Donna Russo Morin

by To Serve A King

  The ohs and ahs of the refreshed revelers joined the song of the nightingale.

  “I believe we are ready to progress.” François slapped his large hands on his knees and a thunderous cheer shook the tapestries upon the wall.

  Lodovico jumped up with his own shouts and applause, and Geneviève joined in hastily, confusion stiff upon her forced pleasant expression.

  “The court is to move, Geneviève. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “It is,” she agreed, comprehension dawning upon her as the last day of the condemned man sees the first rays of sun. “More wine. We must have more wine to celebrate.”

  Lodovico laughed as he filled their goblets for a third time.

  Many a goblet they shared, as the gathering lasted long into the night. Anne stayed until the latest possible hour, always by the king’s side, always his first and most cherished confidant. Arabelle and Geneviève stayed with her, until only the gentilshommes de la chambre remained, many of whom would bed down within the same large room as the king, his most intimate companions.

  Under Louis XII, such men had been called valets de chambre, but the term had become synonymous with servant, and François would have better for his dearest cohorts, elevating them to the same lofty heights he himself inhabited. Commoners now held the posts of valet, but they served him as such, caring for his possessions, fetching for him whenever bid.

  The ladies attended the king’s coucher—the nightly bedding ritual, as convoluted as the morning’s lever—before bidding Lodo-vico good night and attending the duchesse at her own preparations.

  As the ladies of Anne’s chamber watched her servants remove the many layers of her clothing, Geneviève gathered her strength, fortified by the flagon or more of wine she had imbibed through the night.

  “I know we are to leave in a day, madame.” Her voice croaked like an insulted frog. She cleared it and continued. “And I fear I have been remiss in my obligations.”

  Anne didn’t open her eyes, as if already asleep, having little to do with her own preparations for bed. “You have done nothing untoward, Geneviève, fear not.”

  “No, madame, I meant my duties to my aunt.” Geneviève felt the curious gaze of Arabelle and the probing stare of Jecelyn as they extracted a nightgown of pristine linen and lace from the garderobe and moved about the room, dousing most of the candles in the privy chamber. “I promised her I would visit the monastery and write her all about it, but I did not realize my stay here at the château would be so fleeting.”

  “Indeed, we are beginning the season’s journey earlier than normal,” Arabelle offered kindly. “It has been such a fair and warm spring. We’ve had no more than specks of rain. The roads are passable much sooner this year.”

  “It is incumbent upon us to do as our king bids.” Jecelyn directed her bitter rejoinder to Anne’s other attendants as she smiled with charm at her mistress. The two young servants paid little heed to the conversation as they finished their chores.

  “Of course, I meant no disrespect.” Geneviève forged onward, abrogating any offensive inference. “I wonder if perhaps I could visit the monastery tomorrow.”

  “There will be much to do in preparation,” Anne replied, and Jecelyn smiled as if claiming victory.

  “I understand, madame. I need no more than a half hour’s time to see enough to describe it to my aunt.” Geneviève refused to surrender, more determined than ever. “Little time to spare to fulfill a dying woman’s wish.”

  Anne sighed, dismissing the servants with a flick of her delicate, lace-rimmed wrist. “Very well, but no more.”

  Geneviève curtsied quickly, a smile for Anne and Jecelyn as well. “Merci beaucoup, madame. You have my promise.”

  They tucked their mistress in bed with the tender attention of a mother to her child and crept from the room, each woman taking the last of the burning candles with her.

  In the presence chamber, they bid good night to one another and to the sisters, whose evening it was to sleep with their mistress.

  “Do you need me to show you the way to the monastery?” Ara-belle yawned behind a hand.

  “Or perhaps I may ask the duchesse if she would like me to accompany you,” Jecelyn offered, though not as well-intentioned.

  “I thank you,” Geneviève replied, with a nod for Arabelle. “But I am sure I will find the path. We mustn’t let our duties suffer any more than they should.”

