“Do not speak of her!”
“If you killed her, you would never be able to live with yourself. Let her go, Will. Be the king you are meant to be.”
For one startled, horrifying moment, she feared he would strike her. But he tightened his hand and locked it at his side. “What do you know of ruling? This is my kingdom, you will not tell me who I am or am not!”
She softened her voice. “I didn’t mean that. William, I apologize—”
“It’s too late. There are guards outside waiting to escort you out of Whitehall.”
“I don’t need to be guarded back to Hatfield.”
“You’re not returning to Hatfield. You have proven you cannot be trusted. And since you were so eager to release Minuette from the Tower … then you can take her place.”
Elizabeth was struck by a gust of dizziness. Only by sheer force of will did she keep steady on her feet. “That is not necessary.”
“I say it is.”
She would not beg. Instead, with considerable effort, she curtsied to her brother. “As it pleases Your Majesty.”
“There is nothing left can please me.”
17 November 1557
Chateau de Blanclair
On my first crossing of the Channel, I was excited and cheerful and very young and every moment was delightful. The second crossing I was in a temper and shut myself up belowdecks.
This third crossing was like Purgatory, if we were allowed to believe in Purgatory. Although I suppose now I can, seeing as I am in a Catholic household in a Catholic country.
Granted, crossing in late October is a considerably chancier business than in midsummer. Robert, Carrie, and I waited tensely in a small inn outside Dover for two days, praying all the while that the weather would turn. It did, but the seas were rough and the wind cold and I was so damned uncomfortable.
But the truly hellish part of the Channel crossing was that I kept thinking I could hear Dominic, lecturing one of the young girls from our first crossing, or see his face taut with anger and disappointment at my folly during our second crossing. Perhaps it is as well that I am exiled to France, for though I know Dominic was once a guest at Renaud’s home, I have no memories of him here.
Here, it is only Carrie and I and Harrington. And soon my child.
19 November 1557
Chateau de Blanclair
Carrie and Harrington were married today. They only waited this long because Harrington flatly refused to be married by a Catholic priest. “No offense to you, mistress,” he told me gravely, and I assured him with equal gravity that no offense was taken.
Robert Dudley, who has been reluctantly confined here with us since our arrival, gladly took the challenge to locate a Protestant cleric for the ceremony. He was gone for three days and returned in a sort of manic cheer with a suitably reformist priest in tow. Renaud and Nicole, impeccably gracious hosts, welcomed the man and provided a beautiful wedding in a small salon of their home, papered in blue damask and looking like an underwater grotto.
Carrie was neat and lovely in one of Nicole’s older gowns, and Renaud had suitably outfitted Harrington in a no doubt made-to-order jerkin and doublet. For a moment I was amused at the great difference in their sizes: Harrington looms over everyone like a granite outcropping and Carrie is like a little wren tucked beneath his arm. But when they look at each other, there is something innately right about the match. And when they look at me, I see their fierce loyalty and am glad to have them in this new world of mine.
22 November 1557
Chateau de Blanclair
Robert left the morning after the wedding. He claims he wished to be nearer the French court to determine how things stand with Nofolk’s negotiations. But I think he cannot bear to be still and, though I know Elizabeth told him to remain in France until she sent for him, I wager he will make his way back across the Channel as soon as he can arrange it.
I am finding it hard to keep awake these days. Partly because the baby is nearing its time (so say both Carrie and Nicole) and partly, I think, because it is a form of retreat. If I am sleeping, I do not have to remember.
29 November 1557
Chateau de Blanclair
The sun has made its early departure from the winter sky and my pains grow in earnest. They have been erratic all day, but now they are regular and of a quality that announces the time is now.
I will not cry.
Minuette did not cry, not precisely. Carrie encouraged her to cry, or scream, or curse, but that all seemed far too much work. Though Minuette had always been told how transparent she was in her emotions, how everything she felt was there for others to see immediately, perhaps the last years of secrets and lies had taught her concealment. Or perhaps she was only comfortable being transparent on her own terms. In any case, in the extremity of the pain Minuette closed in on herself. She knew she moaned, when it seemed as though the pain wanted to pull her under, with barely a breath or two between surges, and she seemed to be whispering things under her breath, but even she wasn’t entirely sure what she said. Please was in there a lot, and so was Help, and several times Mother.
It went on and on until Carrie told her the sun was just beginning to rise. “How much longer?” Minuette croaked to the French midwife who had been chattering volubly all night. She didn’t even know if she managed to speak in French, or if it was English, but the midwife patted her hand and smiled. “Good girl,” she said. “Almost.”
There seemed a longer pause than she’d had for hours, and then Minuette felt a gush of something warm. She’d heard of a woman’s waters, but this was nothing like what she’d thought. One moment she spared an almost amused thought for the mess of all this, and then she was swept by something more terrifying even than the pain: an urge to push that was primitive in its demands.
