Bitter Greens (4 page)

I was soon warm again and drowsy. My thoughts drifted. I imagined my mother bent over me, stroking my hair away from my forehead. ‘Oh, Bon-bon,’ she sighed. ‘What trouble have you got yourself into now?’

I wrenched my mind away. I did not want to think about my mother. It grieved me to imagine her up in heaven with the angels, looking down and seeing me here. It was better to disbelieve in heaven altogether.

I had not prayed to God all those long cold hours. I had not prayed since I was a child. I had simply gritted my teeth and set myself to endure. It had seemed important to me that Sœur Emmanuelle realised she would not break my will. I could have got to my feet once Sœur Emmanuelle was gone. I could at least have huddled on one of the wooden pews, perhaps
even wrapped myself in the richly embroidered altar cloth. I’m sure that is what she expected me to do. Yet to do so would have been to allow her, somehow, to triumph over me.

The Marquis de Maulévrier used to lock me in the caves under the Château de Cazeneuve. They were as cold as the church, and much darker. A hermit had once lived there, many hundreds of years before, and had died there. I wondered if his skeleton was still there, hidden under the stones. I imagined I heard his footsteps shuffling closer and closer, then I felt his cold breath on the back of my neck, the brush of a spectral finger. I screamed, but no one heard me.

Surely he was a good man, that long-ago hermit
, I told myself.
He would not hurt a little girl
. I imagined he was taking my hand because he wanted to show me the way to escape the cave. Perhaps there was a secret door down low in the wall, a door only large enough for a child. If I stepped through that door, I would be in another world, in fairyland perhaps. It would be warm and bright there, and I would have a magical wand to protect myself. I’d ride on the back of a dragonfly, swooping through the forest. I’d battle dragons and talk to birds and have all kinds of grand adventures.

Later, I found that small door into fairyland could be conjured any time I needed it. The world beyond the door was different every time. Sometimes, I found a little stone house in the woods where I could live with just Nanette and my sister, Marie, and a tabby cat who purred by the fire. Sometimes, I lived in a castle in the air with a handsome prince who loved me. Other times, I was the prince myself, with a golden sword and a white charger.

When I went to Paris, I gave that door to fairyland as a gift to the real prince I met there. The Dauphin was just five years old when I was appointed maid of honour to his mother, Queen Marie-Thérèse, but I did not meet him for another two years. I saw him many times, of course, dressed in frothing white gowns, with his hair hanging in blonde ringlets down his back. When he was seven, he was breeched, baptised, and taken from the care of his nurse and put in the charge of the Duc de Montausier, a former soldier who thought any sign of emotion a weakness to be repressed.

One day, the Queen sent me to bring her son to her for their daily meeting in the Petite Galerie. I hurried through the immense cold rooms of the Louvre, my heels clacking on the marble. My wide skirts swished. When I had first arrived at the Louvre, I had been utterly overwhelmed by the vastness and grandeur of the King’s residence. I had always thought the Château de Cazeneuve was imposing, and indeed it was one of the largest estates in Gascony. It seemed small and medieval in comparison to the Louvre, however.

I understood then why everyone at court wore such full-bodied wigs and totteringly high heels and full skirts with trailing trains, and beribboned petticoat breeches and immense embroidered cuffs and hats flouncing with feathers, and why everyone’s gestures and antics and tragedies were on such a large scale. It was an attempt to be undiminished.

As I reached the Dauphin’s apartments, I heard the Duc de Montausier’s voice along with an all too familiar
swish-crack
as he brought his cane down upon the little boy’s body.

‘You’re a fool …
swish-crack
… an imbecile …
swish-crack
… an affront to His Majesty …
swish-crack
… you shame me …
swish-crack
… and yourself …
swish-crack
… stupid as any peasant boy …
swish-crack
…’

I stood still, shaking, unable to move or speak. In the past two years, the memory of those dreadful years under the Marquis de Maulévrier’s care had slowly faded to a mere bruise. The sound of that
swish-crack
brought it all back to me. I hunched my shoulders and set my jaw. At last, the Duc stopped and came shouldering past me like an angry bull. I waited a while, but the sound of the boy within weeping broke my heart. I gently pushed open the door and went inside.

The Dauphin was lying on his stomach on his bed, his curls all in disorder, his eyes swollen and red. His lacy shirt was only half-drawn over his shoulder. His thin back was covered in red weals. I took my handkerchief and dampened it in the bowl. ‘You know, my guardian used to beat me too. I don’t know why. Sometimes, he beat me because I spoke, and sometimes because I didn’t.’

The boy looked towards me but did not speak. I offered him the damp handkerchief but he made no move towards it.

