The Shadow Queen

by Sandra Gulland

  We came to a room lined with bunks. I noticed a signature line of a Gaston “project” near the door: a quill, a stone, a wilted flower.

  He pointed to his chest. “Build,” he stuttered, one hand on a bunk.

  You? I dissembled my surprise: Gaston was hopeless at construction. I wondered if the bunks were for students. Some were small, others bigger.

  “With.” He glanced into the inner courtyard. “F-f-friend,” he stuttered.

  A tall young man in a tunic approached. “Mademoiselle des Oeillets,” he said, bowing, nonplussed by my costume, my breeches and boots.

  The birthmark on his cheek formed a perfect heart. Even so, it took me a moment to place him.

  “Oui, I am Pilon,” he said. “You remember? We met near a cave years ago—not far from Poitiers. Your family was camped there.”

  “You were leading a pack of boys,” I said, breathless with the recollection. A lifetime ago! “Winter Swallows, and—”

  “And you fed us.” He had shy, bright eyes. “We meet yet again, but in more favorable circumstances.”

  Indeed! And then another thought, even more startling, came to me. “Are you the boy who saved Gaston during the flood, years back?”

  “Friend.” Gaston nodded, without stuttering this time.

  “And now you are a novice here?” Life had so many surprises.

  “Not yet. I am a postulant.” Pilon spoke with an accent, but his French was excellent. Clearly, he’d been schooled. “They caught me thieving, but took me in anyway—thanks to Gaston.” He cast a glance at my brother. “Does she know?”

  Gaston made a rabbit nose (“non”).

  “Please, have a seat,” Pilon said with the air of a gentleman, pulling out a stool. “We’re excited to tell you about our plan.”

  The two young men sat opposite each other on bunks as Pilon explained: they would go out into the streets next winter, gather up Winter Swallows, the ones sorely used—offering them food, schooling, shelter … protection from the fleshmongers. Protection from the Bird Catcher.

  “Live. Here,” Gaston said slowly, proudly.

  “With the help of the brothers, we’ll educate them, set them up in a proper trade,” Pilon went on. “Give them an opportunity to have another sort of life.”

  Their excitement was contagious. “This is wonderful,” I said, greatly moved.

  But, of course, it was going to cost. The fleshmongers would have to be paid off, the boys clothed and fed. “I will see what I can do.”

  CHAPTER 52

  The bells were ringing for midday prayer when I emerged from the monastery. There were heavy clouds to the south, but Madame Catherine’s village of Villeneuve Beauregard wasn’t impossibly far. I decided to walk. Dressed in travesty made me more secure, but even so I kept my eyes down and my stride purposeful as I crossed the rubble of the old fortifications near the Cour des Miracles, a hovel that housed the city’s beggars and thieves.

  By the time I got to the squat little church of Notre-Dame de Bonne Nouvelle, it had started to rain. I secured my moustache and turned onto the muddy road.

  The door to Madame Catherine’s house was ajar. It was no longer the humble plank door of years past. I lifted and dropped the heavy brass knocker three times, waiting for a response.

  A roll of growling thunder was followed by a clap of lightning and a gush of blowing rain. I stepped inside to escape the storm. “Madame Catherine?” I called out. The small parlor smelled of gingerbread baking, which made me realize how hungry I was. I hadn’t eaten since early morning.

  I stood in the cluttered salon, dripping onto the floor. Was anybody even home? I felt in the cuff of my coat for the note, Athénaïs’s request for something “stronger.”

  A sleepy yellow dog ambled into the room. Noël. I had befriended him on my many trips. He wagged his way over to me, pushing his wet nose into my hand. I took off my glove and stroked his head. The wind whistled and rattled the panes of the little window facing the street. It had blown up into quite a storm. “Madame?” I called out again.

  “Marie Marguerite?” Madame Catherine appeared, holding a candle.

  “Monsieur de Leu,” I said, using the false name I always went by.

  “Good Lord.” Madame Catherine made her way through the boxes and crates, the books stacked everywhere. “Noël, what kind of watchdog are you?” she said, pulling the old dog’s ears.

