Before Versailles

by Karleen Koen

  Louise stepped out of her heeled shoes so she could run even faster. There was no one about; the queen and her ladies never went outside until after dining with his majesty. In spite of her limp, she ran like the girl she still was.

  STARING AT THE remaining maids of honor as if she were envisioning each of them stripped to the waist and flogged, Catherine had remained where she stood.

  “Miss de la Baume le Blanc forgot the leashes, ma’am,” Fanny ventured. “Shall I take them—”

  Catherine snatched them herself and left the antechamber, her skirts swirling around her.

  “Poor Louise,” said Fanny to the others.

  But Catherine wasn’t looking for a maid of honor to thrash; she had someone else in mind, and she found him in the chamber Monsieur had given him, a long, open room, comfortable and beautifully furnished, not in one of the attics, but on the same floor as the royals were housed, a gesture of great favor from the brother of the king.

  Catherine opened the door without knocking. Writing, her brother sat at a table, a furrow between his brows, and he lifted his head to see who it was and stood to greet her.

  “Your conduct last night was unprecedented!” she burst out. “What on earth is wrong with you! You are so fortunate, so loved, and so perfectly capable of ruining everything for a whim. You stop it right now, or I’m going to Father. I mean it.”

  To summon up their father’s reprimand was something neither ever wanted, not because their father was cruel, but because he was the most honorable man either of them knew.

  “Abominable,” Catherine continued, “charging in on Madame like that, like a bad actor portraying a betrayed husband. Do you fancy yourself in love with her? Is that it?”

  He tilted his head to one side. “Are you of all people going to lecture me on the conduct of betrayed husbands, Catherine? I can only wait with bated breath.”

  But she wasn’t to be sidetracked. “I didn’t sleep a wink last night. What kind of fool are you, Guy?”

  “I should be on his majesty’s council.”

  “And so you embarrass him as he talks with Madame? If you want a place on the council, you misstepped three years ago. I thought us blessed that his majesty didn’t imprison you then—”

  “For what? We were looking toward what could happen if he did die. There were no plots, no cabals, just an asking and receiving of advice. I’ll remind you that Monsieur was in the front row weeping with joy at the thanksgiving service for his majesty’s recovery!”

  “You press your luck too far, you always have! You can no longer treat him like some rival you have the right to question. He’s changing, right before our eyes. I see it if you don’t. You were offensive last night. Dangerously so. If Monsieur doesn’t mind what his wife does, neither should you!”

  “I mind for Monsieur.”

  “It is none of your affair who the king admires!”

  “It is my affair when it is my prince and my friend’s wife!”

  “Monsieur will be out of love in another few weeks. You know that better than anyone. We both know who he really loves.” She was in dangerous territory, but Guy didn’t lose his temper.

  “That being so,” he said, “his majesty should have the decency to wait until Monsieur indicates boredom. I see no sign of such.”

  “What of Madame? What about what she wishes?”

  “Her wish should be to satisfy her husband in all ways. It’s a wife’s only duty.”

  Catherine made a sound of disgust and threw the dogs’ leashes at him. “What a hypocrite you are! I can’t bear it!” The leashes hit him in the mouth and dropped to the floor. “Take those to the queen’s garden and give them to Miss de la Baume le Blanc, who is there with those damned dogs. Take a walk around the garden and think about what you’re doing. I’d hate to see you banished from court. You know how I am. I won’t come to visit you in exile!” She slammed the door shut behind her as Guy rubbed the place on his face where the leashes had hit.

