Lying in my little bed, feeling the delicate flutter in my belly, listening to Athénaïs screaming at the maids, the page boys, her chefs, I tried to think of ways I might get out of my predicament. I dreaded telling her—yet I knew I must. Once Lent was over, she would begin drinking again.
But telling Athénaïs during Lent proved difficult. She was preoccupied with preparations for the voyage, subjected to the habitual enemas and bleedings recommended before travel. She was often in turmoil, and I knew it would be unwise to bring up anything troubling at such a time.
Yet I couldn’t put it off. “Madame, I have something to tell you,” I finally announced as we returned from Easter Mass.
“About Brinvilliers?”
“No,” I said, taken aback. Daily, Athénaïs had been sending me to the market for the latest sordid detail regarding Madame de Brinvilliers’s confessions to sodomy, incest, and murder. Athénaïs had become obsessed with the story of this Parisian noblewoman—“new nobility” it was always noted (as if that explained the woman’s perversion)—the daughter of an administrator who had married into the Gobelins tapestry family, Madame de Brinvilliers had confessed in lurid detail to poisoning her father, her brother, her lover, and countless others, and to perfecting her deadly art as a volunteer at a charity hospital.
“No, it’s nothing to do with the poisoner,” I said, surveying the room, checking to make sure that the fire irons were well out of reach. “I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to go north with you.”
“How is that!”
“I’m with child,” I said bravely.
“You jest.” She sounded more amused than angry.
I pulled my skirts around my hips, revealing my little belly.
“There are things one can do to fix it.”
“I saw a midwife. She said it was too late.” A half-truth.
“This is frightfully inconvenient,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck. “Do you know who the father is?”
“I’ve only ever had congress with His Majesty!”
“Ah, my virtuous suivante.” She rolled her head from side to side. “Damnation.” She sighed as I stepped in to massage her shoulders.
“Damnation,” Jolie echoed.
“Well … His Majesty’s valet will take care of everything. He’ll find a home for it.”
It. “What about His Majesty?” Shouldn’t he know?
“Goodness, Claude, we must not burden him with such a matter.”
“Of course not, Madame,” I said, gently easing the tension I could feel in her muscles. I’m sorry, I started to say—but didn’t.
THAT EVENING, XAVIER arrived to speak with me. “I’ve been informed of your condition. It will be placed with a family in the country.”
It again.
He paused, swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I am required to inform you that His Majesty will never recognize it, nor in fact even be informed of it. Paternity cannot be proved.”
I understood that Xavier was only doing his job, but even so, I was offended. “I don’t expect anything from His Majesty. Only tell me, will the baby be placed … not too far away?” My tone struck me as pathetically beseeching. Being with child had unnerved me, rendered me unexpectedly emotional.
“It is best you not have anything to do with it,” Xavier said, yet with tenderness. “I’m sorry, Claudette,” he said, reaching out to touch my shoulder.
I stepped back, away.
ATHÉNAïS, THE KING, and all the Court set out, the long train of carriages and wagons and cavalry disappearing in a cloud of dust. I collapsed amid the wreckage of departure: the gowns and shawls not taken, the abandoned fans, skirts, bodices. But for the six girls who did the dusting, three kitchen staff, five gardeners, and the guard permanently stationed at the entry, I was alone. Even Gaston thought I’d gone north with the Court. I was invisible.
ON THE DAY of the Marquise de Brinvilliers’s gruesome execution, I gave birth to a strapping big girl.
My little one, I cooed, which made the midwife laugh.
“That’s no ‘little one.’ It took two swaddling cloths just to bind her,” Madame Audouin said, handing me the red-faced wailing infant, tightly ensconced in linen.
“Sweet pea,” I said, overwhelmed with an emotion that I knew beyond a doubt was love.
For a full month, I reveled in the luxury of being a mother, nursing my beautiful baby, waking with her in the bed beside me, sniffing and petting her. Singing to her.
I knew it was not to last. On a sultry July day, I heard the rumble of wagons, the carts loaded with regal furnishings, the beds, curtains, and kitchen implements sent on in advance of the Court’s arrival. My life in seclusion was over.
Xavier arrived almost immediately. I had been scanning the horizon, listening for a horse. But of course he would not come on horseback, I realized, when a carriage came into view. He would come with a wet-nurse awaiting and a hamper of swaddle bands, petticoats, and double-cloths. I had been through this many times already, only now the inconvenient infant being rushed into seclusion was not one of Athénaïs’s bastard babies—it was my own beloved Sweet Pea.