“Carrie,” she gasped, reaching blindly for her friend’s hand, “what …”
But she couldn’t talk, she couldn’t think, she couldn’t do anything except what her body wanted. Carrie spoke low and warm and reassuring in her ear. “Don’t fret, let it come, this is good, trust yourself …”
There was no time after that, just the demands of her body and the awful thought that she would do anything for this to be over, even die, and why would any woman do this more than once?
Finally, after much too long (though even five minutes of that was much too long), a sharper pain, like burning, and the midwife crooning to her in French and Carrie cautioning her to breathe deep and go slowly, but how was one supposed to control any of this?
And then a rush and the horrible pushing sensation vanished and Minuette realized she could breathe deeply for the first time in months and she had completely forgotten what all this was in aid of, so desperately relieved was she that it was over.
Until a sharp, aggrieved wail reached through the morass of her spent body and plucked once—hard and deep and eternal—on the very chords of Minuette’s soul.
Her child.
“Carrie?”
“Ten fingers, ten toes, and a cry to wake the dead. A healthy, imperious girl, just like her mother.”
“A girl?” And just like that, she burst into tears.
She cried for herself and her daughter, cried for England and all those she would never see again, but mostly she cried for Dominic because he would never have a chance to be either glad or sorry that he’d had a daughter rather than a son … or to wonder if the child was even his.
She cried for so long and so untouchably that she must have alarmed all the women present. It was a man’s voice that finally brought her back to her body and her bed and all the present pain that was, in a way, an anchor against the overwhelming pains and regrets of the past.
Renaud LeClerc laid the tightly bundled baby girl in her arms and said simply, “Dominic would want his daughter to have a name, madame.”
It was precisely the right thing to say, and the right way to say it. Compassionate but matter-of-fact, and surely it was his own fatherhood t
hat allowed him to add with a sincerity that could not be denied, “Sons are gifts from God, but daughters are gifts straight from the women we love. Dominic loved nothing in this world so much as you, madame, and now the daughter you have given him in death must know from you both her mother’s love and her father’s.”
Still hiccupping from sobs, Minuette worked hard to keep her arms steady as they curved around the baby girl. Her own crying seemed to have stopped the child’s, and she studied her mother with wide eyes of the indeterminate bluish-gray of infants. What colour would those eyes settle on? Minuette wondered. Her father’s green? Her mother’s hazel? Or the bright blue of England’s king …
At that thought, Minuette knew it would never matter. Not to her, certainly, but not to Dominic, either, if he had been here. She’d known him well enough to be sure of that. Her daughter was a Courtenay, born and bred, and Minuette would make sure she knew everything about her father as she grew.
During the long, terrible months of her pregnancy, she had not given thought even once to a name, for that had seemed an act of folly when she’d been certain she would never be allowed to long outlive her child’s birth. She let herself ponder this question for a few minutes, drinking in her daughter’s face, all round cheeks and faintly indignant expression and pointed chin. She thought of the women she herself had loved and could honor: her mother, Marie; Queen Anne; Elizabeth; Nicole LeClerc; Carrie. But her daughter continued to look at her as though she knew her own name and was just waiting for her mother to recognize it.
The women were cleaning the chamber, tending the fire, moving around the heavily shrouded space like wraiths. “Draw back the curtains,” Minuette said to Carrie.
She complied, though only with the long windows farthest from the bed, in order to keep both her and the baby from the drafts of oncoming winter. But it was enough, for the sun had risen and the light that streamed in through the leaded glass brought with it not only the promise of a future, but the certainty of a name.
“Lucette,” Minuette said, looking first to her child, who seemed contented, and then to Renaud’s rock-solid masculine face. He had the gift of being an island of security wherever he was, very much like Dominic. “Lucette Courtenay, for she is a light in darkness.”
Renaud’s hand curved gently around Lucette’s head and Minuette saw a glint of tears in his eyes. “Well named, madame,” he whispered. “And welcome to the world, Mademoiselle Lucette. Your home is here, for as long as either of you shall desire.”
After William’s first visit to the dungeons, Dominic had prepared himself to expect anything, from hourly visits to taunt him to more long days and weeks of solitude. It was a combination: over the next two days, William descended to the cell five times in all. He veered between brooding, watchful silence, and long descriptions of Dominic’s “execution” and how devastated Minuette had been. At first Dominic closed his ears to all talk of Minuette. He might have urged her to put herself into William’s chancy care, but that didn’t mean he wanted to hear about it. But it soon became clear, from William’s tone if not his words, that things had not gone well between them. There was a mean, selfish part of Dominic that was glad of Minuette’s defiance, though he did not want to see her die.
And that was surely what all this was about, wasn’t it? To punish him to the very limits of his life by either turning Minuette into William’s mistress or by being treated to the specifics of her death and knowing—irrational though it was—that Dominic had failed in his promise to catch her when she jumped out of this world.
After two days came the solitude, with only the silent man to remove his waste bucket and Eleanor to bring him food. She was much worse than William, for she could never stop talking, and Dominic would gladly have choked her to death by the end of a fortnight if he could have reached her. But he remained chained and tried to tune out her light flow of vicious chatter that never told him anything useful.