  Downstairs, he stood in one of the garden gallery’s huge open arches, the view spreading out before him, Louise playing among shrubs and statues with the dogs. Her shoes were off, and she was running like a child, but he was thinking about the past, of a moment when it had looked as if the world was going to be placed in his hands. He’s dying, that was the word that had come. Louis had journeyed to a battlefield and fallen down with a fever, and the fever didn’t lessen. The queen mother and Cardinal Mazarin rushed to his bedside. Louis, the miracle birth, the God Given, was wasting away. Priests chanted prayers outside the bedchamber. Last rites were prepared as he burned with fever for fourteen days. Important officials and courtiers began to call upon the heir to the throne. You must receive them, Guy advised. Philippe was torn between grief, amazement that the crown might be his, and terror of the responsibility, for while Louis had been trained in every way, Philippe had been trained in none. And then, Louis recovered, and he was furious, as if his only brother had planned treason. Not true, Guy had defended. There was never a plot to take the crown, Guy said, only, God forbid, to receive it, and God did forbid, your majesty. Long live the king.

  What Louis didn’t forgive was that Guy had known what to do.

  The maid of honor had a stick and had clearly taught the spaniels, little beggars, disobedient and spoiled, to fetch. She had a way with animals, he’d noticed. One could see it in the response of any horse she rode. He watched her reward the dogs with bits of food from her pockets. What lady keeps food in her pockets? thought Guy. He stepped out from the shade of the gallery and into the strong sunlight and called to her.

  “My sister insisted I bring these to you. Is she as haughty with you as she is with me?” he asked, smiling a little. There was something of an angel about the pure lines of her face.

  She bent over to put silken cords around the spaniels’ necks and murmured, “Thank you.”

  Comfortable in his arrogance, Guy considered her. Common, his sister sniffed, but perhaps the correct word was uncommon. Her hair was a pale butter color he liked, thick and shining with life where it had come unfastened from its pins. She wore a slim, fitted jacket for horseback, blue braiding at seams that flared downward to her slim hips. The outdoors look of her, the hoyden style of her hair, her face shining from running, suited her.

  My hair, Louise thought. She began to repin it. “My mother always says I can’t stay neat for a second.” She spoke nervously and felt stupid the minute she opened her mouth. This Count de Guiche made her feel wary.

  “You’ve been riding?” Guy asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And where did you go?”

  “Oh, here and there.”

  She isn’t about to tell me, thought Guy. She doesn’t like me. He felt amused, but also, suddenly, angry. He’d had enough of headstrong women for one day. “How long have you had a limp? Is your leg healing from something?”

  Louise felt the onset of her terrible, staining blush heat her neck. “I fell from a horse when I was young.”

  “I’ve embarrassed you. Forgive me, I would never have known if I hadn’t seen you running like a peasant in stockinged feet.” He picked up one of her shoes to examine it, pulled out the special little wooden block that evened Louise’s legs, examined it coolly before putting it back in place.

  Louise snatched the shoe and put it on her foot. “No shoes on,” she heard herself saying. “My mother would be so ashamed. I take you from Amboise, she says, but you keep the dirt of it under your fingernails.”

  Guy took one of her hands, examined it. “Quite clean. Your fingernails, I mean.”

  “Yours aren’t.”

  Startled, Guy looked at his hands.

  “Is that ink? Writing love letters, count?”

  “Dozens.”

  “Don’t send one to me.” She and the dogs ran toward the gallery.

  Little adder, thought Guy. Well, he liked that, too. Did she think she couldn’t be seduced? If he wished, he could wrap her, and any maiden like he
r, around his finger. The only question was, did he wish? Do you love Madame? his sister had asked. If to feel a certain, wrenching ache every time he looked at her was love, then yes. He wanted her. Was that love?

  THE PALACE OF Fontainebleau was huge, its center an ancient keep that had since multiplied and sprawled and spread out various branching arms that splayed in all directions and were connected by the length of expansive galleries or the vast width of courtyards or the tall stateliness of ornate gatehouses. It was the custom to build townhouses along the back walls of courtyards or at their corners or on the outskirts of the royal gardens, and in these lived courtiers who held high positions in the court or were greatly favored or ministers who carried the threads of the kingdom’s policy in their hands and memories. One townhouse, built in the reign of the previous king, had housed a great innovator and visionary of the state, one Cardinal Richelieu, who had served the kingdom until the day of his death. Now it housed another man considered important to the kingdom.

