Before Versailles (15 page)

“Who is that?” asked Louise.

“Monsieur Colbert.” Choisy was curt.

“Isn’t he on the king’s council?”

“Hardly. Only the Viscount Nicolas, Monsieur le Tellier, and Monsieur Lionne grace the council. But he was the cardinal’s right-hand man, and I believe his majesty has placed him on some committee about trade or some such.”

“Are you on a council yet?”

“Soon, or so Monsieur tells me. He tells me he has the viscount’s support and that all of us who are Monsieur’s friends will be part of his majesty’s councils, as is our right.”

“How wonderful. I’m very glad for you.”

They rode in silence, the forest ahead of them, a cool, green canopy of ancient trees. Birds warbled a morning chant, and as they rode in under trees, Louise could feel her heart expand. She loved the forest, the wild emerald grace of it. Her morning rides, with or without Choisy, taken rain or shine, settled her in some way she had no words for, gave her the calm she needed to go back to Fontainebleau and act maid of honor to a princess, a young woman on the cusp of infidelity. And if Madame was unfaithful, what then? Deceit, for certain, by Louise and Fanny. And if something went wrong—it’s not going to, said Fanny, who imagined more power, more riches, more honor than was conceivable, spilling down from Madame to them. We’ll marry viscounts at the least, said Fanny.

“Tell me about his majesty’s first love, Marie Mancini,” Louise said.

“So, Fanny told you, did she?”

“He gave her up easily?”

“Who knows what he felt—”

Louise thought of the face she’d seen when the king had stopped on the way to his wedding, a face drawn at the edges, too finely honed. He felt grief, she thought.

“—it’s said she wouldn’t be his mistress. Only queen was good enough for her. Ha. As if a Mazarin niece could be queen.” He wiped his brow. “It’s going to be hot today. I’m going to ruin my complexion.”

“You say that every time. We have to cross the river. Your mother’s château is across the river.” This was the beginning of his arguing with her to turn around. At least twice a week, she managed to talk him into accompanying her on her search for the boy in the iron mask, and for the first hour he tried to change her mind. Hadn’t he learned by now she could be quite singleminded?

She pointed. “Let’s ride north, and see what we find. I have at least four hours before anyone is really awake enough to notice I’ve gone.” There must be a map of this area somewhere, she thought.

An hour later, she sat outside a hut, drinking from a tin scoop, her eyes scanning the lean-to where these peasants’ cow was kept at night, wondering if her boy in the iron mask was hidden in a dark attic somewhere, not here, but somewhere. People tied their mad relatives to braces in attics or basements or back bedrooms. Near her, in the shade, was a baby in a hand-carved cradle, a toddler tied to one of the cradle’s ends, and a small boy sitting in the dust shelling beans carefully and seriously into a wooden bowl. Inside the house, an old man and woman sat up in the only bed, shawls around their shoulders, eyes dull. The woman of the farm, after having drawn water for Louise, was back in her garden, hoeing. Without this garden, the family would not survive. It would last them through the summer, and then there must be vegetables from it dried, something put up, for winter, remorseless in its length and cold.

“Look what I found.”

Choisy pushed a child from around the corner of the hut. Dressed in a faded gown that had been washed far too many times, the girl was barefoot.

“She was hiding behind a tree there.” Choisy pointed to the tree with his fan. “Watching you.”

There were purple bruises on the girl’s arms from elbow to hand, one side of her face was swollen to grotesque proportions. Choisy raised an eyebrow at Louise, then walked over to the patch of garden the woman hoed.

“Is this one much trouble?” he asked, pointing his fan toward the girl.

“My oldest,” said the woman. She looked up from the dirt and raised tired eyes to Choisy’s, pleading naked in them. “She’s in the way, too many of us. Take her, my lord.”

“You need a second servant, Louise,” Choisy said without pausing for a breath, and Louise was too surprised to say anything.

Hoe in hand, the woman walked out of the garden and straight over to Louise, dropped to her knees in the dust and said, “I beg you, noble lady.”

“Done,” said Choisy. “Do you know where the king’s palace is?”

The woman nodded.

“Send her there tomorrow.”

“Today,” said the woman. “Take her today. Now.”

Choisy looked at the hut, the children in the cradle and out of it, the lean-to, the distant figure of a man following a plow pulled by a single ox. That ox was an important part of the farm’s survival, more important than this girl, who … what? Spoke too little? Too much? Moved too fast? Too slowly? Looked too ugly? Or too fair? The past few harvests had been bad. Everyone had his breaking point.

“Her clothing?”

“On her back,” said the woman.

Choisy lifted the girl into the groom’s saddle. “The horse will hold you both,” he told the groom, as he opened a small embroidered leather bag that hung from his waist and pulled out a coin.

The woman took the coin, bit it once, then closed her eyes, the coin in a tight fist. A single tear, dredged from some place that had forgotten how to weep, slid down her face.

“Back home for us,” Choisy said to Louise, and once she was atop her horse, and they were trotting past the lean-to, “No place here to hide a madman, no madman except the one who works the fields. By the Blessed Savior’s fingertips, what we do to one another passes all bounds. I refuse to open the cupboards and doors of every hovel we happen across. Enough, Louise. I’m not aiding you anymore. The sight of this girl, atop that woman’s tears, has broken my heart. I’ll stay in my perfumed chambers and forget this world exists, thank you very much.”

“When we find the place where he is—”

“He’ll slit our throats. Madmen do that, you know.”

