Before Versailles

by Karleen Koen

  “Miss’s earrings?”

  She reached for the pearls that he must have collected from who knew where, the bed likely. They’d been in her ears when this began. Her maid was here now, entering timidly, half-running toward Louise when she saw her, a shawl and Louise’s brushes in her hands.

  La Porte bowed very low before Louise. “I am your humble servant in all things,” he said. “It is my honor to serve my master and now you.”

  “You-you won’t say anything. Please don’t say anything.” She knew her maid hadn’t thought to bring some coins because she hadn’t told her to. “I’ll send coins to you—”

  Lifting up out of his bow like a martinet whose strings had been jerked, La Porte’s small, neat nostrils pinched together. “I require no payment. Your secrets are safe with me because his majesty’s secrets are safe with me. They always have been.”

  He was gone from the chamber before Louise could respond. The maid just stood where she was, looking from Louise to the bed and back again.

  “I’ve taken a lover,” Louise heard herself say. “You must tell no one.”

  The servant nodded her head.

  “It’s imperative,” Louise heard herself say, wondering who was saying it, perhaps the happy, prideful young woman emerging from within her. “No one must know.”

  Louise went to the box on the table and slipped an exquisite bracelet onto each wrist. She’d wear them with pride. Her beloved was the handsomest, bravest man in France. He was a demigod, not only to her, but to all the kingdom, and she had just been graced by his kisses and act of love. If this was the only thing that ever happened between them, she would leave the court, and all her life she would treasure this moment, when the king of France knelt naked before her in a bed and bent to kiss the soft inside of her elbow. Sealed by his mouth now. She was his forever.

  LATE THAT NIGHT, Louise sat in a carriage with Fanny as it swayed around the landscape pool, her face and shoulders out the window to feel the night’s breeze, to see the stars, to try and quiet this flaming in her body that the very thought of Louis brought into being. She didn’t notice a horseman’s quiet approach. But suddenly there he was, bending down and planting one quick, killingly sweet kiss on her lips. Before she could even move he was riding on. This was how it would be, wouldn’t it? Always too quick, too often unspoken, always a good-bye implicit, but always thrilling.

  “Have you made love?” Fanny demanded.

  She didn’t want to talk about it just yet. “Hush.”

  “You have. I’m glad. Now you understand my despair.”

  But she didn’t. “Come sit beside me.” She held Fanny’s hand as Fanny’s tears began. She hadn’t been able to save a moth from dying in a candle’s flame earlier this night. The image stayed in her mind.

  Did the moth know the alluring flame would singe its wings and that it would die?

  Or did it just bless the heat of the flame?

  And did it die happy?

  Chapter 31

  ACK AGAIN AT THE FORTRESS OF PIGNEROL, D’ARTAGNAN shook off weariness with a short nap—any musketeer worth his musket could nap while still in the saddle, if need be—and then went to survey the state of his prisoners. It didn’t take long before he found himself watching Cinq Mars’s face carefully. It was nothing more than instinct, nothing more than the faintest movement of eyelids in the gaunt angles of Cinq Mars’s face, but D’Artagnan thought, he’s going to attempt something.

  “How is the boy?” Cinq Mars asked.

  Not well. He ate little or nothing, made continual clicking sounds when he was not howling, and he defecated in corners. He tried to tear the bandage from his cuts, pulled all bandages off his fingers. Under no circumstances must he die, D’Artagnan had shouted to the musketeers, the priest in charge of his care. But how did one force an insane boy to obey? He made no answer to Cinq Mars’s question. What was there to say?

  “I must see him.” Cinq Mars was forceful. “He doesn’t do well without me. Let me see him. His majesty doesn’t wish him to die, does he?” The musketeer caught the shadow that moved across D’Artagnan’s face and repeated, “Let me see the boy.”

