Before Versailles (36 page)

“So how did you find us, if I may again so inquire? Did you come to buy brandy?” he asked.

“Find you?” She laughed without mirth, the way the gargoyle did. “By not attempting to, I must suppose, else why visit this—” she searched for words, a brow lifted, “—place of sorrow. I scarcely know where I am and must depend on you to point us toward …” at the last moment she said “Paris” instead of “Fontainebleau.”

“What a long way you’ve ridden.”

She shrugged. Great ladies never bothered to explain themselves.

“If I may, who have I the honor of addressing?”

She gave her mother’s name, put down the goblet and walked to the door. “I’m going downstairs to summon my groom,” she said. “We’ve a long journey back.”

“Indeed you do.”

She stood at the door waiting the way the gargoyle would have done, and after what seemed forever, the abbot opened the door for her. In his open hand was her mask. She snatched it from him, was over the threshold and down the stairs in the blink of an eye. She was out the open door, into the shade of the porch, and walking as fast as she dared toward the barns and sheds. Inside one, her groom stood with the horses.

“Did you hear that howling?” he asked her, his eyes wide.

“We have to leave at once,” answered Louise, tying the mask in place.

He held his hands cupped, and she stepped into them and then onto the sidesaddle.

“They’re watered and rested a little. They’ll get us back,” he told her.

“Just let them get us out of here.”

She could hear the edge to her voice, and so did the groom. Blessed Mother, she prayed, let me leave here without being seen by the musketeer. Please, Blessed Mother, I beg you.

Outside, she saw that the gates through which they’d entered were closed. The boys in the garden looked up from their tilling.

“Give me the reins of your horse,” she ordered. “Run and open the gate.”

He obeyed, her voice making him swift. The boys in the garden stared. Louise looked around. The abbot had followed her outside, was crossing the front of the house, but she didn’t slow the gait of the horses.

“How will you find your way back, my lady?” the abbot called to her.

She kicked harder at her horse’s sides. “I’ll trust in the Lord.”

The groom had the long wooden slats that barred the gate pulled back, and one side of the gate gaped open. She tossed his horse’s reins to the groom as she trotted her horse through, and she looked behind once to see that the groom was astride his own horse, and seeing that he was, she whipped at her horse’s haunches with her riding crop hard enough to make the horse leap into a gallop. She intended to gallop all the way back to Fontainebleau if that were possible, but then she remembered that there was a hill that they’d come across earlier, and that from its top, it was possible to see the monastery compound. She wanted another look.

“What frightened you? The addled children?” asked the groom as he rode up beside her.

“Yes.”

“They mean no harm. My brother is such a one, sweet as a lamb.”

The musketeer had called the boy “highness.” A royal lamb. The musketeer didn’t see me, Louise thought. Thank you, Holy Mother.

The horses slowly climbed the hill, and at its top Louise could see again the vineyards and the monastery chapel’s cupola amid the trees. Forget, the musketeer had ordered Choisy. Noblewomen abandoned unwanted children to all kinds of fates. If the boy was an idiot, this was best, wasn’t it? Why did something in her say otherwise? She was so intent on her thoughts that she didn’t hear the sound of other horses approaching until it was too late, until her horse neighed, and she and the groom were surrounded.

“S
IR
?”

Nicolas looked up from a letter he was reading. One of his private guards stood outlined by sunlight and by the lovely columns of Nicolas’s open-air rotunda in this château he was building.

“We found trespassers, sir,” the guard said.

Nicolas stood and saw two people still on horseback in the courtyard on the other side of his moat. He walked out into the sunlight, down the steps of his great porch. There were hundreds of workmen everywhere, around the house, on the roofs, in the gardens. The house must be finished as soon as possible for his fête, for his special guests, the king and queen and royal family. He was throwing the grandest fête ever seen, a fête worthy of a future chancellor. Everyone in Paris was coming. Everyone who was anyone in the kingdom was coming. Nicolas saw that one of the trespassers was a masked woman, and he was at once intrigued. Her groom had dismounted, was standing in front of her horse as if he would fight everyone for her sake. Smiling, he stepped forward and offered his hand.

“Forgive my guards’ zeal, miss. Won’t you dismount and allow me to offer you a cup of wine?”

Louise dismounted, said something to her groom, and Nicolas realized at once that it was Miss de la Baume le Blanc. Had she gotten lost? Surely this wasn’t a deliberate visit. And why the mask?

“If you will follow me, miss.” And he led the way back up the steps, across the terrace, into the beautiful rotunda, and then through a series of chambers on the right, until they were in a small chamber with very high ceilings, its walls elaborately gilded and painted and festooned. There was a huge impressive mirror, and under it, a long sofa with legs of gilt. Tall candlesticks the size of boys stood in the four corners. He gestured toward the sofa, covered in cut velvet, just delivered, in fact. The wagon that had brought it had only just rolled away. He stood near the window, enjoying both the breeze and Louise’s clear discomfort.

A servant brought wine, but she refused it. Was she not going to reveal who she was? Did she think he did not know? What a silly child she was. “Miss, I must ask why you trespass upon my land.”

“We were lost.”

Lost? This little horsewoman who rode out with a groom nearly every morning, who rode like an Amazon during the king’s hunts? Word was his majesty had commented on her skills just the other day. She must know the countryside by heart by now. He didn’t believe her. “Won’t you take off your mask, Miss de la Baume le Blanc? It feels so unfriendly.”

