Before Versailles (32 page)

“The carriage is ready,” Louise said, then she stood to one side as Henriette, followed by Catherine, moved past her.

“See to the dogs.” Henriette tossed the words over her shoulder. She made no secret of her fury at being forced to accompany the queen mother. Fanny said she was only going because Monsieur had begged her. Fanny had overheard the begging.

Louise held out a folded note. “You forget this,” she whispered. It was yet another secret missive from his majesty. There’d been no time for a private meeting between Louis and Madame, but Fanny and Louise had taken notes back and forth. Louise and the other maids of honor followed Madame downstairs to the golden entrance, the king’s entrance. They weren’t going. At the last moment, Henriette had decided to leave her maids of honor behind, but Louise didn’t mind. This gave her an opportunity to expand her exploring. She was continuing to ignore Choisy’s warnings.

On the ground floor was a great, hulking carriage, and also, Louise saw, the king’s favorite troupe of musketeers, called the Grays because they rode horses of that color. Louis was waiting by the door of the carriage, his dashing hat pulled from his head, in his hands.

“I plan to accompany you part of the way,” he spoke to Henriette.

Louise watched the sullen look leave Henriette’s face.

“My brother does us an honor,” announced Philippe, but to Louise’s eyes his face looked a little haggard. There was quite a crowd gathered to watch the departure, the Viscount Nicolas, other officials, and several from the queen’s household. The atmosphere was festive and excited. If Madame was in disgrace, none of these courtiers realized it yet. Many of them were at the carriage door saying good-bye to her, telling her she’d be missed. The queen mother, late, as was her habit, marched through a gatehouse door, her lady-in-waiting following, and narrowed her eyes at the sight of so many people. Once she was in the carriage, Louis mounted his horse, a huge, white stallion trained in Spain. The Spanish were famous for their horses and did not export them; it was a gift from his father-in-law. The horse reared and danced small steps forward on its back legs. Louis sat as easily atop it as if he were sitting in a chair. He shows off for her, thought Louise. She and the others left behind waved. Maids of honor from various households ran out of the palace to watch the carriage roll down the road toward the stables and then out into the world beyond the palace.

“Where’s her majesty?” Fanny asked Athénaïs, as the carriage and horsemen finally disappeared from sight and there was nothing to do but walk back into the king’s courtyard.

Athénaïs rolled her eyes. “Sleeping.”

“Well, she has the heir to protect,” Fanny answered.

“Now don’t forget you promised you’d walk with me in the queen’s garden later.” Athénaïs smiled in a friendly way at Louise. “Please, you come, also.”

Louise and Fanny walked up the gatehouse staircase by themselves.

“When did you become friends with her?” Louise asked.

“We both notice things, and we noticed that we notice, and we’ve decided to compare notes. She’s quite nice, not at all with her nose in the air, like others I could name.” Fanny shook her head. “Poor queen. Athénaïs says she stayed in bed today. I almost feel sorry for her. It’s as if she lives in another world.”

“Choisy told me the only man the queen saw until her marriage was her father.” The Spanish court, said Choisy, keeps its maidens locked away and guarded close.

Fanny shuddered. “I’m glad I’m not Spanish, then. What are we going to do with ourselves while she’s gone?”

Plenty, Louise thought but didn’t say.

I
NSIDE THE CARRIAGE
, Anne watched Henriette across the short space separating them. Louis rode beside a window, and Henriette hung out of it, talking to him about this and that, the ballet to be performed in a few weeks, how pleased her brother was with his coming marriage to the Portuguese infanta, and Catherine leaned forward more than once to join the conversation.

Have you always been this delightfully lighthearted? thought Anne, as she considered Henriette. Let me marry her, Philippe had suggested, before her brother was crowned king of England, when it looked as if that prince would roam a vagabond forever. Philippe was eager for his inheritance, for his own household, eager to move out of the shadow of his brother, and even if Henriette was poverty-stricken and without influence, her mother was a princess of France, a daughter of France. And their dearest cardinal agreed. It was best that Philippe not possess a foreign princess with foreign connections, so the engagement was allowed. And then there’d been all the bustle of Louis’s splendid wedding, a new queen to be presented to one and all, and her own dearest ill, so ill he could not stand up. There had been his dying to deal with, and so she’d withdrawn her gaze from court, from family, from Philippe’s new marriage. Anne put a handsomely gloved hand to her throat, to the knot of grief that lived there. She’d withdrawn her gaze, and look what had happened. Her bereft heart was not allowed its quiet. There was misbehavior and poor judgment.

She brooded on that grievance until, midway on their journey, the carriage stopped. Anne watched as Louis dismounted, opened the carriage door himself.

“I bid you adieu,” he said directly to Henriette. His face was somber. “I’ll be counting the moments until you return to grace my court again.” He turned to Anne. “Majesty, have a care for my dear sister, for I would not wish to see her have anything but the most pleasant of visits.”

He warns me, thought Anne. She swelled with anger. Philippe was behind Louis, and Louis moved aside, watching his brother with hooded eyes.