  Cinq Mars had to be carried in on a litter. He couldn’t stand for long yet, though his own wound had stopped bleeding. Outside the boy’s cell, D’Artagnan motioned for his musketeers to set down the litter, for one to unlock the door. He leaned down and with a grunt picked Cinq Mars up into his own strong arms, walking through the door and kicking it closed again with his heel. The boy sat in a corner rhythmically hitting his head against the wall. The contents of food bowls were everywhere. A flask of watered wine stood on its side, a slow drip falling into a puddle of wet. The boy’s hands had dried blood on them.

  “Put me down near him,” Cinq Mars said. He groaned as D’Artagnan propped him against the wall, and the sound set off a howl from the boy. The sound harsh in his ears, disturbing enough to make his flesh crawl, D’Artagnan brought a pillow for Cinq Mars’s back and then stepped to one side. This boy was little more than an animal, a maddened, crazed beast. How could he be cared for?

  “Hush, now, hush,” Cinq Mars crooned, the tenderness of his voice at odds with his harsh face, his perennial grimace. “Hush, my prince, my handsome one. It’s all right. It’s fine. I’m here now. Old Cinq Mars is here. Hush, my boy, hush.”

  It might have been a lullaby.

  The boy never looked at him, never acknowledged he was near, but the howling gradually stopped under the drone of Cinq Mars’s words, though not the rocking back and forth. D’Artagnan moved his jaw a little to take tension from it when the boy finally became silent.

  “Get fresh food for him,” Cinq Mars said in the same tone as his lullaby. “We’re going to eat now, aren’t we, my prince? We’re going to feed this strong, handsome boy. Yes, we are. Cinq Mars’s good boy. Cinq Mars’s handsome prince.”

  Outside the cell, D’Artagnan gave the order, then took the tray to Cinq Mars himself.

  “Sit in that chair there,” Cinq Mars ordered. With slow and careful effort, he cut meat from a fat roasted pullet and divided bread, eating some of both as he did so. He poured a bit of ale into a cup. Carefully, clearly hurting, he placed the plate of meat and chunks of bread and the ale in front of the boy, sat down on the floor, to one side of the boy.

  “Good,” he said, “so good. They’ve outdone themselves in the kitchen for you. Eat for your servant, Cinq Mars, my prince. Eat the food in front of you. Go on.” He began to eat, making smacking sounds.

  The boy rocked back and forth. An arm darted to the meat. The boy never stopped moving but began to eat what was before him. The mask stopped at the mouth, so that its wearer could eat with ease.

  “Something to clean him with. Don’t step in front of him or too near,” Cinq Mars ordered. When he had what he needed, he wiped the boy’s hands, wiped as much of his face as showed under the iron mask.

  “You miss your Cinq Mars, don’t you?” Cinq Mars said. “Of course you do. That’s a good boy. You’re a good, fine boy. Your mother would be proud. Why does he still wear that cursed mask? What can it matter here? Take it off, and let me stay in here with him. He’s accustomed to me.”

  “No,” said D’Artagnan.

  “He won’t eat unless I’m here.”

  D’Artagnan leaned down and picked Cinq Mars up again, walked with him to the door and kicked it, and one of his men opened it. Howling filled the cell, whitened the face of the musketeer who’d opened the door, made Cinq Mars curse. He cursed D’Artagnan all the way back to his own cell, and when D’Artagnan laid Cinq Mars back in his bed, Cinq Mars told him exactly what he thought of him and the queen mother and the cardinal and his majesty, cursing them all with a string of snarling oaths.

  “Bastard,” he finally said, out of breath. “You’re a bastard, and the queen mother is a cunt I curse to my dying day who hasn’t the compassion of the lowest whore on the streets, and his majesty is a bastard, lower than the cunt who bore him.”
r />   “You took an oath to serve him.”

  “The king I took an oath to serve is long dead.”

  “The king never dies. Long live the king.”

  LATER D’ARTAGNAN SAT on a terrace with the governor of the fortress. He placed a bag of gold on the stones at the governor’s feet.

  “That’s for your trouble and your loyalty. His majesty expects complete obedience from you, and I tell you from first-hand experience, this isn’t a king to trifle with. What has Captain Cinq Mars said to you? Don’t lie. If you do, it will be you locked behind in a dungeon, the darkest one at the Bastille, while we pry it out of you.”