‘I never knew what I was meant to do. If I cried, he beat me harder. If I bit my lip and refused to cry, that only made him angrier and the beating would be even worse. Is that the same with you and the Duc?’

He nodded his head slowly. I knelt beside the bed and passed him the handkerchief again. He took it and pressed it against his eyes.

‘I think being locked up in the cellar was worse than being beaten, though. It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand even if I held it right before my eyes. I was afraid of the spiders and the cockroaches too. And I heard squeaking and squealing and scritching and scratching, and thought there must be rats in there as well. Or maybe bats. Once, I saw little red eyes glowing in the darkness. They came closer and closer and closer …’

The prince’s eyes were fixed on my face. When I paused, he said, ‘What did you do?’

‘I took off my boot and threw it at the eyes as hard as I could.’

He smiled.

‘Worse than the spiders and the cockroaches, worse than the rats and the bats, though, was the ghost.’

‘A ghost?’

I nodded. ‘You see, the cellar used to be a cave where a hermit lived. He was said to be so holy that when he was challenged by a heretic to prove his saintliness, he hung his cloak on a sunbeam.’

The prince sat up on his elbow.

‘He lived in that cave for a great many years and eventually died there. His bones were found there, in the very cave where my guardian had locked me up.’

‘Weren’t you scared?’

‘Terrified. But in the end I thought that a man who was so good he could hang his cloak on a sunbeam wouldn’t hurt me and I’d rather be safe in his cave than where my guardian could get me.’ Then I told the Dauphin about the secret door into fairyland that I had imagined, and how it didn’t
matter how hard my guardian beat me or how cold and dark the cave was, I was always able to pretend I was somewhere else.

By this time, the Dauphin was sitting up and his eyes were eager. ‘Do you think maybe you could find a door like that here?’ I asked, taking up his comb and tidying his hair for him. ‘It’s not a real door, you understand, just a pretend one. But it might make it easier to bear the Duc, at least until you’re grown up and you can have him banished.’

‘Or thrown in a dungeon,’ the Dauphin said. ‘With rats and bats.’

‘Don’t waste the secret door on thinking up awful punishments for him,’ I advised. ‘You want it to be a good place, the sort of place you can always go to, whenever you need to. Here, let me help you get your coat on. Your mother wants to see you.’

He sighed and pouted. ‘I don’t want to go. I want to stay here and think about the secret door.’

‘You can think about it on the way. That’s the beautiful thing about the secret door. You can open it anywhere, any time.’

In later years, the court ladies often laughed behind their fans at the Dauphin, saying cruelly that he could spend a whole day tapping his cane against his foot and staring into space. I knew, though, that he was building castles in the air.

The midnight bell tolled, jerking me awake.

I lay for a moment, disorientated and afraid. My mind was filled with the flapping rags of dreams. I opened my eyes and felt my spirits sink as I recognised the dirty curtain that divided my bed from the others in the dormitory. Wearily, I sat up, sliding my poor cold feet out, seeking my night shoes. It seemed a long time since my feet had last felt warm. Every night, I slept curled in a ball like a wood mouse, my feet wrapped in the hem of my chemise, my dress and my cloak spread over the top of my thin blanket for added warmth. Perfect for quick dressing in the middle of the night.

I wish I had known nuns were woken up at midnight to pray. I’d have taken my chances with being exiled. Somehow, I had thought that nuns lived a life of idle luxury, with servants to wait on them and nothing to do all day but say the occasional rosary and make the occasional genuflection. I had heard stories of nuns who kept lapdogs, held parties in their cells at night and smuggled their lovers in with the laundry.

Perhaps such stories were true of other convents, but sadly they were not at all true of Gercy-en-Brie. Mère Notre and the other senior nuns took the laws of
clausura
seriously indeed. The windows were kept shuttered and barred, the gates were double-locked, and the walls were so high that I had
not seen a bird or a cloud since I had arrived here. In all the weeks I had been here, I had seen no one but nuns and lay sisters – women who had come to the abbey without a dowry and so were not permitted to take full vows. Like me, they wore a plain dark dress, an apron and heavy clogs, their hair covered with a white cap with a veil hanging down the back. They did most of the work, though the nuns each had their chores to do as well.

Not even serving women were allowed in the convent. Nanette had offered to join the community as a lay sister, so that she could serve me, but Sœur Theresa had told her that novices were not permitted to have servants and she would be put to work scrubbing out the pigsty or some such nonsense. So Nanette went back to the Château de Cazeneuve, prepared to beg my sister to ask her husband, the Marquis de Théobon, to intercede on my behalf with the King. I knew it was no use. Théobon was too fat and lazy to bother to travel to Versailles, and the King never granted favours to noblemen who chose to stay on their estates instead of joining the whirligig of life at court. ‘I do not know him,’ he would say, and flick the letter away.

