Before Versailles (25 page)

“We have to go. We can’t linger any longer! Monsieur and my brother are in a gondola drifting our way!”

At the anxiety in her voice, Louis lifted his head, but he couldn’t help shivering. Henriette laughed, her voice shrill. Color came into Louis’s face, but that was lost in the three of them straightening Henriette’s gown and sash before they returned to the galley, Louis unable to stop himself from taking another kiss or two just before they stepped into the open.

As servants began to row them back, he could feel the powerful pulse of his heart. A refuge, he thought, my kingdom for a refuge. I am weary and lonesome. When would Henriette allow him to make her his? To take what he desired so much that he couldn’t help shivering like someone with a fever? And where? At Vaux-le-Vicomte, urged the Princess de Monaco, but he would not take his beloved naked and trembling as he also would be in the house of the man he must destroy. Why had Henriette laughed? He couldn’t get the sound of it from his mind, that shrill, coquettish, little sound she’d made.

My heart hurts, thought Louise, as the galley moved through the water, an oversized swan, toward the suspended garden, and she looked up into the sky, to the stars there, sparkling bright everywhere, to the moon, mist around it. Choisy courted her again, told her stories of the old gods who turned themselves into showers of gold to make love to women they desired, of men who were part bull and lived at the center of a labyrinth or who fell in love with their own reflections, of women who saved the hero with their wit and passion but were left behind as he sailed away. She was dreaming the stories at night. Their symbols were everywhere, painted in the ballroom frescoes, turned to statues in the queen’s garden or the stag’s gallery, woven into the figures in the wall tapestries. Seeing the king and Madame and their desperate love this night made something in her feel languorous and tender, opening. She’d allowed Choisy to kiss her the other day. The kiss had not been chaste, but a mingling of mouth and tongue and desire from him that had surprised her. She didn’t love him, kissed him only because he begged, and hadn’t let him kiss again. But it felt like a door in her was becoming unsealed, that there was something deep and mysterious on its other side, another layer, which would leave the girl in her behind. She’d taken another girl, the little Julie, to see her family. The child had wept and begged to stay, but her mother had caught Louise’s eye and given a sharp shake of the head, and so Louise had brought the crying child back to the nuns. She understood the child’s loneliness. She’d often been lonely in the midst of the Orléans ragged splendor. The child didn’t yet understand that another world beckoned to her, a better life. She preferred the poverty of the farm and the brutality of her father to loneliness, preferred that which was known to what was yet unknown. I must do what I can to ease her sorrow, thought Louise, for that, too, she knew, that sorrow carved a deep path in one’s heart.

I’ve made the king of France shake in his shoes with desire for me, thought Henriette. What triumph.

S
TILL LATER THAT
night, the fête finally over as dawn showed a hint of light over the horizon, Henriette’s maids of honor tossed words back and forth from their beds.

“She danced with him three times in a row, and when she went off in the galley, people noticed. The Count de Guiche’s face was a storm cloud. Madame’s face when you came back from the pavilion, it looked, well, it looked kissed,” said Madeleine.

“I didn’t see any kisses, and I was right there with them,” said Fanny. “Did you, Louise?”

“It’s a sin to be unfaithful,” said Claude.

“But it is not a sin to flirt,” answered Fanny.

“Nothing would make me flirt if I were married,” claimed Madeleine.

Fanny laughed. “If the king began to smile at you, Miss Madeleine, if the king asked for your hand to partner his favorite dances, looked pensive until you appeared on the scene, gave you diamond earrings and knelt at your feet to put them in your ears, are you telling me that you wouldn’t entertain the thought of making him happy? Her very presence makes him happy. That’s all there is to it.”

There was silence in the chamber. Then Fanny spoke again, driving home her point.

“I’m speaking of his majesty, that serious man with the thick curling brown hair I have to make myself not reach out and touch, that man who takes off his hat to talk to any one of us and seems to listen, too. So that man, who happens to be master of us all, smiles at you, wants to listen to what you say, wants to escort you hither and yon just to be beside you. And you’d be cold as snow? Nothing tingling? Nothing sparking? Nothing in you urging you to accede to his wishes? The only thing Madame is guilty of is enjoying his majesty’s very high regard. I would, too. And so would you, any one of you, and you know it!”

No one answered.