  “He offered coin to allow him and the boy to go. He said he could write one letter, and in three days I’d have a thousand gold louis and the blessings of the queen mother herself.”

  “There aren’t a thousand louis in that bag, but a sum to make up the difference will come to you in a month, I swear it on the soul of my wife. Forget you ever heard the queen mother’s name in this.” D’Artagnan’s voice was so grim the governor blinked.

  “Who else has talked to him?” D’Artagnan asked.

  “No one.”

  “A servant?”

  “Your men have been there whenever a servant has entered.”

  They were silent, drinking wine the governor’s wife served them.

  “Is the boy completely mad?” ventured the governor.

  “I can tell you nothing about him.”

  “His howling frightens the guards.”

  “It would frighten anyone, wouldn’t it?”

  D’Artagnan sat up until late going over details of the next step of his mission in his mind. A letter to his majesty lay written and sealed, would be given to the governor to deliver with all haste the next day. Keep me informed, his majesty had ordered. I want to see it as if I were standing there beside you.

  Chapter 32

  AUL PELLISON, THE VISCOUNT NICOLAS’S PERSONAL SECRETARY, sat on the edge of the public fountain staring up at a fortress built into the side of a mountain in a little village called Pignerol. Bleak and forbidding, the façade of the fortress told him nothing. Its governor had been equally stoic. No promise of any amount of coin moved his lips nor did a letter with the viscount’s seal. But guards were lesser mortals. They usually liked to drink at a tavern somewhere before they went home to plump wives and too many children and even more wine. They liked to talk among themselves about their work, as any man did. He went into the tavern around the corner from the fountain, ordered wine.

  “Do the guards from the fortress ever come here?” he asked the woman who brought his goblet. She had the hard-eyed squint of a woman who might own the place.

  “They live here. I have to send them home to their wives like bad boys.” She looked Pellison up and down. “You from Paris, too?”

  “Too? You’ve been entertaining visitors from Paris?”

  “Musketeers, big ones, handsome things, cheeky, pinched me more than once where they shouldn’t have, they were from Paris, I could tell.” And she mimicked his accent with a quick change of expression and emphasis. “You all talk like sissies,” she said, then sighed. “But these boys weren’t sissies, I can tell you.”

  “Many of them?” asked Pellison.

  “Fifteen, twenty. They bought up our wine and all the food we could cook.”

  “Going on a journey, it seems.”

  “To Monaco,” said the woman. “At least that’s what the stable boy heard. I hear the view of the sea is pretty there.”

  “I hear that, too,” said Pellison.

  “SO YOU’RE SANDRINE.”

  Louise’s maid stood perfectly still and hoped against hope that stillness would suffice. A musketeer had appeared out of nowhere, and now here she was, standing before the king of France, as La Porte pulled hunting boots off his feet.

  Louis cocked his head to one side, puzzled. “Are you or are you not Sandrine? Not that shirt, and I want a brocade jacket.”

  Sandrine nodded her head, the best she could do.

  “You serve Miss de la Baume le Blanc. Yes?”

  Again, Sandrine managed a movement with her head. Her eyes met his, but she had to look away. She saw him around the palace. Everyone did; it was the custom of French kings to live in public, but to be this close, all by herself, in his most private chamber, well, it was too overwhelming.

  “Sandrine, I am going to need your complete loyalty. You will be the holder of a secret, the secret of my love for your mistress. Have you the strength to hold that secret?”

  Her nod was a jerk.

  He stood, still in his hunting clothes, his hair wild and unkempt, planted himself inches from her. It was as if she could feel some holy warmth radiating out from him. So she’d tell her children one day.

  “Will you play messenger between your mistress and me? La Porte will bring you notes which you must see her receive. Request your mistress to be in the chamber where we meet after dinner. Will you deliver that message for me?”

  She dropped into a curtsy, nodding like a maniac at the floor. To her shock, he reached out and brought her up out of the curtsy. He bowed over her hand.

