‘Over there,’ she said.
The very beginnings of a gravel bank showed where the river bent around the edge of a slight hill. It was as good a place to put ashore as any and better than most of the sites we’d seen. I put my feet down, felt nothing and pushed myself under, my heels digging deep enough into the riverbed’s gravel to bring the boat to a brief stop. Pushing towards the shore I found my feet could reach the bottom. Even then the current was strong enough to throw us into the bank a hundred yards further along.
‘Too fierce,’ I said, after we’d tried to push our shell upstream.
‘We should let it go . . . ’ Virginie was right. Dragging it up would tell the charbonnières this was where we landed. That is, if they were looking for us still.
‘Ready?’ We came out from under our boat and the flow carried it away as we trudged back to the gravel bank. It shifted noisily underfoot and I looked round. A hundred peasants could be watching without us knowing. But no one shouted or shot at us as we scrabbled ashore and reached the safety of the undergrowth at the river’s edge.
‘Now what?’ Virginie asked.
I took her face in my hand, my fingers so cold they could barely sense the flesh of her cheek, and kissed the corner of her mouth. Only once and gently. ‘I’ve missed you,’ I said. ‘All summer and the two years before. I missed you.’
Huge eyes considered me, brown as cut agate and twice as bright. Then she nodded and looked around her, my words held somewhere for later. ‘We should find safety,’ she said softly. I agreed with her; I simply wasn’t sure what safety was in the middle of a jacquerie. A stone house if we could find one? A church? Although we’d seen one of those on fire. A cave in the hills, if there were hills nearby?
‘This is safe,’ I told her. ‘The trees will hide us.’
‘And when night comes?’ The day was barely afternoon but night would come as it always did.
‘We sleep in the trees.’
‘Separate trees?’
‘If you want. Although we’d be safer together.’
Again that nod, as if she were saving the words. Maybe she was, because she looked around her as she’d looked around her before and finally nodded. ‘We stay here,’ she said. ‘And we sleep like animals in the trees.’
Unbuckling my belt, I put down the hunting dirk I’d been issued that morning. Then I unbuttoned my jacket, which was so heavy with water I would have discarded it had I been able to while clinging to the upturned boat. After that I struggled out of my wet shirt. I’d long since kicked off my boots in the river, as they’d filled with water, but I kept my breeches, although I undid the knees and dragged off my stockings. It was only as I stood in the clearing in the afternoon sun in my wet breeches that I realised Virginie was staring at me. ‘I’m frozen,’ I said.
Pushing a stick through the arms of my shirt I hung it from a jutting branch and began looking for a stick thick enough to support my jacket, which had been heavy enough when it was simply dry leather. Finding one, I hung the garment from a thicker branch and draped the stockings next to it. ‘Where did you learn to do that?’ Virginie demanded.
‘At the academy.’
‘Why would they teach you something so strange?’
‘So we can dry our clothes in situations like this.’ I meant we the students, me, Jerome, Emile, her brother . . .
But she simply said, ‘Turn away.’ And a few moments later, her voice resigned, she said, ‘I need your help.’ She still wore her sodden dress and still shivered from the cold despite standing in the sun. ‘My fingers.’
Her fingers were those of the dead, blue and shrunken where water had leached oil from her skin and bleached her nails. She could barely hold still as I examined them. ‘Let me do it,’ I said. My fingers trembled both from cold and nervousness as I struggled with the first of her buttons. Where I had huge buttons, her dress had dozens of tiny ones, arranged in twos, which fed through cotton loops that seemed to have shrunk. It took me minutes to undo the bodice of her wet dress and she dragged herself out of it rather than face the embarrassment of having me undo more. Her chemise was also sodden but she was naked beneath. It clung to her hips as she turned away from me.
I hung her dress in direct sunlight and told her I would find food.
‘What?’ she said. ‘Where?’