  “Forgive me. The door was open.” Madame Catherine had grown round as a biscuit, clearly well fed. As well, she’d taken to adorning herself with glittering gewgaws—of real gems, it appeared. I wondered how she could afford them.

  “I’m expecting my daughter back from the market,” she said, her left eye twitching.

  “I knocked, but …”

  “Acht. I didn’t hear a thing. My old mother is in the kitchen, complaining of her joints. I give her remedies, but she doesn’t use them properly and then she goes on and on.” She went to the door and peered out. “Marie Marguerite should have been back long ago. She’s going to catch her death in this storm. The girl has no sense.”

  I had only seen Madame Catherine’s daughter twice before. Hardly sixteen, if that, lightsome but womanly for her age. She struck me as wily, in the manner of a fox. She would worry any mother.

  “May God Almighty look over her,” Madame Catherine said, signing herself. “Someone’s going to have to. Would you care for a bit of gingerbread?” The dog yelped and Madame Catherine chuckled. “I know you would, you beast.”

  Hungry and chilled, I rashly accepted the offer, following the enchantress through the cluttered rooms into a warm kitchen. Everywhere I looked there were framed images of saints and crosses hung with rosaries as well as other, more mysterious and somewhat frightening images, one of snakes writhing, another a diagram showing parts of a female corpse. I followed her past an open plank door. Inside I glimpsed a room set up with copper vats and fat glass bottles with tubes running out of them. There was a smell of something burning, something noxious.

  Was Madame Catherine practicing alchemy? The thought made me uneasy. Her lust for riches was more and more apparent.

  In the kitchen, a crow jumped about in a wicker cage hanging from a meat hook. Madame Catherine introduced me to her mother, a nodding crone in the corner.

  “I’m having an open house tomorrow, so we’re busy,” Madame Catherine said. A maid was stirring a cauldron on the open hearth. “It’s rain or shine, so do come. I get the highest society—duchesses and marquises, even the occasional duke. Have some ale?”

  There were three jugs on the table. “Thank you, mais non—I can’t be long.” I suspected she and her mother had both been imbibing. “I’m leaving Paris soon,” I said, accepting a square of warm gingerbread slathered with creamed butter.

  “Whereabouts do you live?” Madame Catherine asked.

  She seemed cheery enough, as always—but there was something calculating and frantic about her now, her face contorting in a false grimace.

  “Let me guess,” her mother said, placing her palms on the table and closing her eyes.

  Madame Catherine rolled her eyes. I noticed that she was using thick face paint: that was different, as well. “My mother knows everything there is to know about chiromancy and physiognomy, but a clairvoyant she’s not,” she said, disapproving.

  “Wait. It’s coming to me. Saint-Germain-en-Laye.” The old woman looked over at me, pleased. “Or maybe around Versaie?”

  “I’m afraid not.” I began to perspire. I wasn’t sure my disguise could hold up in a room of seers. “I’m from Meudon.”

  “Then you must know Madame de Verrue—or rather, the Widow Verrue,” Madame Catherine added, taking the wood spoon from the maid and stirring the pot simmering on the fire. “She was married to the blacksmith, a bawdish man. He’s worms’ meat now, praise the mighty Lord.” She glanced at her mother with what seemed a proudful glint. “His depart came as a great relief to the wife,” she said, winking at me.

&n
bsp; I was saved from answering by the sound of the front door slamming. “That had better be Marie Marguerite,” Madame Catherine said, wiping her hands on her apron.

  The girl appeared in the door, dripping wet and carrying a covered basket. “I hate these things,” she said, dropping the basket onto the floor. The lid flew off to reveal a swarming mass of what looked like beetles.

  I stepped back, repulsed.

  “How many times do I have to tell you not to alarm them!” Madame Catherine clamped the basket lid back on. “It sets them off,” she said, fastening the latch.

  An acrid stench had filled the air. Blister beetles?

  “They set me off,” the girl said sullenly.

  “What took you so long?” Madame Catherine’s voice had a curiously pleading quality.

  “Nothing,” the girl said, popping her cheek with her thumb. There was something not right about her, something unsettled.