Xavier saluted and then bowed, sweeping his hat. “Mademoiselle des Oeillets.”
“Monsieur Breton.” He was thinner—months of riding on campaign had hardened him. He had a patch over one ear. “You’re wounded?”
“Just a cut.”
“Were you in battle?”
“Not so heroic. I fell setting up camp near Ninove.”
I covered my smile with my hand.
“You look … beautiful,” he said, as if surprised.
“How kind of you to say.” I made the clown face that had always made him laugh.
But he didn’t laugh, not this time. “You know why I’m here,” he said gravely.
I led him into the withdrawing room where the traveling basket had been set. “She sleeps well,” I whispered. “She won’t be hungry for about two hours.” I had nursed her shamelessly, like a peasant mother. “You have a good wet-nurse?” My feelings were betrayed by my voice, which grew tremulous.
“Certainly,” Xavier said in hushed tones, but I didn’t think it likely that he knew a good wet-nurse from a bad one. “Madame Colbert recommended her,” he added, sensing my doubt.
“Ah,” I said, relieved. The Minister of Finance’s wife had a number of children. She would know. I cleared my throat. “Where is my baby to be taken?”
“I’m not to say,” he admitted gently.
I felt my heart break.
“I’m sorry, Claude.”
“Just go!”
“They’re good people, caretakers of a château,” he whispered, picking up the basket. He turned at the door. “In Suisnes,” he added softly.
I stood frozen, listening to the door close, the muffled sound of voices, a carriage door, wheels rolling, horse hooves on the gravel. My knees gave way.
CHAPTER 50
Athénaïs returned from the voyage north in the early stages of yet another pregnancy, up-throwing constantly.
“Darling, I’m ill today—too ill.”
I heard her words with dread. The King was expected shortly. “Madame, forgive me, but I … I can’t. My courses …” I put my hands over my belly. “They started this morning and they’re heavy.” The truth was that I didn’t want to be of service anymore—not in that way. I didn’t want to be used, even by a king.
“There are other ways to give relief,” Athénaïs reminded me archly. She’d become vigilant with respect to His Majesty, displaying her charms artfully (if artificially), using all the magical talismans and potions she could buy. She had lost the bloom of youth and there were always women circling—young, voluptuous women whom the King regarded with the growing interest of an aging man. “You owe me as much.”
That afternoon, I put drops into the King’s wineglass, as usual. On impulse, I put a salt spoon of the “amatory assistant” into my own glass as well, and downed it in one go.
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I placed the King’s glass on the gold-plated tray and went into the closet, where His Majesty was waiting. Wigless and bootless, he sat perched on the edge of the bed. His legs, which had always been his best feature, had become even more muscled on campaign.
I set down the tray. I knew the routine well by now, but the drops had started a frenzied buzzing in my body. I felt my throat constricting and that alarmed me. I took the obligatory sample of the King’s laced wine, then presented it to him, my head bowed—as if it were sacrificial holy water.
I am sacrificial, I thought as I sank to my knees before him.
WHENEVER I SAW Xavier accompanying His Majesty, my spirits lightened. As we stood side by side in attendance, as Athénaïs and His Majesty coupled, I plied him for news of my little girl. At first he was reluctant to say anything, but over time he weakened. It was his job to check, and in any case, he liked to talk of her. Sweet Pea had grown, she was sitting up, she had a charming smile. She’d cut her first tooth and was miserable, she was trying to stand, she could say a few words.
I lived for these scraps of news! “How often do you go to see her?”
“About once a month.”
“How do you get there?” Suisnes, I’d found out, was not far on horseback, but in a carriage the journey would likely take days. One would have to first go into Paris and then take a coach south—but which road?
“I ride,” he said evasively.
“The road to Brie-Comte-Robert is said to be fraught with bandits.”
“Not really,” he said, giving me the answer I sought.
THAT EVENING, I accompanied Athénaïs to a ball. “There she is,” she hissed behind her fan as a young woman stepped into the room: Angélique, the girl the King was currently besotted with (in spite of the rumor we helped circulate that she had a contagious skin condition).
The room silenced, and everyone bowed low at her approach.
Zounds! They believed her to be the King’s chosen?
