Before Versailles (69 page)

“Father,” said Louis to the priest. “Now will you hear my confession?”

The shock on Father Gabriel’s face was mirrored on Cinq Mars’s.

“Leave us,” Louis ordered Cinq Mars, then he knelt before the priest.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned—” and Louis recited the litany that had begun weeks ago with his toying with the affections of a dear princess and thus hurting both her and his brother, that moved on to falling in love with and seducing an honorable girl, and that ended with exiling another brother to a nearly deserted island to live in obscurity. His spirit felt lighter as he confessed. Thank God for that; there was still so much to do.

N
ICOLAS REREAD THE
letter that had arrived from his secretary. The trail of the wandering D’Artagnan and the mysterious prisoners led to Monaco. His majesty, so Monsieur told the Chevalier de Lorraine, who told Nicolas, went on a secret pilgrimage to the Magdalene’s cave, which, if Nicolas was not mistaken, was close to Monaco. Do I really believe in coincidence? he thought. He considered the sloping, inked letters of the words, spread on the page before him. What do I do with this? He was ordering his secretary off this quest and to Belle Isle. He wanted the latest word on the state of its fortifications, a recount of men and weapons, of ships. He did not wish to pick up a saber and wave it at his majesty, but he would. But perhaps his fête, its magnificence, its abundance, its wealth of guests, would be saber-rattling enough. Shining little Louise de la Baume le Blanc was his majesty’s new lover. An interesting choice, the choice of a man with a tender heart, but he possessed a lion’s heart, too. Nicolas could hear its faint roar. La Grande Mademoiselle had returned to court. He sent me away because he thought I wrote disgusting old Mazarinades to him, La Grande whispered. As if I would.

L
OUISE SAW HER
musketeer standing in an arch of the open-air gallery and excused herself from her circle of friends.

“And where are you off to?” asked La Grande, shading her eyes and looking at Louise.

They were embroidering, but at least Madame had declared the queen’s gallery too stuffy and marched her ladies outside to the garden, and other courtiers were there, young men, drawn to the sight of the ladies, holding long skeins of thread for them or making suggestions about color, all the while winking promises with their bold eyes. Madame’s charming laugh kept ringing out at frequent intervals, and Catherine made no pretense of embroidering at all, but walked arm in arm in the distance with her cousin.

“To the nearest close stool, highness.”

“Oh, very well.”

Louise walked past garden statues and into the cool shade of the garden’s open-air gallery. Her musketeer waited. Had he a letter from his majesty?

“It’s the dog, miss,” he said. “La Porte sent me to find you.”

Skirts in her hands, she followed him up twisting stairs. La Porte’s face told her everything.

“Is she—”

“Very nearly.”

Inside the king’s closet, Belle lay in a nest of fine linen. Louise settled herself on the floor, put her hand on Belle’s nose. Her children were there, all lying close, their noses pressed into their mother’s side.

“I don’t know what else to do,” said La Porte.

Louise could see how upset he was. She kept her hand on Belle, began to repeat the rosary, and La Porte and the musketeer knelt, their voices joining hers. After a time, Belle’s legs jerked and she made a whiffling sound, and her children lifted their heads, rose, and began to circle her, sniffing every inch of her.

“I think it’s over.” Louise bent forward and put her head against Belle’s. “He’s going to miss you very much,” she whispered. “You were a fine dog.”

La Porte had to sit down he had begun to cry so hard.

Louise made her way back toward the garden. When would his majesty be back? She longed to see him, to lie with him in bed again. The pretense at embroidery had ended, and everyone was playing a game of blindman’s bluff. There were giggles and shouts of laughter, and La Grande was the blindfolded pursuer, and her laughter was loudest of all.

“Come and join us.” One of the king’s gentlemen whirled her into La Grande.

“You’re it! You’re it!”

She let them tie the handkerchief around her eyes. She would have to pretend to enjoy this, when all she wished was to sit quietly by herself for a time. So, she thought, this is what it is like for him.

