Bitter Greens (46 page)

And Françoise was much occupied with the recent marriage of Princesse Louise Françoise, Athénaïs’s eldest daughter, to the grandson of the Grand Condé. Princesse Louise Françoise was only eleven, and so, after the ceremonial bedding with her husband, she had gone back to the schoolroom and the loving care of her governess. Except Princesse Louise Françoise despised the Marquise de Maintenon and refused to submit to her authority. Add to that her elder half-sister’s outrage that Princesse Louise Françoise now outranked her and the court was in an uproar.

In addition, the King had a boil on his leg the size of a plum and was in such pain that he could not walk. He had to attend council lying on a couch and could only shoot from his little carriage, which enraged him so much he was in a perpetual foul mood. Françoise was kept busy nursing him and trying to keep him happy – a task that left her pale and tired and preoccupied.

At last, though, I managed to catch Françoise’s eye and made a begging motion with my hands. She came to greet me, a stately woman dressed in sober clothes that nonetheless rustled richly.

‘Mademoiselle de la Force, is there something you want from me?’

‘My conscience is troubled,’ I said. ‘I need spiritual guidance.’

‘Do you not have a confessor?’

‘
Madame
, you forget. I’m … I’m …’

She looked surprised. ‘
Mademoiselle
, have you not yet recanted? The King will be most displeased. Have you not heard of the new laws against heretics?’

‘I have. I am most troubled in my heart. I wish to be a good and loyal subject to the King, and to confess and mend my ways, but I feel a duty to my dead parents.’

Her face softened. ‘Indeed, I understand. Come this afternoon and we shall talk and see if I cannot help you in your dilemma.’

That evening, I crept out to meet Charles in the palace gardens. The palace glowed with candlelight from nearly every window, and I could hear music and shrill laughter and the clink of glasses. Outside, though, all was quiet, the lawns and paths frosty-white under the moon, the canals and fountains glimmering, the shadows black and deep. It was chilly, and I drew my velvet cloak close about my shoulders.

Charles was waiting for me near the fountain, a tall, broad-shouldered figure wrapped in a dark cloak. In the moonlight, his face looked different – all hard planes and dark hollows – but he smiled at the sight of me and stretched out both hands, and I ran forward with a low cry of delight.

‘All is arranged,’ I whispered. ‘If I abjure my faith, the Marquise will talk to the King and persuade him to sanction our marriage. She says he may even give me a pension.’

Charles caught me in his arms and whirled me around. ‘That’s wonderful! Oh, my father will not be able to deny us his permission when the King himself supports us!’

I wound my arms around his neck, running my hands under the stiff edge of his wig, nipping at his lower lip teasingly. ‘I’ll be Madame de Briou.’

‘You will,’ he asserted. He walked me backward towards a small grove under a circle of trees, his hands busy undoing my bodice. My own hands were unbuttoning his waistcoat. ‘We’ll be able to sleep all night together like an old married couple. No more sneaking around at the dead of night.’

I pretended to pout. ‘Really? I rather like our clandestine assignations.’

‘In that case,’ he said, and he tipped me backward over his arm, lowering me to the ground.

I gasped and laughed, clutching at his strong arm, my skirts billowing about me.

‘Why must you always wear so many clothes?’ he said, untying my cloak and tugging my dress away from my shoulders. ‘It’s so hard to get inside them.’

‘I’d have thought you’d have had enough practice by now,’ I responded, helping him strip off his coat. He took off his wig and flung it aside, then lay beside me, kissing down my bare shoulder to my breast, one hand deftly unfastening his breeches, the other sliding up my thigh, seeking the soft naked skin above my garter.

‘That’ll be the best thing about being married. I can have you naked in my bed whenever I want you.’

I opened my lips to say something teasing in response, but he seized possession of my mouth. His hands did their best to unravel me from my layers of skirts and petticoats and stockings and stays, till I was as naked as he could get me. The ground was cold and damp underneath me, and I shivered and snuggled closer to him.

In one swift motion, Charles rolled me over and lifted me so that I sat astride him, my knees on either side of his hips. Eagerly, he guided himself inside me, thrusting up his hips so I cried out in surprise and pleasure. I had never made love in such a way before; I felt him penetrate deeper than I would have thought possible. I arched away and then slammed back down upon him, and arched again, feeling a sudden surge of power and control as I heard him whimper and strain to follow me. Clenching my knees, I bent to my task, our bodies moving together in an ever-escalating rhythm, as if I was riding a galloping horse. My head fell forward and I grasped at a tree trunk, bracing myself, feeling the familiar wild sweet explosion. ‘Oh, God, Charles. I love you! I love you!’

He gasped his response into my neck as I collapsed upon him, his hands upon my bare buttocks, rocking me a little as if he could not bear to stop that exquisite motion. ‘
Ma chérie
,’ he whispered tenderly. ‘Soon to be my little wife.’

I sat with my quill in my hand, the ink drying on the nib, and looked down at the blank white page before me.

