by Karen Harper
“Your clear blue eyes give you away, Mary,” he was saying, apparently with all seriousness as she turned in a rustle of mauve brocade.
She did not look back even when his last words floated to her alert ears. “William Stafford at your service always, Mademoiselle Mary Bullen.”
It annoyed her that the impromptu interview had unsettled her so, and especially that William Stafford had seen her father dash off as though he cared not at all for his daughter. Still, her father had complimented her appearance, and she knew he felt proud that she was a part of this important international occasion.
She soon forgot the annoyance at being ignored by her father and teased by William Stafford in the pomp and glory of the afternoon. The king looked more godlike than ever, and she could watch his aquiline profile clearly over the queen’s plump shoulder from the screened platform in the corner of the stage. He sat enshrined on a royal dais, his silver cloak lined with herons’ feathers setting off his muscular body encased in golden silk. He nodded and raised his hand in salute to the Englishmen who displayed their official papers and recited the English king’s salutations in deep-voiced Latin. When it was over Francois, his advisors, and his trinity of bedecked and bejeweled women descended from the stage and retreated down the lengthy purple velvet path edged with two hundred gendarmes, gilt battle axes held perpendicularly before their grim faces.
Mary shuddered with excitement. Her eyes darted proudly to see her father’s alert gaze as she swept by poised on the left rim of Queen Claude’s heavy train. But she fought to control a grimace when she caught the intent stare of that rude William Stafford only one aisle beyond King Henry’s royal ambassadors.
The second day of the English visit continued in a marvelous fantasy of beauty, glory and grandeur. After an elaborate formal mass at Notre Dame early in the day, the crystal afternoon air resounded with the trumpet blares, crashes and rumbling clinks of a formal joust. Though Mary and the other maids of honor had not been able to attend the gay tournament, the loss was easy to bear, for they spent the afternoon in final fittings of their lovely Florentine gowns and in rehearsal for their roles at the evening banquet.
“It is the most beautiful gown I have ever had,” Mary admitted to Eugenie, fair, blonde and blue-eyed like herself. “The queen said Signor da Vinci sketched each costume separately to blend with his masque scenery. I cannot wait to see it all!”
“It will be magnificent,” responded the petite Eugenie as she stretched her silken arms luxuriously over her head. “I detest standing about for measurings and tuckings and...you know, Marie, we shall have to carry these gowns with us and dress at the Bastille. It would never do to offer du Roi a sweetmeat with a wrinkled skirt.” She laughed and turned away, and Mary’s excited eyes took in the tumble of gentle hued colors about the vast room: blonde beauties, all, with their silk garments of creams and whites, pale yellows and golds punctuated only by the more homely colors of the dressmakers who cleared their cluttered gear to depart. She wished desperately that the king himself might come to check on his chosen maids and that his eyes would rest on her again as they had so long ago.
She sighed and shrugged out of her dress. She was one of only three maids dressed entirely in gold and white, the full satin skirts flounced and gathered with tiny silken rose buds. They had told her that Signor da Vinci had labeled the drawing of this dress for the English maid Boullaine. She smiled at the compliment. The master had not forgotten the girl he had rescued in the gardens at Amboise more than a year ago.
The sparrow-like seamstress stuffed the dress’s sleeves with cotton batting and darted off with the garment held high. Mary drifted with the others in the direction of the special hairdressers assembled for the event. She soon found, to her great delight, that the mastermind of this elaborate spectacle had sent numerous sketches of hair styles for the setters to emulate on the maids. And one fine-lined drawing was of a clearly recognizable face while the others merely had the shapes of heads under the curled or upswept tresses. Mary gazed on the sketch in wonder.
“It is my face indeed,” she breathed.
“It seems, Mademoiselle Boullaine, the premier peintre du Roi has decreed this very look for you,” smiled her hair setter. “Sit, sit. I hope my art will not disappoint Monsieur da Vinci.”