  The Viscount Nicolas stood before a long pier glass in a chamber on an upper floor. Turning this way and that, he surveyed himself wearing a new jacket, his quicksilver mind upon the conversation he was holding but also playing upon other things. Pier glass was expensive; only the Venetians made this surface whose silvering showed a man precisely what he looked like, and they extracted a pretty penny for their expertise. We should make it, Colbert had said earlier today. Colbert was an old enemy who had, unfortunately, not been entombed alongside Cardinal Mazarin. The man was obsessed with manufacture. And how would we do that? Nicolas had asked him, feeling irritated and wary, but also interested. Steal their secret, was Colbert’s reply. Well. Colbert might have the liveliness of a block of winter river ice, but there was certainly a clever brain frozen inside, but then the cardinal wouldn’t have amassed the fortune he had with an idiot managing the figures in his ledgers, would he?

  Nicolas ran his eyes over the cut of his short, tight jacket and drew his brows together, but it wasn’t the jacket which displeased. His majesty insisted that a ledger now be kept again, but Nicolas made no attempt to enter correct figures. He couldn’t have if he’d tried. One didn’t finance war and more war and then a wedding between princes by meticulous addition and subtraction. Cardinal Mazarin had understood such. He had never asked how Nicolas had amassed funds; he had just held out his hand for them. Hopefully, once his majesty was past this first heady rush of ruling, he’d do the same.

  Nicolas slapped his abdomen. With the death of Mazarin, forty had become old compared to the age of the king and his set of friends, but he looked well for an old man. He nodded at the image in the mirror, and the man sitting in a chair in a corner took Nicolas’s nod for dismissal and stood.

  “A moment more,” said Nicolas. “No detail is too small. Is he still his mother’s boy? What does he say in private about the cardinal? Does he gamble? How much? What’s his favorite dish? Does he water his wine? Who are his favorite friends? His most trusted servants? Who has he loved? For how long? Does he take laudanum to sleep? Has he a favorite color? A favorite hunting dog? A favorite mount? There is no detail too small to be of interest. Do you understand?” He had spies in the king’s household, but not enough, he had decided.

  A knock on the door interrupted. Nicolas indicated the man could go and waited to see who his secretary would announce next. The whispered name surprised him, but only for a moment. After all, she’d warned him she’d call.

  Olympe pulled back the hood of her cloak and untied her mask. A lady who didn’t wish to be recognized always wore a small, dark, silk mask over her eyes. Nicolas considered her carefully. She was one of the stars in the sky of court, and as far as he could ascertain, she had no conscience of any kind.

  “Will you have some refreshment?” he asked.

  She shook her head. Little niceties weren’t her style.

  “How, then, may I be of service to you, my dear countess?”

  “I want to be moved from her majesty’s household. His majesty would never forgive me if I asked it, so you must arrange it for me.”

  He was astonished. “But, countess, your position is the highest there is! You won’t earn the sinecure you do now anywhere else. Nor have the importance you possess, and, if I may say so, deserve.” There had been near slaughter for positions in the new queen’s household. Had she forgotten?

  “His majesty has stopped asking me to plan entertainments for the court, hasn’t asked since they came to Fontainebleau. She’s doing it for him now.” The “she” was said with a sneer.

  Of course, thought Nicolas. This was about the new Madame. “She is the second lady of the kingdom.”

  “But she isn’t the queen! It’s the queen’s duty to plan entertainments! And if not hers, mine! I ought to have seen it at Easter. That’s when he first began to honor her. And I can’t join in now when they go to swim in the river—everybody’s going, you know. I can’t go unless her majesty does, and there is no chance of that happening. Oh, trust a Spaniard to make getting out of bed in the morning a religious ritual! Her majesty doesn’t even mind that her sister-in-law takes her place. She’s glad to be relieved of the responsibility. She is glad to leave the entertainment of court to someone else. What a fool! Move me to Madame’s! Say you’ll do it!” Olympe turned obsidian-colored eyes directly to his in appeal. “I’ll be ever so grateful. There’s nothing I have, nothing that I wouldn’t give you.”

