In the Shadow of the Sun

by EM Castellan

  “It has to be a boy,” he said, his voice lower.

  I nodded. His entire life had been defined by the fact he would become king should his brother die. Louis’s son would free him of that burden, that fate that had meant everyone had always regarded him as either a threat or a disappointment. Philippe believed that the birth of the Dauphin would allow him to become who he wanted to be. I understood it, even if I didn’t believe it myself. As long as we lived at court, as long as his brother was the king and a magicien, Philippe and I would never be free of Louis. But for this one day, I would allow him his fancy. I would let him have his dream.

  And if he turned out to be right, if after today Philippe was indeed no longer heir to the throne, I would make sure his new position didn’t make him vulnerable. Louis needed my magic, needed me. I would use it to ensure both my and my husband’s position at court. Our lives would be different, but they would be safe.

  I held Philippe’s gaze.

  “It’ll be a boy.”

  He pressed his lips together, happiness and anxiety battling on his handsome features. Then he kissed me.

  CHAPTER XXV

  The small château of Versailles sat like a broken dollhouse in the late November mist.

  The square courtyard was a giant puddle of mud where the horse-drawn carriages of the king’s party found themselves nearly trapped. Loose boards paved the way amid the sludge toward the empty doorway of the king’s hunting retreat. Windows gaped open in the red-brick-and-white-stone facade, their panes removed just like all the doors’.

  “My shoes will be ruined!” Louise moaned as a musketeer helped her out of her carriage after the king. Her satin footwear was indeed ill-advised, and I exchanged a glance with Athénaïs as we both alighted from my carriage in our leather boots.

  “What’s happened to the building?” Armand emerged behind me, his stage whisper too loud to be ignored by anyone present.

  Philippe followed him out. “It’s called renovation, darling. They gut out the whole place and somehow turn it into a habitable space.”

  Armand surveyed the disaster with an unconvinced pout. “It’s going to take a miracle. Or magic.”

  “It’s why we’re here, dimwit.” Athénaïs rolled her eyes at him.

  Armand gaped like a fish at the insult and turned to Philippe with exaggerated outrage. “Did you hear what she called me?”

  “No.” Philippe bypassed him with a teasing grin and headed for the building after his brother.

  As with our last visit here, only the royal family and their closest friends had been invited—minus Marie-Thérèse, who was still recovering from the birth of her son, and the Queen Mother, who’d deemed the weather too cold for an excursion in the countryside. It was just as well, given what Louis had planned for the day.

  Inside the hunting lodge a damp chill permeated the air despite the roaring fire in the drawing room. The room was bare, its heavy curtains removed and stained tapestries gone, revealing walls of crumbling plaster and rotting wood. The only furniture left was a couple of chairs and a wooden table, upon which biscuits and hot beverages awaited us amid a few candlesticks. No one had time to enjoy the refreshments, however, as the king led the way through the château’s dark corridors to the grounds outside.

  If the building was a desolate sight, what had once been its gardens was worse. The land that materialized out of the fog was a field of upturned brown soil dotted with huge holes, as if the ogre from Monsieur Perrault’s fairy tale had raked his huge fingers through the park and torn it apart, uprooting its trees and digging up its fountains.

  “Oh,” Louise said as we reached the terrace outside.

  Her disappointed exclamation echoed all our thoughts, I would wager. I shot Louis an anxious glance. Until then, I had thought his plan possible, if not ambitious. But faced with the extent of the task before us, doubt built up inside me. Yet the king’s chin remained high and his gaze on the land ahead unwavering.

  Shivering in the cold mist, we all gathered around him, as if pulled by a magnetism we could hardly explain.

  “Well?” Philippe broke the silence. “What happens now?”

  Louis turned his unreadable face to him, his golden eyes bright in the gray light. “Now nature answers its king’s whims. Now what was once a small hunting lodge becomes a magnificent palace fit for a court without rival. Now we make Versailles the center of the world.”

