Before Versailles (23 page)

“Where did she go?”

“Rode an hour or more northeast of here.”

“Did she meet anyone?”

The old groom shook his head.

“You may go now,” said Colbert, and the old groom glanced back once to see the man, the crow he was called behind his back, staring down intently at all the words that were written on the paper before him.

Chapter 10

T WAS
M
ADAME’S BIRTHDAY; SHE WAS MIDSUMMER’S PRINCESS
in all ways. Everyone knew the king would acquiesce to no entertainment without her presence or approval, though few yet suspected what lay behind their intense friendship. And now her husband gave her a birthday fête. The fountain courtyard and suspended garden were filled with courtiers, many of whom had driven from Paris in their carriages to pay their respects to her.

In the famed suspended garden lantern after lantern had been lit for night’s strolling. The courtyard was a fairyland with light spilling in soft patches everywhere from candles and torches. In the carp pond around the garden gondolas floated, footmen at the oar to row courtiers to the small open-air summer pavilion built on a little manmade island at the pond’s southern end. It was late dusk, when dragonflies made a final flurry of flight, and their wings caught the tints of the setting sun, while all along the pond’s edge frogs chirped.

Henriette looked wonderful, dressed in white, but with a flame-colored sash pinned with a huge diamond cross at her shoulder. The sash splashed across her gown in a burst of drama. White feathers were pinned in her hair and trailed down into her curls. And there was one patch, a single patch, at her mouth. Her ladies all wore the same dramatic white feathers in their hair fastened with little pearl dragonflies she’d given them as gifts, and tonight, once more, they all wore a single, forbidden patch upon their faces.

“We’re so lucky,” Fanny said as they walked among the crowd. “Do you remember six months ago when I was crying out of boredom?”

“You’re up to something. I know that expression, Fanny. What mischief are you plotting?”

“Hello! Hello! You there, La Baume le Blanc!” Waving a large scarf shot through with silver thread, one of her tiny, badly behaved, growling dogs tucked in her arm, La Grande Mademoiselle advanced across the courtyard. The princess, towering over nearly everyone around her, called greetings, nodded approvingly or ignored as if she were deaf, and accepted the bows and curtsies around her as her due as she approached.

“Pretend you don’t see her. Follow me,” hissed Fanny, and she immediately thrust herself into a group of chattering courtiers and vanished from sight. But Louise wasn’t quick enough. The next thing she knew La Grande was at her side.

“Are your ears filled with wax?” said the princess. “Come with me at once. We’ve a mission.” Raising heavy skirts and marching up the broad, wide, outside steps, she left the fête behind her, and Louise suppressed a sigh and followed obediently.

She trailed the princess down halls and through antechambers, La Grande never looking back to see that she was there or addressing a word to her. In the princess’s mind, Louise was simply one of the legions of lesser nobility who were hers to order about. Musketeers stationed along various walls saluted her, and Louise realized with a start that they were in the king’s chambers.

“Here we are,” La Grande sniffed once they were inside a bedchamber, everything about it magnificent, from the thick, intricately embroidered hangings on the bed to the gilt in the woodwork to the size of the surround of a fireplace large enough for Louise to stand in. La Grande’s little dog began to yap. She put it down, and it ran in circles until it stopped and, to Louise’s horror, urinated on the floor. I should never have cured her, thought Louise. All of a sudden, dogs came leaping over the
ruelle
, the low railing that separated his majesty’s bed from the rest of the chamber. Barking and growling, they surrounded La Grande’s dog.

“Silence!” commanded La Grande. “Sit! Come here, my precious Odalisque, come to Mama.” La Grande opened the gate of the
ruelle
and stalked to the bed.

“Come here,” La Grande commanded, and realizing she, not the dogs, was being summoned, and in spite of the fact that she didn’t wish to obey, Louise walked into the sacred space that only a king and those he allowed might enter. She saw that another dog lay in the center of the king’s bed. The dog was large and tawny with a handsome head. Everyone knew her. She was his majesty’s favorite, Belle, his best hunter.

“My father gave her to his majesty,” said La Grande, “and the king tells me she’s sick and that though his physicians have given her an emetic, she seems no better. I told him I knew someone who had a way with animals, that you’d made my little Odalisque all better. What do you think, La Baume le Blanc?”

Louise sat on the bed, put her hand out, and felt the dog’s muzzle. “She feels warm, a fever, perhaps.” She lightly caressed the dog’s back and haunches, pulled her front paws. “Where does it hurt, Miss Belle?” she whispered, and Belle turned over, exposing her belly, and when Louise caressed that, a low growl was the response. At once the three other dogs were on the bed, barking furiously at Louise.