  “I must be going, Madame,” I said, touching the brim of my hat. It sounded as if the rain had let up. “Thank you for the gingerbread.” I felt a little ill, in truth. I wondered what might have been in it.

  “Are you sure you don’t know Madame de Verrue?” Madame Catherine asked at the door, handing me a parcel of the usual powders and drops. Swiftly—deft as a pickpocket—she disappeared the coins I gave her.

  “I keep to myself,” I said, pulling the folded paper from the cuff of my coat. I hoped the ink hadn’t run in the rain. “This is from my mistress.”

  Madame Catherine held the paper to the light, squinting. “She needs something stronger?”

  “She said to tell you that the situation is desperate.”

  “Ah, her lover must be wandering.”

  He most certainly was.

  “Tell her I can resolve the situation to her full satisfaction, but it will cost. It requires the services of a priest—”

  That was reassuring.

  “—but she herself will have to be present,” Madame Catherine insisted. “No substitutes.”

  CHAPTER 53

  Athénaïs tore open the packets from Madame Catherine and held the vial of drops to her heart. “I’ll be needing some this afternoon. What did she say about—?”

  “She said she could help, but you’d have to go in person.”

  Her old pug Popo snuffled at her feet. “But that’s impossible,” she said, scratching the dog behind his little ears.

  “I told her that.” It was difficult for Athénaïs to go anywhere undetected. “But she was firm. A priest is required, apparently, for some sort of ceremonial.”

  She frowned, considering. “Will it banish Angélique? Erase her from the King’s thoughts?”

  Oui: and all the other Angéliques swarming. “She pledged that it would, but at considerable cost: three hundred louis d’or—for the first ritual, that is. A second or even a third—which she recommended—would cost only a fraction as much.”

  Athénaïs’s jaw dropped. “Did I hear you correctly? Three hundred?”

  “And it would have to be paid in advance, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Where on God’s earth am I to get such a sum?”

  Yet what choice did she have? Her empire was in danger of crumbling. Without the King’s favor … “Maybe you could tell His Majesty you need the money to cover a gambling loss,” I suggested.

  “He just covered one for seventy louis d’or.” She fell back into the cushions. “Mort Dieu. Three hundred? That’s a lot of money.”

  “His Majesty never refuses you, Madame. Imagine the cost were you to lose his favor,” I added quietly.

  SHORTLY AFTER, I donned my male attire again and returned to Madame Catherine, Athénaïs’s gold in a hemp sack. The sorceress took me into a back room to count out the heavy coins. She bit into several and weighed them on a scale to ensure they weren’t counterfeit. Her massive ropes of gems jiggled as she moved. “You’d be surprised how easy it is to make false ones,” she said.

  I thought of the flasks and vials I had glimpsed on my last visit, and wondered if this was a trade she herself indulged in. One didn’t buy gems such as she wore from selling love potions and charms. “Have you ever tried?” I asked with an intentionally indifferent expression. On the table behind her was a thick book, covered in leather and embellished with intricately tooled metals. It looked to be a forbidden grimoire, a book of magic spells. I caught my breath. Gospel of Satan.

  “That’s the type of question a constable would ask,” Madame Catherine said, pausing in her counting. Her piercing look was both wily and amused.

  “Or a crook,” I countered with feigned cheer, but a cold sweat came over me.

  “Touché!” she exclaimed with surprising cheer. “Three hundred louis d’or,” she pronounced, straightening the stacks. “I will send the priest confirmation that your mistress has paid,” she said, scratching out directions to where the ritual was to take place.

  I paused at the door. “And if it doesn’t work, Madame?”

  “Believe me,” she said, clasping the heavy cross that hung from her neck, “this ritual involves the strongest powers. It never fails.”

  WE SET OUT well before dawn, Athénaïs disguised as a wealthy merchant’s wife, I as her valet, both of us fully masked.

  “You make the most charming gentleman, Monsieur,” Athénaïs said as I helped her into the coach.

  “You’ve said that before,” I said with a smile, recalling that moonlit ride to the marshy field, the morning of the fateful duel. This journey, too, seemed dangerously illicit.