It’s not a good sign, Louise thought, as she tried to settle under the covers, that we’re talking of this. If we are, others are, too. Her most recent canter had taken her to a farmhouse near Vaux-le-Vicomte. Beware on your way back, said the farmer, leaning against a rake. There was a werewolf seen. My cousin saw it. Wolves and legends about wolves were part and parcel of country lore. When? Louise had asked. In the spring, he’d answered. A werewolf, she’d thought, riding out of his farmyard, might just be a boy in an iron mask, weeping and howling as he ran through the forest.

L
OUIS STARED DOWN
at the Mazarinade that had been left in Belle’s collar. It had fallen onto the bed as he touched her neck. The words were cruel:

Licentious birds of a feather
,

she a tool of unnatural passion
,

he a tool of unnatural ambition
.

The “she” was his mother; the “he” was Mazarin.

Chapter 11

HE NEXT DAY, INDOLENT AND SAD AND YAWNING
, A
NNE, QUEEN
mother of France, lay in a special daybed her beloved Cardinal Mazarin had commissioned for her from Italy. The finest artisan in Rome had carved its frame, and soft padding covered with lustrous silky fabric lined its exterior. She could half-sit, half-lie upon it, and she did so now, facing tall doors opened to the terrace and pond and gardens. Curtains hung down to protect her from the sun pooling into this chamber—she was vain of her white complexion, her equally white hands—but the wind lifted the fabric in graceful arcs that allowed her glimpses of the palace gardens. All about her was the finest of furniture and paintings and tapestries. Above, her initials were handsomely carved in each honeycomb of the coved ceiling. A little brazier sent out the sweet scent of a perfumed lozenge, for she couldn’t bear even the hint of an offensive odor. Over in a corner, her favorite musician played the guitar.

She craved sleep. Since Mazarin’s death, she slept little. The music lulled; she began to doze as her mind darted lightly here and there among impressions from the previous night … surprising how Henriette had turned out so well … Philippe settled … thank the Holy Mother and all the saints for that … no need to worry anymore … Louis seemed almost a little too appreciative of his new sister’s grace … A soft snore wafted toward the honeycombed initials on the ceiling.

Madame de Motteville, her favorite lady-in-waiting, who had been with her forever, in good and bad times, who carried secrets that if ever uttered would send the woman, no matter how favored, to the deepest dungeon of the terrible Bastille prison in Paris, entered the chamber, stepped to the daybed, and said loudly enough to wake, “Your majesty, he demands to see you.”

Anne opened blue and still quite lovely eyes. “Tell his majesty—”

“It’s Monsieur, and he won’t be denied.”

Oh, bones of Mother Mary, the last thing she wanted to deal with at this moment was her excitable, high-strung, talkative second son. She sat up, a frown on her face. From being pleased at the thought of the way he’d settled down, she moved to feeling extreme annoyance. After the lovely fête only last night, what could he possibly have to complain of?

“He says ‘Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Your majesty naps,’ ” said Madame de Motteville.

“What on earth does that mean?”

Madame de Motteville made a gesture, and at once a woman of the bedchamber glided forward to hold out a bowl of water. Anne dipped her hands, patted her face, took the crisp, starched, white-as-snow linen, her initials painstakingly embroidered in a corner—she would have no other touch her, never had—to wipe her face. Her tastes were fastidious and had been a hugely civilizing influence on the court. Courtiers no longer spat wherever they pleased or blew their noses on their sleeves. She had become queen of France at ten and four. She’d been vivacious enough to learn French and hate her husband’s chief adviser. She’d been strong enough to outlast not bearing an heir for years. That strength served her now, though she was a ghost of the self she’d been before Mazarin’s death. She would need her wits about her if Philippe were in a temper.

He was. He marched into her bedchamber in a fury. Anne surveyed him coldly, as if he were an opponent. It was second nature to do so. No one who survived on the throne could do any less. Both her boys were so handsome. This one’s hair was darker than his brother’s, more magnificent, thicker, but he was slighter than his brother, more like a boy. Sensitive and intelligent, he tried always to please. She didn’t love him the way she did Louis, never had.

“He’s fallen in love with my wife! He is seducing her right under my nose!”

With one gesture from Anne, the chamber emptied. Only her lady-in-waiting remained, standing silent against one wall. There was no point to hide anything from her. Sooner or later, Anne would have to make use of her.

“I’ll kill him! I will, Mother!” ranted Philippe. “First he denies me the governorship of Languedoc, which is mine by precedent and right, then he doesn’t appoint me to his council, again my right as a prince of the blood, now this—”