Minette

by Melanie Clegg

  ‘After all,’ Françoise de Rochechouart whispers to me as I walk past her. ‘Anne-Marie may be twelve years older than Louis but she’s still the wealthiest heiress in all Europe, if not the world and that’s not to be sniffed at. Why else would your mother be so desperate for her to marry one of your brothers?’

  ‘All her millions would buy a lot of ships and guns,’ I say thoughtfully. I look over the bobbing heads of the crowd to the podium where we are all to sit together. Tante Anne and Louis are already there and survey the courtiers in gloomy silence. Philippe is standing just behind them, chattering with Armand de Gramont and occasionally shrieking with nervous laughter.

  ‘You must be so thrilled to have your cousin back in the fold again,’ Françoise says in her quiet way as we walk together to the podium. ‘It’s certainly been peaceful without her.’

  I sit down beside Mam just as the doors at the end of the gallery swing open and Anne-Marie strides into the room, her eyes fixed on Louis, who squirms awkwardly in his chair. She may have been stuck in the countryside for years but its clear that her interest in fashion hasn’t abated at all as she’s wearing the most extraordinary gown of lavish, shimmering purple satin embroidered all over with sapphires and pearls.

  ‘Is that ermine?’ Philippe whispers behind me as she comes closer and we can see that she is wearing a purple velvet mantle fastened to her shoulders and trailing a full twelve yards behind her. Two grumpy faced page boys walk behind, hiding yawns behind their small hands and making desultory attempts to carry the mantle with their fingertips, Anne-Marie is moving too fast though and so they keep dropping it and in the end give up so that it trails in the dust, almost pulling her off balance as it does so.

  ‘Good God,’ Mam murmurs beside me as she sails somewhat wonkily towards us. ‘I can’t remember the last time I saw such a spectacle.’

  Everyone knows that Anne-Marie has been back in the bosom of our family for weeks but they all pretend to be touched and wipe away invisible tears as Tante Anne kisses her over rouged cheek and Louis himself leads her to her chair on the podium, his face carefully devoid of all expression although I fancy I glimpse a glint of amusement in the depths of his dark eyes.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to see you at court again,’ my mother says with a smile as Anne-Marie takes her seat beside her. She reeks of musky perfume and wine. ‘There’s not a lot to do in the countryside,’ Mam whispers to me with a wry shrug.

  ‘It’s always a delight to see you too, aunt,’ my cousin replies with a fake smile that reveals all of her large teeth and shining pink gums. She looks past Mam to me and frowns. ‘And who is this?’ Her voice is shrill with mingled jealousy and outrage. ‘It can’t be…’

  ‘Surely you have not forgotten my daughter, your little cousin Henrietta-Anne?’ Mam says smoothly and, if I’m not mistaken, with more than a pinch of satisfaction. I was a child of eight when she last set eyes on me, but I’m thirteen now and, I’m told, more than reasonably pretty for a princess although I don’t see it myself for I think my jaw is too long, my hair too red and my lips too thick for true prettiness.

  Anne-Marie glares at me as if I am a snake that has just slunk out from inside Mam’s thin bosom. She even recoils a little. ‘Little Henrietta?’ she repeats with a nervously brittle laugh. ‘My, how you have grown.’

  I force myself to smile and incline my head in what I hope is a friendly way. I feel anything but friendly though. I notice Anne-Marie’s protuberant pale blue eyes slide past me to Philippe and have to raise my pretty painted fan to hide my smile. So that’s where the wind lies, does it? She hasn’t got a hope of marrying Louis now but could his younger brother still be within her grasp?

  ‘Well, isn’t this nice?’ Tante Anne says loudly, looking around us all with what appears to be great satisfaction, apparently pleased to have the royal family all together again.

  ‘It’s certainly very pleasant to be back,’ Anne-Marie says, dragging her eyes away from Philippe, who gives a nervous little laugh and hurries off with his friends to form a little whispering gaggle on the other side of the room. Olympe de Mancini, recently married off by her uncle, alarmed by the King’s attentions towards her, to the Comte de Soissons and already hugely pregnant saunters over to them and casts a spiteful dark eye over my cousin. As I watch them all put their heads together, Armand de Gramont turns and looks directly at me for just a moment before smiling and turning away again.