  Arabelle grinned with a circumspect, sidelong look at Jecelyn, who had nothing further to say on the matter.

  Geneviève slammed the door behind her, dismissing Carine with few words of explanation. The king’s plans had sent her into a panic. She had to get a message to her sovereign, had to let him know all she had gleaned this day, but there was so little time. She had chased away Baron Pitou with her monstrous rage, the one man who could have helped her. She knew of but one outlet for messages and it was here, at this château. Geneviève felt as if the hemp connecting her to England was fraying one thin, ragged strip at a time; if she did not get a message out, the tenuous bond might well be severed.

  From her notions box she retrieved her ink pot and quill, gathering her book and a small sheaf of parchment from her bedside table, her mind whirling with her message and how she would transmit it. She would use an alphanumeric code, not willing or able to spend the time on a polyalphabetic substitution and its key. She threw herself onto the rushes before the hearth and added two sturdy logs to the low-burning embers. She would swelter in the added warmth, but she needed the light. She stripped herself down to her shift, discarding the satin saffron gown, and set to work.

  Every word of her message would become a set of three numbers, indicating the page in the book, the paragraph on the page, and the word in the paragraph. She had so much to tell—the cracked condition of the French court, François’s fiscal inability to make war—she had to fill both sides of the small square of parchment with the squiggle of numbers. And as she painted the paper with her communication, her smile grew. Not the restrained, half gesture she offered to those of the court, but a true smile that dimpled and plumped her cheeks.

  In her mind, each set of numbers and the word it represented was a gift she offered her king. She imagined him as he read it, his blue eyes sparkling beneath his red hair. She saw him smile; she felt his approbation—that which she so desperately craved—as if he were in the room with her.

  Untold hours passed as she constructed her message with the slow translation into cipher. She rolled her head on her neck, squeezing the taunt shoulder muscles with one ink-stained hand. Her body ached with exhaustion as the candle shrank and the quivering light cast lengthening shadows upon the stone walls, but never had she felt more purposeful.

  9

  Rich in hope and poor in earthly gold …

  Leave me my hope; without it I am cold.

  —Alain Chartier (1385–1433)

  The cacophony began before the sun flung itself over the horizon. Rugged men barked orders, silver plate clanged against copper pot, females fussed over folded linens. The palace was a beehive of frenetic activity as hundreds of people prepared to move the king and his court.

  Geneviève made her way past the stables, where the grooms trained the horses to carry women, watching as they taught the stately beasts to lower themselves on their front legs as though they knelt in prayer. She sprinted through the symmetrical gardens with their well-manicured lawns, the grass turning from light spring bud to deep myrtle, and the blossoming shrubs and hedges with their plump, moist buds. Beauty in hand, soon to be abandoned for that which lay upon the horizon.

  She shivered as she stepped into the looming shadow of the monastery. Built hundreds of years before the château proper, there was nothing grand or opulent in its architecture. The slate square spoke of the somber, pious existence lurking behind the cold, anodyne façade.

  The shrieking hinges of the two-story wooden door announced her arrival far better than any bell. She bent forward and then leaned
back as she put the weight of her body into the effort to open it and the sound echoed into the empty, vaulted-ceiling foyer, returning back to her—a faded wail—as though in warning.

  Her contracted pupils were useless in the dim recess. She jumped back from the ominous beings welcoming her: crouching gargoyles and floating specters with ravaged faces. Geneviève closed her eyes, forcing her breathing to slow. When she opened them again, she distinguished the statues standing guard at the inner door and the saintly tapestries adorning the walls.

  She skulked forward through air thick with cloying incense and melting wax. Crossing into the inner sanctum, she stopped, unsure which of the three passageways before her to choose.

  “How may I help you?”

  The hushed, benevolent greeting struck her with the force of a pummeling ax and Geneviève jumped, hands balling into fists, heart slamming against her chest. The cassock-cloaked man had materialized out of thin air. Her fearful gaze found him in the shadowed corners of the vestibule.

