Before Versailles (62 page)

L
ATE THAT NIGHT
, Louise sat in a carriage with Fanny as it swayed around the landscape pool, her face and shoulders out the window to feel the night’s breeze, to see the stars, to try and quiet this flaming in her body that the very thought of Louis brought into being. She didn’t notice a horseman’s quiet approach. But suddenly there he was, bending down and planting one quick, killingly sweet kiss on her lips. Before she could even move he was riding on. This was how it would be, wouldn’t it? Always too quick, too often unspoken, always a good-bye implicit, but always thrilling.

“Have you made love?” Fanny demanded.

She didn’t want to talk about it just yet. “Hush.”

“You have. I’m glad. Now you understand my despair.”

But she didn’t. “Come sit beside me.” She held Fanny’s hand as Fanny’s tears began. She hadn’t been able to save a moth from dying in a candle’s flame earlier this night. The image stayed in her mind.

Did the moth know the alluring flame would singe its wings and that it would die?

Or did it just bless the heat of the flame?

And did it die happy?

Chapter 31

ACK AGAIN AT THE FORTRESS OF
P
IGNEROL
, D’A
RTAGNAN
shook off weariness with a short nap—any musketeer worth his musket could nap while still in the saddle, if need be—and then went to survey the state of his prisoners. It didn’t take long before he found himself watching Cinq Mars’s face carefully. It was nothing more than instinct, nothing more than the faintest movement of eyelids in the gaunt angles of Cinq Mars’s face, but D’Artagnan thought, he’s going to attempt something.

“How is the boy?” Cinq Mars asked.

Not well. He ate little or nothing, made continual clicking sounds when he was not howling, and he defecated in corners. He tried to tear the bandage from his cuts, pulled all bandages off his fingers. Under no circumstances must he die, D’Artagnan had shouted to the musketeers, the priest in charge of his care. But how did one force an insane boy to obey? He made no answer to Cinq Mars’s question. What was there to say?

“I must see him.” Cinq Mars was forceful. “He doesn’t do well without me. Let me see him. His majesty doesn’t wish him to die, does he?” The musketeer caught the shadow that moved across D’Artagnan’s face and repeated, “Let me see the boy.”

Cinq Mars had to be carried in on a litter. He couldn’t stand for long yet, though his own wound had stopped bleeding. Outside the boy’s cell, D’Artagnan motioned for his musketeers to set down the litter, for one to unlock the door. He leaned down and with a grunt picked Cinq Mars up into his own strong arms, walking through the door and kicking it closed again with his heel. The boy sat in a corner rhythmically hitting his head against the wall. The contents of food bowls were everywhere. A flask of watered wine stood on its side, a slow drip falling into a puddle of wet. The boy’s hands had dried blood on them.

“Put me down near him,” Cinq Mars said. He groaned as D’Artagnan propped him against the wall, and the sound set off a howl from the boy. The sound harsh in his ears, disturbing enough to make his flesh crawl, D’Artagnan brought a pillow for Cinq Mars’s back and then stepped to one side. This boy was little more than an animal, a maddened, crazed beast. How could he be cared for?

“Hush, now, hush,” Cinq Mars crooned, the tenderness of his voice at odds with his harsh face, his perennial grimace. “Hush, my prince, my handsome one. It’s all right. It’s fine. I’m here now. Old Cinq Mars is here. Hush, my boy, hush.”

It might have been a lullaby.

The boy never looked at him, never acknowledged he was near, but the howling gradually stopped under the drone of Cinq Mars’s words, though not the rocking back and forth. D’Artagnan moved his jaw a little to take tension from it when the boy finally became silent.

“Get fresh food for him,” Cinq Mars said in the same tone as his lullaby. “We’re going to eat now, aren’t we, my prince? We’re going to feed this strong, handsome boy. Yes, we are. Cinq Mars’s good boy. Cinq Mars’s handsome prince.”

Outside the cell, D’Artagnan gave the order, then took the tray to Cinq Mars himself.

“Sit in that chair there,” Cinq Mars ordered. With slow and careful effort, he cut meat from a fat roasted pullet and divided bread, eating some of both as he did so. He poured a bit of ale into a cup. Carefully, clearly hurting, he placed the plate of meat and chunks of bread and the ale in front of the boy, sat down on the floor, to one side of the boy.