  ‘You know, I could have cheerfully wrung your neck when it happened,’ Tante Anne says ruminatively, making us all look at her with surprise. ‘It’s lucky that you were nowhere near me at the time.’

  Anne-Marie looks as if she is going to be sick. ‘Well, that’s nice to know,’ she says at last as Louis gives a snort of laughter that he has to pretend is a coughing fit.

  Chapter Eight

  Paris, December 1657

  The snow, which started off this morning as a light dusting, swirling through the air like rice thrown at a wedding, is now falling thick and fast, covering the city with a soft white blanket. I kneel on a stiffly embroidered window seat in the gallery at the Palais Royal and press my face against the ice cold glass, imagining what it would be like to have the freedom to run through the crisp, thick snow, lift my face to the pale heavens and feel the damp flakes settle softly on my outstretched tongue.

  I shiver with pleasure as I remember the soft dense thud that my inelegantly booted feet made that morning when we made the trip across the the Rue Saint-Honoré to visit Tante Anne. Mam was watching me closely the whole way, no doubt recognising the mutinous glint in my eyes and so I did not dare give in to the urge to run shrieking around the Louvre courtyard and pelt the pink cheeked courtiers with snowballs.

  I’ve chosen a window that overlooks the street and watch, enthralled as a fashionably dressed couple swathed in rich furs carefully and unsmilingly make their way arm in arm down the treacherously icy street, taking teeny tiny steps and frowning down at the snow as they go. The gentleman has a vivid crimson satin lining to his dark cloak, while his lady wears a black velvet half mask on her face and has her hands thrust deep inside a large ermine muff. She looks elegant but extremely bad tempered, with rouged lips drawn together in a petulant little pout of displeasure.

  Behind them there trudges a much less well dressed couple - an earnest young man in a dark grey woollen suit who strolls hand in hand with a laughing blonde haired grisette whose bright green cotton skirts are tucked up around her red stockinged ankles. As I watch, she suddenly ducks down, scoops up a handful of snow then tips it down the back of his shirt, making him holler and hop about in shock then swiftly retaliate with a ball of snow scraped from a window sill. They cling together and shriek with laughter in the middle of the road then kiss and continue on their way.

  I know which couple I would rather be a part of.

  Later, after dinner, Mam lets her dresser, Mistress Stewart take me out with her two daughters to a small fair that has been set up on the Place de Grève, beside the town hall. I’m thrilled as I’m not often allowed such treats and my joy increases severalfold when my mother hands me a small jingling bag of coins to spend. I’ve never before been entrusted with my own money and can’t stop opening the bag to count the coins and reassure myself that they are still there.

  The roads are so thick with snow that it is difficult to drive carriages down them and so we opt instead to walk together, enjoying the bracing sting of the cold wind against our faces and occasionally laughingly ducking to avoid the snowballs thrown by passing apprentices. The two little girls run on ahead, shrieking and laughing with excitement, but I walk at a more decorous pace alongside Mistress Stewart, occasionally putting my gloved hand in hers when we have to navigate a particularly slippery spot on the pavement.

  ‘This is just like old times,’ she says in her kind, bracing way as we all walk down the Rue Saint Honoré to the town hall. She has a soft Scottish accent that makes me think of misty lakes, moors covered in swathes of p
urple heather and pungent peat scented fires. ‘When your family lived in London, they would have gone daily to see the fair and skate on the Thames if it froze over.’ Like everyone else in Mam’s circle she goes a little misty eyed as she recalls happier times gone by. ‘Your brother Charles is an excellent skater,’ she says. ‘How the crowd used to clap and cheer when he went flying past on his skates.’

  The Seine hasn’t frozen this year but it is grey and thick with churned broken up ice and solid mud. We can’t see the river from the street, but I can still smell its pungent, fetid waters on the wind and in the distance there is always the shouts of the boatmen as they force their crafts through the heavy waters.

  The fair is bigger than expected with at least three dozen stalls set up in a semi circle at the edge of the square, with cheerful bunting and coloured lanterns that will be lit at dusk strung between them. The air is fragrant with the delicious aromas of gingerbread, spices, warm cider, chestnuts and roasted chicken and we all pause for a moment to savour this before plunging with happy smiles into the dense crowd that fills the small square.