  Geneviève swallowed back the rush of fear. Focused observation returned as her panic abated, and she glimpsed the smooth-skinned face of a young man within the gloom of his hood, pale hands clasped together at his hemp-bound waist.

  “If I may, I would care to make my confession,” Geneviève whispered, afraid to shatter the unearthly silence holding sway over the monastery.

  “I can hear your confession, my child,” the man replied, though Geneviève thought him younger than she.

  She curtsied with great pious humility. “If it would not be too great an imposition, I would choose Father Bernard to hear my sins.”

  Geneviève bit her tongue as she realized her blunder. For all she knew, this man was Father Bernard; that she did not know him could reveal her subterfuge.

  The young monk bowed. “I will call him. Please wait in the confessional.” His long, pale-skinned hand and scrawny wrist escaped the bell sleeve of his cassock as he gestured through the door before her. With the same stealth with which he had appeared, the man evaporated through a side door, leaving Geneviève to wonder if she had imagined him all along.

  Passing through the curved archway, the chapel of the monastery opened before her. On the left side of the transept, beyond the long rows of pews, Geneviève spied the closet of the confessional, a boxlike room within this room, much like the stool closets in the palace, save for the crosses carved into the door. Multicolored rays of light streamed in through the stained glass windows of the clerestory’s eastern wall, the ochre and blue like a bloody sky upon the oak pews and granite floors.

  Geneviève entered the tiny chamber. In the middle of the room stood one lone chair. In each of the four corners yellow glowed from single-candle torches, the only light in the windowless chamber. There was no screen concealing the chair, there was no prie-dieu before it. Geneviève would face her confessor, knees upon the hard stone floor. She had not practiced the sacrament of confession often in her childhood; perhaps her aunt had known it for the hypocrisy it was in a life meant for such iniquities. Geneviève had found neither succor nor blessing in the act.

  She perched herself on her knees, gathering beneath them as much of her lavender gown as she could to cushion them. Thankfully, no more than a few minutes passed before the door opened behind her and the man took his place in the hard, armless chair, the wood squeaking in protest as it accepted his corpulence.

  “God is listening, my child.” The voice warbled as the words puffed out on thin breath.

  Geneviève, head bowed from the moment she had heard the priest enter the room, stared at the floor, brows knit in a wrinkle upon her brow. Was she to give a true confession? She was here to deliver a message, not to bare her soul to this man. But the heavy silence bade her to confess, having interpreted no signal that the priest would receive her covert communication. Geneviève had no choice but to turn the hard vision of truth inward upon herself.

  “I have lied, Father.” Geneviève spoke the ironic honesty. Up to this day, she had committed few acts that God would call a sin. What she held in her heart—the anger and the hatred—were something different altogether, but she felt sure any deity that did exist would absolve her for just cause. “I have thought ill of others.”

  “Have you regretted your feelings?” the man asked with little more than a mumble, as if he channeled the voice of God from the far distance of Heaven.

  The memory of Baron Pitou, the scourge on his features after her fist collided with his face, the fruitless search for him the next day, came to Geneviève’s mind.

  “Oui, Father, I regret it most sincerely.”

  “Then God will be merciful and forgiving.”

  Geneviève lowered her head, scavenging the recesses of her mind for something else to report to this man. One day she may have more to say, may hope to cleanse herself of a bloody stain, but perhaps not. Far more important than the state of her immortal soul, she scavenged her mind for some word that would work magic; some unknown code to turn this priest from confessor to conspirator.

  As if knowing she had nothing further to add, the priest leaned over her, chanting the Latin that would absolve her of her sins, forming the cross above her head over and over with a beefy hand.

  “Pray tonight, my child,” he told her as he sat back. “Pray to our God in the words of His Son and you will feel His benevolence.”

