by Karleen Koen
Louise sagged against the upright back of the sofa, untied her mask and dropped it in her lap. She knew she needed to say something, to be light and playful, but she couldn’t summon up a single word. Her playacting at the monastery had taken all her wits.
“Well,” he said, when it was clear she wasn’t going to speak. “What a delight for me. I have the honor to show you my wonderful château. It’s the penance you pay for trespass. Allow me to escort you around the grounds and boast a bit, the way a man must when he has something new of which he is very proud. Then I will bundle you back in your cloak and send you and your groom on your way to Fontainebleau with one of my guard as escort.”
“All right, then.”
Her response wasn’t enthusiastic, but Nicolas ignored that. She was his guest; it was a beautiful day, and there was nothing he liked better than showing off his château.
One hand on his arm, Louise allowed herself to be led back into the rotunda. All around her, in a perfect circle, were immense arches, some leading outside, some to other chambers in the château. The symmetry was beautiful, and it was continued upward, on the next level, where even sets of windows, spaced perfectly above the arches below, made their own circle. And then above them was a dome.
“Do you know of Le Brun?” he asked, and she shook her head and listened to him explain that Le Brun was a great artist and that he had not yet completed the painting that would be inside the dome. Louise didn’t yet understand that the men and women of this age measured themselves not only by their bravery, but by the beauty they created. The man who was destined to love her would set the standard for his century, but before him, creating that standard, was this man beside her. All of this was in the future, years from now when she would have been taken to the heights of her century and known all that was fashionable and exquisite and beautifully done. But now, this day at the viscount’s château, she was just an exhausted girl aware that everywhere she looked were beautiful things, from polished wood to onyx-topped tables to huge golden candlesticks to dozens of busts sitting atop marble columns in between the arches. On one of the tables in one of the chambers they’d passed through was a tumble of crystal decanters and goblets, of silver trays and épergnes, all piled together like pirates’ booty.
She stood on the terrace with him and looked out at his gardens. They were magnificent. Even the gardens in Paris, at the Luxembourg Palace, where the Orléans and her mother lived, were not this beautiful. Everywhere she looked, there was order and beauty. She saw a landscape canal, alleys of young trees, statues and fountains, gravel paths, sets of steps, patterned parterres in which gardeners were still planting lilies and carnations and in which stood graceful statues or fountains. She caught her breath at the splendid, grand symmetry of it, and hearing the sound, Nicolas was pleased.
Yes, he thought, looking out at a vista before him, I leave a legacy for generations. They will be talking of me, of the beauty of this, a hundred years from now. Too bad the fountains aren’t playing, but she’d see them soon enough.
“Do you know Le Nôtre?” he asked, and Louise shook her head, no.
“Well, he is one of the king’s gardeners, and he has designed all of this for me. For five long years, he’s been designing this.” He told her of the many fountains that sprayed water upward and pointed out a long waterfall a mile or so in the distance. We diverted a river, he told her, and she listened and looked around her and thought that she’d never seen anything so magnificently ordered, but she was so very tired now.
“I really must go now, sir,” she said. “I have a long ride ahead.”
He leaned against the terrace balustrade. “Ought I to send you back in my carriage?”
She shook her head.
“It’s said that you were born in the saddle.”
She laughed, and he was reminded again of her youth and freshness.
“My father taught me to ride when I was very small. He took me all through the woods around our home, used to tell me there were fairies everywhere, watching. If one was very quiet and sat under an old tree, one would see them, he said.”
“And did you discover any fairies on my land?”
“They must exist in this beautiful place.”
“I am so glad you find it to your taste.”
“I find it exquisite beyond words. Thank you for your hospitality, and forgive my intrusion.”
He followed her back into the rotunda, stood watching as a servant brought her cloak and she retied it. He felt curious again as to how she had ended up on his doorstep. “You were near the monastery, I’m told. Did you go in?”
She hesitated. He watched her struggle about whether to lie to him or not. Not, please, he thought.
