Courtesan

by Diane Haeger

  This final comment made Charles, the second son of the house of Guise, the one who most closely understood his elder’s ambitions, stop in the corridor and look up in utter surprise.

  “What does mythology have to do with any of this?”

  A sage smile passed across the Cardinal’s face, his white beard glistening like snowflakes in the afternoon sun.

  “You will remember, my boys, the goddess of the moon was Diana. You doubt me, I see. Never the matter, you will discover it for yourselves soon enough. Whatever you may believe now, listen well. There is a new moon rising, and when this Diana makes her ascent, and I fear it shall be soon, she will undoubtedly eclipse all with whom we now find favor. We must be very, very careful; very sure of ourselves. If we can accomplish these things, rest assured, as we have for a great many years, the mighty Guise shall remain favored by the highest house, no matter what the obstacles.”

  “But you told His Majesty that you believed the Dauphin’s liaison with her to be a passing affair,” said the elder nephew.

  “I told His Majesty what he wanted to hear. Remember, my boys, for the sake of the family, first diplomacy. Always diplomacy.”

  IT WAS HOT and no one could recall it ever being so unbearable, even for August. The air was still, wet and unrelenting, and the flies were more numerous than the courtiers. Diane lay half naked on top of her bedcovers in a loose-fitting shift of white cambric cotton. There were two blue silk ties near her breasts. She touched one of them gently and lay her head back against the pillows.

  “I cannot keep this child. How can I?”

  She thought that she had whispered the words to herself, but with the sound of them, Hélène looked up from her place by the window, as though she had been roused from a nap. Diane smiled back at her. This had been an unbearably difficult pregnancy thus far, and now with the heat, she was not certain at all how she would manage the remaining three months.

  She felt like a prisoner in her own body, just as she was a prisoner in the King’s Court. As her feet continued to swell and her belly grew, she felt less certain of risking public ventures. It took far too much energy and effort to keep up the pretense, and if it should fail, not only she but Henri too would be ruined. Gradually, she began to turn down invitations to play cards with the Cardinal’s niece, Marie de Guise, and she no longer attended even the King’s weekly banquet.

  It is an impossible situation. It is not safe for a child of ours in this world, in this climate that is so against Henri; so against the two of us. It will be a bastard and I. . .even worse. What is between us is called criminal by nearly everyone. How can a child ever rise above that? And how unfair of me to ask it to try.

  All of her life Diane had been honored and respected. She had been born to a noble family; wife to a great man. Her blood was royal, owing to a connection her family claimed to Louis XI. Yet, since she had come to Court, she had fought daily to retain that respect, which thanks to Anne d’Heilly’s mysterious disdain of her, little now survived. Her liaison with Henri, now widely known, threatened her standing further still. She had few friends at Court any longer. . .and many enemies. She knew that if she acknowledged this child, a child born of an adulterous affair with someone half her age, she would lose everything. She had seen it too many times to doubt it. She would be nothing more than a noble mistress. . .a courtesan.

  But this child would face a worse fate than a loss of honor. He would be ridiculed. Maligned. The progeny of a scandal. Henri was not yet King. He did not have the power to protect his own child or his lover from that sort of scorn. Henri’s pride over his impending fatherhood prevented her from discussing the matter further with him. Each time they were together, he was brimming with plans and ideas for his child’s future. He said nearly every day that his greatest desire was to be a better father to his child than his own father had been to him. Diane had not been able to bring herself to destroy his happiness. Not yet. But she must consider it. Henri was required once again to return to the front. He would be at Court only a few days more. Plans must be made. Her future. The child’s future. . .their child. . .She ran a hand across her swollen belly. . .yes it was their child, no matter what became of it.

  There was a knock at the outer door. Diane looked over and nodded to Hélène as she covered herself with a sheet. Hélène rose from her chair by the open window to answer it. Henri stood before her in a formal pose, one hand at his side cupping the handle of his sword, the other thrust behind his erect back. After a moment, he passed her and came into the room.

