To Serve a King (40 page)

The attendant daringly raised her caramel eyes. “That would be my grandfather, Your Highness.”

Henry snorted a half-amused laugh, affected more by what the young lady’s glance said than her words. “Ah yes, I remember him well.” He shifted to the edge of his seat, animated and attentive.

“Your Majesty”—Anne took her turn in the conventions—“may I present Mademoiselle Gravois, and Mademoiselle d’Aiguillon—the daughter of the comte de Vandreuil.”

Like Arabelle, Geneviève dropped into her deepest obeisance, but dared to look up, peeking at the king.

Henry turned to them with a perfunctory gaze and an indiscernible grunt. Geneviève shivered from the empty chill of it.

“Your Highness,” Arabelle intoned as she and Geneviève rose.

Geneviève said nothing, nor did it matter. She had sat for weeks as Lodovico had painstakingly captured her likeness onto the
miniature, and she had sent it to King Henry as requested. And yet his gaze passed over her without the barest glimmer of recognition. He had heard her name without a tincture of reaction. He gave all the ladies the same cold, cursory greeting, save Mademoiselle de Nemours. To the exotic beauty—a woman young enough to be his granddaughter—he offered a lecherous smile and asked after her journey, his rheumy eyes rarely straying from the rounded globes of her breasts spilling from her jewel-trimmed square neckline.

“Thank you, ladies.” Marguerite pleasantly dismissed both her attendants and Anne’s, sharing a cynical roll of her eyes with the duchesse.

The four women dipped a quick curtsy, taking themselves back to their own seats, but not before a last knowing look passed between the king and Mademoiselle de Nemours.

Geneviève rushed back to her place, grabbed the full goblet of wine before her, and drank deeply, her mind tumbling with thoughts of the encounter and the king’s complete lack of acknowledgment, thoughts fraught with the sting of devastation.

Her breathing slowed; she raised her eyes heavenward as she chided herself, as understanding dawned. Henry VIII was a cunning man, one of the most powerful in all the world; he knew better than to show any sign of recognition of her, for it could be disastrous for them both. She fought with herself over the logic of it, struggled to believe this was the reason for his arrogant dismissal. Part of her clung to her rationale with all the inner tenacity she could muster. The other said far less but spoke much louder.

28

A fool may well teach a wise man.

—François Rabelais (c. 1494–1553)

S
he circled the square in the gloaming, her heels clacking upon the cobbles, losing herself in the anonymity of the smudgy light. Fires crackled around her amid the grumble of those who sat in their warmth, but few paid her any heed; she had become another of the nameless who began to settle down for the night. Geneviève counted the steps as she passed the buildings a second time, filling her head with the useless words, pushing out those intending her harm.

“Geneviève?” The whispered call was lost in the whistling wind meandering through the courtyard. “Geneviève,
s’il vous plaît?”

Geneviève spun toward the sound of her name and the ill-spoken French, finding a huddled shadow beckoning to her from beyond the corner of the next building. There was something familiar in the small, bent form and she inched toward it. Only when she came within a few steps of the shadowy figure, when the form turned outward and the mangled profile caught the torchlight from the pole above them, did Geneviève recognize it as the old, scarred woman.

“Are you well, madame?” A sudden chill rippled across her flesh and Geneviève pulled her cloak tighter about her shoulders.

“Well enough.” The woman’s voice warbled with age as she tripped over the unnatural language.

“I am surprised to hear you speak in my tongue.” Geneviève stepped closer; it was easier to look upon the woman in the dim light, when the gloom concealed the ravaged skin. “Why did you not converse with me this morning?”

The bent woman shrugged a single shoulder in a lopsided gesture. “I could not find the words, then,” she said portentously, and Geneviève frowned at her.

“Do you need a doctor? Is that why you call for me, madame …?” Her question hung in the air. Geneviève would know this woman’s name before they spoke any more.

“Hainaut. I am Millicent de Hainaut.” The woman straightened her shoulders and raised her chin as she offered her name. Her face appeared serene as the light from the fire grazed it from below, and yet somehow horrifying.