“Boy. He was a boy, Choisy.”

They rode on in silence for a while, each lost in thought, Louise wondering how she might learn the countryside more precisely and how she could pay for an extra servant, and Choisy wondering why worlds such as the one the peasant woman lived in existed. It’s God’s will, said his mother, said the priests, but the harshness of God’s will overwhelmed him at the moment.

“Choisy,” Louise said, a tone in her voice that made Choisy turn to look directly at her. “I-I can’t afford another servant. I’m so sorry, but it’s true. What shall we do?”

“We’ll take her to the Carmelites.”

There was a nunnery in a village near the palace. Nunneries, monasteries, the nuns and priests within them, dotted the countryside, served as accent marks in the towns and cities. Every noble family was linked in some way to the church, an unmarried daughter or a widow who’d become a nun; second and third sons looked on the church as another way to advance through society. Jesuits, Carmelites, Benedictines, Poor Clares, Franciscans, and others served the world in ways as varied as the order and tradition of each individual community. Some took in orphans, some the mad, some lived in silence, some wove themselves into the politics of every court. A disgraced wife, the family drunkard, an illegitimate child, the wayward son, any of them might find themselves locked behind a nunnery’s gate, confined within a monk’s cell, the rules, the chants, the prayers, the ringing of bells, the chores, the ritual of the day unvarying and constant, there to soothe, to chastise, to placate, to soften, to mold, to serve.

“Are you going to rescue every beaten girl you come across?”

“Most probably.”

Louise pulled the reins of her horse short, and when Choisy did likewise, she leaned up out of the sidesaddle and kissed him on the mouth. “That’s for your large heart, sir,” she said.

He looked off in the distance. “Would you marry me if I asked?”

His question made her laugh. What a jester he was and a gossip and a dear. “Would I have to share my gowns?”

There was a short silence she didn’t expect. Then he said, “I should have worn a mask and a large hat like you have on. I think I’ve burned my complexion.”

Louise tapped at her horse with the crop to ride on, thinking, I ought to have asked the woman about madmen roaming the forest. There were always legends that were more than half true among peasants and country folk.

I think I truly love her, thought Choisy. What will I do with that?

I
T WAS JUST
noon when they returned from the nunnery. The girl had been dropped off as if she were a pumpkin or basket of apples. The nuns would decide her fate, perhaps teach her a skill, sewing or cooking. Such was the lot of poor girls. Louise wasn’t poor, but if her mother hadn’t remarried, she might have ended up in a nunnery herself because after her father died, managing the farm was too much for her mother. The palace was alive on every level as she and Choisy dismounted their horses, courtiers up, dressed, running from one royal set of apartments to the next. Many of them also called upon the Viscount Nicolas, who wasn’t royal, but whose power was.

I’ll visit and see how the girl fares, Louise thought, as she hurried into a kitchen to grab some bread and cheese, drink down a gulp of cider, because soon she’d have to stand for several hours if Madame chose to dine in public with the royal family. She ran all the way to Madame’s set of rooms. In the first antechamber her friends embroidered on an altar cloth Madame was going to present to the queen. Madame’s spaniels ran yapping joyously to her, and she, who liked all animals, bent to pull long dog ears, so that her eyes didn’t have to meet the gargoyle’s, who stood lovely and impatient by the frame of one of the tall windows.

“There you are,” Catherine’s voice was ice. “Slept in, did we?”

“I’m sorry.” Louise had a soft voice, and under the softness was a sweet, clear pitch that touched most hearts.

But Catherine was impressed with neither soft nor sweet. “Take the dogs out, La Baume le Blanc. At once.”

Dismissed like a washerwoman’s daughter and glad of it, Louise stuck out her tongue at her three friends left behind to embroider with her difficultness, her haughtiness, her nose-in-the-airness, Catherine, the Princess de Monaco, while she, Miss Louise de Nobody, escaped.

Louise ran, the dogs behind her, down to the queen’s garden, and the spaniels, naughty half-wild things because everyone stayed too busy to train them properly, did what they should. Dogs in chase, Louise ran from one bronze statue to another unaware they were replicas of magnificent statues that had once embellished ancient Rome. It had been the whim of one of the king’s ancestors to send architects directly to Rome, where marble statues and temples of the long-ago empire were not yet all rubble or all stolen. Artisans had brought back ancient busts, statues, torsos, and molds of that which they couldn’t buy. Right here at Fontainebleau a smelting works had been set up, and bronzes were made from the molds: huge, handsome, overpowering mythical figures that had once gazed down at Roman emperors, Roman legions, and Roman citizens, figures with the names of Hercules, Ariadne, Venus, Apollo.

This garden, which had become completely enclosed over time, a verdant cage smelling of sweet olive and orange blossoms, of jasmine and rose, was completely to her majesty’s taste. She liked being encased and surrounded. The wilderness of forest beyond upset and frightened her. She didn’t understand the furor with which the French court hunted there, distrusting the wild passion and abandon displayed, a passion she suspected spilled over into other aspects of life.

Louise stepped out of her heeled shoes so she could run even faster. There was no one about; the queen and her ladies never went outside until after dining with his majesty. In spite of her limp, she ran like the girl she still was.

S
TARING AT THE
remaining maids of honor as if she were envisioning each of them stripped to the waist and flogged, Catherine had remained where she stood.

“Miss de la Baume le Blanc forgot the leashes, ma’am,” Fanny ventured. “Shall I take them—”