Mistress of the Sun Read online

  “Mademoiselle Clorine is honest, a God-fearing girl,” the man interrupted uneasily. “She does not steal. She was schooled at a charity convent and knows manners, I assure you. She does not speak coarse, or stand close. I need not remind you that it is not easy to find a maid in these times. The daughter of the deceased has provided a reference.” A sheet of paper trembled in his hand.

  Françoise looked it over and quickly handed it back. “Very well. She has her belongings with her?”

  “I assure you,” the man said, bowing.

  CLORINE PUT DOWN her carpet haversack in Petite’s attic room. “They didn’t tell me that you have a limp.” She looked around, her hands on her hips.

  “It’s always warm,” Petite said. “You can use that trunk there, and that bed over there. The scullery girl used to sleep on it, but she ran away with a field hand.”

  “Is it true that your mother is to marry a marquis and that you will soon be moving to the château at Blois?”

  “Yes,” Petite said.

  “Well, then.” Clorine opened her haversack and transferred a nightcap, flannels, three aprons and small linens into the trunk. “It’s said even the servants eat with prongs at Blois.” She sat down on the bed, testing it. “I’ll have to do you in curl-papers every night,” she said.

  PETITE SAT IN THE WOODEN chair in the sitting room, trying to read Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours. The maid Clorine had persuaded her mother that it was time for her to wear a training corset, and it itched, breaking her concentration. Furthermore, they were expecting a caller: the Marquis, the man her mother was to marry. The man who was to be her new father.

  Her mother poked at the enormous log blazing on the hearth, then went into the room that used to be her father’s study, a sewing room now, and looked out the window that faced the courtyard. “Maybe he won’t be able to make it,” she said, returning to her chair by the fire. It had been raining for days.

  A horse whinnied, followed by the sound of carriage wheels. “That must be him now.” Françoise took the book from Petite’s hands and positioned her in front of the occasional chair. “Whatever you do, don’t move,” she said, “I haven’t told him about your…you know.” She glanced down at Petite’s leg. “Mademoiselle Clorine, are you there?”

  The maid, done up in a smock somewhat too small for her (the sleeves not reaching her stout wrists), poked her head from behind a door.

  A loud knocking sounded. A field hand, dressed in a worn butler’s jacket, darted into the entry. Petite heard the voice of an old man, followed by a belch. As the sitting room door creaked open, Françoise tugged down her bodice.

  “Madame de la Vallière, I am come through blustery weather and squall to pay a visit upon you,” the Marquis de Saint-Rémy announced, making a deep and ceremonious bow.

  Petite’s future stepfather was older than she’d expected. Under a powdered wig in the tightly curled style of Henry the Great, his face was a mass of wrinkles, the frown lines deep furrows between his blackened thin brows. He was short—about Petite’s height—with a belly as round as an inflated ox bladder. His boots were covered in muck up to the ankles.

  Françoise curtsied. “Monsieur le Marquis de Saint-Rémy, my waiting woman will take your sword and riding boots.” She signaled to Clorine. “She will polish them for you while you relax by the fire with a cup.”

  The Marquis lowered himself into the best chair, the one with the tapestry footstool, as Clorine knelt to remove his muddy boots, yanking them free.

  “I have noticed your fondness for vin sec and went to some effort to get in a cask,” Françoise said, taking a wide-mouthed glass of liqueur from the field hand’s tray and handing it to her intended.

  “You are sympathetic, Madame de la Vallière.” The Marquis took a sip and grimaced.

  “May I introduce to you my daughter, Mademoiselle Louise?”

  The Marquis craned his neck toward Petite. “That girl? I reflected her to be a domestic.”

  Françoise gestured at Petite to curtsy, using a sly downward movement of her right hand at hip height.

  Petite made an obedient reverence. Everyone was behaving strangely, she thought, as if on a stage.

  “She is ten and has just returned from the Ursuline convent in Tours where she was well trained in needlework and comportment, but she misses her brother Jean,” Françoise chattered on nervously. “He’s a student at the Collège de Navarre—in Paris—where all the noblemen’s sons go. He gets an allowance of six sous a week and will earn even more upon graduation, no doubt.”