When I returned it was with three small trout, a handful of mushrooms and, unexpectedly glorious, a summer truffle with pale flesh and the most elegant scent. I used the hunting dirk to gut and fillet the trout, slicing carefully along each fragile spine. I stripped skin from the first fillet, broke off a piece of flesh and offered it to Virginie. She shook her head so I ate it and offered her the second piece. She swallowed the raw fish so quickly she could barely have tasted it. ‘Slowly,’ I said. ‘Eat it slowly.’
‘I can’t,’ she said, looking sick. ‘I can’t eat it at all.’
We found a beech tree just beyond the clearing twisted with age and split by lightning. In the top of the cavity inside was dry wood so rotten it crumbled in my fingers. I had my flint and steel, because what boy didn’t travel with such in those days. Putting the rotted wood on a flat stone out of the wind, I cracked the flints together. The kindling caught and I blew it ablaze, adding a handful of rotted wood ripped from the tree’s innards.
‘I suppose they taught you that at the academy too?’ Virginie demanded. She was smiling as she said it. Finding the driest twigs I could, to keep smoke to a minimum, I left her holding a stick-skewered trout over the first flames and returned to the river. By the time I came back with a larger trout that I’d tickled from the water, she’d eaten the first and was looking at the second hungrily.
‘Have it,’ I said. ‘I’ll catch others.’
She took a bite and grinned at me; the relief of eating, the warmth of the sun, the fact we were now on dry land putting light in her eyes.
‘No,’ I said, before she could ask. ‘I taught myself how to fish.’
I could have caught her rabbit or wildcat or water rat but I knew trout would make her happiest so that was what I offered. I would love to write that we stripped and I took her in the clearing in the sight of the sun and the trees, or that we kissed and pleasured each other as we discovered secrets hidden to us before this, or even that we lay naked in each other’s arms and kissed. But the truth is we kissed once, right after we landed, the slightest kiss for all the touch of her lips skewered through me like the lightning that blasted that beech tree. And though we held each other through the night we were dressed by then, and we huddled together for warmth, and when she slept I held her so she wouldn’t fall.
Who knows what another day alone in the forest and a night in the trees might have brought us. But the next morning, before I could even catch us breakfast, a large boat filled with soldiers sailed down the river, with the duke himself in the prow shouting for us to show ourselves if we were within hearing. Emile had delivered our plea for help. Charlot and Jerome had put ashore further downstream than us at the first sight of soldiers. Charlot had a cracked shoulder and Jerome a split head but both would be fine. Since Emile had saved us, I was unsure why the duke spoke his name with such distaste. I was to discover the reason soon enough.
On our trip back to Chateau de Saulx we passed gibbets filled with slowly twisting charbonnières and peasant cottages burning and carts full of blank-eyed prisoners, as silent and solid as the animals with whom they shared the land. The fire in their eyes was gone, extinguished by the sight of the soldiers around them and the ropes that fixed their hands behind their backs. Cows lay dead in the fields. Crops had been trampled. In a town square on the way home a half-naked woman was being whipped, her rags ripped from her shoulders and her breasts bare to the jeering crowd. She was gagged, probably against the risk of sedition, since her cries wouldn’t have worried the soldiers. A small child at her feet sobbed loud enough for both of t
hem.
Virginie saw none of this. She sat next to me in her father’s carriage, her face buried in my neck and her fingers twisted so hard into mine that her knuckles were white. She would not let go of my hand or move further from me despite her father’s silent gaze. As we entered the courtyard at the chateau she ground her face into my neck and wrapped her arms tight around me as if she would never let go. But she did without being asked and was the first from the carriage, greeting her mother with a kiss.
‘That’s the second time he’s saved me.’
The duc de Saulx looked at me. ‘We must talk.’
They took Virginie in one direction and the duke walked me in another towards a knot garden he’d planted when he first married. He told me about the planning and the planting of the garden as we walked. So far as I could tell his story existed only to fill the silence until we reached the middle of the garden and a circular pond filled with goldfish.
