Minette

by Melanie Clegg

  Our mothers are all smiles as he leads me out into the middle of the gallery and we take our places for the dance. Most of the court saw the commotion but have no idea what just happened so they watch us curiously, wondering what drama they managed to miss. As we dance, I spot Philippe wandering from group to group, scattering glimmering droplets of delicious gossip as he goes. By the time the party is over, everyone in the Louvre, from the sleepy little maids who live in the attics to the stable boys looking after the royal horses and the red cheeked cooks toiling in the enormous kitchens will know that my cousin refused to dance with me and that, worse still, I declared that I had no wish to dance with him either.

  Louis doesn’t say a word as we dance. It is only when the music pauses and we bow to each other before parting that he firms his grip upon my hand and pulls me a little closer. ‘I am sorry about your brothers,’ is all he says and then a second later he releases me and is gone.

  ‘Is there nothing they won’t do to throw that poor girl underneath you?’ I hear Olympe mutter waspishly as he returns to her side.

  The rest of the ball passes without incident. I partner a few eligible young men, carefully chosen and approved by Mam, who blush as they lead me out and make embarrassed small talk as we dance. At Tante Anne’s insistence, I also dance with Philippe, who murmurs spiteful gossip about the Mancini girls into my ears and pinches my fingers until they smart.

  My mother often tells me that reports of all my doings are sent back to Oliver Cromwell in England. I like to think of him, sitting in his hard wooden chair at Whitehall, avidly poring over descriptions of balls, parties and picnics. I think about him every time my feet feel too tired to dance and it spurs me on.

  I’m resting on a stool beside my aunt’s chair when Philippe’s handsome friend wanders past and gives me a long look from those wide hazel eyes.

  ‘Who is that boy?’ I ask whoever is standing beside me.

  It’s Françoise de Rochechouart, of course. ‘That is Armand de Gramont, the Comte de Guiche,’ she immediately says. ‘He is the eldest son and heir of the Duc de Gramont.’ She turns her beguiling gaze upon my face. ‘Do you like him, Madame?’ she asks.

  I can feel my cheeks go hot and red. ‘I think he is insufferable,’ I say.

  She laughs. ‘All the young men at court are. They copy your cousins.’

  I smile. ‘My brothers aren’t like that,’ I say with a pang of sadness as I wonder where they all are now.

  Françoise nods. ‘And nor are you,’ she says with a smile before pausing and looking at me for a moment as if weighing me up. ‘It won’t always be like this, you know,’ she says and then is gone with a whisper of pink silk and a faint tang of rose scent before I can ask her what she means.

  Chapter Six

  Paris, February 1656

  There’s a painting in Mam’s closet of my elder sister Mary as a little girl, pensive and pale in pale blue satin with her hair arranged in soft auburn curls on either side of her face. It used to hang in pride of place in our father’s room when he was imprisoned at Hampton Court but after his execution Lady d’Aubigny, one of those courageous and highly coloured aristocratic ladies who have remained loyal to my family’s cause, cut it from its frame and smuggled it under her voluminous black silk skirts out of the country to Mam.

  Mary was twelve years old and had already been married and living in the Hague for two years by the time I was born. She could almost have been my mother in fact. She never fails to write and send lovely, well chosen presents on my birthdays and at Christmas but I think of her as more like a distant but affectionate aunt than an actual full blooded sister. All I know of her is her portrait and so in my mind, she is forever a small girl with a shy smile and uncertain eyes.

  It’s therefore a huge shock when she arrives in Paris breathless, pink cheeked, bursting with gossip and a head taller than our mother. Her small hands are thrust into an enormous fur muff and she hops restlessly from side to side as she looks us all over in the chill marble entrance hall of the Palais Royal. ‘I can’t believe that I haven’t seen you for thirteen years,’ she says brightly to Mam, kissing her pale cheek. ‘Not since you took me to the Hague to be married to poor William. Do you remember father riding along the cliff top and waving his feathered hat in the air to us as we sailed away?’

  ‘That must have been the last time that you saw him,’ Mam says with tears in her eyes. It doesn’t take much to make her cry these days.

  Mary sighs and turns to me. ‘Let me look at you,’ she says, hugging me close. She smells of roses and vanilla. ‘Just look at that astonishing red hair.’

