by Eric Flint
“To start making overtures, more or less. Put out feelers at the court by way of military men who know Grand Duke Bernhard, get some sense of the mood from former associates of your Grand-père Sully, that sort of thing. Marc is speaking to various associates of his father—bankers, financiers, people that Gaston will need if the government is to have funds. This all has to be done before your mother starts hinting at salons and soirées that the allegiances of the Rohans would be more likely to move in the king’s favor if he revoked the exile decree. The king has a lot of popular support right now, but it’s still far from universal support. If quite a few people start murmuring about how it would be desirable for your uncle to come back to France, he and his advisers may, ideally, conclude that it is their own idea. It’s not as if she’s requesting permission for your father to return. That would be a lot harder.”
“Yes, because they know that Papa is very calculating and ambitious. He shows it. I suspect that Uncle is also. He just isn’t obvious. But Uncle is already here.”
“You know that. I know that. Colonel Raudegen knows that and your mother knows that. It is entirely likely that several dozen royal spies know that. The new king does not, officially, know that. Right now, it will be a lot better if he and his advisers don’t officially know that. If he reverses the edict as a ‘gesture of magnanimity,’ Colonel Raudegen says, then they will wait a couple of weeks of discreet ‘travel time’ before your uncle ‘arrives.’ Otherwise, if the king won’t reverse his exile, they’ll have to take him on to Burgundy. But if the hints to the court receive favorable hints from the court, then your Maman can make a formal request.”
“Will the king let Uncle Soubise stay?”
“Marc thinks…”
Marguerite’s mind suddenly flitted away. “I saw Marc kiss you at breakfast this morning.”
“I kissed him back,” Susanna said. “It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last time. I’ll probably marry him some day, when we are old enough, if I can learn to live among Calvinists.”
“I thought that you are his fiancée.”
“Our families haven’t signed any contracts. His father forwards our letters to one another, though. My mother and stepfather are aware that his father, though a Calvinist, is likely to provide for his future very well indeed. So. Well. Anyway, M. Cavriani was there the first time we kissed each other.”
“So. Well. Anyway,” Marguerite mocked her. “It sounds to me as if you are indeed his fiancée, whether you know it or not. I have never kissed anyone. I never will, unless I get married. Perhaps then I will have to. Would I have to kiss a man if we were only betrothed but not married yet? I hope my husband will be very businesslike about begetting and not”—Marguerite made a little gesture that somehow reminded Susanna of worms, spiders, slugs, snails, and swarms of things that crept and crawled—“not put his hands all over me or slobber all over my face. How can you stand it? How can Maman stand it? Also,” she assumed a facial expression that would have suited a seventy-year-old Puritan, “it’s bad for your reputation.”
Susanna raised her eyebrows. “Don’t you have something more important to worry about than my reputation? You’re in the middle of a country that’s cheering for a usurper and from all I hear, the usurper is on the other end of the spectrum from trustworthy. For what it’s worth, Your Grace, I assure you that my virtue is quite intact. As for reputation, girls like me don’t have one. Or need one, for that matter.”
“Girls like you? It’s women like Maman and the other court ladies who don’t have reputations. Not, at least, good reputations. Don’t you want a good reputation?”
Susanna’s forbearance snapped. “Where would I get one? You’ve lived in courts all your life. You know what the morals are, and they aren’t what your Calvinist preachers would like them to be. They’re not even like the way your ordinary provincial official or school teacher or shopkeeper or artisan manages his household. Even in the Netherlands, where both couples—the king and queen and the Stadthouder and his wife—are personally so well behaved, it doesn’t mean that the people who revolve around them follow their example. No one raises an eyebrow when a servant becomes a nobleman’s mistress. And if, when he ends it, she comes away with a generous settlement, she has a better prospect for marrying some other upper servant rather than a worse one. If I had given into that Lorrainer colonel, my dowry would have been a lot bigger than it is.”
Marguerite bowed her head. “It’s just really hard to think of virtue separate from reputation. Isn’t reputation a mirror of a person’s character?”