La Grande batted at them with a pillow. “Get down! Down, I say! They won’t hurt you.”

“I think it’s her stomach,” said Louise. “Run your hand just here, princess, but be careful. I think it hurts her for us to touch it.”

La Grande did as Louise suggested.

“A hint of swelling, don’t you think?” asked Louise.

“I don’t feel it, but I haven’t your touch. La Porte!” The princess walked away from the bed bellowing the name. Her little dog went scurrying away to the fireplace, where it hid behind one of the elaborate silver fronts of the andirons. The other dogs leapt back upon the bed and walked around Louise, who held out her hands so that they could smell them. She knew them from the hunts, but she’d never been this close before, and she was an invader in their territory. Her smell would reassure them; she knew that. It always did.

A boy entered the chamber, clapped his hands, and all the dogs but Belle bounded off the bed and to him. Belle’s tail whipped back and forth. “You’d go to him if you felt better, wouldn’t you?” Louise said to the dog. “He’s a friend, isn’t he?”

“There you are, La Porte,” said La Grande. “I’ve brought La Baume le Blanc to see the dog, at his majesty’s request. My little Odalisque wouldn’t be with me today if it weren’t for her. I need to wash my hands. Tell his majesty that Belle has a swelling on her stomach. A poultice should do the trick, I think. And tell him she has a fever. I’d give her whatever he takes for fever. Odalisque! Where are you, darling sweetness?”

La Grande remained exactly where she was until he brought a basin of water. Then she dipped her hands in it, waiting, those same hands outstretched and dripping, until the valet brought a cloth to dry them. The dogs growled and pawed at a fireplace andiron. The boy, Louise realized, wasn’t a boy at all, but a very small, very trim man, hair pulled back into a neat tail.

He clapped his hands again, and the three big dogs went swirling out of the bedchamber, as Belle whined. He reached down and pulled La Grande’s dog from one of the silver andiron pillars. It tried to bite him.

“Odalisque, my jasmine blossom,” La Grande said, folding the dog into the crook of her arm.

“It will be too much to give her the same amount of fever water his majesty might take.”

Both La Grande and the valet looked over to Louise, who had moved outside the
ruelle
.

“Yes,” said La Grande. “Half—”

Louise shook her head.

“A quarter, I would say. Yes, that should help.” La Grande marched out of the bedchamber, leaving Louise behind her like a discarded ragdoll.

The valet considered Louise, then nodded, a small, neat movement matching his small, neat presence. “Would miss care to wash her hands?”

“Oh, yes, please. Thank you so much.” Louise hurriedly splashed her hands in the basin of water, dried them on the cloth. “I think Belle would like to be wherever the others are.”

She fled, not daring to tell him about the mess La Grande’s dog had left on the other side of the
ruelle
. She just didn’t dare.

A
T MIDNIGHT
, P
HILIPPE’S
birthday gift came rumbling up the road from the stables. It passed along the length of the carp pond, and linkboys ran before it lighting the way with the torches they carried. The gift, a carriage, pulled up to the ornate doors of what was called the golden entrance, the king’s personal entrance into the palace, a beautiful pavilion built to resemble a gatehouse. Courtiers crowded around the vehicle, lacquered black with Philippe’s crest picked out in gold and blue paint on the doors. Six white horses—matched in size and color, no easy task to find—were in harness. The inside was blue velvet and blue leather, and Philippe played footman, opening the door for Henriette, while Louis walked around the carriage inspecting it.

“Do you ride inside or with us?” Philippe asked his brother. He pointed to Guy, who sat in the coachman’s place. One nimble movement, and Philippe was up beside Guy in the groom’s seat. Louis climbed up to join them, as courtiers looked on enviously.

“Stand aside. We take Madame for a drive,” Guy shouted.

“Don’t be disappointed not to join them.” Anne, the queen mother, patted the hand of Louis’s queen as they watched the carriage being turned around. “His majesty would do nothing to harm the child you carry, and with that scamp driving,” she pointed toward Guy with her fan, “anything could happen.”

“Élan,” Molière said to one of his fellow actors as they stood among the crowd watching the carriage depart. Part of the kitchen staff this evening, the two carried heavy trays to the courtyard laden with food from the kitchens—duck floating in orange sauce, flan with lemon, a swan stuffed with pigeon breasts and apricots—to tempt Madame’s capricious appetite. “His majesty has tremendous élan. Take that and exaggerate it, and you have a hero.”

G
UY MANEUVERED THE
horses toward the grand canal that anchored one end of the gardens. Built by the king’s grandfather, the canal stretched nearly four thousand feet in length; it was this same canal the young court drove around in the wee hours of the morning.