The afternoon swept around Mary’s excited, spinning head on wings. Their carriages approached the massy Palais du Bastille an hour before the royal party, ambassadors, and the two hundred and fifty chosen revelers would arrive. The street leading to the Bastille gateway seemed more a tunnel through a deep forest, for fragrant boxwood, laurel and festoons of flowers decorated the shops and towering narrow houses.
They were ushered into a hallway adjacent to the courtyard where the banquet, dancing and masques would later take place. When they had been attired, they were scrutinized by the pointed stare of their steward and left on their own with warnings not to peek out when the royal persons arrived—and not to sit or lean. They stood about in beige and yellow clusters chatting, anticipating, and giggling nervously.
But then their steward was back, and with him strode the master of Francois’s fete du royale, Signor Leonardo da Vinci. He looked fragile and more stooped, Mary thought, but somehow dynamic force emanated from his face and gestures. The girls hushed at once.
“Perfect, perfect,” the old man chanted, nodding his masses of snowy hair in rhythm with his voice. “Olympian nymphs all with a Diana and a Venus too.”
Mary stood to his left, and he approached her slowly. His eyes seemed very red and tired. She curtseyed.
“Stand straight, my Diana, stand straight. S, the lines of the dress and hair are perfect. I knew they would set off your face the way I had seen it in my mind.”
He clasped his blue-veined hands tightly in approval, and she smiled at him in sincere appreciation and affection. He lowered his voice and turned his back on the hovering steward. “Would you like to see the rest of the frame for my creation, la Boullaine?”
“Oh, yes, Signor da Vinci! Would it be possible?” She almost bounced from excitement, but restrained herself properly.
“But of course. Cannot the artist share his visions with those he created?”
He gestured toward the doorway, ignoring the perturbed steward who obviously wished none of his costumed wards out of his realm of control. The double doors to the central courtyard stood ajar, and Mary sucked in her breath as they entered. It was magic. In the broad daylight of chill December he had made the gardens at Hever or Amboise. Above them stretched a clear starlit night with the golden star planets trembling overhead in a velvet blue heaven. Tears flooded her eyes at the wonder of it.
The master’s cracking, gentle voice disturbed her speechless revery. “Though you say nothing, I know you understand. It is always in your eyes, charmante Boullaine.”
“It is magnificent, truly magnificent.”
“It is only waxed canvas painted with stars and hung with golden balls and set off with hundreds of candles and torches. But somehow it seems more, eh?” He smiled and his thick mustache lifted. “I did a much vaster one for Ludovico Sforza in Milan years ago, you know.”
He raised his fragile left hand and pointed. “The queen and queen mother will sit in the lower galleries and the king and his beloved sister Marguerite there in the center.” Her eyes took in a richly brocaded platform draped with flowers, boxwood and ivy. “Du Roi insisted on his shield and colors of tawny and white on the walls and as the carpet. Well, it is still the heavens of Florence or Milan, Francois’s salamanders or not. All is ready. I had best return you to your jailer.” He smiled again.
“Though I have been much busy and have not seen you for, well, for a time, Mademoiselle Boullaine, I knew how you would carry your new year on your fair face. I have sketched you since we have been together, often as a chaste Diana and once as la Madonna.”
Mary’s steps faltered. “The Blessed Virgin, Signor?”
“S. Do not be surprised or de
em it only an honor. You see, that Mary showed pain in her eyes too and even at His birth and adoration, she could never hide the pain to come. Adieu, mi Boullaine.” He bowed slightly and drifted back toward his creation before she could thank him or say farewell or ask him what he meant, and the anxious steward immediately shooed her back into his skittish brood.
Too soon the hours flew by and they held their breath at the blare of trumpets and the shouts and bustling of the heralds and servers as each of the nine courses went to the tables of the feasters. The lilt of fife and viol came and went as did the dancers and singers. Then the twenty maids grew silent, for they knew their time had come.
Bearers appeared with flower-strewn trays of confections and sweetmeats which the golden nymphs would offer to the guests royal and honored, French and English. Mary marvelled briefly at the orange and lemon blossoms of December which lined her tray.