“My horse stumbled, and we went in to see if she’d thrown a shoe.”
“What do you know of the order?”
“Very little. They care for addled, idiot boys.” In spite of herself, she shuddered.
“Yes, the sight of them is disturbing, isn’t it?” One visit had been enough to cure him of any further curiosity. He walked her outside, helped her into the sidesaddle, looked up at her as she settled in it. The sun framed her thick hair, casting light through it like the halo of a young Our Lady. She must be the age Mary was when the angel loved her, he thought. What a divine visit for the angel. He watched her ride away, thinking about the monastery. It was on the edge of his land, but he never rode there. He’d visited it once. Seeing boys born without wits, some of them half-wild, had been more than he could bear. If he remembered correctly, it had been founded by the queen mother years earlier. Or was it the cardinal who’d founded it? Unlike the cardinal to found an order and then ignore it. Mazarin would have led yearly pilgrimages with all the court along to applaud his piety for the less fortunate and abandoned, so it must have been the queen mother.
Perhaps when he was chancellor, he’d order a large yearly stipend to the monks who cared for such troublesome children. A tragedy, to bear a son without a mind, but not his tragedy. He wanted to walk all the way to the waterfall and admire the enormous statue of Hercules that his brother had sent from Italy only a few months ago. One stood at the statue and looked back to the house and knew that magnificence and subtle grandeur had been summoned and shaped, and that he, the Viscount Nicolas, was the sorcerer who had conjured it into being.
THE MUSKETEER Cinq Mars stood in the frame of the doorway of the house in which he and the boy lived. Like its outside, the interior of this house was fit for a king, or at the very least, a prince of the blood. His charge was inside, being fed the drugged wine that always quieted him. We’ll bathe him, he had been thinking, and cut his hair and nails while he’s quiet. He’d allowed the hair to become too long, hadn’t he? The boy hated having his hair cut. In his heart, Cinq Mars was devoted to his charge, having been with him since he was a babe. He walked out to smoke a pipe of tobacco, which explorers to that vast new world across the sea had brought back to the kingdoms of Europe. Cinq Mars found that smoking a pipe soothed him. He always hated it when the boy had to be held down and force-fed. The child was growing strong. He was ten and six, a young man, really, not a boy. What were they going to do with him? Was he going to languish forever in this netherworld? Should he risk angering the queen mother by asking her such? He was thinking those thoughts, grieving and bitter for this boy who would never take his rightful place, when he realized he was watching the gate swing shut, and he thought he caught a glimpse of a horse’s tail. He saw the abbot standing in the chapel yard, saw the boys in the gardens with their hoes suspended. Had visitors come to the monastery? When? And what had they seen? Damn their eyes if it was the boy.
Chapter 17
HERE WAS A CERTAIN LISTLESSNESS TO THE EVENINGS WITH Madame still absent. On this particular one, ladies were spread out near the queen on rugs and cushions, and the queen was content to sit in the suspended garden while her dwarves irritated courtiers by stealing fans or other trifles and dropping them into the water of the carp
pond. Louis and his friends were on the water racing gondolas again.
“I shouldn’t say so, but I find I’m glad she’s gone. Aren’t you, majesty?” Olympe’s voice was a silk ribbon falling from the sky. Reclining on her cushion, she looked like a sultan’s favorite, all creamy arms and shoulders, dark hair, sullen mouth.
“Who?” Maria Teresa asked, watching one of her dwarves who had just taken La Grande Mademoiselle’s shoe and dropped it in the pond.
“Madame. When she’s around, his majesty doesn’t pay as much attention to you, I’ve noticed.”
Maria Teresa stared at her superintendent of the household as if she didn’t quite understand, and since Olympe spoke in French, such might be true. La Grande, however, stopped scolding the thieving dwarf and was unable to keep herself from glancing toward the water, toward the gondola that Louis commanded. His majesty would be furious at this conversation.
“Majesty,” La Grande was imperious and not to be trifled with, “I think we ought to walk a while.”