  She left no doubt about what generosity entailed, even leaning forward a little so that he would see her breasts, not that one could miss breasts in the fashion of this day.

  “Let me see if I understand,” Nicolas said because he was so surprised by her request. “You wish to resign your most high, most important position, the premier position among ladies-in-waiting, and take something in the household of the wife of the king’s brother?”

  “Thank you, viscount. I’m in your debt, as always.” Olympe put her hand to the mask she’d taken off. “When I’m mistress, I’ll see you rewarded a hundred times over for your kindness to me.”

  Mistress? thought Nicolas. What’s this? “A moment more, my dear countess. He still visits the queen every night, doesn’t he? I rely upon you to tell me such things. Or have we misunderstood each other?”

  She had tied her mask back upon her face and now stared at him through the eyeholes. “I tell you everything of interest,” she answered.

  “A mistress is of immense interest to me, my dear. Has his majesty—” he paused to find a delicate way to express his question, “—invited you?”

  “Her majesty doesn’t satisfy him. Any fool can see it. He’s ripe to fall into someone’s hands, and he is going to fall into mine, and if I am at Madame’s, it will be easier to win him.”

  “But if he’s still visiting her majesty every evening—”

  “Later and later. He’s out until all hours with Monsieur and Madame and their group. It’s diverting, you see. He likes to laugh and talk and walk among us as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Who wouldn’t? Her majesty, that’s who. We pray, we embroider, we go to hear chanting in the monasteries and nunneries, we go to visit the queen mother and her ancient coven of witches, we nap. Yesterday, Madame’s ladies let down their hair in the park in front of everyone to dry it. Do you know how beautiful, how thick my hair is? He wouldn’t have been able to stop thinking of me if I’d been sitting among them.”

  Nicolas remained in the doorway to watch her walk down his back hall. She was a niece of Cardinal Mazarin, who had brought his sisters’ children under his wing, so that his majesty had known them all since they were children, had lived and played among them as if they were related. Each child had made or would make a grand marriage into the highest families of the land or among the kingdom’s neighboring kingdoms, first because Cardinal Mazarin had seen to it, and now, because his majesty had taken on that task. No one gossiped any longer that the cardinal had begun as nobody because he’d ended as more than somebody. It was a story
Nicolas liked, the way a man of exceptional ability could ease himself into a majesty’s life, become indispensable, and then he and his children were guaranteed a place in the firmament of court forever and ever, amen.

  He was caught off guard at what she’d just told him, surprised at himself, that he hadn’t sensed it, seen it, guessed it. The king had been married a year, and, as far as anyone knew, had been faithful. The queen was less than stimulating. Of course he would begin to look elsewhere. He showed restraint not to have leapt from the marriage bed sooner. A mistress was an extremely important piece on the chessboard that was court, more important than the queen, if the queen was weak. A mistress became, in fact, the queen. Strength in a queen or a mistress turned women from delightful companions and playthings into dangerous people who must be pleased, who took sides in official business, who demanded favors, who changed kings’ minds. What a secretive young man this king was, this king who didn’t like surprises. Well, neither did Nicolas, but the thing was, he paid handsomely so that there should be none, and in that, he became a cat, always knowing where to leap.

  Chapter 7

  OUIS MET WITH HIS COUNCIL THAT AFTERNOON. THEY talked of Charles II, the king of England, only upon his throne a year, and unmarried. They had manipulated a bride-to-be for him from among the princesses of Europe. The choice was to the advantage of the kingdom of France and certain long-term priorities Mazarin had set in place. The years the three members of this highest of councils had worked together showed in the adroitness with which they had maneuvered a Catholic princess for a Protestant king.

  “Who on the English council do we have in our pocket?” asked Nicolas, as skilled in diplomacy as he was in finding funds. Much of the credit for the coming English royal marriage belonged to him, but there were delays in the wedding that they were attempting to hurry with bribes.