‘D’Aumout,’ he said, and it was unlike him to use my name so formally. ‘Did you take a bet with your friends as to who could be the first to kiss my daughter? Who could do more than simply kiss her?’
‘No.’ I said with such fury that he blinked.
‘I require your word on this.’
‘You have my word on this. I did not take part in any such wager. Nor would I ever take part in any such wager.’
‘You love her, don’t you?’
‘Since the first moment I saw her.’
The duc de Saulx sighed. ‘And from the moment you saved her from that wolf she’s loved you . . . ’
‘Before, perhaps.’
He looked at me strangely and I blushed. ‘Charlot teased her about liking me that first summer I was here. Before the wolf.’
‘My son told you this?’
‘Your daughter.’ I didn’t offer when she’d said it or that she’d been in my room at the time, with the rest of his family at supper. He thought I meant in the day and night just passed and I let him think it. The duke nodded thoughtfully and looked beyond me to a man I recognised. It was the doctor who’d treated me for the wolf bite.
‘Wait here,’ the duke said.
The two men spoke quietly and briefly and then both bowed and the doctor retired while the duke returned to where I waited. ‘My daughter has been examined,’ he said. ‘Her mother insisted and I’m not sure Virginie will ever forgive her, or me for agreeing. The doctor says she is intact. That she is untouched. So I ask you honestly, have you been . . . ’ He chose his words carefully. ‘Close to my daughter?’
‘We kissed,’ I said. ‘Once, when we climbed from the river. It was a small kiss.’ I touched the corner of my lip. ‘Here.’
The duke smiled at me. ‘Oh, to be so young again.’
‘May I ask . . . About that wager?’
‘Something Emile said to Jerome when he thought he was alone and not overheard. To the effect they had no chance of winning now. Virginie does not know how they dishonoured her. A boy like Emile, I would expect no less. But I am ashamed for Jerome. Although he redeemed himself saving my son.’
And Emile brought you warning of our trouble. I kept that thought to myself, still cross with Emile for the original bet, and lacking the courage to defend him.
The King’s Mistress
Our engagement began with an argument. Of course, I didn’t know it was an engagement then. After supper, the duke and duchess and Margot having left the room, Virginie walked up to me and slapped my face, hard. ‘How dare you,’ she said, her face white. Her eyes were on the edge of crying and her temper looked barely under control. Jerome stopped what he’d been saying, Emile stared at us, and Charlot smiled.
‘She does that,’ he said.
Virginie shot her brother a look that would have turned another man to stone. Being Charlot, he simply pointed to his heavily-bandaged shoulder and said, ‘You wouldn’t slap an injured man, would you?’ Virginie stalked from the room.
‘What was that about?’ I asked.
Charlot looked at Jerome, who blushed, and his gaze dismissed Emile, who pretended not to notice. ‘I wouldn’t know.’ He stared at me. ‘Well, go after her then. Unless you’re a complete fool.’
I caught up with Virginie in a corridor. ‘What have I done?’
She swirled round and raised her hand, wrenching free when I grabbed her wrist before she could slap me again. ‘You know exactly what you’ve done.’ She turned from me and hurried though a door at the end of the corridor and out onto the terrace, leaving me to follow like a stubborn shadow, across the terrace and down stone steps to a lawn. We ended up in the knot garden where I’d talked to her father earlier. ‘Go away,’ she ordered.
‘Not until you tell me what I’m meant to have done.’
She glared at me, eyes huge in the darkness. ‘How could you?’
‘Virginie. Tell me.’
‘How could you have wagered with those . . . ?’
‘I didn’t,’ I said fiercely. ‘I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I told your father.’
‘My mother said . . . Why didn’t Charlot stop it?’
‘He didn’t know.’
‘So there was a wager!’
‘Jerome and Emile wagered on which could steal the first kiss.’
‘And you?’ she said.
‘What could I have told you?’ But that wasn’t the question she was asking. She planted her feet solidly on the gravel of the knot garden and faced me full-on.