They stood in order, breathless. The doors swung inward. They smiled and tripped in gaily among the clustered tables, each a golden glory in the vibrant glow of six hundred candles.
The guests murmured to each other or sighed audibly, their sight again dazzled and newly surfeited as their palates had been with delicacies and fine wines. They chose their confections gingerly, and their admiring glances did not waver from the exquisite Florentine living creations of Master da Vinci.
Only after the sudden impact of their entry did individual sights sort themselves out for the excited girls. Mary’s eyes again took in the incandescent magnificence of the overhanging heavens. Queen Claude and Louise du Savoy were ablaze with winking jewels. Mary could not pick out her father among the Englishmen though she scanned the jumbled faces as best she could. But Francois du Roi stood clearly before her gaze as she smiled and nodded and inclined her laden tray to the eager hands of guests on both sides.
Francois was the sun at the very core of the artificial universe as he circulated on his own course among his seated guests. He glowed in white satin embroidered with tiny dials and astronomers’ instruments and mathematicians’ compasses all in gold, no doubt also the wonderful work of the Master da Vinci. Mary tried to watch the king often, lifting her eyes whenever she moved from person to person or swung her tray from side to side.
“Thomas Bullen’s daughter, so I hear,” a robust Englishman announced to his surrounding friends.
Mary smiled radiantly at him and replied, “Though I am raised at the French court, I am true English at heart, my lord.”
Several applauded and commented heartily to one another. She could not see her father to share this fine moment, and she felt it would seem foolish to ask the men where he sat. To her dismay, she did take in the avid gaze of the tall, brown-haired William Stafford, who sat but one person beyond the man she served now. How she would like to bypass him deliberately or give him a pert remark to wipe that wide-eyed smile from his lips, but she dared not in full view of so many.
As she turned toward the spot where she would be forced to offer him his choice, several of the Englishmen about her rose suddenly and she spun slightly, hoping to relocate the king. She nearly dropped her gilded tray, for he was so close that her flared nostrils took in his musky scent, and the white and gold shining satin of his doublet nearly blinded her. The room seemed to tilt as she curtseyed.
“A goddess in gold and white to match her king,” he spoke lightly in his peerless French. His eyes pierced her satins and her skirts, and her heart beat terribly fast. She could not answer. One slanting eyebrow arched even higher over his narrow, dark gaze. She began to tremble and fortunately he suddenly looked aside at the observant group of Englishmen.
“And now you can understand more fully the glories of my France,” he boasted to them. His eyes sparkled and his teeth gleamed in the rampant candlelight. He extended his jeweled hand and, in full view of the avid hall, stroked her blushing cheek with the backs of his slender fingers. He towered over her far into the painted heavens and the tiny instant of time seemed to hang eternally in the stillness.
“But, indeed, Your Grace, this golden nymph is one of the glories of fair England,” came a voice in halting French. “This is Mary, Ambassador Boullaine’s eldest daughter.”
There were a few random stifled laughs, but most trained at court held back to see Francois’s reaction.
“Then I am certainly anxious for more complete French and English relations, my lords,” he chortled, and the surrounding groups exploded in appreciative and relieved guffaws.
Mary went scarlet and her eyes darted from face to face, torn by fears of what her father might think of such sport. Her gaze caught and held with William Stafford’s. He did not laugh with the others, but looked most annoyed.
Francois gently pulled her tray from her hands and set it on the edge of an ivory tablecloth. He boldly tucked her right hand under his arm and held it close to his warm, muscular, satin-covered ribs.
“I think, gentlemen, the English ambassador’s daughter should be a more important part of this grand alliance of nations. Besides, she matches her French king better than any other lady here tonight. Our pure white and gold seem destined to make us a pair!”
He laughed again and kept her at his side as he strolled and chatted and drank in their adulation. But Mary, stunned and thrilled as she was, took in other realities under Signor da Vinci’s gold and deep blue heavens: Queen Claude’s condescending glance, his sister Marguerite’s amused smile, and Francoise du Foix’s bitter glare. Finally, when she saw her father’s proud grin and curt nod, she relaxed somewhat, but she could not seem to escape the disapproving face of the impudent Sir William Stafford. And, too, she kept wondering what Leonardo da Vinci could read in her eyes if she had seen him again as she paraded under his painted waxen sky.
