“It is not for my pleasure alone that I gather these treasures.” François shuffled to the high-backed wing chair awaiting him in the corner. He lowered his large frame into the dented blue brocade cushion. From this perch, he could view every piece in his collection or gaze out the leaded glass window to the front gardens and the rolling hills of the land beyond. He put his elbow in a depression in the chair’s arm and his head in his palm. “I want my people to open their minds to this genius, this beauty. Our artists mark the trail to enlightenment, if we can only learn how to read the signs.” He turned back to the woman’s portrait standing guard over the chamber. “Da Vinci taught me this.”
Geneviève knew not what to say; she felt as if she had never met the man before her, and she struggled with the awkwardness of unfamiliarity. “I have heard he was a very learned man, Sire. That he knew of many things besides art.”
“’Tis true,” François nodded. “I have never known a man as thirsty for knowledge as he, or as willing to share such with the world. The hours I spent with him I count as the most precious of my life. Never before or rarely since has my intellect felt so challenged, or my eyes opened so wide.” He shook his head and a deep furrow formed between his brows. “I will never forgive myself for not being there at the moment of his passing.”
Geneviève had heard the artist had died in his patron’s arms, but it seemed the story was no more than rumor, another myth surrounding this enigmatic king. The king’s own words dispelled it, and the naked anguish in his almond-shaped eyes could not be denied. It resonated deep within Geneviève, touching the pain of grief buried in her core.
“It was your bed upon which he lay? Your physicians who attended him?” Geneviève whispered, breaching protocol with such intimacy.
François dropped his hand into his lap and looked at her, perplexed. “Oui.”
“Then you held him as tenderly as if it were with your own arms.”
The elderly man’s need for succor was compelling and she responded to it, in denial of all she had been taught. These days of close proximity had revealed so many of this man’s cracks; despite herself she felt a sudden urge to fill them, perhaps because they mirrored her own fragmented existence.
The king rubbed at his forehead, seeing Geneviève’s perplexed pity as if she wore it on her sleeve. “Complete your task, mademoiselle, so that I may tell the duchesse how well you saw to your duty.”
With a quick dip, Geneviève turned to the high bed and laid the shirt upon it, fanning out the sleeves to display them at their best, and placing the flower at the end of one cuff as if an invisible hand held it.
She faced the king once more, gave a full curtsy—skirt opened wide—and made for the door. As she grasped and turned the cold gleaming knob, she heard his whisper.
“Merci, my child.”
The ladies stood like pretty flowers all in a row along the rail of the grandiose spiral staircase in Château Blois, an artistic architectural achievement renowned throughout all of France. An exterior spiral-shaped incline, at each floor a landing overlooked the courtyard below. It had become tradition for the courtiers and nobles to rest at the rail, as if from a balcony, and watch the jousts and plays in the common, another place to see and be seen. Looking up from below, the spiral rose up like a five-story monument, the exterior of the pale stone balustrade festooned with a sculpted garland of crowned salamanders.
Here the ladies awaited the duchesse as she spoke with the king on the landing above, the sun once more shining bright upon the hordes milling below them, multicolored sparks bouncing off jewels and swords. With so much to look at, the women chatted amiably as they bided their time.
“I hope it is not forward of me.” Arabelle reached out a tentative finger and touched the back of Geneviève’s hand resting on the railing, and the discoloration upon it. “But how did you come by this mark?”
Geneviève looked down at the stain upon her flesh; it had been there as long as she remembered. It was a splotch more than a scar and could have passed as a birthmark. “It is a burn,” she responded dispassionately. “Acquired the night of the fire that killed my parents.”
“Oh, mon Dieu, my poor Geney.” Arabelle’s fair face flushed behind a hand raised in shock. “I had no idea. Forgive me, it was wrong of me to ask.”
Geneviève reached out and lowered Arabelle’s finger with a small squeeze. “Not at all. I remember nothing of the event and never has the wound pained me.”