  We made uneasy small talk all the way to Paris: the Widow—La Marquise de Maintenon now—had taken Athénaïs’s eldest boy by the King to a spa in the mountains of Barèges in the hope of curing his feeble leg. He was seven, yet still unable to walk properly. “The Widow acts as if my children are hers,” Athénaïs complained.

  I agreed that the Widow took herself somewhat too seriously, especially now that His Majesty had rewarded her with a title and a château.

  “I don’t even have that,” Athénaïs protested. As magnificent as her château at Clagny was, it didn’t, in fact, belong to her, but to the Crown. “And as to a title …” She made a rueful grimace. Although officially separated, she and her husband remained married by law. Were His Majesty to give Athénaïs the title of duchess, her husband, by rights, would be a duke—and that, His Majesty simply would not abide.

  And then Athénaïs got onto her favorite complaint of late, the inanity of the girl Angélique: beautiful, sixteen, and stupid as a brickbat. Even I was affronted at the way she put on airs, now even pretending to be pregnant by the King by stuffing her gowns with cushions.

  “Soon His Majesty won’t even glance at her,” I told Athénaïs with satisfaction.

  Once through the Paris gates, the coach headed out the rue Saint-Denis, past my old neighborhood and into the shanties. We slipped on our masks as the coach rolled to a stop. I handed Athénaïs down, wary of the shoddy surroundings. I was relieved to be greeted by an attendant in an elegantly embroidered justacorps. “Father awaits,” he said, leading us into a sunny courtyard bursting with flowers. A gardener looked up from his work, then returned to clearing the ground of weeds.

  The attendant ushered us into a small stone chapel lit by only two branches of dripping candles. He whispered instructions to me and left, the door closing behind him.

  “Well?” Athénaïs’s voice was muffled behind her mask.

  I hesitated. What the attendant had told me was shocking. “He said you’re to remove your clothes.” And stretch out mother-naked on the table in front of the altar. Sacré coeur.

  “All of them?”

  “Except your mask.” It had been a mistake to come. “Are you sure you want to go through with this, Madame?” The sweet scent of ambergris filled the air.

  “I’ve already paid a small fortune,” Athénaïs said, irritated, pulling off her gloves. She turned so that I could unlace her.

  “Your chemise too, I’m afraid.�
� At least a brazier had been lit and it was warm. I spread Athénaïs’s blue velvet cloak over the table and helped her climb up onto it.

  She stretched out, pulling the sides of her cloak up over her breasts and pubis. “Maybe I’ll have a bit more of that brandy,” she said.

  “You finished the flask on the way down, Madame.” Along with two opium pills, for nerves.

  A door creaked open and the valet entered carrying a torch. He was followed by a priest, who smelled of tobacco. He had high coloring and a terrible squint. “Madame, your maid must wait outside,” he said.

  “She stays,” Athénaïs said drowsily.

  The priest scowled at me.

  “I can be trusted,” I said, clasping Athénaïs’s hand, which was damp. The room was smoky; my eyes burned.

  With resignation, he put a white napkin on Athénaïs’s bare belly and set a heavy chalice on it. “You must remain absolutely still,” he cautioned, his breath foul.

  Had Athénaïs heard? “Madame?”

  She nodded sleepily.

  “She won’t move,” I assured him. His eyes rolled grotesquely in different directions.

  “In nomine magni dei nostri Satanas,” he began. His voice—a curiously beautiful voice—echoed in the stone chamber. “Introibo ad altare Domini Inferi,” he intoned, and the valet, standing by the chimney, responded, “Ad Eum Qui laetificat juventutem meam.”

  This wasn’t what I had expected. It was like a Mass, but different.

  Domini Inferi. Lord of the Grave.

  Nomine Satanas. In the name of Satan.

  I understood little Latin, but I knew enough to sense that Satan was being invoked. I clutched the cross at my neck with a trembling hand and glanced at Athénaïs. Was she sleeping? I wanted to wake her, put a stop to this!

  The priest uncovered the chalice and raised it. The smoke of burning incense filled the tiny chamber. My throat burned; I coughed. I could hardly see through the thick haze. “Veni Satanas, Imperator Mundi, ut animabus famulorum …”