  ‘She can always dye it when she’s older,’ Mam says. She thinks my hair is unlucky. Witch hair she calls it sometimes when she thinks I can’t hear. It reminds her of the Scottish, whom she has hated with a passion ever since they sold my father to Parliament.

  ‘And miss the opportunity to parade her in front of those bastards in Edinburgh?’ Mary exclaims as we make our way upstairs to the gallery where the rest of the court are waiting to see her. ‘I think not. The Scots may be hard as nails but they are driven by pure sentiment and this girl is a true Stuart through and through.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ Mam sounds weary already. She warned me that a minute in Mary’s company is more than enough for anyone and I’m beginning to see why. ‘Rumour has it that you have come to set your cap at Louis.’

  My sister shrieks with laughter. ‘Set my cap? What very vulgar expressions you use these days, mother dearest.’

  Mam presses her lips together. ‘So you don’t deny it then?’ she says.

  Mary grins. ‘Well, it’s obvious that one of us should marry him, don’t you think?’ She turns her head and sticks her tongue out at me as I skip up the stairs behind them, holding my breath and desperate not to miss a single word of this fascinating exchange. ‘It should be Minette of course but seeing as she is still just a baby…’

  ‘I’m older than you were when you got married,’ I protest furiously, earning myself a scowl from Mam.

  ‘Yes, and look how that turned out.’ I hear Mary’s pudding faced lady in waiting, Mistress Hyde give a snort of laughter behind me.

  ‘Hold your tongue, Mary.’ Mam throws up her hands in exasperation. ‘None of this answers my question. Why can you never just give me a straight answer?’

  ‘I told you in my letter,’ Mary says as we sweep past the waiting courtiers on our way to Mam’s closet. ‘I missed you.’ Mam looks unconvinced and she sighs and rolls her eyes. ‘I’m also furious with Charles for having signed a treaty with Spain. He claims not to have any choice but what about all the rest of us? The Dutch have been at war with Spain for as long as I can remember and as for you…’

  Mam raises a hand to her cheek as if she has been slapped. ‘It has been very difficult,’ she says in a small voice. France and Spain are at war and Charles’ decision to throw his lot in with the Spanish and accept a pension from them in return for the promise of men and arms to aid his return to England, has made things very awkward between us and the Louvre. ‘Your Tante Anne has been very kind although of course she was a Spanish Infanta before she married my brother so what else can she do? Louis, however, is a very different matter…’

  Mary nods and sighs. ‘Boy kings can be tricky creatures,’ she remarks, rather cryptically.

  Louis is clearly most displeased with my family’s perfidy but angriest of all, ironically enough, is James. Charles’ treaty with Spain meant that he and Harry were expelled from the French army, where they had both been very happy and instead were required to fight for Spain against their former comrades at arms. Harry had been with the French army for less time and went cheerfully enough but James was furious and stormed back to Paris to pour his complaints into Mam’s willing ears and remains here still. ‘I’ve fought alongside Marshal Turenne since I was a boy,’ he said. ‘And now I am expected to face him from the other side of the battlefield? How can Charles ask such a thing of me? Has he
learned nothing about loyalty from what happened to our father and to us all?’

  I consider this now as Mam and Mary sit in front of the fire in the closet and chatter on about their lives, their voices rising and falling in sympathy, surprise and astonishment while I sit beside them on my little cushion, hugging my knees and staring into the fire’s glowing depths. Even allowing for his own anger and disappointment, James isn’t being entirely fair to Charles. Loyalty is such a shifting, changing beast and our elder brother knows this better than most.

  ‘I can’t believe you have a baby now,’ Mam says, breaking into my thoughts.

  ‘He’s not a baby any more - he’s just turned five,’ Mary says before turning to me. ‘My husband died a week before he was born, which was unfortunate timing even by his low standards. I thought I was going to die too in childbed and leave the poor little mite an orphan. My mother in law, Amalia, would have adored that as she can’t stand me and it would have meant having full control of the little prince instead of having to share him with me.’ She gives a shrug. ‘It was a miserable business. Not least for Amalia for here I am, alive and inconveniently well.’

  ‘What is the boy like?’ Mam says wistfully. It’s been a long time since we had a baby in the family. I know that she will be unbearable when I start to have children of my own.