Louise sagged against the upright back of the sofa, untied her mask and dropped it in her lap. She knew she needed to say something, to be light and playful, but she couldn’t summon up a single word. Her playacting at the monastery had taken all her wits.

“Well,” he said, when it was clear she wasn’t going to speak. “What a delight for me. I have the honor to show you my wonderful château. It’s the penance you pay for trespass. Allow me to escort you around the grounds and boast a bit, the way a man must when he has something new of which he is very proud. Then I will bundle you back in your cloak and send you and your groom on your way to Fontainebleau with one of my guard as escort.”

“All right, then.”

Her response wasn’t enthusiastic, but Nicolas ignored that. She was his guest; it was a beautiful day, and there was nothing he liked better than showing off his château.

One hand on his arm, Louise allowed herself to be led back into the rotunda. All around her, in a perfect circle, were immense arches, some leading outside, some to other chambers in the château. The symmetry was beautiful, and it was continued upward, on the next level, where even sets of windows, spaced perfectly above the arches below, made their own circle. And then above them was a dome.

“Do you know of Le Brun?” he asked, and she shook her head and listened to him explain that Le Brun was a great artist and that he had not yet completed the painting that would be inside the dome. Louise didn’t yet understand that the men and women of this age measured themselves not only by their bravery, but by the beauty they created. The man who was destined to love her would set the standard for his century, but before him, creating that standard, was this man beside her. All of this was in the future, years from now when she would have been taken to the heights of her century and known all that was fashionable and exquisite and beautifully done. But now, this day at the viscount’s château, she was just an exhausted girl aware that everywhere she looked were beautiful things, from polished wood to onyx-topped tables to huge golden candlesticks to dozens of busts sitting atop marble columns in between the arches. On one of the tables in one of the chambers they’d passed through was a tumble of crystal decanters and goblets, of silver trays and épergnes, all piled together like pirates’ booty.

She stood on the terrace with him and looked out at his gardens. They were magnificent. Even the gardens in Paris, at the Luxembourg Palace, where the Orléans and her mother lived, were not this beautiful. Everywhere she looked, there was order and beauty. She saw a landscape canal, alleys of young trees, statues and fountains, gravel paths, sets of steps, patterned parterres in which gardeners were still planting lilies and carnations and in which stood graceful statues or fountains. She caught her breath at the splendid, grand symmetry of it, and hearing the sound, Nicolas was pleased.

Yes, he thought, looking out at a vista before him, I leave a legacy for generations. They will be talking of me, of the beauty of this, a hundred years from now. Too bad the fountains aren’t playing, but she’d see them soon enough.

“Do you know Le Nôtre?” he asked, and Louise shook her head, no.

“Well, he is one of the king’s gardeners, and he has designed all of this for me. For five long years, he’s been designing this.” He told her of the many fountains that sprayed water upward and pointed out a long waterfall a mile or so in the distance. We diverted a river, he told her, and she listened and looked around her and thought that she’d never seen anything so magnificently ordered, but she was so very tired now.

“I really must go now, sir,” she said. “I have a long ride ahead.”

He leaned against the terrace balustrade. “Ought I to send you back in my carriage?”

She shook her head.

“It’s said that you were born in the saddle.”

She laughed, and he was reminded again of her youth and freshness.

“My father taught me to ride when I was very small. He took me all through the woods around our home, used to tell me there were fairies everywhere, watching. If one was very quiet and sat under an old tree, one would see them, he said.”

“And did you discover any fairies on my land?”

“They must exist in this beautiful place.”

“I am so glad you find it to your taste.”

“I find it exquisite beyond words. Thank you for your hospitality, and forgive my intrusion.”

He followed her back into the rotunda, stood watching as a servant brought her cloak and she retied it. He felt curious again as to how she had ended up on his doorstep. “You were near the monastery, I’m told. Did you go in?”

She hesitated. He watched her struggle about whether to lie to him or not. Not, please, he thought.

“My horse stumbled, and we went in to see if she’d thrown a shoe.”

“What do you know of the order?”

“Very little. They care for addled, idiot boys.” In spite of herself, she shuddered.

“Yes, the sight of them is disturbing, isn’t it?” One visit had been enough to cure him of any further curiosity. He walked her outside, helped her into the sidesaddle, looked up at her as she settled in it. The sun framed her thick hair, casting light through it like the halo of a young Our Lady. She must be the age Mary was when the angel loved her, he thought. What a divine visit for the angel. He watched her ride away, thinking about the monastery. It was on the edge of his land, but he never rode there. He’d visited it once. Seeing boys born without wits, some of them half-wild, had been more than he could bear. If he remembered correctly, it had been founded by the queen mother years earlier. Or was it the cardinal who’d founded it? Unlike the cardinal to found an order and then ignore it. Mazarin would have led yearly pilgrimages with all the court along to applaud his piety for the less fortunate and abandoned, so it must have been the queen mother.

Perhaps when he was chancellor, he’d order a large yearly stipend to the monks who cared for such troublesome children. A tragedy, to bear a son without a mind, but not his tragedy. He wanted to walk all the way to the waterfall and admire the enormous statue of Hercules that his brother had sent from Italy only a few months ago. One stood at the statue and looked back to the house and knew that magnificence and subtle grandeur had been summoned and shaped, and that he, the Viscount Nicolas, was the sorcerer who had conjured it into being.