  ‘I wish it could always be like this,’ I confide to Mistress Stewart as we wander from stall to stall, buying gingerbread angels, delicious sweet hot chestnuts and clove and cinnamon spiced warm wine thick with apple ‘wool’.

  ‘Perhaps you should live somewhere where it snows all the time,’ she replies, laughing. ‘Like Russia.’ She slants a wicked look at me. ‘I hear that there are many good looking princes at the Russian Tsar’s court.’

  I smile, thinking of handsome Russian princes in fur hats and imaging one coming in his sleigh to claim me for his own. ‘I like the sunshine too,’ I say eventually, carefully peeling open a chestnut and scattering the shell on the ground before handing it to Mistress Stewart’s elder daughter, Frances. ‘The snow is fun now but only because we have warm clothes and plenty of fuel and food…’ My voice trails away and I shiver beneath my cloak as a hazy memory half surfaces of a much smaller me curled up and pretending to sleep beneath a threadbare blanket in a freezing cold room with no fire lit in the grate and the wind howling through a broken window pane. A younger Mam, dressed in pale blue cotton rather than the heavy black mourning she donned as soon as news came of father’s death, sits beside my bed with a blanket across her knees. She’s reading a crumpled letter and crying softly into a tattered piece of cloth. I desperately want to say something to comfort her, to make her stop crying and maybe sing to me again but I don’t know what to say.

  I drag myself back to the present and meet Mistress Stewart’s intense blue gaze. ‘That’s all in the past now,’ she says kindly, taking my hand in hers and giving it a reassuring squeeze. ‘We have much better times to come, my lady.’

  A puppet stall is being set up beside a stall selling hot mouthwateringly fragrant meat pies and the two little girls scamper off to take a closer look, leaving myself and their mother to follow at a more dignified pace. I badly want to rush to see the puppets as well but I know that Mistress Stewart, kind though she is, will report every little thing back to Mam and so I walk slowly and feign indifference, knowing that this is what is expected of me as a princess.

  Afterwards, we trudge back along the Rue Saint-Honoré, our arms laden with delicious treats and cheeks red and glowing from the cold. Frances has a hole in her boot and pulls faces and cries as the freezing cold slush seeps in between her toes. ’Ssh,’ her sister Sophia whispers with a worried look at me. ‘No one wants to hear you complaining. Besides, we’ve been colder than this, remember?’

  As we stroll past the ancient Rue Fromenteau with its grey smoke stained old houses and ramshackle shops, an elderly gentlemen from Mam’s wide circle of impoverished English exiles recognises me and courteously stops to bow, doffing his moth eaten feathered hat while his feet in their rather worse for wear leather boots slip perilously on the treacherously icy pavement. ‘I trust that you are both enjoying the snow,’ he says with a saucy wink at Mistress Stewart, who smiles faintly and looks away.

  I nod. ‘We’ve been to the market,’ I say, showing him my haul of gingerbread, sticky toffee apples and scarlet silk ribbons. ‘Mistress Stewart says that the ribbons will clash with my red hair though.’

  He smiles politely and I can see that he is weighing up which one of us it is most proper to offend. ‘I hate to contradict a lady but I think they will look charming,’ he says with aplomb and I smile. ‘There’s a new arrival at the Palais Royal,’ he says over my head to Mistress Stewart. ‘Another cousin. They arrived by foot just now, having abandoned their carriage to the snow a few streets away.’

  I turn to Mistress Stewart in surprise. ‘Another cousin?’ I say. ‘Who could it be?’ I hope it is Rupert as he always tells such marvellous stories of far away lands where the air is heady with the scent of spices and richly dressed princes ride around on the backs of painted elephants. I adore him but he hasn’t come to Paris for many years now, mainly because like everyone else he finds it hard to get along with my mother.

  ‘Let’s go and find out,’ Mistress Stewart says briskly and I can tell that she is just as curious as I am to see who our mysterious new arrival could be. She takes her daughters by the hand and we hurry across the icy Rue Saint-Honoré to the grand gilt painted gates that lead to the Palais Royal’s front courtyard, where once my brother Harry had knelt in a puddle and wept as Mam swept past him on her way to Chaillot.