“But there are other scars,” Arabelle whispered, “and other pains. Oui?”
Geneviève’s silence revealed far too much, and her gaze skipped away from her friend’s intuitive vision.
“I wager my scars would best any that delicate damsels such as you might boast.” The king’s cajoling voice echoed along the twisting, cavernous staircase and the ladies dropped into their curtsies.
“I have this one.” Lisette held up one elbow, and the women craned around the king to see.
With a patronizing chortle, the king dismissed the small crescent-shaped disfigurement, no larger than a fingernail, on the back of her plump arm. “Why, I can barely see it. How did you come by it?”
“I fell out of bed as a child,” Lisette pouted prettily. “And landed on a ewer.”
François chucked her under the chin. “I see you survived well enough.”
“Indeed, Sire.”
“Where is the duchesse?” Jecelyn asked, having watched the stairs, waiting for her mistress to appear.
The king looked sidelong at his cousin. “She felt a need to freshen herself.” The cloud passed over his features. “Perhaps you might see to her?”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” Jecelyn said with a bob, and set off.
The king turned back to the expectant faces before him. “Can no one do better than this paltry contestant?”
Geneviève felt Arabelle’s glance but would not rise to its bait; she would not show this man the scar on her hand, nor discuss how it came to be there. But a childhood spent learning how to use dagger and arrow had left more than cunning upon her. She pulled up the short puff sleeve of her almond-colored silk gown.
“Now here we have a contender.” The king peered in, as did the other women, at the inverted V-shaped gouge upon the uppermost part of her arm, the thick line a putrid reddish purple. “Did you crash through a window?”
“No, Sire,” Geneviève said with a jaunty shake of her head. “I was struck with an arrow.”
The women gasped, pulling back with alarm, but the king stared at her, a glint in his tired, bloodshot eyes, as if Geneviève had thrown down a pair of gauntlets at his feet. With a glimmer of a smile, he doffed his feather-plumed toque, and pulled up the hair on the left side of his head. There a thick, white, hairless line ran through his full dark hair like a road running through a dense forest.
“Was it received in battle, Sire?” Arabelle asked with awed timidity.
The king chuckled. “No, at play. Though I have plenty enough gouges gained in battle. No, this one came from a day of fun. I was a young man, no more than a pup, though already king. We were visiting the estate of the comte de St. Paul for Twelfth Night and he had prepared the most marvelous mock battle for us to participate in. He had actually erected a model town upon his grounds, complete with a moat and a gun battery.” The king looked out across the courtyard and the years. “It was the duc d’Alençon and I against St. Paul, Vendôme, and Bourbon.”
For the briefest moment, the fondness in the king’s eyes dimmed and the small vertical crease between his brows deepened.
“It was a marvelous fray, one of the best ever. We pummeled each other with snow balls, apples, and eggs, but my squad and I soon gained the upper hand.” The king laughed at what was to come and the ladies with him. Though they didn’t know the story, they were charmed by their sovereign’s self-deprecation. “St. Paul ran out of ammunition and thought it would best serve him to throw a burning log out of a second-story window. It struck me dead on.”
Every one of the women stared at him, openmouthed and with bulging eyes. Geneviève lost herself, swept away by his story.
“I could have had him hung.” François laughed. “But it was far too amusing. Except, of course, when they had to cut off all my hair to seal and cauterize the wound.”
“Is that how you came by your current style?” Lisette asked.
“Indeed,” he answered. “How surprised I was to see others boasting the same fashion within days. I couldn’t very well change it back at that point.”
The women all agreed.
“So what say you, Mademoiselle Gravois—do you concede?” He pushed back his heavy mop to reveal the scar once more.
Geneviève peered at it with mock seriousness. “Well, I don’t know. It is large, but it does not look very deep.” She pulled up her sleeve. “While this struck bone.”
The king and the lady-in-waiting moved close together, a bare shoulder revealed, a head leaned down, a laugh between them.
“Well, whatever do we have here?”