“It is my pleasure to meet you, Madame de Hainaut,” Geneviève said, but no such polite response came her way. Instead, a strange silence rose up between them.

“Does this name mean nothing to you?” Madame de Hainaut asked finally.

Geneviève shook her head, brows high. “No, nothing. Well, only that I am surprised to hear it is a French name.”

The woman stepped back farther into the alleyway, to the fire that kept her company, and her companion followed along.

“Yes, it was my husband’s name. My French husband.”

Once more, the thick hush bundled them in a stultifying embrace.

“Are you sure you do not require a physician’s care?” Geneviève asked. The woman showed no discernable physical ailment, but her strange behavior was beyond reckoning.

“I know your mother.”

The words cut the heavy oppression like the hard edge of a cleaver.

Geneviève stared at the apparition across the wavering light with a dropped jaw. Not since she was a very small child, when she had watched them lay the earth upon her parents, had anyone spoken of her mother. Though Geneviève cherished the small portraits of them, she had never asked her aunt more about them, for it could only bring more pain. It was far easier to pretend such a love had never existed, than to know it had been lost.

“I fear you are mistaken, madame. I have no mother,” Gene-viève responded with a harsh bitterness. The shield she had brandished all her life rose up to protect her heart once more. “My mother is dead.”

Madame de Hainaut fell back against the stone wall behind her. Geneviève rushed forward, grabbing her by the arm before the elderly woman fell to the cobbles.

“Who told you that?”

Geneviève craned to hear the harsh whisper reaching out for her.

“Come stand before your fire, madame.” Geneviève felt the scrawny limb trembling beneath her grip, and pulled the woman gently back to the flames.

“Who told you your mother was dead?” the frail woman repeated, teeth chattering with chill or fear or dire insistence. Geneviève could not tell which.

“I have always known it. She died in the fire of the great meeting of the kings.” Geneviève did not falter against the piercing stare of the woman’s pale eyes. “I saw her body, saw it buried with my father’s. I saw the stone carved with the name of Gravois, with my own eyes.”

Madame de Hainaut clamped her hands together, fingers pointed to the sky, pressing them against her lips as if in fervent prayer. The chattering of the old woman’s teeth grew so loud it rose above the crackling of the kindling at their feet. She tottered
and swayed on legs Geneviève did not think would support her much longer.

“Do you have a place to sleep tonight, madame? Do you have a bed?” Geneviève would not relinquish the arm in her grip, though she shivered in aversion at the feel of the bones so fragile beneath the thin flesh.

Madame de Hainaut answered with a shallow nod and eyes pleading for something unfathomable. Her hands moved not an inch from her lips, but the fingers folded together into two clasped fists. She began to walk, allowing Geneviève to keep her hand upon her arm, not telling her where to go but leading her on with her wrathlike silence.

Together the women entered the courtyard, the older woman leading the younger in a diagonal direction, toward a small but well-kept establishment in the corner, near the large stately manor in which the king stayed.

“Have you eaten dinner tonight?” Geneviève asked, receiving nothing more than another silent nod in response. “Are you sure you do not require the attention of a physician?” She grew more concerned with the woman’s unrelenting silence. Geneviève felt her weakness growing with every step they took.

The hinges of the door squeaked as they entered the small building, already veiled in darkness and the somnolence of sleeping inhabitants. The stairs groaned as they tread upon them; so slowly did they ascend, each creak fairly announced a minute as it passed.

Madame de Hainaut led Geneviève to the top landing, stumbling as she breached the last stair and entered the angle-ceilinged room opposite. Without word or sound, the old woman, seeming far older than she had been when the night began, floundered in the pale light of the small window, found the tattered ticking in the corner of the closet-sized chamber, and threw herself down upon it. In the shadows, Geneviève found a rough blanket and laid it gently upon the small frail form, tucking in the ends.

Geneviève knelt down beside her, unable to leave this strange woman, touched somehow by the depth of emotion emanating off her in waves. Without consideration, Geneviève followed the urging of her own feelings and reached out a hand, smoothing the wiry gray hair upon the pillow, stroking this unknown troubled soul, until the woman’s breathing grew slow and her trembling ceased.