  In any other place, said by anyone else, these words would have elicited laughter from the assembly. But as they echoed loud and clear in this eerie November fog, the thought of dismissing the Sun King’s statement didn’t cross anyone’s mind.

  A stunned silence greeted his reply, and Philippe raised an eyebrow to mask his shock.

  “I see.”

  His grip on his cane tightened, and Armand shuffled his feet, sensing the tension inside him just like I could. But Philippe remained outwardly calm as he turned to me. “Go ahead, then.”

  Against the king’s wishes, I had explained to Philippe what Louis and I intended in order to prepare him for what would happen today. Yet despite my warning, it appeared he hadn’t grasped just how far his brother’s ambitions stretched until now.

  Swallowing my nervousness, I acknowledged his approval with a nod and took my position by Louis’s side, my heavy cloak settling around my ankles. Excitement shone in Louis’s eyes as we clasped hands, and he tilted his head to the side, waiting for me to say the spell. Around us, everyone held a collective breath, and for a fleeting moment I was reminded of my wedding, when the priest had asked for my consent to marry. The same expectation. The same power resting in my lap. The same choice: yes or no. I gazed into Louis’s golden eyes, just like I had into Philippe’s brown ones all those months ago.

  And I paused.

  He blinked, the realization that I wasn’t going to say the spell drifting like a shadow across his face. A slight frown pulled at his eyebrows.

  “Henriette?”

  I waited, unperturbed.

  His frown deepened, and his tone turned sterner. “Henriette. Please.”

  The beginning of a smile teased the corners of my lips. I said the incantation.

  “Raccommode.”

  After the spell that had defeated Fouquet, this was our second time attempting a creation spell. Repeatedly casting long-lasting enchantments rather than short-lived illusions was a talent only the most powerful magiciens could hope to achieve. The Crown Magicien had been the only one able to accomplish such a feat in living memory. But when Louis latched onto my magic and a thousand sparks exploded along my limbs, all my doubts vanished in their wake.

  Louis channeled my power into the spell with such determination, the magic had no choice but to obey him. The golden specks swirled into a huge cloud up into the skies, before showering the derelict château like glittering rain. As soon as each bright dot touched the building, it dissolved into its stones and bricks. It washed the grime off the facade, repaired crumbling beams, mended holes in the roof, covered walls with plaster, wove curtains and carpets, conjured up freshly painted doors and clean windows.

  Then, churning along the restored rooms like a summer breeze, the speckles of golden magic carried on their task, this time carving elaborate shapes in ceilings and summoning chandeliers out of thin air, wrapping gilded ribbons around columns and along corridors, embroidering curtains and weaving tapestries, putting together furniture, and lighting fires in every fireplace. My mind’s eye trailed after the sparks up the chimneys and above the former hunting lodge, to take in the small jewel of a château now nestled amid the bare trees.

  Exhaustion tingled my limbs and threatened to pull me down, but the exhilaration that ran through my blood won over. I let Louis pull more of my power into the ground at our feet, and the land awoke with our magic.

  “Versailles,” it whispered. “Versailles.”

  It covered the upturned soil like a blanket, green grass growing and flowers blooming in its wake.

&n
bsp; “Enough!”

  My hand jerked out of Louis’s grasp as a force pulled me away from him. I blinked, light-headedness striking me. Black dots danced before my eyes, nausea rose in my throat, and I coughed. Strong arms enveloped me, and I stumbled into a hard chest, but a buzzing in my ears grew louder than the confused voices around me. My vision darkened.

  “Henriette, stay with me.”

  My teeth rattled. Someone was shaking me. I forced my eyes open with a wince and pushed at the weight against me. But my hands found no purchase, slipping on soft fabric, clumsy and weak.

  “Henriette!”

  The buzzing in my ears faded, and my vision cleared. Philippe held me up against him, his grip the only thing keeping me upright.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  My panting and weak voice contradicted my words, but I didn’t care. I twisted in Philippe’s grasp to take in the château behind him. Still covered by the remnants of the spell, it glittered unnaturally in the November mist, a thin layer of golden dust wrapped around its renovated facade.