“She’s a flirt. I don’t trust her.” Olympe was not intimidated by La Grande.
La Grande frowned down at Olympe. “A nice walk will do us good.”
Olympe smiled. “But you’re lacking a shoe.”
“Trust? What is this word ‘trust’?” Maria Teresa looked from one of her ladies to the next.
“Was that a raindrop I felt? You mustn’t get wet.” La Grande shivered dramatically. “We mustn’t have you rained upon, majesty. The dauphin, you know.”
But one of Maria Teresa’s dwarves translated the word into Spanish for her, and it hung there in the air like something threatening.
Athénaïs watched the queen absorb Olympe’s venom-filled words, and once they were understood, watched her majesty’s face change from careless and laughing to something somber. Athénaïs could literally see the queen cast her mind back over the past weeks, where, if she tried, she could find a hundred examples of Madame’s favor over hers.
So. As easily as that, poison pierced, and the little queen of France stopped being quite so maddeningly innocent and blind. Interesting, thought Athénaïs, as intrigued as if she were witnessing the quarrel that led to a fatal duel. A single sentence could sow doubt. Useful to know.
Obedient to the suggestion that the dauphin could be harmed by a raindrop, tingling with emotions she didn’t understand, Maria Teresa began to walk toward the stone stairway.
“She doesn’t like anyone.” It was one of her dwarves, the female one, speaking quickly in the language of their home.
“Who?” asked Maria Teresa. She trusted this little being, a link with her beloved Spain, with her court there, her past, where all was simple and rule-bound.
“The one with the dark heart.”
Servants marched across the courtyard with lighted lanterns for the gondolas; twilight was here. The queen and her ladies walked toward the outside stairway, their heels clacking on the stones. Louise curtsied in the queen’s direction, returned Athénaïs’s wave.
Choisy and Lorraine made vague bows but returned at once to their gambling. They were throwing the dice at the stones under their feet, and Louise watched, her mind elsewhere, a dog with a bone, the bone being the day’s events. Who was the boy in the iron mask?
“By all that’s holy, you must be cheating.” Choisy picked up an offending die and threw it into the water of the carp pond.
“Pay your forfeit,” drawled the Chevalier de Lorraine.
Louise watched as Choisy leaned forward and dropped a quick kiss on Lorraine’s mouth. Until she’d come to court, she hadn’t known men could kiss one another the way a man and a woman did, hadn’t known they could love one another in that way, too. She didn’t mind it. It was just she hadn’t known.
Lorraine put his arms around Choisy, but Choisy pushed Lorraine back. “You’ll make Monsieur jealous.”
Lorraine pointed toward the pond, the gondolas gliding in it, the laughing, jesting men. “Guiche has been rowing him around the pond all evening as if Monsieur were a lady he courted. I assure you I can’t make him jealous, though I don’t give up trying. I never knew affection could be so painful.”
Choisy bowed to Louise. “Do me the honor of rowing with me to the summer pavilion and back.”
At the queen mother’s terrace, a few rowboats waited to be taken out and floated on the pond. Choisy rowed as Louise leaned back on her arms and looked skyward. How pleasant it was here on the water with a breeze as cooling as a fan. She touched her cheeks. She’d felt hot all day long. What was she going to do about what she’d seen today? Who was he? A bastard child of one of the families of the blood? With a deformed face? She didn’t notice that they were now floating quietly in a part of the pond where there were no rowboats and no gondolas, no strolling courtiers on the shore, only willow trees whose limbs bent to touch the water.
“I’m sorry I kissed him. I saw it upset you, but I had to pay the forfeit.” Choisy had let go the oars, leaned toward her, earnest, appealing, curling hair framing his eager, beautiful face. “It’s you I want to kiss.” And when Louise didn’t answer, “You were gone a long time today.”
“I rode to the convent of the Carmelites in nearby Avon to hear the nuns sing and to visit with little Julie. And I stayed to pray.” How much I’ve lied today, thought Louise, looking up at early stars to avoid the expression on Choisy’s face. June was nearly ended. She had begun the month looking for a map. She ended it with finding the boy.