“Good,” he said, “so good. They’ve outdone themselves in the kitchen for you. Eat for your servant, Cinq Mars, my prince. Eat the food in front of you. Go on.” He began to eat, making smacking sounds.

The boy rocked back and forth. An arm darted to the meat. The boy never stopped moving but began to eat what was before him. The mask stopped at the mouth, so that its wearer could eat with ease.

“Something to clean him with. Don’t step in front of him or too near,” Cinq Mars ordered. When he had what he needed, he wiped the boy’s hands, wiped as much of his face as showed under the iron mask.

“You miss your Cinq Mars, don’t you?” Cinq Mars said. “Of course you do. That’s a good boy. You’re a good, fine boy. Your mother would be proud. Why does he still wear that cursed mask? What can it matter here? Take it off, and let me stay in here with him. He’s accustomed to me.”

“No,” said D’Artagnan.

“He won’t eat unless I’m here.”

D’Artagnan leaned down and picked Cinq Mars up again, walked with him to the door and kicked it, and one of his men opened it. Howling filled the cell, whitened the face of the musketeer who’d opened the door, made Cinq Mars curse. He cursed D’Artagnan all the way back to his own cell, and when D’Artagnan laid Cinq Mars back in his bed, Cinq Mars told him exactly what he thought of him and the queen mother and the cardinal and his majesty, cursing them all with a string of snarling oaths.

“Bastard,” he finally said, out of breath. “You’re a bastard, and the queen mother is a cunt I curse to my dying day who hasn’t the compassion of the lowest whore on the streets, and his majesty is a bastard, lower than the cunt who bore him.”

“You took an oath to serve him.”

“The king I took an oath to serve is long dead.”

“The king never dies. Long live the king.”

L
ATER
D’A
RTAGNAN SAT
on a terrace with the governor of the fortress. He placed a bag of gold on the stones at the governor’s feet.

“That’s for your trouble and your loyalty. His majesty expects complete obedience from you, and I tell you from first-hand experience, this isn’t a king to trifle with. What has Captain Cinq Mars said to you? Don’t lie. If you do, it will be you locked behind in a dungeon, the darkest one at the Bastille, while we pry it out of you.”

“He offered coin to allow him and the boy to go. He said he could write one letter, and in three days I’d have a thousand gold
louis
and the blessings of the queen mother herself.”

“There aren’t a thousand
louis
in that bag, but a sum to make up the difference will come to you in a month, I swear it on the soul of my wife. Forget you ever heard the queen mother’s name in this.” D’Artagnan’s voice was so grim the governor blinked.

“Who else has talked to him?” D’Artagnan asked.

“No one.”

“A servant?”

“Your men have been there whenever a servant has entered.”

They were silent, drinking wine the governor’s wife served them.

“Is the boy completely mad?” ventured the governor.

“I can tell you nothing about him.”

“His howling frightens the guards.”

“It would frighten anyone, wouldn’t it?”

D’Artagnan sat up until late going over details of the next step of his mission in his mind. A letter to his majesty lay written and sealed, would be given to the governor to deliver with all haste the next day. Keep me informed, his majesty had ordered. I want to see it as if I were standing there beside you.

Chapter 32

AUL
P
ELLISON, THE
V
ISCOUNT
N
ICOLAS’S PERSONAL SECRETARY
, sat on the edge of the public fountain staring up at a fortress built into the side of a mountain in a little village called Pignerol. Bleak and forbidding, the façade of the fortress told him nothing. Its governor had been equally stoic. No promise of any amount of coin moved his lips nor did a letter with the viscount’s seal. But guards were lesser mortals. They usually liked to drink at a tavern somewhere before they went home to plump wives and too many children and even more wine. They liked to talk among themselves about their work, as any man did. He went into the tavern around the corner from the fountain, ordered wine.

“Do the guards from the fortress ever come here?” he asked the woman who brought his goblet. She had the hard-eyed squint of a woman who might own the place.

“They live here. I have to send them home to their wives like bad boys.” She looked Pellison up and down. “You from Paris, too?”

“Too? You’ve been entertaining visitors from Paris?”

“Musketeers, big ones, handsome things, cheeky, pinched me more than once where they shouldn’t have, they were from Paris, I could tell.” And she mimicked his accent with a quick change of expression and emphasis. “You all talk like sissies,” she said, then sighed. “But these boys weren’t sissies, I can tell you.”