  Mary glances uneasily away. ‘To tell you the truth, I barely see him. His grandmother is in charge of his education and I’ve always been at some pains to avoid any involvement in Dutch politics.’ She sees that Mam is about to cry again and relents. ‘He’s a handsome little man though. Did you know that I wanted to call him Charles but they made a huge fuss and in the end I had to agree to Willem just to keep the peace. What a name!’

  ‘I’m sure it suits him very well,’ Mam says with a watery smile. ‘Please send me a portrait when you get back to the Hague. I only have the one you sent me when he was a baby and would love to see what he looks like now.’ There’s a hint of reproach in her voice for of course we are all very well aware that Mary ought to have brought a portrait of her son with her instead of all those dozens of parcels and boxes of expensive, perfumed fripperies that we saw being unloaded into the hall downstairs.

  ‘Aunt Elizabeth wants to know all about you,’ Mary says, turning her huge brilliant hazel eyes on me as I squirm awkwardly on my cushion. ‘The youngest Stuart. She says that you are our good luck charm.’

  Mam pinches her lips tightly together and looks away. She still hasn’t forgiven our father’s sister Elizabeth for taking Harry’s side against her all those years ago. After he left Paris, a letter arrived from Elizabeth telling Mam exactly what she thought of her. She read some of the most choice passages out over dinner then angrily stuffed it into the fire. ‘How dare she speak to me like that?’ she demanded of Lord Jermyn and me. ‘Just who does she think she is? The exiled queen of nothing at all. Her husband only managed to keep hold of his throne for a few months before they were sent packing.’

  There’s an awkward pause. ‘You can tell your aunt that my daughter is a devout Catholic,’ Mam says at last, waspishly as my sister sighs and rolls her eyes. ‘And that I will thank her not to meddle in our affairs.’

  There’s a knock on the door, which opens to admit a procession of maids bearing silver pots of hot chocolate and plates of pretty iced cakes and little biscuits. They are all agog at the sight of Mary, who is not at all what anyone expected in her saffron silk travelling dress with fabulous diamonds sparkling on her fingers, around her neck and dangling gracefully from her ear lobes. Restless as ever, she’s thrown herself carelessly into her chair and is reclined across it with both legs hanging over the arm. One pink velvet slipper sewn with pearls is dangling precariously from her foot and as I watch it falls to the polished wooden floor with a clatter.

  As soon as the door closes behind the maids, Mary leaps up and pours out the hot chocolate herself, dipping her long fingers into the pot and sucking on them thoughtfully before popping a succession of biscuits into her mouth. ‘I’m famished,’ she says to me with a grin. ‘You should have seen the inn that we stayed at last night. Fleas in the beds, cold coffee and dry bread. That’s France for you though, I suppose.’

  ‘We will call for dinner soon,’ Mam says wearily. She’s pale as a bone and I press her hands between my own to warm them. ‘Really Mary, could you stop putting your fingers in everything?’

  ’No,’ Mary says with a wink at me as she hands Mam some hot chocolate in a delicate china cup. ‘You shouldn’t be so hard on Aunt Elizabeth,’ she says, settling herself back down on her chair with a pile of biscuits on her lap, scattering crumbs all over the floor. ‘She believes that she is protecting Charles’ interests.’

  Mam goes a little pink about the ears. This is never a good sign. ‘She knows nothing whatsoever about the matter,’ she says firmly. ‘It’s none of her business and I refuse to let her meddle in what ought to be a private family matter.’

  ‘Mam…’ Mary puts her hand on our mother’s arm but is shaken off.

  ‘Did you know that Cromwell and his minions still write to me to ask when Henriette is going to receive instruction in the Protestant faith and to inform me that even as her mother I have no right to raise her in my own faith?’ she rages. ‘How dare they. I’m her mother and what are they? And what is your Aunt Elizabeth for that matter?’

  ‘The Princess of England should be a Protestant,’ Mary says gently with a helpless shrug. ‘That has always been the way of things.’

  ‘I should like to remind them that my daughter that they apparently care so much about was forced to flee in the middle of the night from their clutches,’ Mam says as if Mary hasn’t spoken. ‘Lady Morton walked for over a hundred miles with her in her arms until they had reached Dover and were able to board a ship to France. She almost died of exhaustion.’