“Madame,” said Philippe, grasping Henriette’s gloved hands and kissing them. “I await your return with eagerness. Majesty my mother, you’ll give the duchess my kindest regards, won’t you? You’ll like her, my darling. The stories of her are extraordinary. If my mother does not share them, I will, when you return. Well,” he looked from his mother to Henriette, sensing the coldness in the carriage, feeling guilty for his part in it, “enjoy your visit.”

Guileless, thought Anne. The victim in all this. My precious waif. She leaned forward, taking his chin in her hands, kissing him on the lips. The occupants of the carriage were silent as men called to one another. They listened for a while to the sound of retreating hooves and then to the silence of the country around them. Philippe’s lieutenant of the musketeers appeared at a window and suggested they commence their journey. The carriage made a lurching movement, began to roll forward. Even in this, the best of carriages, the ride was jolting.

“I have a headache,” Henriette said to no one in particular.

“Dear Madame, do let me tell you about the Duchess de Chevreuse,” said Catherine. “It’s most amusing. His majesty, the late king, hated her, but our dear majesty here felt only adoration. They were best of friends.”

“We are best of friends,” corrected Anne.

“In her day, she plotted against Cardinal Richelieu and the oh-so-worthy Cardinal Mazarin, and our gracious majesty is so large-hearted, so full of tenderness and Christian charity—such an example to us all—that she forgave her. I swear it. Perhaps the duchess will instruct us in statecraft, in how to plot, yet never be punished.” Catherine’s mocking laugh filled the interior of the carriage.

“Is this true, majesty?” asked Henriette. “Not only do you sweep me away like some disobedient child, but I’m to be lectured by a traitoress?”

“Who said anything of lectures? And I will not allow her to be called a traitoress. Those were treacherous times, times you cannot imagine.”

“Do you think I can’t imagine treachery?” asked Henriette. “I, whose father was beheaded? Let us make no more pretense, if you please.” She sat up straight-backed and pale on the carriage seat opposite Anne. “You blame me for his majesty’s affection.”

Anne felt Madame de Motteville, sitting beside her, stiffen. “You’re overwrought,” said Anne, reeling a little at Henriette’s defiance. “That’s why I take you from court. To divert you. You aren’t thinking clearly just now.”

“I am here only because Monsieur asked me. I obey him in all ways, even if you don’t believe it.” With that, Henriette turned her head to look out the window.

Catherine watched Anne with an arrogant glee.

This was off to a bad beginning. Anne looked down at her hands, held tightly together so that she would not put them around Henriette’s throat and strangle her, after, of course, she had strangled Catherine.

T
HE OTHERS LEFT
behind, Louis galloped toward his stables, and when the buildings were in sight, he pulled the reins of his horse, his mind playing, as it always did, over the business of his kingdom. The Dutch had fifteen thousand merchant vessels in their fleet. France had twenty, and that number was both war and merchant ships. How to rebuild? The other thought in his mind was Henriette. What if his mother, his mother’s clever friend, should convince her not to love him? How would he endure?

An elderly groom limped out to take the reins of his horse. “Left them in the dust, didn’t you, your majesty?” he said. Others could be seen in the distance galloping forward. “Well, if I were riding that handsome beast, I’d do the same.”

“So, you give tribute to the horse and not to its rider’s skill?”

“Now, now, sire, I didn’t say naught about skill. Everyone knows you could ride a whirlwind. It’s just that’s a fine fellow you’re on. He keeps the grooms hopping, he does. Likes to kick a man now and then.”

“He’s Spanish.”

“Don’t I know? That’s why he kicks, I say. We may be at peace, but a Spaniard never stops fighting. They’ll lash out in death.”

The others were close now. Louis expected a musketeer in the lead, and several were, but alongside them was Guy.

“Sire,” called Guy, as he reached Louis and trotted his horse in a circle around him. “I didn’t hear the signal for a race to begin.”

“I didn’t give it.”

Guy laughed. “That is one beautiful horse. I might have beaten you if I’d had a better mount.”

“Just what I was thinking,” said Louis.

Some distance away, Philippe leapt from his horse and threw the reins toward a groom. “You didn’t give a signal to begin. That isn’t fair,” he called.

“Keep him occupied,” Louis said to Guy, “as you so well know how to do.”

Guy’s jaw clenched. Louis was beginning to push at everyone; a space around him was widening into an unseen circle into which no one could step. He was beginning, really, to become king. In all the time Guy had been at court, that role had been a ghost, Louis’s father indecisive off a battlefield, and Louis himself deferring to the cardinal and to his mother. He stared after this man, this king, walking away from him toward the palace, this boyhood friend whom all the court said he so favored, to whom he had never yielded an inch. He had yielded to Madame. Did Louis really expect him to yield all?

T
HE CARRIAGE ROLLED
into the gravel courtyard of the duchess’s estate, and Marie, the Duchess of Chevreuse—a true legend in her time, married or lover to the most important men in the kingdom, once superintendent of the household of the very queen who now came to visit her—stood waiting on the château’s stone steps. At the sight of the carriage, she ran down the steps with the grace of a girl and curtsied and then kissed Anne on her cheeks when the queen mother descended from the carriage.