooden prie-dieu set into an alcove. Three terriers jumped off the bed and growled at the Marquis, who kicked them away with his boot. A chambermaid and a footman emerged from behind brocade curtains and stood at attention.

“This way,” the Marquis repeated, leading Petite and her mother into a narrow oratory that smelled of incense. A guard in uniform stood at attention by a great double door (which had, Petite noticed, a horseshoe nailed over it, to keep out witches and evil spirits). “We have arrived,” the Marquis announced. He smoothed the white towel he had folded lengthwise over his right
shoulder and rearranged his cape over his left so that it draped in the manner of nobles.

“Remember, Louise, never turn your back to royalty,” Françoise whispered, fussing over Petite’s ribbons with trembling hands. “When dismissed, walk backwards while curtsying.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Arranged, Madame?” the Marquis asked.

The doors opened onto yet another ornate jewel box of a room, this one smoky from a smoldering fire. Though it was daylight, the room was dark, the drapes drawn. It took a moment for Petite to make out the large mound of a woman lying on a wide chaise in front of the fire. An equally round man, his face bright as a red Holland tulip, sat blowing smoke rings. His bucket-top boots were such as a country magistrate might wear. Petite thought perhaps this room was an antechamber, and that these were neighboring nobility, awaiting an audience with the royal family.

“Your Highness, Your Highness,” the Marquis said in a low voice.

These
were the Duke and Duchess? Petite was astounded that this man in a sagging ruff was the son of King Henry the Great.

The Marquis made an extravagantly subservient bow. Petite and her mother, likewise, made deep reverences. When Petite looked up, she saw that the Marquis was still bowing. How did his wig stay on? Finally, he straightened and cleared his throat.

“I understand that congratulations are in order, Saint-Rémy,” Monsieur le Duc d’Orléans said, admiring a smoke ring that
emerged from his lips. “This must be your wife and…her daughter? Very well. Your wife will work with you, I presume? As for the girl—” The Duke looked Petite up and down. “How old is she?”

“Ten, my Lord. Unsoiled in her routine and trained at a convent in Tours.”

“The Ursuline convent?”

The Marquis glanced at Françoise, who indicated that it was so.

“I was once summoned there,” the Duke said, fussing with his pipe, “to dispel an infestation of demons.”

“A prodigious quantity of time ago, my Lord,” the Marquis said. “The girl had not even been birthed—in Tours, I might add, to the august la Vallière family, renowned throughout the land for religiosity.”

“What sign was she born under?” the Duke asked, inhaling sharply, trying to get the tobacco to relight. “Is she Scorpio? She has that look about her, something…
irregular.
”

Françoise glanced at Petite in alarm. “Your Highness.” Her trembling hands causing her skirts to rustle. “I beg you, permit me to speak.”

The Duke nodded his assent.

“My daughter was born under the sign of Leo. She is devout as well as dutiful.”

“Our Marguerite is Leo,” the Duke noted, blowing a smoke ring and watching it float, disintegrate, disappear.

“
Exactly
, my Lord: an auspicious auspice,” the Marquis said with a stutter. “A most portentous indication. And—in that Princess Marguerite necessitates an auxiliary chamber attendant—I thought
perchance
that the girl might…furnish attendance on Her Highness.”

“How many attendants does Little Queen have now?” the Duc d’Orléans asked.

“Ten and one,” the Marquis stuttered, “together with the two pages, but barely one waiting maid, the girl Mademoiselle Nicole de Montalais, my Lord.”

“The noisy one,” the Duchesse d’Orléans said dreamily, selecting a sweetmeat from the china platter beside her.

“And nosy,” the Duke added, knocking his pipe embers into a bowl. “Well, perhaps you have a point. Marguerite is six now—one waiting maid is insufficient.”

“Marguerite is ten,” came the ghostlike voice of the Duchess as a footman stepped forward to usher them out.