  “Leave us,” he said.

  When they were alone, he looked at Diane with distant, defeated eyes. “I cannot divorce her.”

  He tossed his cape onto the floor and began to pace the sitting room of her apartments. Diane came from her bed and saw the rage inside of him; the bitter frustration.

  “He will have me marry Marie de Guise if I reject Catherine. It is all a game to him. Damn him! And you know I will have no other wife if it cannot be you!”

  Once he had said the words, Diane turned from him, pushing down the weight of her own private disappointment. She walked toward the window that faced the garden. There was a long silence between them before she said anything. When she spoke it was without turning around.

  “I want you to bed with your wife,” she quietly said.

  “I will not! That is an obscene suggestion when you know I can be with no one but you.”

  “You can, and you must.”

  Diane turned back around and leaned against the windowsill. Even across the room she could feel his surging power, the power he possessed over her. The firmly chiseled face. The muscled arms. It was difficult for her to look at him and not be weakened.

  “How can you ask such a thing when I am sickened by the very thought?”

  He moved swiftly toward her, wrapping her in his arms to assure her. She let him hold her for only a moment and then broke from his grasp. “But, I adore you, M’amie. I live for you. . .only for you!” he uttered with pleading clouded eyes.

  She was resolute.

  “You are Dauphin now,” she said. “You have a responsibility to France to beget an heir.”

  “What of my responsibility to you?! To our child?”

  “Chéri,” she said, reaching out to touch his bearded face. “Catherine is your wife. Pretending she does not exist will not rid you of your duty to her.”

  Henri did not listen. He clutched at her with an open, raw desire, as though forcing her now could somehow make the duty to that Italian stranger disappear. Catherine was the enemy, but it was Diane who felt his rage. When he kissed her, it was with rough thrusts, pushing his tongue inside her mouth, biting at her lips. She tried to pull away, but he clutched her more tightly, branding her mouth and neck with angry, tortured kisses. He was not gentle. His urgent passion had already overcome him. Bound by his arms, with his heart pounding against her tender breasts, her own desire began slowly to surge up. She surrendered, and molded to him. After a moment, he scooped her into his arms and carried her to the open bed. They fell together onto the white linen, joined by their arms and Henri’s furious kisses. He raised her silky shift and tore away his stockings.

  “It is so unfair. . .” he muttered, still kissing her. “I worship only you. . .only you! Tu es ma vie, m’amie. . .toute ma vie. . .” He kissed her throat and bit the soft fleshy skin of her breasts as he whispered the words and the despair into her soft shining hair.

  “God help me, somehow, no matter what it takes, someday I shall make you my Queen!”

  THEY LAY IN SILENCE on the rumpled sheets, the rest of the bedding tossed to the floor. The room was completely dark but a cool breeze blew across their wet bodies from an open window near the bed. The distant sounds of the banquet below washed across them. They were naked now. Flesh against flesh. Henri was curled up beside her, his thigh wrapped over hers, his head resting on her breast, his hand tenderly stroking her round belly.

  “I wonder what his name s
hall be. . .” he whispered. When Diane did not reply, he looked up, thinking that perhaps she had fallen asleep. She was perfectly still and staring up at the canopy above them.

  “Plans must be made,” she said in a voice of resolution delivered just above a whisper.

  “What sort of plans?”

  “For the child.”

  “He. . .or she is our child,” Henri smiled. “His future is secure.”

  Diane sat up and leaned against the carved oak headboard. Henri reached up and took a long strand of her blond hair between his fingers but he could not make her smile.

  “Henri. . .I will not be the mother of a bastard child. I could not live with the guilt of what he would be forced to endure on my account. This child was conceived in love. In that, he deserves more than you and I can give him. He deserves respect. The way things are here with you and the King. . .myself and the Duchesse d’Etampes. . .he will never have that if the world is to know he is our child.”

  Henri’s smile faded. “What are you saying?”