I had been allowed to see Nanette before she left, though we were separated by an iron grille so thick that we could not touch more than a fingertip.

‘They will not let me stay with you,’ she wept. ‘Me, who has looked after you since you were no more than a tiny flea.’

‘Don’t cry, Nanette,’ I told her. ‘You don’t want to be locked up in here with me, I promise you. The food is dreadful.’

‘Oh, Bon-bon, I don’t like to leave you here.’

‘You must,’ I said. ‘You’ll do more good nagging my brother-in-law to get off his fat arse and help me than scrubbing out pigsties, I assure you.’

I had heard nothing since she left. Nuns were not permitted to receive letters, Sœur Emmanuelle took great pleasure in informing me.

The only break from dreary routine was the monthly arrival of the priest to take confession and give mass. And you cannot count that as seeing a man. Even if you consider a priest a man – which I don’t – I never actually saw him. He was just a shadow and a sweaty smell and a mumble and a
grumble. And what did I have to confess, locked away here with all these old women? Wishing the food was better? Wishing I had a man in my bed to keep me warm? Confessing that I had woken up more than once with my body twisting with desire, my dreams filled with images of Charles …

‘What I wouldn’t give to see a man,’ I exclaimed one morning as the other novices and I swept and dusted the dormitory. ‘A young comely one, preferably, but I swear any man would do.’

The other novices giggled nervously.

‘Oh, you mustn’t say such things.’ Sœur Irene looked over her shoulder.

‘The butcher comes in autumn to slaughter the pigs,’ Sœur Juliette said. ‘But we all have to stay in our cells till he’s gone. It’s horrible – all we can hear are the pigs screaming. We hate it when he comes.’

‘Sometimes, the bishop sends a handyman to fix anything that’s broken,’ said Sœur Paula, a novice with a freckled face and gingery eyebrows. ‘But he only comes when we’re all in church and must be finished by the time we return. The portress rings the bell so we know not to enter the cloister.’

‘It’s been a long time since anything’s been repaired here,’ said Sœur Olivia, a lovely young woman with the smooth oval face of a saint in a painting. She might have gone on to say more if Sœur Emmanuelle had not then entered the room and given us all penances for speaking without cause.

There were only a handful of novices, ranging from Sœur Olivia, who must have been approaching eighteen, to little Sœur Mildred, who was only twelve. We all slept together in one long dormitory, with canvas hung up to divide our rooms into the semblance of cells. With the sound of the midnight bell dying away, I could hear the girls next to me stretching and yawning, and Sœur Emmanuelle’s knees creaking as she clambered to her feet.

I dressed quickly, wrapping my heavy cloak about me. My nose felt like an icicle. My hands were mottled blue. Sœur Emmanuelle looked past my curtain, frowning and beckoning. I moved instantly to join her, knowing that the slightest sign of insubordination would result in yet another humiliating punishment.

Beyond my curtain, the other novices were already lined up, their eyes lowered, their hands tucked into their sleeves for warmth. I hastened to fall
into line with them. Together, we glided down the length of the corridor and down the night stairs to the church. There was no sound but the shuffle of slippers on the stone floor and the occasional chink of rosary beads. All was black and sombre, the only light coming from the small lantern that burned at one end of the dormitory. It illuminated each black robe and white veil briefly, before each novitiate passed back into shadow.

My thoughts turned, as always, to the court. If I was in Versailles, I’d be drinking champagne as I strolled through the gardens under the light of rose-coloured paper lanterns, listening to an orchestra play as it floated past on a gondola. I’d be leaning on a gentleman’s satin-clad shoulder, rattling dice in a cup, promising him some of my Gascon luck. Perhaps I’d even be dancing.

I must have displeased the King greatly for him to have banished me to this bleak place. Perhaps the Noëls had been the last drop of water that caused the jug to overflow. Perhaps the King had been enraged with me for some time. I wondered if I had offended him with the novel I had written about Queen Margot, his grandfather’s scandalous first wife, the previous summer. It had been published anonymously, but I should have guessed the King would know I had written it. Thanks to his spies, the King knew everything.

I had always been fascinated with Queen Margot, having heard lots of stories about her at the Château de Cazeneuve, where I’d been born and where she had once lived. Perhaps it had not been wise to choose her as the subject of one of my secret histories. After all, she had made the King’s grandfather, Henri of Navarre, look like a cuckold and a fool.