Chapter 35

OUIS RODE BACK INTO
F
ONTAINEBLEAU AT DAWN, HAVING
woken in the dark and summoned those musketeers with him out of sleep. The blue tiles of the roofs and the chimneys loomed in the distance, and in a short time he rode past palace walls. He slipped off his horse, glad to have arrived. The surface of the carp pond was still. His fish slept. The row of long windows in the ballroom blinked at him as sunlight touched their panes. He’d gone to the cave of Mary Magdalene. Pulling the hood of his cloak over his head, he had joined the other penitents standing in line to light a candle, to leave prayers and supplications with her. He’d prayed on his knees for himself, for all the women he’d loved, his mother and his wife and Louise and Henriette, he’d prayed that she should forgive him, that he had not harmed her too deeply, and finally, for her for whom he had been reared, whose glory and honor he must sustain and increase, France, his kingdom. He’d prayed that he should rule wisely.

The leagues he’d traveled in the last days fell away from him as he dismounted in his private courtyard. He had been unflinching, riding longer and harder than any of his musketeers, rolling up in his cloak and sleeping on the ground when he became too tired. His endurance and strength of will as well as his visit to the shrine were already adding to his growing legend among his men.

“A council meeting this morning,” he informed his master of the household, as he sat in a bath, “and a hunt afterward. Inform the queen and Madame that I’d like their ladies to join me.” He waved the man away. “Tell me how she died,” he said to La Porte.

“Quietly, her children with her and Miss de la Baume le Blanc. I hope I did not displease by doing so.”

“No.”

Belle lay wrapped in finest linen, waiting for him in a basement. La Porte brought him notes from Louise, one for every night he’d been gone. He read through them hungrily, kissing the signature of each one, especially the one in which she described Belle’s death.

“And this,” said La Porte.

And there it was, another Mazarinade. He didn’t even read it all the way through.

“It was lying near Madame Belle in the basement.”

Louis folded Louise’s notes and put them inside his shirt next to the flesh of his heart. The Mazarinade he put in a pocket in his doublet. Hold your friends close and your enemies closer, said his beloved cardinal. If not La Grande, then who? The viscount. It must be.

His gentlemen shared the gossip of the last few days.

“Where’s Monsieur?” he asked. No one seemed to know. He stopped by his wife’s chambers to greet her and give her a quick kiss. He could see from her face, from her ladies’ faces, that everyone thought they knew where he’d been. He led Maria Teresa to a window and told her about the cave and shrine. Her eyes glowed so sweetly that he had to drop his.

“My dog Belle died,” he said.

“Your valet sent me word. I’ll have my father send you a dog from Spain.”

I don’t want a dog from Spain, he thought, but he kissed her hand and thanked her.

“Y
OUR MAJESTY’S JOURNEY
went well?” asked Nicolas, when the council assembled.

Louis surveyed the three men with him, the men the cardinal had bequeathed him to run this kingdom, men who had served for years, who knew its every secret, one of whom was the lynchpin. When he fell, what would the others do? One Louis was certain would stay by his side, but the other?

“I made a pilgrimage,” he said, deciding that a portion of the truth was the best lie, “to the grotto at Saint-Baume to pray for the queen and the dauphin. I had a dream to do so, and the affection I bear the queen and my unborn son made obeying the dream imperative, but I don’t wish this spoken of. I went as a private man, not as sovereign.”

“Did you go to Monaco, sire?” asked Nicolas. “Being so close …”

“Yes, I did stop to see the prince, but only to rest my head on a soft pillow for a night.” Nicolas knew something, he thought. How much?

Nicolas pushed forward a paper that showed taxes collected thus far. “From the reports I’m receiving,” said Nicolas, “the harvest will not be a plentiful one.”

Yes. Many of those at the shrine had been there to pray because they feared the scarcity in their fields, feared surviving the winter. His hood drawn over his face, he’d moved among them and listened. The ribs of my cow show through her skin. My one good pig died. There is nothing for fodder. What will we do?

“Perhaps we need to purchase wheat and corn for the winter,” said Louis. “Will you request the intendants of each province to send a report about their best estimate as to the harvest and those most in need? And will you obtain prices from the Dutch and the English and Swedes as to what they’d charge us for grain?”