  “I am going home to Anet. When I return to Court, to you, and I hope with all my heart that you will still want me. . .he can have all of the titles and honors you wish to bestow upon him as your son, but on this I will not bend; no one can ever know that he is our child.”

  HENRI CHARGED HIS HORSE through the thick woods around Fontainebleau, but he felt a million miles from the thundering hooves and the churning dust beneath him.

  The plan would need to be executed without flaw for it to succeed. As Henri sat in disbelief that night in Diane’s darkened bedchamber, she weaved for him the elements of an intricate deception. In the intervening months, she had successfully negotiated the marriage of her daughter, Françoise, to Robert de La Marck. Her presence now was required at Anet to supervise the details of that union. It would be a convenient explanation for her abrupt departure, one that would go unquestioned by the Court. Meanwhile, she proposed that Henri should confess to the King a battlefield liaison with a village peasant. The King was to be told that the girl was now pregnant by him. She reminded Henri that as offspring of the Dauphin of France, the King would insist the child be brought to Court and raised with the other royal children. He would also predictably insist that the child’s mother be installed in a good convent to avoid further embarrassment to Catherine. This would remove from them the fictitious paramour. Tales of extramarital children, and the need to make adjustments for them, were not new at the Court of France.

  “I wish there was another way,” she had said, as he had listened in horror to the plan. “But I cannot allow this child. . .our child, to be born into this kind of danger. In England they are still calling Anne Boleyn’s daughter ‘the little bastard.’ At least this way, without me. . .he, or she, will have half a chance at a respectable life.”

  There were responsibilities. There was honor. Despite his protestations to her that night in her chamber, Henri knew that she was right. He also know that he must have a child with Catherine. France was vulnerable without a legitimate heir. When he was not with Diane, near her. . .beside her, he could see the obligation; see his responsibilities. But he was obsessed with this woman who meant life to him.

  He had agreed to her pleas only because he loved her, but even now the prospect haunted him. By her plan, the child could be near to them both at Court and legitimatized as a natural child of France. Natural children, as bastards were delicately called, were an incidental element of royal life. The King had several. Infidelity was an expected course of events among nobility where marriages most often represented political alliances, not matches of the heart.

  As he wound through the meadow and past the village, pushing his horse ever harder, he thought how cruel, once again, fate had been to him; as though he were a joke; a toy whose life was to be bandied about for no other reason but for the mere enjoyment of a mighty god. To have given him this woman, the woman he adored. To have given him her love. Now, a child, and yet being made to promise never to acknowledge to another living soul that the child was not only his, but theirs! What purpose could there be in such a fate? Who could find pleasure in such cruel irony? How, in the name of God, could he find the strength to overcome it?

  Henri pulled the braided reins and stopped near the river in a meadow thickly carpeted with green grass and bluebells, his chest heaving from the exertion. He tasted the salty tears on his lips; felt the heavy pain of futility. Then the rage began to fill him like Vesuvius and he sprung from his horse. He drew his dagger and began to pace back and forth as though stalking imaginary prey. In his rage his face went purple; his body rigid.

  “Never! Do you hear?!” He tipped his head heavenward and howled, full of anguish. “Damn you! Damn you all! You may have forced me into this hell! You may force me to stay here! But I have survived with one last shred of dignity and, by God in his Heaven, I shall not bed her! That one thing you can never. . .never make me do!!”

  THROUGH THE HOT SUMMER MONTHS, the relentless battle between the King and the Emperor flared again. Henri returned to his place beside Montmorency at the end of August while Diane went to Anet to await the birth of their child. She would send word to him, she had said, when it was time.

  Summer turned to fall with no sign of an end to the siege. Despite his personal quest for peace, Montmorency pushed on in the name of the King, forcing his way along the Val di Susa. More towns fell. More death. More destruction. The garrison of Savigliano. Pinerolo and Turin. The King himself had followed behind with the rest of the army, against the ardent pleadings of his sister and his mistress. He had joined Montmorency for the taking of the Piedmont region, as far as Montferrat, the prize at the border between France and Italy. François had wanted to spare nothing for this assault as the brass ring of Milan, not far beyond, dangled glittering before him.