  The Marquis cleared his throat and looked about for a spittoon, which Françoise leapt to provide. “She’s ten, you allege?” he asked, wiping the corners of his mouth with his gloved thumb and index finger.

  Allege? People from Blois must speak a different language, Petite thought.

  “My daughter, you mean? Yes—she’s ten now. My son Jean is two and a half years older. He knows many noblemen’s sons, even princes. He’s a good-looking boy, and excellent at sword fighting. It’s cold now in Paris, but he’s allowed a fire in his room for a half-hour after a meal.”

  “Can your girl mend?”

  “All girls mend,” Françoise said, frowning. “In the school common, my son speaks Latin with princes.”

  “And does she intone? I am partial to hear singing whilst attending to epistolary matters and ledger books.”

  “In fact, she sings rather well.”

  “Command her to intone at present.”

  Françoise looked over at Petite, who shook her head: no!

  “I’m afraid my daughter is suffering an attack of…an engorgement of her throat.”

  Petite breathed a sigh of relief. She would not sing for this awful little man who was soon to take her father’s place.

  “Conceivably, it then follows, she should be quiescent in her chamber,” the Marquis said, attempting to pull Petite’s mother onto his lap.

  The time dragged by. Petite lowered herself onto the occasional chair as the Marquis droned on about the staff at the Blois château: the blackguard boy who had broken three earthen drinking vessels, the marketman who took all day to buy a dram of cream, the butler who insisted that it was not he who had written on the ceiling with the smoke of a candle. With his fourth glass of vin sec, the Marquis began to reveal more intimate concerns: the state of his bowels (unforthcoming), the enema and purge he took once a week to balance his humors, his hippo-tusk false teeth. “Far enhanced to elephant ivory,” he said proudly, slipping them out of his mouth so that Petite’s mother might admire them.

  “The workmanship is excellent,” Petite’s mother said with illconcealed repugnance.

  At two of the clock, the Marquis cleared his throat. “I abundantly regret forsaking your society, Madame de la Vallière,” he said, rising.

  “So soon?” Françoise hid a yawn behind her chicken-feather fan.

  At last the Marquis departed, strutting out the door like a bantam cock.

  Françoise collapsed into a chair. “I thought he would never leave,” she said, closing her eyes and rubbing her forehead. “Don’t you ever forget what I do for your sake,” she added, her voice weary and sad.

  Honor thy father and thy mother. Petite went to her mother and knelt before her. “Don’t, Mother,” she said. Don’t be bitter, don’t be harsh, she thought, resting her head on her mother’s lap.

  “Don’t what, Louise?” her mother asked, running her fingers through Petite’s hair.

  Don’t marry that old man. “Don’t be sad.” Her mother’s gentle touch felt strange to her.

  Outside, a cow was lowing plaintively. “You have such fine hair,” Françoise said. “Our little angel, your father used to call you—did you know that?”

  Petite sat back on her heels.

  Her mother collected her features. “But then I’d tell him not to be fooled, that there was a devil in you,” she said with a smile, pinching Petite’s cheek.

  IT COULD HAVE BEEN worse: it
could have been a Great Wedding, a traditional two-day fete, but because both the bride and groom were widowed, and because their families were distant and the groom had responsibilities to attend to in Blois, it was felt that a simpler ceremony would be more appropriate. To Petite’s relief there was to be no wedding feast—no hogsheads of wine opened, no pigs slaughtered, no swans, cranes or herons roasted, no toasts called out, no singing “Veni, Creator Spiritus” or dancing to fiddlers.

  The Marquis’s carriage pulled up the hill to the little church in Reugny as the bells rang ten of the clock. It wasn’t customary for a bride and groom to arrive in the same vehicle, but the wagon had already been loaded with trunks and furnishings in preparation for the journey to Blois that afternoon.