‘Swear,’ she said. ‘Swear you weren’t part of this.’
‘I wasn’t part of it. I would never have taken that bet.’
‘Why not?’ she demanded.
‘Because I love you.’ The truth fitted the moment, and I had a sense my life was about to change here among severely cut shrubs under a cloudy night sky. ‘Because I’ve loved you since that summer.’
‘You barely noticed me. All you did was gaze at Margot.’
‘Because I didn’t dare to look at you.’
‘A sweet lie,’ Virginie said, but she was smiling.
‘A sweeter truth.’
Sometime later, when our kisses become so deep we stopped caring if people wondered where we were, I dropped my hand to the front of her dress and closed my fingers around the slight mound between her legs. Virginie’s eyes widened and she bit her lip. A minute later she lifted her dress out of the way so I could touch her again, this time with her hand holding mine in place. Her other hand covered her mouth until her whimpers died away. ‘So much for untouched,’ she giggled.
*
The duke had moved swiftly to put down the riots, mobilising the local regiments and ordering courts to sit day and night to try those captured mid-riot or later arrested. The sentences were harsher than normal, far harsher than for an equivalent crime tried in the same courts a year before. Examples were made. Youths were whipped through the streets, young women pilloried for days in the town squares, with all the risks that brought them. The ringleaders were hanged, the lieutenants sent as slaves to the galleys at Marseilles, or to work out their lives chained together at the arsenal there.
The duke’s personal vengeance was brutal. The charbonnière accused of leading the riots was tried for treason and convicted–even though the man swore on his soul he was innocent. He was whipped through the streets, then lashed to a wooden frame in the local town square and the long bones of his body broken with an iron bar by the sergeant of the watch. After that he was hanged, dragged from the cobbles by a rope around his neck since he was no longer able to stand. Only the duke among us watched. He reported the crowd had been respectful but sullen. Which is what he would expect.
‘Necessary,’ was all he said to me on his return. Jerome and Emile had been sent back to the academy. Charlot and I would not be joining them. Charlot was to take up his duties at Chateau de Saulx. As for me, I was waiting to be i
ntroduced to Louise, the king’s mistress, who was Margot’s age but even more beautiful. Virginie was furious about this. A fierce sulk from her produced pleading from me, which became a sulk on my part the moment she began relenting. We made up shortly before Louise arrived, in what was becoming our traditional way. ‘You look flushed,’ was all Charlot said.
‘It’s hot, I’m nervous.’
‘That’s my sister,’ he reminded me. ‘It’s as well I like you.’
We stood in the courtyard awaiting Louise. She arrived in a royal carriage, bearing congratulations from the king on the duke’s handling of the uprising. She refreshed herself and then disappeared into the duke’s study. An hour or so later she entered the drawing room, smiled at all of us and turned to me.
‘Will you walk?’ She asked this in a gentle fashion, as if she really expected me to say I was busy or had better things to do. She was beautiful, this king’s mistress. Looking, to me, little older than Virginie, and I was still an age when a few years either way really counted as a difference. I bowed and offered my arm, and she smiled as she might at a clever child. ‘This way, I think.’
She led us down to the little lake and we walked its edge, ducking under willows and watching coots steady in the water as little battleships. We stopped to marvel at an ancient trout, large to us and monstrous to the insects that kept it fed. ‘What are you thinking?’ Her question made me stutter.
‘I’m wondering if a large trout would taste better than a small one.’
‘Worse,’ she said with certainty. ‘Old things always taste worse.’
I could think of exceptions but didn’t contradict her.
‘You keep looking at me,’ she said a hundred paces later. ‘Why?’
‘You’re younger than I expected.’
She stopped, turned in a slow circle beneath a willow tree, her smile suddenly coquettish. Her cream dress was rich with brocade, its neck cut low enough to show the slope of her breasts. She smelt of rose water and musk. ‘You like what you see?’
The Last Banquet Page 11