Then she popped her head up again, her eyes bright. “What colonel?”
Susanna tsked. “Not one you know. Just remember. Reputation is nothing but what ‘they say.’ A lot of what ‘they say’ can be really malicious—rumor, insinuations, allegations. But I don’t have to care. I am who I am and Marc believes me and not anyone else’s gossip. And if he damages my ‘reputation’ by kissing me, he’ll take the greatest of care for me, for myself and not for what anybody says about me.”
“It’s almost worse,” the little duchess concluded, “when what ‘they say’ is true rather than false.”
* * *
“Even Paris should be better than this.” Ruvigny tapped his finger on his kneecap, watching Gerry Stone clear up their camp beside a road in eastern France. “He’ll finish washing the dishes any minute now. When Rohan dumped him on us once the vaccination project got delayed, we should have at least given him time to unpack before we headed out again.”
“It wouldn’t have done any good,” Bismarck pointed out dismally. “The infernal instrument is small. Portable. Pocket-sized.”
Gerry sat down, pulling out the harmonica that he played often, if not particularly well. Oh bury me not, on the lone prairieeeee…
Bismarck spoke through the wailing. “Even with a recalcitrant duchess to retrieve, Paris will be better than this.”
* * *
“This is the morning that Soubise is to ‘arrive’?” Susanna asked.
Marc nodded. “We expect him shortly before noon. I—well, people I know—planted perfectly true reports in the Amsterdam papers that he had left England and met with the Stadthouder in the Hague. We discreetly avoided pinning down just when this occurred. Vague is your friend. The Paris papers picked that up, of course. Raudegen has managed to cobble together a decent-sized retinue to ‘accompany’ him, since he could hardly be expected to travel with just a secretary, cook, and valet. He’s hired several plain but good quality carriages and a half dozen bodyguards, and rented a couple of dozen trunks. The trunks are empty, but as far as the reporters and the gawkers along the street are concerned, he’ll have about as much luggage as would be expected if he were coming from the Low Countries. He’ll hold a news conference, of course.”
“Will the duc de Sully and his wife be coming soon?” King Gaston, not one to lose a public relations opportunity, had not only revoked Soubise’s exile, but also added a lagniappe by ending the house arrest of his father’s old first minister.
“No.” It was the duchess who replied to Susanna. “My parents are old; my mother is not well. In their case, it’s the appearance of the thing that matters. My father is happy and profoundly grateful, but they won’t return to Paris.”
Marguerite pelted into the breakfast room. “Henri is back again! With M. von Bismarck and an up-timer. A genuine up-timer. I’ve never met one before. I saw Madame Mailey when she came to negotiate the treaty after the League of Ostend débâcle, but I never got to meet her because Maman,” she waved at her mother, “could not decide if it was acceptable etiquette for us to be presented to her, or that she must insist that the USE’s ambassador plenipotentiary, being a commoner, must be presented to us. And I saw the famous physician, too, but only at a distance. He is very impressive, for a surgeon.”
“Why,” the older duchess asked, her voice like ice, “is he here?” A well-choreographed morning was suddenly descending into chaos.
; “With all due respect, Your Grace,” Ruvigny said as he came through the door, “you must know.”
“The duke wants us to leave Paris? Still wants it? Wants it again?”
Ruvigny handed over a packet of letters.
“I would not say that he wants it, Your Grace. I would say that this time he requires it.”
* * *
“There’s a limit to how long the duchess will be able to drag her feet,” Raudegen said. “Soubise is making public appearances now and has managed to get whispers that Rohan has requested that she join him circulating around the court. If she is seen to refuse, then rumors about an unconditional breakdown of her marriage will follow in short order. As long as Rohan appears to condone her actions, her standing remains unimpeachable. Once he withdraws that toleration…”
Whispers did not quite cover it.