  “I am your servant if you help me. You will never regret earning my trust.” He turned away, went over to a chair where his valet had laid out clothing for him.

  “You may leave now, Sandrine,” La Porte said.

  She turned in a circle, not remembering which door she’d entered.

  “That one.” The valet pointed. In his hand was a small bag. “From his majesty,” he told her.

  She was in the maid of honors’ bedchamber before she had the wits to see what was in the bag. She took a peek. There were coins. She swallowed. More coins than she had seen in her lifetime. She sat down on the little cot in a back attic that was hers. Merciful Mother of Heaven, they were rich, and the king himself had bowed over her hand. The world as she knew it had just tipped over.

  THIS TIME LOUISE felt less shy and more impatient. She was in the chamber again, sitting in a chair, hands clasped in her lap. When the door opened, and he entered the chamber, she jumped up from where she was sitting and smiled. She even forgot to curtsy. “I thought you might not send for me again—”

  “You’re all I can think about.”

  She sank down on her heel to curtsy to him, but he pulled her close. Her ear was against his chest, and through the sumptuous fabric she could hear his heart beating hard. For her.

  “My ministers think me solemn as they talk about this and that, but all I am thinking of is you. I was half-afraid you wouldn’t be here—” he said between the kisses he was now placing on her face.

  “I will always be here.”

  Louis put his mouth on the bare flesh that began a sweet swell of breast. His hands explored the soft part of her upper arms hidden by the lace of her full sleeves. She stood with eyes half-closed, trembling a little, which touched Louis. She was no court diamond, polished to hardness and facile in feeling. He wanted to obliterate for a time all else in his life. He led her to the bed, pulled at her laces and ties, at his laces and ties, and then they were mostly naked, and he kissed her like a soldier on pillage, entangling his hands in her hair. Lovemaking was easier this time, wetter, fuller, sweeter, and he could not have imagined that it would be more overpowering than the first time, but it was.

  Even when it was over, he couldn’t stop kissing her. He kissed down one side of her and then the other, and she shivered and sighed, but was silent. Tell me you love me, he willed her to say, but she was silent, closing those hypnotic eyes and covering her face with one arm. The arc of her arm, the hollow of its pit, were beautiful. And now he wanted to make love again, and this time he was slower, more curious, more focused on her. He wanted to bring her to the passionate cries his wife made, but soon he was kissing her like a wild man, and his release was close to pain it was so good. He pulled her tight against him. “Every night, we must send one another a note. Will you do that? I won’t rest until I’ve
had a note from you,” he said.

  “What shall I say in the note?” Though Louise didn’t know it, her voice carried happiness like a silver bell in its tones.

  “That you love me. That you miss me.”

  “Every second I’m not with you, I miss you.”

  He ran his hands down her body, fierce and possessive and as happy as she was. “Tell me that. Tell me of your day. Wish me good night. There will be no secrets between us, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you always so obedient?”

  The happiness in her face dimmed. “I told you I wasn’t clever—”

  He stopped the rest of her words with a kiss. He traced the achingly fine planes of her face. “I don’t want clever. I want true-heartedness.”

  “To the prince, like an altar fire.”

  “What is that?”

  “The motto of my house. Appropriate, yes?”

  She made him laugh. “Come hunting with me tomorrow,” he demanded. He loved the way she looked on horseback.

  “If Madame goes, certainly I will.”

  That’s right; he forgot. He couldn’t command her at will. She was not the maîtresse en titre with her own household and lodging. She belonged to Henriette’s household. Well, so be it. They’d maneuver around it for now. She was maîtresse en titre of his heart.

  “Have you any other orders for me, your majesty?”

  She teased him, smiling at him in a way that he could not resist. “Wear a blue ribbon here,” he touched above one ear, “for love of me tomorrow. And when you write to me, tell me what you’ve fretted over in the day. I would rid your life of any worries. Now, get out of bed, you lazy wench. Go over there and then walk toward me.”