  But the heavy financial burdens of war on the country, and his own failing health, dampened the King’s spirit. By November he was tired again. He was not the same relentless war horse who had claimed Milan for France twenty-three years before.

  So, as the burgundy-gold fall leaves blew aimlessly across the courtyard, François returned home to Fontainebleau. Home to his Anne. He was tired of the struggle. Of the deaths. Of the meaningless war that seemed to have no end and was leaching his country dry of its money, its patriotism, and its pride. As he returned this time, he had so little to show for all of the losses that ambition had cost him. The Dauphin, his François, was dead, His daughter, Madeleine, too. Provence lay in ruin from the siege, the royal coffers were nearly dry, and the troops were worn down. There was little chance now that he could ever regain Milan by force. For the first time in years, François began to consider more than an armistice; a legitimate truce with the Emperor. Much to his surprise, he was advised that the Emperor was equally receptive to such an accord. Montmorency was dispatched immediately to Leucate along with the Cardinal de Lorraine, to pursue the idea of peace.

  “NEWS FROM ENGLAND, Your Majesty, “announced Guillaume Poyet, as he strode into the royal apartments waving a crumpled communiqué.

  Poyet was the newly named Chancellor of France who had received his post through his connection with Montmorency upon the death of Antoine du Bourg, earlier that year.

  “King Henry requests a selection of French brides be sent to him in England, Your Majesty, and his Ambassador suggests that the King would not be opposed if Marie de Guise were among the contenders.”

  François was sitting for a portrait in his private drawing room at Fontainebleau. Clouet, the official Court painter, daubed the canvas with short strokes and continued to admonish the Sovereign. If he continued to fidget, the lighting across his face was sure to be ruined. On the other side of the chamber, near a long casement window, the young Archbishop de Rheims studied a chess move against him just made by the King’s third son, Charles.

  François scoffed at the news. He thought of Henry VIII. Queen Jane Seymour had not been dead a month. Three wives and all of them gone. One d
ivorced. One beheaded. The other dead in childbirth. A selection of brides from France indeed!

  “Our good brother is a pig!” he snapped. “We do not send French women for the choosing; not even for a King! As to the Cardinal de Lorraine’s niece, you may inform the English Ambassador that We have approved her marriage to Our Scottish brother, James.”

  François stood and began to cough from the exertion. A steward rushed in with a goblet of wine; another with a silver jeweled walking stick. The portrait sitting was over. Clouet said nothing but began packing up his brushes and oils as the King brushed past him.

  The Archbishop ran a hand through his full blond hair and smiled the sharp Guise smile. He watched as the King’s son moved a knight across the marble chessboard and pretended not to notice the exchange between the Sovereign and his Chancellor. So it had been decided. . .his sister a Queen! This was the first he had heard of a confirmation. He knew his uncle would be pleased. He must be told at once!

  At the Cardinal Lorraine’s private instructions before his departure to Narbonne to help negotiate peace, Marie’s name was discreetly withdrawn from the list. She would not be a replacement for the Dauphine of France. Following the confrontation between the King and Henri, discussions of a divorce between he and Catherine were also discontinued.

  A discreet period of time passed. In October, Marie had been formally proposed as a new bride for Scotland. Charles de Guise knew that King James was pleased with the choice of his sister. Their uncle’s spies had intercepted a communiqué from the Scottish Monarch. He had welcomed her as replacement for the Princess Madeleine. François needed to maintain the new bond with Scotland. There would be no impediment to a wedding. Marie would be Queen of Scotland. Charles would one day become a cardinal, and his brother, François, the most ill appointed of the three, had gained the confidence of the future King. He had worked that like a true Guise! The house of Guise was, as their uncle had foretold, rising in the shadow of the goddess of the moon.