  Geneviève dared to look up then. The tent of his dirt-colored cassock hid the obese body, not a speck of the chair visible beneath him. The heavy jowls of his ashen face hung far below his chin, and vein-laden lids covered his eyes. The dismissal was clear.

  Geneviève staggered to her feet, wanting nothing more than to grab the man by his rounded shoulders and shake him until he told her what she wanted to hear. But his closed expression brooked no argument, welcomed no discourse. On the verge of angry, frustrated tears, she quit the confessional chamber, unable to stop herself from slamming the door behind her.

  The clatter echoed through the rafters and she stalked off down the long aisle, balled fists quivering by her sides, feeling the harsh stare of Jesus upon her back from His place on the cross at the head of the nave, but caring little for its denunciation.

  “Won’t you give alms for the poor?”

  Geneviève scuttered to a stop, nearly toppling forward as her feet came to a halt, but her body continued on with momentum. Bracing herself on the curved, carved end of a pew, she turned round.

  Standing in the middle of the nave, the mammoth man who was Father Bernard stood, casting a shadow large enough to rival that of any of the chapel’s statues. In his age-spotted hand, he held out a small, slotted basket.

  Her innards quivered with excitement as she took those few steps back toward him.

  “The poor are in greater need than ever. I will personally see your donation put into the proper hands.”

  Geneviève’s eyes fluttered closed in a moment of relief. Here at last was the prayer she had come to hear. She grappled for the small drawstring bag dangling from her wrist, grabbing the small folded square of parchment and a few coins, and dropped them all into the basket.

  “Thank you, my child.” Father Bernard’s cloudy blue eyes, as pale as a winter’s sky, caught hers and in them, she glimpsed a smile.

  Geneviève took his hand and bowed over it.

  “I am most privileged to do my part.”

  10

  Distance is nothing;

  It is only the first step that is difficult.

  —Madame Marie du Deffand (1697–1780)

  “You can do this, Geney. Give it a nother try.” Arabelle looked up at her friend, her eyes wide and hopeful yet not without a shadow of doubt. She stood poised by the horse’s side as if ready to catch Geneviève should she tumble from the mount, again.

  As instructed, Geneviève wrapped her right leg around the front of the curved pommel while her left leg hung down the side of the horse. She held the reins in her gloved hands as if she hung on to the very thread of lif
e. Already the bruises on her derrière ached where it had collided with the gravel of the stable courtyard, and she had no wish to feel its brutal hardness once more.

  Never had she ridden a horse upon a sidesaddle. In all the days of her youth, she had ridden astride while hunting, hidden by the forests surrounding her aunt’s modest château, or upon a sambue, as befitting a lady. Though there was little control while upon one of these chair-shaped platforms, which forced the rider to remain turned outward, body perpendicular to the horse’s own, she had long since mastered the art of traveling upon one. To learn a new skill set, here and now, as the entire French court surrounded her, as spiteful courtiers gazed upon her, was proving a frustrating chore.

  With mumbled words, Geneviève cursed the name of Catherine de’ Medici. Though the Dauphin’s wife was a pale presence at court—and only a desperate one to be pitied, at that—she had brought the newfangled means of feminine saddlery to France and therefore was deserving of all of Geneviève’s curses.

  Three short blasts of the heralds’ horns sent her already skittish mount into spasms, and Geneviève reached down and clung to the chestnut mane.

  “Hold still, you ungodly beast,” she hissed, ignoring the mare’s angry neighed response.

  “We must hurry,” Arabelle urged. With agile deftness, the graceful woman stepped into the stirrup hanging from the lowered horse’s back, and launched herself upon the saddle. “It is time to leave. We must take our place with Anne at the front of the line.”

  “If you cannot ride, then perhaps you should find room in one of the wagons, Geneviève.” Jecelyn rode up beside them, her body barely moving with the little effort it took her to stay upon her mount, a formidable stallion as black as her hair.