  A smile split my face as wonder filled my chest. “It worked.”

  Louise, Athénaïs, Armand, and the musketeers wandered about the building, their heads back and their mouths open at the transformation. I sought Louis among them, but he stood apart, in the middle of the lawn we’d created—a sketch of the painting we’d meant to bring forth and a hint of the lush gardens to come, a dream landscape that would boast beautiful fountains, evocative copses, unexpected grottos, marble staircases, mythological statues, and endless rows of trees.

  Too weak to move, and firmly held by Philippe, I didn’t join him, but I didn’t need to. I knew what he saw in the vast expanse of grass and the small château in the fog before us. The others may look at him with fear and awe mixed on their faces, but for the first time since lending Louis my magic, I shared his vision for the future, and it didn’t scare me.

  An absolute certainty settled over me and widened my smile.

  Here, magic and dreams would collide to birth a place that would be filled with power and wonder for decades to come.

  Here, flowers would bloom in winter, enchanted water shapes would spurt from sculpted fountains, colorful fireworks would fill the skies, music and laughter would twirl toward the heavens, trees would whisper secrets, and a gilded palace with a hall of mirrors would grant you all your desires.

  Here, Louis and I would create the most magical illusion of them all—and we would make it last through the centuries.

  “What is it?” Philippe asked. “What do you see?”

  I met his gentle, concerned gaze.

  “Versailles. I see Versailles.”

  The wind captured the name and whispered it over and over again as it rustled in the bare branches of the trees, disturbed the thick layer of leaves on the ground, and breezed through the open door into the castle, where the candlelight wavered and the curtains shuddered. As it moved along the gilded rooms, it became an idea and a promise, a memory and a future reality, a command and a plea, an echo and a repeated incantation.

  It became a spell.

  Versailles. Versailles. Versailles.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  The reign of Louis XIV is a very well-documented time in French history. Much has been written about the Sun King, whose ambition was to make France—and by extension, himself—the center of the world in the seventeenth century. One of the reasons so much is known about the period of his rule is that every aspect of what happened at his court was chronicled not only in official recordings and documents but also in the courtiers’ personal correspondence, diaries, plays, and poems. As a result, it isn’t hard to form quite a clear picture of everyone who lived at the French court between the middle of the seventeenth century until the early eighteenth century. For many of them, we know much about the way they dressed, ate, loved, and entertained themselves, and we even know in great detail what their daily schedule entailed and the minor events that shaped their lives.

  In this regard, 1661 is a fascinating year in the life of the French king and his closest relatives and friends. Not only is it the year when Louis took full control of his kingdom and decided to build Versailles, but it is also the year of the birth of his first son and heir, the year of his brother’s marriage to an English princess, and of course the year of the infamous party at Vaux-le-Vicomte and of Nicolas Fouquet’s spectacular disgrace. Interestingly, it is also the year when the then twenty-two-year-old Louis spent a leisurely summer at Fontainebleau. Often, those three months are overlooked by historians and biographers, squeezed as they are between the far more exciting (and historically relevant) events of Cardinal de Mazarin’s death in the spring, and the fall of Fouquet in the autumn. Yet there is something intriguing about the idea of all these young royals and courtiers spending the hot summer weeks in a single setting, with no other objective than to flirt and enjoy themselves.

  With the exception of Moreau, all the characters who appear in this book are historical figures. From the artists (Lully, Molière, La Fontaine) to the courtiers (the Comte de Saint-Aignan, Olympe de Soissons, Madame de Lafayette…), they all played their part in Louis XIV’s court—whether significant or not.

  Prince Aniaba is the one breach of historical accuracy in this story: Although he very much existed, and much of what is said about him here is, to the best of my knowledge, correct, he came to the French court in 1691. Yet his life story is so interesting it felt a shame not to include him here. Another slight deviation from the historical truth is the character of Madame de Valentinois. Overlooking the fact that she was Armand de Gramont’s sister was a deliberate choice, made to focus the plot on Henriette rather than on the complex web of relationships at the French Court.