“I think you’re still looking for your boy in the iron mask.”
Did he read her mind? “I’ve quite given up on that. But I must have my gallop, or I’m irritable all day.”
“I want to kiss you, Louise.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?” He leaned forward and put his mouth on hers.
It was gently done, no tongue intruding as before or as one of his majesty’s friends had done after catching her alone in a hallway not too many days ago. That man had touched her breast, too. She pulled her face away.
“I’m thinking of running away. Of going to the provinces and acting. Molière says I have talent,” he told her, his hand still on her neck.
“Would you go as a man or a woman?” She regretted the words the moment they left her mouth.
“In bed, I am fully a man, Louise.” He grabbed her hand to force her to touch him between his legs, but she snatched her hand back.
“I don’t want to!”
“You owe me an apology! If you were a man, I’d call you out.”
“I’m sorry, Choisy.”
“Words aren’t enough. You have to kiss me.”
Oh, let’s get this done with, thought Louise. She pursed her lips as Choisy’s mouth fell on hers. What if I hate kissing my husband? she thought. Her marriage would be arranged. She might never know the feeling that Fanny said the Count de Guiche gave her when they kissed. No telling who her mother and Madame de Choisy would drag out of a box for her to marry: some down-at-the-heels cousin, some toadying troll desperate for office at court. In a way it was too bad that she’d been set in such a rarified atmosphere, set among the sun and moon and stars of court, the handsomest, most dashing of men, with laughing eyes, white teeth, smooth manners, their youth and birth and brio like magic talismans spilling light over those who watched. And yet she wouldn’t have missed it for anything. When she was old, she would tell her grandchildren about the dazzling men of this court. He noticed you, he noticed you, Fanny had danced the words around her today. Yes, apparently for a few, brief seconds the young sun of their court had placed brilliant eyes upon her and complimented her riding. It was the stuff of dreams.
“No,” she said, as Choisy tried to kiss her again. “No!”
Chapter 18
IS FINGERS DRUMMING AGAINST THE VELVET POUCH, Colbert waited. Without Madame to distract him, his majesty was keeping earlier hours, so there was a possibility Colbert’s head would touch his pillow before too much longe
r, and sure enough, within three quarters of an hour, in walked the king.
Restless, prowling the chamber, touching this or that objet d’art, he was curt. “What do you have for me?”
Colbert took a deep breath. This was a moment he’d been waiting for. “I’ve had word about his island. It isn’t good.”
Louis stilled.
“He forbids all access to this island. No one may leave. No one may visit.”
“But someone you trust has done so.”
Colbert allowed himself the smallest possible smile. Another man would have been beating his chest in triumph. “Yes.”
From his pouch, he pulled out a sheet of paper. “Here is a map of the island, procured under most difficult circumstances, if I may say so. A full report of my spy’s difficulties awaits your pleasure.”
He spread the map open on a nearby table at which earlier, envisioning this moment, he’d taken a quiet and very deliberate pleasure in slowly lighting every candle of a large branch of candelabra whose rock crystal drops reflected back the flames.
Louis stared down at the map. The island was located just off the coast in the bay that separated Spain and France. It was along a main shipping route. His fingers traced various squares and lines. “A fort? Your man is certain it’s a fort? How large? What are these? Ditches? For what? To repel whom?”
“There is already a garrison of two hundred men.”
Colbert read the figures out in dry tones, letting not a single inflection betray emotion. He might have been giving the king numbers about the harvest. “There are four hundred cannon in the fort, as well as bombs and explosives, enough weapons and munitions for six hundred men. There are three hundred casks of wine, as well as wheat for bread. The weapons have come from our neighbors to the north.” This was the hated republic of the Dutch. “The locals stand guard on the island and welcome no strangers. I would assume the nobility and governor of the province are in his pocket. I have furnished a list of their names. There are some one thousand men working to finish the fort and trenches, and they work day and night and are forbidden to leave.”