He forced his mind to work, to scratch out the days as marked by food, to sleep at regular intervals, to wash his face and limbs in the cold water brought every third day, to recite to himself scripture and poetry and mathematics and the history of battlefield tactics. He couldn’t decide if it made him saner or crazier to speak aloud, but sometimes he could not bear his own silence any longer and would talk to Minuette. Words of comfort, of encouragement, of safe delivery of the child, of mercy, and of hope.
It was late December, he thought Christmas Day itself by his reckoning, when William appeared once more. The moment he saw William’s eyes, Dominic’s hope died. It was the face of a man who has been cheated of the one thing he wanted, desperately angry and lost even though he himself has thrown it away.
“She’s dead. The execution was ten days ago. I thought you would want to know.”
There were a million things Dominic wanted to know, but was not willing to ask. Did she die well? Was it quick and painless, as I promised her? Was she frightened? Did she cry for me? Where is she buried?
But only one question mattered enough to ask. “And the child?”
William’s eyes shuttered, locking away his own anger. “A son. I’ve claimed him as mine and given him his own household.”
Dominic wanted to shut his eyes and pretend none of this was happening, but he would not weaken before William. Was it better or worse that the child survived? Better, surely, for the child was, after everything, part of Minuette and it was important that her son be safe.
William turned away from the cell and Dominic called after him, “Are you finished with me now?”
Are you going to kill me now? he meant. And surely William understood that, for he paused and threw an almost casual glance over his shoulder. “Not until your hope is gone. I will know when it is.”
Only when William said it did Dominic realize he did still have hope. Knowing that Minuette’s son (My son? his heart whispered) lived gave him a hope of purpose.
“You’re a cold-blooded bastard.”
William didn’t turn back this time. “I know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WHEN WILLIAM LEARNED of Minuette’s escape from the Tower, he had grimly begun to compose the lies he would tell Dominic about her. Her husband must not be allowed to know that she had slipped to safety, for then he might be content to die. And Dominic could not be allowed to die as a reward. His death would be agony, not release, breaking him beneath the weight of all his failures.
So when word reached William from his spies in France that Minuette had given birth to a girl, he ignored the fact that it was December and the roads grew progressively worse the farther one traveled north and that he would miss Christmas at court and that Elizabeth was still in the Tower … He ignored it all and rode to Lakehill House. Where he told Dominic the lies he thought would hurt him the most: that the child was a boy, that the child was in England under the king’s name, and that Minuette had been executed as threatened.
William did not find it as satisfying as he’d expected.
After only one night (in which he rebuffed Eleanor’s company and slept alone), he rode away without seeing Dominic again. It took him nearly three weeks to make it back to Greenwich, for he grew feverish along the way and spent five days in one of his father’s old hunting lodges that had not been regularly lived in since William’s coronation. These fits of illness were growing increasingly troublesome, leaving him with only the blurriest of memories. He saw that his men’s faces were wary when he emerged from the lodge ready to ride again, and wondered if it was fear for him or fear of him that caused it. Either way was as well—he would never again make the mistake of having friends.
Jane was at Greenwich, having overseen the Christmas festivities in his place, no doubt with punctilious generosity and personal devotion. She was now six months along with child and looked to be carrying well, though she had always been rather pale.
She was also, as she had always been, relentlessly good. Which was a valuable trait in a queen, but one that William f
ound tiresome when pointed at him and his actions.
Of course she did nothing so direct or combative as ask precisely where he had been or why. No doubt she assumed it was a woman. If Jane was jealous, she gave no sign. William could never decide if that was insulting or a relief. She did worry about his health and the strain of traveling poor roads in poorer weather and having only men and local servants to treat him at the outlying lodge, and would he like her to make him a tisane, she had a receipt for one that was most efficacious—
“Jane,” William cut her off. “What is it you want to ask me?”
Whenever she had a request to make that she was uncertain about, she would twitter on as though she could slip in something distasteful in a long flow of words and he would be lulled into agreement. He didn’t remember her being like that when they were younger; Jane had always been rather direct. Was it possible his own wife was afraid of him?
It would appear not. “I would ask you to release your sister from the Tower,” Jane said, meeting his eyes without blinking. She was the only one other than Lord Burghley who had spoken directly to William about Elizabeth since her imprisonment.
“Elizabeth is my family and that is not a matter you need concern yourself with.”
“Elizabeth is my family, also. And what good is a queen who cannot move a king to mercy?” Jane observed.
“Elizabeth earned her punishment. I did not choose it for her.”
“But to what end? Surely your displeasure has been well noted. And you cannot change the past. No punishment you can devise will bring her back to you, William.”
She did not mean Elizabeth. Only Jane would be principled enough to bring up the woman her husband had loved to his face. Or foolish enough.
“Do you think I don’t know that?” he lashed back, knowing that she would hear the warning signals in his voice. “Do you think I do not know every single thing that has been taken from me forever? Don’t tell me about changing the past. Are you not proof that I am living for the future?”
The Boleyn Reckoning: A Novel (The Boleyn Trilogy) Page 32