But it was such a great story, too good to resist. Queen Margot had had many lovers, including, some said, her own brother, Henri, who would in time become king himself. She was accused of insatiable sexual desires, murder and treason, and left a wake of broken hearts and scandal everywhere she went. It was said that her parties in the Rue de Seine were so noisy that no one in the Palais du Louvre was able to sleep.

At the age of nineteen, poor Margot had been forced to marry Henri of Navarre, a Huguenot, even though she was said to be in love with Henri de Guise, head of one of the most powerful Catholic families in France. She refused to say ‘I do’ during the ceremony and so her brother, King Charles
IX, had taken her skull in his hands and nodded it up and down for her.

Six days later, on St Bartholomew’s Day, King Charles had signed the order for the slaughter of thousands of Huguenots. It was whispered that the whole wedding had been a trick designed to lure the noble Huguenots to Paris. Margot’s mother, Catherine de’ Medici, was said to have already murdered Jeanne of Navarre, Margot’s mother-in-law, with a gift of poisoned gloves; the slaughter of another fifty thousand Huguenot dissenters was not such a stretch for her, surely?

No one knows for sure how many died. The Duc de Sully, who escaped the massacre by carrying a Book of Hours under his arm, said it was closer to seventy thousand. My own grandfather said simply that everyone he knew had died: his father, his brother, his uncle, his cousins, his servants …

Margot had saved her husband’s life by hiding him in her room and refusing to admit the assassins, which had included her lover, Henri de Guise. It had still been an unhappy marriage, though, with infidelity on both sides. As is often the way, the men in Margot’s life had been determined to break her. Poor Margot was kept imprisoned in the Louvre by her brother after the massacre, and then later – after rebelling against her husband – was imprisoned by him in various chateaux, including that of my family, for eighteen long years. At last, their marriage was annulled and she was allowed to settle in Paris, running a literary salon where poets and philosophers, courtiers and courtesans all rubbed elbows together.

I admired her immensely, for her boldness and her wit and her refusal to be broken. Besides, it was far too delicious a tale not to tell. I had collected every anecdote I could find about her, and studied Margot’s own memoirs and read between their lines, and woven the most exciting story I could manage. Published in six volumes in Paris and Amsterdam, my secret history of her life had taken the court by storm, rather to my surprise. For a while, my novel was all anyone could talk about, and it was all I could do to hide my surprise and delight. I should have remembered what Queen Margot herself had said: ‘The more hidden the venom, the more dangerous it is.’

The King had said nothing, just smiled his placid inscrutable smile and continued with his day: rising from his bed; saying his prayers; sitting
immobile while he was shaved and bewigged; rising to his feet as the First Valet passed the royal shirt to the Grand Master of the Wardrobe, who passed it to the Dauphin, who passed it to the King, who put it on. Every moment of the King’s day was ruled by etiquette, even the hour in which he would visit his mistresses and his dogs, until at last he retired again to bed, the First Valet being permitted to unclasp the garter on his right leg and the Second Valet the garter on his left. Really, the routine of the abbey was not so different from the routine of the court, except that here it was work and prayer, work and prayer, and so much harder on the knees.

I looked about me. All I could see were rows of black-clad backs, bowing before a gilded and embossed reliquary in which was meant to reside a scrap of St Bartholomew’s skin. The chest gleamed in the light of hundreds of candles, which trembled in the draughts that crept about our ankles like hungry rats. Far, far above, at the summit of towering pillars of stone, graceful arches held up the high vaulted ceiling. I wondered how those long-ago stonemasons had ever built the place. Surely it defied the laws of nature? Surely the whole edifice should come crashing down upon our heads? I felt as small and insignificant as an ant under all that mighty weight of stone.
Wasn’t that the whole idea?
I thought. All those soaring spaces, those immense windows in gorgeous jewelled hues, the babble of rite and ritual, was it not all designed to make us feel small?

I knelt when I was meant to kneel, rose when I was meant to rise, crossed myself and murmured ‘Amen’ as I ought, feeling numb all through as if even my soul was deadened with cold. All the while, my mind slipped free. I remembered warm golden days when my sister and I had run wild in the chateau’s parkland, riding horses, sailing boats on the millpond, exploring the caves and cellars under the chateau, and building fairy bowers in the park. I remembered swinging all one long afternoon, higher and higher into the sky, legs pumping hard, then slowly drifting down till I could draw in the dust with the toe of my slipper. I remembered my first days at court, dazzled and afraid, and how the King’s mistress, Athénaïs, had taught me to talk with my fan, and where to place my patches. I remembered the first time I met Charles, my lover, my husband, my doom …