  A few neighboring families were already at the church, among them Monsieur Bosse with his wife and nine bedraggled children, including Petite’s childhood friend Charlotte, whom she’d not seen since her father’s funeral. In a worn gown far too big for her, Charlotte grinned a gap-toothed smile.

  “Don’t speak to them,” her mother warned.

  Petite recognized the mayor and the owner of the apothecary, both of whom had been her father’s pallbearers.

  A clerk ushered them into the church. Her mother knelt at the altar rail and the Marquis did the same on the other side of the aisle. Behind them, in the pews, were a few whispering strangers.

  Curé Barouche entered, his long cassock trailing. He’d grayed since Petite had last seen him. She wondered if his donkey, Têtu, was still alive. The Curé used to ride the sorry thing out to the manor to teach Petite and her brother the catechism.

  The mumbled service was thankfully short. Petite knew it was over when Curé Barouche intoned, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” and placed a gold ring on her mother’s finger. Then her mother and the Marquis kissed the altar and returned to their places for the Mass, which was offered in their name. At the offering, Petite presented the bridal candle, lowering her eyes as her mother and the Marquis kissed it. Then her mother and the Marquis knelt as Curé Barouche recited a series of long marriage prayers. “O Lord, omnipotent and eternal God, You created man and woman in Your image and blessed their union…”

  On leaving the church, the Marquis discovered that the church doors had been tied shut with ribbons. Children could be heard giggling outside. The Marquis promised a coin, and the wedding party was released.

  Children were leaping about. They’d put up two additional ribbon “barricades” around the coach. The Marquis once again obliged them with coins, the way was cleared, and he helped his bride into the coach.

  Petite climbed in and sat facing the newlyweds.

  The driver cracked his whip and the carriage lurched down the hill.

  Chapter Seven

  THE FIRST NIGHT Petite, her mother and stepfather were forced to lodge opposite Amboise. The rain made the bridge crossing precarious and they had been advised to wait until morning. The inn had only one room to offer, but fortunately two beds, so Françoise and Petite shared one, while the Marquis de Saint-Rémy slept in the other. The staff, including an indignant Clorine, were lodged in the stables.

  By the light of a single lantern, the Marquis ceremoniously said his prayers and removed his wig and hippo-tusk teeth before propping himself up in the bed to sleep upright. “For only the dead recline,” he said. Throughout the night, he belched and farted and snored.

  “I will never sleep again,” Petite’s mother said wretchedly.

  HEAVY HORSES TOWED the passenger barge from Amboise to Blois. The servants, trunks and furnishings followed behind on another. The distance was less than fifteen leagues, yet due to the rain the journey took two days. Petite and her mother stayed in the ladies’ cabin with three nuns from Bordeaux and a milliner, all of them sharing a washbowl, a towel and a comb. Meals were served in a stateroom, first the men and then the women. Françoise turned ill, so during the day Petite was content to sit and read in the stateroom, now and again looking out at the sandstone cliff, the plantations of sisal and oak, the villages and vineyards. Three times she saw a White—but one was a pony, one was spotted and the last was the stocky sort of horse bred for armor.

  Petite stood at the rail of the barge as they approached the ancient city of Blois. She had never seen so many houses in one place, so many gables and turrets. Tours was a grand city, and Amboise even grander, but neither could compare to Blois, where, the Marquis had informed them (several times over), there was a stone bridge of many arches, thirty-two racket courts, an aqueduct from antiquity, a clock and even an academy of riding (“a conservatory of traverse”). At Blois, he claimed, the language was spoken to perfection (“uttered to excellence”). Petite looked for the castle, but it could not be seen from the water.

  The boatman let them off at the busy river landing. The Marquis hired a coach to pull them through the narrow streets and up a steep hill to the château, which appeared to have been built on a cliff. They wound around and up until they were on a high terrace overlooking the great river Loire, the clustered houses below and the castle before them.

  “We have arrived,” the Marquis announced with an air of grandeur as they entered a courtyard. The château was irregular in shape, and each of its many sides had been built in a different style. There appeared to be no symmetry or order. Heaps of construction stone and timber edged one of the wings, which seemed to be under construction.