  All the members of the royal family (the Queen Mother Anne d’Autriche; les petites mademoiselles Elisabeth and Françoise, as well as their sister, the larger-than-life Marguerite; and Queen Marie-Thérèse) are also women who really existed, and their depictions in this story are as true as I could make them within the confines of fiction.

  The inimitable Armand de Gramont, Comte de Guiche, is a historical figure as well, one whose truly stranger-than-fiction life story deserves a book of its own.

  Louise de La Vallière and Athénaïs de Montespan are both remembered as Louis’s official mistresses, yet in 1661 they were still young (seventeen and twenty-one, respectively) with their whole lives ahead of them and certainly no idea they would become part of French history.

  Nicolas Fouquet was the superintendent of finances in France from 1653 to 1661. His mistake was to use his position to acquire enormous wealth, which made the young king Louis feel so threatened that he had him imprisoned. His spectacular rise and subsequent fall, as well as the extravagant party he threw at Vaux on August 17, 1661, are remembered in French history as the ultimate cautionary tale. Every story needs an antagonist, and that’s what he is in this one. However, reality is far more complex than fiction, and reading his biography will show you what a truly incredible fate he had.

  Finally, Philippe d’Orléans and Henriette of England are two people who have been the subject of countless biographies, novels, and portrayals in films and TV series. More often than not, however, they are depicted as adversaries—doomed by a mismatched pairing where either one or the other is shown as a grotesque villain. By all accounts, they both had strong personalities and captivating life stories, so it didn’t feel too much of a betrayal of history to imagine they actually found common ground in their relationship. They did have three children together, after all.

  Much like the people of the time, the places mentioned in this story are also all real. The Palais-Royal, where Philippe and Henriette got married, as well as the Tuileries Palace, where they moved after their wedding, don’t exist in the manner they did in the seventeenth century anymore: The former now houses several bodies of the French national government, while the latter burned in 1871 during the Paris Commune and became a publ
ic garden. The Louvre Palace is today the world’s largest art museum. The three châteaux—Vaux-le-Vicomte, Fontainebleau, and, of course, Versailles—can still be visited today. Fontainebleau and Versailles are UNESCO World Heritage sites. You can still see the carp pond and the horseshoe-shaped grand staircase at Fontainebleau, the castle and gardens at Vaux, and the fountain of Apollo and the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. It is hard to imagine they were built without magic. And yet …

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is the result of a long and amazing journey, and I am very grateful to everyone who made its existence possible. I want to express my deepest gratitude to:

  My editor, Liz Szabla, and everyone at Feiwel & Friends—US Macmillan, for believing in this story and for working so hard to get it into readers’ hands.

  My agent, Carrie Pestritto, and everyone at Laura Dail Literary Agency, for championing my writing and making my publishing dreams come true.

  My friends and early readers, for supporting me at the various stages of writing this book: Jessica Rubinkowski, Katie Bucklein, Sarah Glenn Marsh, Sam Taylor, Alexandra Stewart, Rachel O’Laughlin, Lauren Garafalo, Kat Ellis, and Stephanie Garber. You are all incredibly talented, and I am very lucky that you chose to help me along my journey.

  My Wattpad readers: Your endless enthusiasm for my stories has meant more to me than you can imagine.

  And last, but definitely not least, Rachel Fenn. For everything. Merci mille fois.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  EM Castellan grew up in France and now lives in London. A lover of all things historical, she has a particular fondness for seventeenth-century France and Ancient Rome. Some of her stories can be found on Wattpad, where they have been featured twice and read over 300,000 times, including The Bright and the Lost, the winner of the 2017 Wattpad Awards (Wattys) in the Newcomers category. Visit emcastellan.com, or sign up for email updates here.