A sort of paralysis had hold of me. I could not write the words, though I knew what I must say: ‘My dearest sister, I write to let you know that I have decided to obey His Most Christian Majesty, the King, and my own conscience, and embrace the One True Faith …’

I could not bear to think of Marie’s face as she read the words. I could not bear to imagine what she would think of me. I had only seen my sister a few times in the past twenty years, but she was still blood of my blood, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Together, we had listened to stories at our mother’s knee and learnt to read from the Bible. Together, we had seen my mother seized and dragged away, locked up in a convent against her will. Together, we had endured the hard years of our guardian’s rule. We were bound together by something much more potent than time.

‘I can’t,’ I said, laying down my quill. ‘She will never forgive me.’

Then I thought of Charles, I thought of the horror of being locked up in prison or burnt at the stake, and I took up my quill again, its feathered plume trembling.

‘My dearest sister,’ I wrote tremulously, ink blotching the page with
black tears. I wished fervently that I could go on and tell Marie all that was in my heart, my feeling that I had lost God and that God had forgotten me, my fear that my mother had been wrong and that we were not the elect of God but cursed by our own arrogance, my conviction that love was the only thing of worth in this graceless world of ours.

Yet I did not dare. All mail sent anywhere in the kingdom of France was opened and read by the King’s spies. I would have to write a private letter to my sister as if making a public acclamation before the court, and I could only hope that Marie would understand the necessity.

It was at that moment I heard a faint scratch at the door. Nanette came in, her hands clenched before her, her face pursed with anxiety. ‘
Mademoiselle
, a messenger has come from Cazeneuve, bearing gifts from your sister, the Baronne, to celebrate Easter.’

I stared at her in utter perplexity. We
réformés
did not celebrate Easter. And Nanette never called me ‘
mademoiselle
’ unless in company. I looked over her shoulder and saw Bertrand, the man who had been my gaoler in the Bastille, standing behind her, a basket in his hands. Two hard-faced palace guards stood behind him.

‘Thank you, Nanette. A parcel from the country is always welcome.’ I rose and went towards Bertrand, who fixed his dark eyes upon my face in some kind of unspoken warning. I smiled at him. ‘How lovely to see you again, Bertrand. Country air seems to be agreeing with you. What has my sister sent me?’

‘Eggs.’

‘Eggs! Lovely. Let me see.’ I lifted the napkin and saw a dozen gaily painted eggs nestled in straw.

‘Those soldiers wanted to search the basket, but Bertrand was worried the eggs would be broken,’ Nanette said in a neutral tone.

‘Yes, that would be a shame. A gift from my sister is a precious thing!’

‘We need to be sure no treasonous or heretical messages are contained within,’ the soldier said. ‘That man’s a Gascon, and the dragoons have been having a great deal of trouble in Gascony.’

‘Indeed? I am sorry to hear that. I don’t think you’ll find anything
heretical in a basket of Easter eggs, though.’ I smiled at the soldiers, though my pulse was thudding loudly in my ears.

‘Need to check.’

‘Well, let me take the eggs out first.’ I put the basket on my bed and sat beside it so my body concealed as much of it as possible. The soldiers craned their necks suspiciously, and I smiled at them and began to carefully remove the painted eggs, one by one. Most had been hard-boiled – I could feel the weight of them in my hand as I lifted them out of the basket – but a few were light as air and I heard a faint rustle from within. I laid them down carefully and then rummaged through the straw. An envelope was hidden within. I tried to draw it out discreetly, but the guards saw it and strode forward at once to seize it, filling the tiny room with their bulk. ‘It’s a letter from my sister,’ I protested as one ripped it open, but they ignored me.

‘It says “Happy Easter”,’ the guard said blankly and threw the note back on the bed. They then upended the basket, scattering straw everywhere. There was nothing else to be found.

‘Just you look at the mess you’ve made,’ Nanette scolded. ‘You like making work for poor old ladies, do you? Out! Out! Go on, be off with you.’

As the guards backed out, mumbling apologies, I read the brief message on the card, in my sister’s familiar neat script, then loudly admired the painted eggs. ‘I wonder if my niece helped make them,’ I said to Nanette. ‘She must be quite a big girl by now.’

The moment the door shut behind the guards, I leapt up and seized the four eggs that had been blown empty. Very carefully, I broke them open and found within tiny scrolls of paper, covered on both sides with miniature script. They had been poked through the holes at either end of the egg, where the yolk and whites had been blown out. As Nanette tidied up the straw, I unrolled the scrolls and found they made a letter, cut into quarters. My sister had written in Garonnais, our local dialect. Drawing near the window, I endeavoured to decipher the tiny handwriting:

I sat for a long while, holding my sister’s letter in my hand, feeling faint and sick. Then I bent and poked the little scrolls into my lantern. They flared into flame and, in seconds, were gone. Smoke stung my eyes. I found I was weeping.
As smoke is driven away, so let God’s enemies be driven away …

Nanette came and sat beside me, passing me a handkerchief. I mopped my eyes and blew my nose. ‘She has abjured,’ I said.