Geneviève jumped back at the sound of her mistress’s snide voice, tugging her sleeve down.
“There is my love now.” The king dropped his hair and turned to Anne with an outstretched hand. “Nothing more than a battle of scars, ma chérie, one I fear I have lost.”
Geneviève dipped at the offered victory, but with little gladness. The thunderous gaze from the duchesse did everything to dispel any triumph. How well Geneviève remembered her first conversation with Anne, how keenly she saw anger and suspicion in the woman’s squinty-eyed gaze. All would be lost if the duchesse should dismiss her.
Anne placed her jeweled hand on the king’s offered arm. “I am glad you have kept yourself amused in my absence.” No one, especially the king, missed the derision in her tone.
“No, indeed, I was highly entertained. And I thank these ladies and especially Mademoiselle Gravois for that.”
He gave them all a bow and Geneviève cowered at how the duchesse might interpret his words.
“You have brightened my day, mademoiselle.” He took up Geneviève’s hand with his free one and bowed over it. “You remind me a great deal of my beloved Lily.”
It was as if he chanted a magic spell. To mention his dead daughter banished any qualms Anne’s imaginings had caused her. For Geneviève, to be likened to a daughter, and a king’s at that, caused her only more doubt.
17
No bird can ever fly
Like a heart can rise so high.
—Mellin de Saint-Gelais (1491–1558)
The dust rose up in great clouds; so dry was the earth, so thirsty for moisture, it lay parched and cracked, misused by the drought prevailing over the sweltering summer. The horses’ hooves kicked up great puffs of particles and the wagon wheels left tracks in the powdery roads.
Today, like yesterday, the first day in the court’s next progress, the king traveled beneath the gauzy curtains of his litter. Geneviève envied him; her eyes stung from the dust, and the taste of gravel lay thick upon her tongue.
“He must not be feeling well.” Sebastien rode beside her in the group trailing the royal conveyance. How natural it seemed that they would seek out each other’s company on the journey. From the moment the king announced he and his library were ready to make for their next home, thoughts of the guard had come to Geneviève’s mind. The informal intimacy of travel allowed her to enjoy his companionship so much more than at court.
“I wish to go home,” the king had said, and so to Fontainebleau they made their way, the palace the king longed for more and more with the passing years. There he would bring his beloved books and rest awhile.
“Perhaps it is his souvenir from Spain. I hear the illness plagues him with greater frequency these days,” Dureau offered from atop his charger on the other side of Sebastien.
Lisette shook her head as she bobbed upon her clopping mare. “Nay. It is a gift from one of his many paramours.” There was little note of churlishness as she gave voice to the rampant rumor; she simply relayed what to her were well-known facts. “It’s been said that it may be the end of him.”
“Truly?” Geneviève winced at the shrillness in her voice and cleared her throat. “He is that often ill?”
Sebastien frowned. “No one knows for certain what illness tortures him,” he said with a stern sidelong glance to the small woman riding beside Geneviève. “But it does seem he is more and more frequently bedridden.”
Such thoughts burst into Geneviève’s mind. That King Henry would be keen to learn of François’s declining health was understandable; that she should be bothered by it was not.
“I’m sure he will see his other physicians once we are closer to Paris,” Albret offered, eager to soothe. “They will b—”
His words were lost as the thunder of galloping hooves roared up around them like a wave crashing against the shore and they no more than helpless pebbles in its path. A great posse of courtiers rushed by, whipping up the dirt and the dust, hats flying off their heads in their urgency forward. Those overtaken wrestled with their reins, fighting to keep their skittish mounts from bolting.
“Whatever is happening?” Arabelle squealed with fear from between the duc de Nevers and Sebastien’s friend Edgard.
“Look!” Lisette pointed a chubby finger and all eyes followed.