“Hell and damnation!” Soubise yelled. “You have to go. Rohan’s demands, not requests, have ratcheted up to a level that not even you can ignore or refuse. Since I’m here, I’m the one who can and will stay in Paris to advance the Rohan causes at court. Get your promiscuous little tush off to Besançon.”
The relations between the duchess and her brother-in-law had never been marked by familial affection. She glared at Soubise in return. “This is absurd, you know. Within three months, you will find yourself crosswise with the king and get your head cut off.”
“Perhaps so, but I am philosophical about it. Better for the family to lose a crusty old bachelor uncle than to lose its heiress.”
With the senior members of the household making life in the palais rather unpleasant, the younger ones followed Marc’s principle of “when in doubt, duck.”
Gerry went and matriculated at the University of Paris, just on general principles in order to have his name on the register. “It’s getting to be sort of like that ‘Kilroy was here’ cartoon,” he said to Bismarck. Explanations followed. And, on the theory that he hadn’t time to unpack the smaller kit from his duffel bag before he left Burgundy, he vaccinated the entire Rohan household against smallpox.
* * *
“Will you stop that? Better, you will stop that.”
Gerry took the harmonica out of his mouth and the strains of “Your Cheatin Heart” ceased to resonate through the Rohan stables.
“Do you want something different?”
“I don’t want that instrument of torture at all. Think of something else to do.”
“Uh?” Gerry looked at Ruvigny. “Can I ask something?”
“Yes. I don’t guarantee an answer.”
“The duchess; the older one; her hair.”
“What?”
“Is it for real? Those tight little ringlets screwed down to her scalp? Or is it a wig? Up-time, I remember, a lot of the little old ladies used to go to the beauty shop and get permanents. A lot of the time they’d end up with hair that looked like that.”
“It’s real. A lot of the French nobility have really curly hair like that.” Ruvigny paused to think. “Soubise does—take a close look the next time you see him. So does the duke—it’s just not so obvious because he’s bald in front and usually ties his back hair down in a queue unless he’s making a formal appearance, when he lets it loose and tries for a comb-over. Our little daisy is lucky that hers isn’t so frizzy. Curly, but not frizzy.”
* * *
“Oh grief,” Marguerite said to Bismarck. “Candale’s back in Paris. His only redeeming quality is that he’s usually off serving in the army. He’ll probably come slithering around again. I thought Maman had decided to stick with Gondi for a while longer.”
“Which one is worse?”
“I don’t know, really. I avoided Candale when he used to be around and I avoid Gondi now that he’s around. ‘They say’ that Candale is agreeable and lively, but he’s never seemed that way to me. His first marriage was annulled on the grounds of nonconsummation, you know, even though his wife brought him a ducal title and he only inherited that of comte through his mother. He tried to keep the ducal title, but her second husband—that’s Schomberg—also claimed it. He was nineteen when he married her, poor, and very ambitious. She was rich; not just an heiress but of full age, already in possession of her estates and wealth, not having to answer to guardians. They don’t have any children. Candale has never remarried, though it’s been over fifteen years and he’s Epernon’s oldest son.”
Marc pushed the curl back off his forehead. “What’s de la Valette doing these days? Is Candale fronting for his brother?”
“Hmmn,” Marguerite said. She wrinkled her forehead. “Which brother? Louis? The cardinal? He’s with the army right now, I think. I haven’t heard anyone say that he’s up to anything in particular, though of course he’ll be scrambling to ingratiate himself with the new king. Bernard was taken captive by the USE two years ago, of course, and hasn’t come up with a ransom yet. Old Epernon, their father, is still alive. He’s ancient, at least eighty years old. Still, he’s the duke and he holds the purse strings. He won’t pay, because having Bernard rotting somewhere in Brunswick means that Epernon controls his son, who’s the heir after Candale. Nobody likes Bernard. His first wife was one of the legitimated bastard daughters of Henri IV. Everyone thinks that he poisoned her after the match became no longer politically advantageous. The politics of the Nogarets are just too complicated to sort out, even for them, probably.”