‘It is like the old days,’ Nanette said in miserable bewilderment. ‘I thought such things could never happen again.’

I looked at Bertrand. ‘Thank you so much for coming. You took a grave risk, carrying such a message for me.’

He bobbed his head in acknowledgement.

‘Are things really so bad in Gascony? What has been happening there?’

The story he told us had both Nanette and I in tears. Sealed within the artificial world of the royal court, we had known nothing of what was happening in the French countryside. The Huguenots were being maltreated on all sides: fined, flogged, hanged, burnt and stabbed to death.
In one village, Bertrand told us, a few hundred
réformés
had gathered in the winter to christen their newborn babies. Some had travelled a long way, since their own churches had been wrecked or burnt. They found the church barred to them by soldiers, who herded them all into a field and would not permit them to go home until they had all knelt and received absolution from the army chaplain. The
réformés
refused, even though it was snowing and bitterly cold. All night, they huddled together in the icy field, singing psalms to keep up their courage. In the morning, all the little newborn babies were stiff and cold, frozen to death on their mothers’ breasts, and many others had died too, mostly the young and the elderly. The
réformés
were not permitted to bury their dead in consecrated ground, the soldiers flinging the corpses into a ditch by the side of the road.

‘Why didn’t they just submit?’ I said, wiping away my tears. ‘Those poor little babies.’

‘Life on earth is short and brutal,’ Bertrand said, ‘but the faithful shall live forever in the glory of heaven.’ His eyes were lit with the fervour of a true believer and I looked away, feeling shame, indignation and fear all at the same time.

‘Why did they not flee, then?’ I demanded. ‘Surely it’d be better than freezing to death in a field?’

‘Many tried,’ Bertrand said. ‘They hunted them down like rabbits and dragged them back. I’ve heard of ladies staining their faces with walnut juice and dressing as peddlers, or pretending to be servants, walking in the mud while their husbands rode, for it’s the women who have suffered the most, you know, soldiers being what they are. Some pretended to be old women, hoping that the soldiers would leave them be, but still had their clothes torn off their backs and the soldiers having their sport with them before they were killed.’

‘It’s so terrible.’ Nanette looked more knotted up in her face and body than I’d ever seen her look. ‘What kind of world do we live in?’

‘No one dares help any more,’ Bertrand said. ‘There was a man who was guiding people through the Languedoc to the sea and helping them find passage on ships. He was discovered and tortured cruelly before he
was hanged. And the poor people he was helping were loaded with chains and forced to march through every village and town for miles around, with the soldiers beating them with whips till their clothes were in tatters and the blood running freely, so everyone could see, before being sent to the galleys. A bishop saw what was happening and tried to stop the soldiers, and so he was sent to the galleys as well.’

‘I heard yesterday that the King had sent one of his own councillors to the galleys when he refused to abjure,’ I said. ‘One of his oldest friends!’

‘We are laden with chains,’ Nanette said in a voice of heavy resignation. ‘We are driven into the wilderness once more.’

On Easter Sunday, I prepared myself for my public humiliation by candlelight, dressing myself in a plain dark dress with a simple lace collar.

‘At least I’m not expected to wear sackcloth and ashes,’ I said bitterly to Nanette. ‘Or crawl to the cathedral on my knees.’

The ceremony of abjuration was not to take place at the private chapel at the palace, but at the new church built in the township. A majestic pile, it was nonetheless built low so it would not dominate the town. Only the palace was permitted to do that.

I was not the only one abjuring my faith that day. The sentencing of the King’s own councillor, Louis de Marolles, to the galleys had caused much shock at court, and many – both courtiers and servants – had decided it would be best to recant as soon and as publicly as possible.

Nanette was to go with me. We knew the King’s soldiers-of-God would care nothing for her age and frailty, and, besides, although she did not understand why the King should make a law forbidding her to sing the psalms she loved so much and forcing her to worship in a way that made no sense to her, Nanette was at heart a practical woman and had no wish to die a martyr’s death.

It was dark outside. With Nanette beside me, a woollen shawl draped over her thin shoulders against the sharp nip in the air, I carried my candle through the dark quiet corridors of the palace. Slowly, other
réformés
joined me. Some looked sulky and recalcitrant, others ashamed.
Only a few walked with head held high, or with faces shining with true conviction. I myself was one of those who walked with head lowered, unable to bear the thought of meeting anyone’s eyes. I felt as if my gown had been ripped from my shoulders, as if some hidden part of myself, usually concealed from prying eyes, was now on display to be mocked. All was quiet. Not even the birds had yet begun to sing, and all the church bells were mute. Yet deep inside my head I could hear the echo of long-ago singing.

How often had I heard this psalm being sung? Nanette had sung it to me as I drifted into sleep, the cook had sung it as he kneaded the dough, the goose-girl had sung it as she brought the geese home at the end of the day, my mother had read it as a blessing at the beginning of a meal. How many times had I sung it myself, in the small white chapel at Cazeneuve, the voices of everyone I knew singing together, word and note bound together in plainsong, many voices singing as one?