“Back out,” Petite’s mother whispered as they exited, then collapsed onto an upholstered bench. “Mon Dieu!” she gasped, pulling her fur-trimmed tippet close around her shoulders.

“You are not to relinquish your senses, Madame. I shall revisit you presently,” the Marquis informed his wife, handing her a sweat-cloth and signaling Petite to follow.

Petite shadowed her stepfather back down the circular stairwell and across the courtyard, climbing yet another stairwell and going
down a vast gallery before coming to a halt before a vaulted door. A guard with a rusty halberd snapped to attention.

The Marquis, perspiring, turned to face his stepdaughter. “The Duke and Duchess are graced with three daughters,” he said, clearing his throat. “Princesses.”

Petite nodded. She’d never seen a princess.

“Princess Marguerite is the eldest. She has attained the epoch of nine.”

“I thought the Duchess said she was ten,” Petite said, puzzled. She’d noted it because she was ten herself.

“You’re not to discourse if not discoursed to.”

“Are you not discoursing with me?”

“Discoursing
with
and discoursing
to
are not an identical identity.” The Marquis cleared his throat again. “Princess Elisabeth is fifteen months younger, followed by Princess Madeleine at an additional span of two years.”

“Isn’t there an older princess as well?” Petite asked. Not long ago, during the Age of Conflict, this warlike princess was said to have climbed the wall of the palace at Orléans
all by herself
and even to have fired cannon from the tower of the Bastille prison in Paris.

“Yes, la Grande Mademoiselle. However, the Duke’s offspring by his original mate is a celebratory and lives away.”

“The warrior one.”

The Marquis raised a warning finger. “It is deeply erroneous, Mademoiselle, to reference la Grande Mademoiselle in this mode.
I will have Abbé Patin edify you on the theme of titles and accurate appellation.” He frowned, doubling his chins. “Endeavor to be perpetually cognizant that Monsieur le Duc and his progeny are the
descendants
of King Henry the Great.”

Petite nodded, fingering the tangle of ribbons at her waist. Often her father had told her tales of the brave and honorable King Henry, a great horseman. Bucephalus was the name of his favorite stallion, a White like Diablo.

“All of his daughters, even the girls, are King Henry the Great’s granddaughters. The princesses hold the most uppermost grade in France,” the Marquis went on, making his eyes wide for effect, “an echelon bestowed by the supreme Almighty.”

Petite put her hand to her cheek pretending a gesture of awe, but in fact surreptitiously to swipe at the spots of spittle the Marquis had showered upon her.

“Subsequently, Mademoiselle, they are
under no circumstances
flawed.” With a shaky sigh, he raised his head, made the sign of the cross and commanded the guard to open the door.

It was not yet nightfall, yet the room was ablaze with candles and lanterns. The air smelled of smoke, candle grease, and—regrettably—urine. Three girls were stooped over a game table, silhouetted in front of a blazing fire. The eldest had a long face and prominent chin. Her plump lips were dark, her lower lip drooping. Her hair was curly, to judge from the strands poking out from under her nightcap. The middle girl had a wandering eye, and
the youngest unsuccessfully disguised an enormous nose under a hooded linen night rail. All three of them were hunchbacked.

“No!” the youngest screamed.

A buxom maid in a window alcove and an older woman sitting to one side of the fire took no notice.

“Spin it,” the eldest commanded, tossing a bone top onto the felt-covered table. “Ha, ha, you lose,” she said, scooping up coins.

Put-and-Take?
Petite wondered. They were playing with real coins. In the convent, no games had been permitted, and certainly not this gambling game played by ruffians on the street.

“Your Highnesses,” the Marquis stuttered.

The girls turned to stare.

“Princess Marguerite, Princess Elisabeth, Princess Madeleine,” the Marquis intoned, “may I have the honor of introducing Mademoiselle Louise-Françoise La Baume Le Blanc de la Vallière…my wife’s daughter.”