Not far ahead, down a gentle slope, lay a small orchard abutting meandering farmland. Not as lush as it should be, it was the healthiest vegetation the cortege had seen along a dusty trail lined with dehydrated, yellowing oak. Trees heavy with bright green leaves dotted with coral peaches and purple plums stood in symmetrical rows, and sugar beets poked their lush leaves up toward the sun.
Sebastien smiled at Geneviève and she caught hold of his mischievous spirit. Together they kicked at the horses and set off, not to be outdone or denied the spoils of the road.
As the king looked on in amusement from the open curtains of his stretcher, the nobles descended upon the small demesne like starving locusts, tripping through the foliage and vegetation as if it were a great dance floor, hanging from the tree branches like acrobats on the stage. They plucked the fruit with little regard for ripeness, like snatching pearls from the neck of opulently dressed ladies. Bees, fat with nectar and pollen, hummed in agitation and birds squawked, protesting the disruption.
The farmer and his family raced from their home, begging the nobles with pathetic cries of outrage to cease their pillaging, mollified into a semblance of silent acceptance when the king’s representative handed them two brown leather pouches jingling with coin. The courtiers paid them no mind, flitting from fruit to fruit, frolicking with joyful abandon and childish exclamations as they stripped the trees of their bounty, as they trampled tender tendrils beneath their stomping feet, as they robbed the farmer of his living, all in the name of entitlement.
They reached the small village of Fourneaux in the early evening, a little before dusk began to threaten the day, unable to make Orléans for the night as intended, their progress slowed by the king’s mode of transport. As they passed the small hovels on the outskirts of the tiny town, mothers ran out of their ramshackle homes holding their children aloft, husbands assisted weak and decimated wives, all crying for the touch of the king.
Geneviève saw the pale and drawn faces, the small bodies limp in their parents’ arms, and felt a rush of sympathy couched with a stab of impatience. These desperate people clung to their conviction of the healing power of the French kings, a belief as nonsensical as the royals’ faith in soothsayers. The long-standing legend of the curative ability of the sovereigns seemed like false hope to her, one that opened the heart to a fair chance for heartbreak. Geneviève assumed François would ignore their pleas and continue on. He did not.
“Are you all right?” Sebastien pulled hard left on his reins to keep his mount from colliding with Geneviève’s as she drifted toward him.
Geneviève pulled up and nodded. “Yes, I … I’m fine.�
� She ticked her chin toward the scene before them, as the guards lowered the king’s litter and the sluggish man hefted himself out from its confines.
The villagers rushed about him, circling him, his large head and broad shoulders rising far above the reaching, pleading hands. With great patience François reached out a bearlike paw, taking great pains to touch upon each head bowed before him, with a merciful pat.
“I did not expect him to heed their calls,” Geneviève said.
Sebastien smiled. “He always has and always will, for as long as he is able, I’d wager.”
Geneviève stared at the king. It was the same long, horselike face, the same slanted eyes, long nose, and wide mouth, and yet she did not know him, and the inconsistency ate away at her like scrofula itself, the disease most sufferers came to the king to cure.
“Are you feeling ill?” Sebastien asked. So many on the journey had contracted a stomach flux; the drought had dried up the wells, forcing the courtiers to drink from polluted waters. The duc d’Orléans suffered badly, as did Lautrec, who ran for the trees with great frequency.
“I’m fine, I said,” Geneviève snapped, unable to contain the uneasiness and anger her tumbled thoughts caused. She regretted her sharp words the instant they left her tongue. “My apologies, Sebastien. It seems I am much more tired than I myself realized. A long night’s sleep will stand me in good stead once more, I’m sure. I will make for my pillow as soon as we stop.”
“I am sorry to hear that.” Sebastien shrugged off her truculence, not batting an eye at Geneviève’s astounded expression. He leaned over in his saddle and drew on her reins, pulling her and her horse as close as possible. “I have made the acquisition of a rare bottle of Bordeaux and was hoping you would share it with me this evening.” His gaze slipped for an instant to the gathering of courtiers around them. “It is a very small bottle. Not enough to satisfy this rabble.”
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