  ‘I’m tired,’ Frances complains as we hand our sodden cloaks to a waiting footman and then go up the stairs to the long gallery, where a gaggle of courtiers has gathered around the fireplace. ‘Your Highness,’ the Duchess of Richmond slips gracefully away from the group and comes to me in a whisper of silk and rose perfume. ‘Your mother has asked that you go at once to her closet.’ She looks at the loot that I am still carrying in my arms and raises one immaculately pencilled eyebrow. ‘Perhaps I should take that for now?’ she offers before seeing my unwillingness to part with it and adding with a lopsided smile: ‘I promise not to eat any of it.’

  I knock on the door and without waiting for a reply, enter the closet. Behind me I can hear Mistress Stewart exclaiming as the other courtiers rush to tell her who has just arrived. Who could it be? I step into the closet and look around. The new heavy crimson taffeta curtains are pulled tightly shut against the bright winter sun, making the room snugly womblike. I want to lie on the overstuffed red sofa, put a cushion under my head and go to sleep but instead I must smile brightly and curtsey to my mother, while curiously eyeing the auburn haired young woman who sits at her side, her large hands folded neatly on her lap.

  ‘Minette,’ Mam says, a little tremulously. ‘This is your cousin Louise.’

  The name means nothing to me or rather it could mean anything for there are a lot of girls called Louise in our family. I smile though and curtsey. ‘I am very pleased to meet you.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you at last,’ she replies in a low voice. Her accent is peculiar - English with a touch of something else. German? Dutch? ‘My brother has told me all about you.’ She smiles then, realising that I am floundering and require help. ‘My brother Rupert,’ she adds. Ah, Dutch then.

  ‘Louise has come to stay with us,’ Mam says. Again that excited tremble in her voice. I look at her curiously, wondering what is going on.

  ‘I ran away,’ Louise says in a matter of fact way. ‘I left the Hague in the middle of the night and rode on the back of a cart to Delfshaven and from there I took a ship. It’s taken me just over a week to get here.’ She looks utterly unruffled by her epic journey and I begin to suspect that the pirate princes Rupert and Maurice are not the only adventurers in our family.

  ‘Did you leave a note for your mother?’ I ask, darting a look at Mam, who has settled back in her chair and is looking extremely pleased with herself. What is going on? ‘Does she know where you are?’

  Louise shrugs and I see that her shoulders are extremely thin beneath the soft pale grey silk of her gown. ‘I l
eft a note telling her that I would write when I arrived at my destination,’ she says calmly. ‘I didn’t want to be stopped.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘I’ve come here to be received into the Catholic faith,’ she says in a rush. ‘It’s my intention to take the veil and become a nun.’

  I gasp. I can’t help it. ‘You want to become a nun?’ I say in astonishment, sinking down on to the sofa. Surely she would be more at home shouting orders on a pirate ship, exploring the mystical rainforests of the Americas or riding astride a stallion through a lonely desert? I stare at her, trying to imagine this tall, restless young woman dressed in a nun’s habit and bending her head and bright inquisitive eyes to the restrictions and silence of the cloister.

  ‘I believe I have a vocation,’ she says brightly. ‘I’ve thought it for a long time now but you can imagine what my mother thinks of this.’ She spreads her long fingers on her knees and looks at Mam apologetically. ‘As you know, my mother is a most staunch Protestant and she has always expected that I will remain at her side to care for her as she enters old age.’ She says this without any rancour but for the first time my imagined image of perfect Aunt Elizabeth is tarnished a little. Surely anyone with eyes can see that my cousin Louise was not designed to be kept indoors to fetch and carry for others.

  I begin to see why Mam is looking so smug though. This is the perfect revenge for Aunt Elizabeth taking Harry’s side against her when she tried to persuade him to convert to Catholicism. It’s also pay back for all the many times that Elizabeth sided with my father and siblings against her, making her feel like the odd one out in our family; the difficult one who causes quarrels and awkwardness. ‘I will write to your mother tonight,’ Mam says, gracious in her victory. ‘I will let her know that you are safe and that I will care for you as if you were my own daughter.’