Gerry shook his head, He found the customs of the French nobility that allowed a father and his three sons to have four different names dizzying. Not being the kind of person who worried about saving face, he said so. “I thought I understood the German system,” he said. “They use places too, but it’s consistent. Wilhelm, Bernhard (before he moved out of town), and Albrecht are all Herzog and all von Sachsen-Weimar.”
“The French designations aren’t personal names, exactly,” Ruvigny explained. “They’re the names of estates or lands that the family holds. Rohan is a dukedom. Soubise inherited the estates from which he takes his title from his mother. They are not a dukedom and he is not a duke.”
Bismarck contributed with some disdain the opinion that the lands on which a lot of those “de Somewhere” and “sieur de This or That” titles were based often didn’t amount to more than a large farm. “Not that our estates amount to much more than a large farm,” he added cheerfully. “But though we may be Niederadel, we’re also Uradel.”
Gerry frowned. “I know ‘lesser nobility,’ which is mediatized sometimes and nontitled sometimes and…stuff. But what’s Uradel? Original nobility? Prehistoric nobility?”
“Basically, it means that when the first ruler who wandered through Brandenburg hired the first clerk who could put quill to parchment and started keeping government records, we were already there. Those of more exalted rank did not create us; they just found us in place.”
“But anyone with a ‘de Somewhere’ is a noble? I can rely on that?” Gerry asked.
Soubise shook his head. “Not up north. Just like in the northwest of the USE, there are some commoner families with ‘von’ because they’re so close to the Dutch and there ‘van’ doesn’t signifiy nobility at all. Around Dieppe, for example, you’ll find a family of artisans, maybe—ship carpenters or something. They’re named X and most people will call them X. But because there are a dozen families named X in the Catholic parish and the priest has to keep track of how they are all related to prevent marriages within the forbidden decrees set up by the Council of Trent, he’ll write them as X de Y, with Y simply being the little village they lived in before they moved to the city. Some of the other X families will be written X de Q or X de R.”
Gerry groaned and thanked God for a good memory.
Acts of royal magnanimity rarely occurred without some expectation of quid pro quo.
As June turned toward July, King Gaston’s advisers floated a suggestion to the duchesse de Rohan that it would be so delightful if her daughter Marguerite married one of the king’s close supporters.
“For supporters,” the duchess snorted, “think sycophants. Favorites. Not mignons, since he doesn’t tilt that way.”
“Can he make her do that?” Gerry asked Henri later. “Can’t her father refuse?”
“Not really, if the king is directly involved. Kings can make marriages—just as Gaston’s father did for Rohan himself. Kings can unmake marriages, for that matter, just as Louis refused for years to acknowledge Gaston’s own marriage to the current queen, the Lorraine duchess. Right now he’s being tactful, since he just took the throne, but if King Gaston decides to press the issue, Marguerite will marry his candidate and no one else.”
The Royal Guards placed a respectful watch on the Rohan palais, disguised as security forces. The king made continuing demands that the two Marguerites be in near-constant attendance upon his wife or daughter. Royal Guards accompanied their carriage every time it left the mews. All this interfered with the general routine.
“I don’t like this,” Marguerite told Ruvigny. “Maman brought her little bastard Tancrède back from Normandy three years ago. At first, she had secluded him there with one of her old servants—after all, what can one do with an infant but send it to the country in hopes of more healthful air?—but when he got old enough not to need a wet nurse, she changed her mind. Especially, with the uncertainties that arose around the activities of the League of Ostend, she was uneasy about having him so near the coast. Since then, she goes to visit him clandestinely at the home of his foster parents. Not just now and then, but regularly, dressed as an ordinary Parisian bourgeoise. She doesn’t take the carriage with our crest on the door, but all this surveillance may uncover this and give the king another lever to use in pressuring us.”
* * *
Ruvigny knocked on the door of the small home in a Parisian suburb.
The maid-of-all-work who answered wore a cap that was askew, an apron with its strings half-untied, and one shoe. She didn’t appear to be dirty or slatternly. She was just disheveled.
“Monsieur?”