  Mary and I exchange looks. We’ve heard this story so many times before. It’s one of Mam’s favourites and is rolled out without fail every time one of us does anything to disappoint her. I must have heard it a hundred times in the days after Harry went away.

  ‘Except it wasn’t like that at all,’ I tell Mary later when we are walking together in the snow covered garden with ugly little Mistress Hyde meandering a discreet distance behind us and casting flirtatious looks from beneath her heavy eyelids up at the gentlemen who watch us from the windows above. Our brother James strides silently at her side, his expression gloomy and thin hands thrust deep into his pockets. The gardens look like something from a fairy tale with gleaming icicles drooping from the trees and frost covered leaves crunching beneath our feet. ‘Lady Morton later got a very strange letter from the steward at Oatlands. He told her that as instructed they waited three days to raise the alarm about my escape so that we would have enough time to get away but when Parliament eventually sent some men to investigate they just laughed about how glad they were that I was no longer to be a burden upon them and wondered why it took poor Lady Morton so long to make off with me.’

  I expected Mary to laugh at this revelation but instead she just looks sad. ‘Poor Mam,’ she says. ‘Always thinking that the world is against her. She wasn’t always like this, you know.’

  I know that this is true as I’ve seen a painting of Mam as she used to be when father was still alive and they presided over their own court in London. Back then she wore shimmering colourful silk gowns with precious lace at her collar and cuffs and heavy lustrous pearls swinging from her ears and clasped around her neck. Her eyes were bright, not with tears but with laughter and her lips were painted pink and curved into a humorous smile. She was bold and beautiful and shimmering with life and wit and vigour. Poor Mam. How times have changed.

  ‘What is Aunt Elizabeth really like?’ I ask as shivering with cold we make our way back into the palace, pausing in the vestibule to hand our fur lined cloaks to a waiting maid. ‘Mam won’t tell me. She doesn’t like it when I talk about her.’

  Mary smiles and pulls off her
gloves. ‘Ah, poor Mam really is just eaten up with envy isn’t she?’ She sighs and gives a little shrug. ‘Our father idolised his sister, you know and Mam ended up hating the very mention of her name. It was all ‘Elizabeth would do this’, ‘Elizabeth thinks this’ and ‘Elizabeth won’t like that.’’ She grins and hands her gloves to the maid then turns to take my hand. ‘I think the thing that bothered her most though was that everyone knew that it should have been Elizabeth on the throne and not our father.’ She accepts two glasses of warmed spiced wine from a footman and hands one to me before taking a sip of her own. ‘Our grandfather, King James, always lamented that Elizabeth was not born a boy as she would have made an excellent king one day.’ She looks thoughtful. ‘Ignoring the fact of course that she was named for the great Queen Elizabeth Tudor, who proved to be a better monarch than any of them.’

  For the next six months my usual quiet, orderly life of lessons, sedate parties at the Louvre and visits to Chaillot with Mam is completely disrupted as my sister quickly becomes all the rage in novelty hungry Paris. Even the courtiers at the Louvre are lured across the Rue Saint Honoré when they learn that Mary has seemingly bottomless bags of money and wears jewels and pearls that are even more fabulous than Tante Anne’s. ‘What’s the use of living in the Hague, surrounded by all those merchants and money lenders if you can’t take advantage of it?’ she says to me, fastening a string of beautiful pearls around my neck and kissing my cheek. ‘You should keep these. I feel bad for sending you those tawdry coral beads now when clearly you deserved pearls.’

  ‘Do you like the Hague?’ I ask, reverently touching the chill pearls with my fingertips.

  Mary laughs and shakes her pretty head. ‘Not in the least. I didn’t want to marry William, you know but what could I do when Mam and father were so determined? He wasn’t a terrible person just boring, with a nose whistle and no discernible sense of humour.’ And then it all pours out about her dull husband who at least had the grace to die but in doing so left her with his overbearing sharp nosed mother who loves to pry into Mary’s business and is doing her best to turn her son against her. ‘I’ll show them though,’ she says with a grin. ‘Do you know, I still can’t speak more than a dozen words of Dutch? It’s a horrible language. Guttural.’ She looks at me. ‘You are so lucky to be here in Paris.’ She sighs. ‘I always forget that I am half French too. I wish I could stay here forever.’