  “Do up your bonnet ties,” Petites mother told her, clutching her casket of jewelry.

  The carriage rolled to a stop and a footman with few teeth appeared with a ladder. Petite was the first to climb down. This was where King Louis XII was born, where King Francis I and Charles IX had lived. Queen Catherine de Médicis had brewed poisons in this castle, and it was here that the Duc de Guise had been stabbed to death, assassinated by King Henry III, whose ghost was known to wander the dark passages with a parrot on his shoulder.

  Petite followed her mother and the Marquis around the piles of stone and across a manure-covered courtyard to a small house on the château grounds, a humble wood and plaster cottage with a slate roof. “It is not extensive, but the rental is barely two hundred per annum,” the Marquis said, pushing open the plank door.

  “Two hundred livres?” Petite’s mother ducked as a bat flew out. “But it’s so small.” Outside, the servants could be heard unloading their trunks and furniture.

  “The bedstead can go at this juncture, by the flue,” the Marquis said. “Your daughter and the servants may avail themselves of the upper compartment.”

  Petite climbed the narrow stairs to the loft, a dark, low space. Pushing away cobwebs, she pried open the shutter. Far below she could see the silver ribbon of the river and, in the distance, the towers of what appeared to be another castle. To the right were the château stables. She stood for a time looking out over the high and low gardens, the paddocks of horses, searching out of habit for a White.

  CLORINE PUT THE curling tongs down beside the charcoal brazier and stepped back, appraising her creation. Petite stood sullenly before her, her hair in wax-stiffened ringlets, silk ribbons at the roots, heavy false pearl ear pendants pulling at her earlobes.

  “You look highborn,” the maid said proudly. “Truly ladified.”

  Petite heard pounding on the door below. “I feel like a circus monkey,” she said.

  “Petite!” her mother called up, her voice tremulous. “The Duke and Duchess will receive us now.”

  “Zut!” Clorine whispered.

  The north-facing room below was frigid in spite of the season. Warming herself in front of the smoking chimney, Petite’s mother fussed with her side curls, which dangled from wire frames secured to her ears.

  The Marquis coughed into his white-gloved hand. “Ready?”

  Petite followed her mother and the Marquis as they traced their way across the cobbled yard to a spiral staircase, the grand entrance into the King François wing. “Proceed this way,” the Marquis sa
id, already out of breath.

  They wound up and up, emerging into a room that smelled of tobacco—the guard room. Four men in uniform were sitting at a table playing cards. The fire in the ornate fireplace at one end was blazing, the room overly warm. Windows of fine horn let in a milky light. Every surface had been ornamented with design, but was blackened by smoke.

  “This way,” the Marquis said, leading them into an enormous bedchamber, empty of furnishings but for a curtained bed and a wooden prie-dieu set into an alcove. Three terriers jumped off the bed and growled at the Marquis, who kicked them away with his boot. A chambermaid and a footman emerged from behind brocade curtains and stood at attention.

  “This way,” the Marquis repeated, leading Petite and her mother into a narrow oratory that smelled of incense. A guard in uniform stood at attention by a great double door (which had, Petite noticed, a horseshoe nailed over it, to keep out witches and evil spirits). “We have arrived,” the Marquis announced. He smoothed the white towel he had folded lengthwise over his right shoulder and rearranged his cape over his left so that it draped in the manner of nobles.

  “Remember, Louise, never turn your back to royalty,” Françoise whispered, fussing over Petite’s ribbons with trembling hands. “When dismissed, walk backwards while curtsying.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Arranged, Madame?” the Marquis asked.

  The doors opened onto yet another ornate jewel box of a room, this one smoky from a smoldering fire. Though it was daylight, the room was dark, the drapes drawn. It took a moment for Petite to make out the large mound of a woman lying on a wide chaise in front of the fire. An equally round man, his face bright as a red Holland tulip, sat blowing smoke rings. His bucket-top boots were such as a country magistrate might wear. Petite thought perhaps this room was an antechamber, and that these were neighboring nobility, awaiting an audience with the royal family.