CHAPTER SEVEN
January 10, 1519
Chateau du Amboise
The familiar stifling silence had fallen on the queen’s court again: for the fifth time in four years the twenty-one-year-old Claude was sickly and swollen with royal child. Again her young and vibrant maids whispered begrudgingly in the hallways and took care to smother their giggles and gossip. All too soon the twenty fortune-favored maids who had attended the lavish French and English ceremonies in Paris ran out of marvellous tales to relate, and life fell back into its ponderous pattern of prayers and readings and study and needlework.
But for once the enforced duties in the hush of Queen Claude’s wing of rooms at Amboise seemed a welcome shelter to Mary Bullen. Claude’s chambers were a precious haven before the storms of decisions and rolling emotions which surely must follow if she would be caught in the shoals of Francois’s power outside the queen’s influence. Jacqueline, Jeanne and Eugenie and her own dear Anne might murmur and complain under their breaths at the tightening new restrictions, but Mary was secretly glad for the respite.
It was true that the news of her glorious walk with the king at his banquet in the Bastille had done wonders for her reputation and power among the other maids. Anne had made her tell the story over and over, though she had not told any of her listeners of the ill-bred William Stafford, nor of Francois’s lingering kiss on her lips as he departed to rejoin his imperious sister, nor of his quiet, deep-throated promise that he would see her again soon and in private.
It was that very thought that terrified her. She was not so unschooled in court ways to be naive as to his intent. She read his piercing gaze and felt his fingers brush her tight gold bodice as he bid her swift adieu. How she treasured each gilded moment with him—and how greatly she feared a future near him.
Her girlish fantasies of Francois quite eluded her now. She seemed frozen, unable to summon up the marvelous dreams she had paraded back and forth across the stage of her imagination since that magic time he had gazed on her long ago in Princess Mary Tudor’s chilly room at Cluny. This was different. It was a flesh and blood Francois, and she could no longer control his longings and his chivalric manners by a mere turn of her mind’s eye. She feared for her reputation
and that her father and Queen Claude would disown her if she shamed them with the king. But then, was it not an honor, too, to be so chosen? She shuddered again though she sat full in the warmth of the vast hearth in the queen’s anteroom.
“Are you cold, Marie? It is stifling in here in general, I think.” Anne’s nimble fingers halted poised above her small tapestry loom, her needle trailing a thin shaft of crimson yarn.
“No, Anne. I am fine.”
“Your patience to sit about has certainly improved since your journey to Paris,” Anne responded, narrowing her dark almond-shaped eyes slightly. “You used to be happy to escape these dreary chambers once in a while.” She lowered her voice even more. “I think the sullen mood of Her Grace’s pregnancies has mushed your spirit, Marie Boullaine.”
“Do not tease, Anne. It is gloomy outside today anyway. If you need the diversion of a stroll or high adventure in the frozen gardens, Jeanne will be only too willing to go with you. I shall remain within summons to Her Majesty. Besides, the queen mother and Madam Alencon will be here soon and they always provide diversion. Really they are as much at the heart of the realm as is the king.”
“Do you think much about seeing him again, Marie? How exciting that the great king truly knows you and favors you and recognizes you. Does not the sense of power thrill you?”
“His Grace was only being kind, Anne. I told you that we happened to be dressed much alike and I caught his eye. That is all.”
“Coward,” Anne teased and laughed. “I shall ask our father what he thought of it, next I see him.”
“Feel free to leave me, little sister, if you care more for your own interpretations.” Mary rose swiftly and some of her flaxen threads spilled from her full-skirted lap.
“My sweet sister Marie does indeed show the temper of which she used to accuse George and me,” said Anne, widening her gaze in gentle mockery as Mary bent to scoop her threads from the footstool and floor.