“I will visit you on the morrow, madame,” Geneviève whispered, coaxing her to peaceful slumber. “We will talk more then.”

With one last caress and another tuck of the blanket, Geneviève rose and crept from the room.

Madame de Hainaut said not a word. She turned to watch the young woman as she left her side, as she vanished beneath the stairs, reaching out a hand, trembling with her silent tears.

The scream pierced the pallid, slumberous dawn like a screeching banshee wailing in pain. Geneviève fell as she jumped from her bed, stumbling on feet not yet awake, legs tangling in her white cotton nightdress. Arabelle yelped as she flung herself up and the two women spoke at once, their words falling one on top of the other.

“
Mon Dieu,
what was that?”

“Heaven help us.”

They stared at each other, faces swollen with sleep, contorted in fright—eyes bulging, mouths gaping.

More screams, more yelling rose up from below.

“The duchesse,” Arabelle hissed, and the women launched into movement, shedding their nightclothes, throwing themselves into gowns, lacing them as they rushed from the room.

They clattered swiftly down the stairs, unsure footing slipping on worn runners. They pushed against the door to Anne’s rooms, shoving it open with a bang and a crash.

Anne stood by her raised bed, clad in her nightgown, sheet
clutched to her chest as if it would ward off the evil knocking at the door. “It is not I,” she assured them.

Footsteps banged on the stairs behind them as people rushed from the inn; voices rose in alarm in the courtyard beyond the windows. Anne jumped to the leaded glass.

“Something is out there.” Her eyes cast furtively about. “Everyone is running toward the center of the courtyard, but I cannot see what draws them.”

Arabelle and Geneviève needed to share no more than a half second’s glance and they rushed for the door.

“Help me get dressed, and I will—” Anne began.

“You will stay here, madame.” Geneviève whipped around, one finger pointed sternly at her mistress, like a general directing his troops into battle. Threat brought out her soldierly training, and she instinctively applied it to one for whom she felt responsible. Anne parted her lips as if to argue, but Geneviève did not move, pinning her mistress in place with her finger and a squinty-eyed stare; her powerful command brooked no argument.

Anne frowned at her, for an instant unable to recognize her maid, seeing something—someone—unknown to her, antithetical to the stoic and devoted servant she had come to know. The duchesse offered a quick nod of agreement; she would acquiesce no further to one lower in rank, but it was enough.

Geneviève whirled away, sprinting to catch up to Arabelle, hot on her heels as they raced down the stairs.

Hazy light spilled in the doorway left open by the last person to run across the threshold, and they aimed for the rectangle of suffused illumination. Arabelle stepped out and hugged herself fast, her breath streaming from her mouth as she turned to the woman behind her.

Like their own, every door on the square hung open as people streamed from the dark interiors, creatures escaping from out of the blackness, their mouths gaping maws in pale faces, their eyes wide in fright. Arabelle and Geneviève joined the rush as the pack
around them surged forward, many still in their nightclothes, heading toward the center of the square where a large, noisy horde gathered. The rumble of distressed voices grew louder as they approached, and the newcomers searched among the rabble for the source of the ruckus. Only Geneviève thought to look up.

She tripped at the sight, a choked, garbled scream caught in her throat. Arabelle reached out and grabbed her a second before she tumbled to the hard stones at her feet.

“What is it? Are you all right?” Arabelle’s fingers dug into the soft flesh of her upper arm, golden, untethered hair spilling into her eyes.

Geneviève spoke not a word; she could not. She raised her hand, one tremulous finger pointing up ahead. Arabelle’s eyes followed, though she pulled back and away, shoulders curling round as if to guard against what lay in the distance.

The body hung from the lowest thick branch; small and frail, it looked like no more than a rag doll spinning on the end of a thick, grimy string. Long, wiry gray hair hung over the face, splotched black from the coagulating blood behind the diaphanous skin.

With a whimper of repugnance, Arabelle jerked her head from the sight, thin hands rushing to her face to guard against the vision. “Who is it? Do you know who it is?”