Athénaïs wept that evening, back in the privacy of her chamber. “What in God’s name can I do?”
“I have a number of things to get in Paris, and I’ll be dropping by Madame Voisin’s,” I offered. “Why don’t you write her a note, ask her for something… stronger?”
IT WAS A long trip to the Château de Suisnes, even in a hired coach. The driver got lost three times. Certainly, it would have been easier on horseback—or even on a mule—so it was with some relief when I finally arrived at a charming striped-stone château with peaked roofs and big arched windows overlooking a lush garden. Smoke—the only sign of life—curled up from one of its chimneys.
I heard a bark, and a man, a caretaker or gardener by his dress, rounded the corner with a bearlike dog on a rope, its tongue hanging down in the heat.
Monsieur de Maisonblanche, he introduced himself, a round little man with elf-like eyes and an enormous moustache.
“I’m sorry to have come so unexpectedly.” I wasn’t sure how to explain. “Is your wife in?” Perhaps it would be easier talking to a woman. “I’m Mademoiselle Claude des Oeillets,” I confessed, unsure how that might be received.
Monsieur de Maisonblanche looked at me, startled, twirling one of the points of his mustache. “The girl’s birth-mother,” he said, his voice apprehensive.
“I’ve only come to visit. I’ll be leaving well before dusk.”
“That will never do.”
“Pardon?” Was I not to even see my baby?
“You’ll have to stay the night … Come, let me get your bag. I’ll show you to Madame. You must be thirsty in this heat. Ah, the babe—wait till you see her. She’s the light of our hearts.”
“I’LL BE.” Madame de Maisonblanche grinned, standing up in a row of turnips and wiping her hands on her apron. “Pardon my rags. We’re not too fancy here when the owner is away. But then he’s always away. You can call me Gaby.”
I had worried I would be jealous of this woman, but I loved her immediately. “It’s beautiful here,” I said. A verdant meadow sloped down to a river.
“The baby is having her afternoon sleep,” Gaby said.
I was ushered down into the lower level of the château—the kitchen and service quarters—where Monsieur was building a fire. Doors onto the garden let in a flood of light. A bouquet of summer flowers graced a plank table.
“I thought we could have tea,” Monsieur said.
“And maybe some cakes?” his wife added.
“Mais oui, cakes! Have a seat, have a seat,” he said, jumping up to pull out a wooden chair.
I startled at a child’s cry.
“Oh, there she is, right on the hour,” Gaby exclaimed, disappearing down a passageway.
“She’ll quiet with some nursing,” Monsieur said, offering me a little cake of currants and raisins dusted with sugar. “We lost our own boy—maybe you don’t know?—just before the Lord sent us your little one. Saved my wife from a bottomless sorrow. I’m afraid we’re spoiling her some.”
Gaby returned with the baby on one teat. “Look at her, so big,” she said proudly, pulling the baby off and holding her up for me to see.
“That’s good milk,” Monsieur said proudly.
I smiled, aglow from tip to toe. The baby—my baby—had round cheeks and bright eyes. She had the King’s nose and Mother’s red hair.
Then she opened her mouth and wailed.
And Father’s booming player’s voice, I thought with a teary grin.
“Oh, that’s enough of that,” Gaby said, clamping the baby back onto her breast.
LOUISE DE MAISONBLANCHE, she’d been christened. I watched, enchanted, as she slowly picked a crust out of her bowl and gummed it.
“Sometimes I can get her to use a spoon,” Gaby said. “Here, sweet thing.”
“I used to call her Sweet Pea,” I said, watching in wonder as she latched onto the spoon and waved it around.
“I like that,” Gaby said.
The baby banged the spoon on the tray with gusto.
“Now don’t do that, Sweet Pea,” Gaby said as the spoon fell clattering onto the floor.
Sweet Pea looked at her empty hand and then up at Gaby. She opened and closed her hand: bye-bye.
Ah, we two women sighed, making bye-bye motions like little fools. Sweet Pea chortled and did it again, enchanted with her audience.
I STAYED AWAKE late that night, staring at the stars through a narrow open window, staring at the crescent moon. I pulled the patched woolen blanket up over my shoulders. The coarse linens smelled of woodsmoke and the pillow smelled of duck. In the distance, I could hear wolves howling, one calling, another answering.
Like the evenings of my youth, I thought, falling into a deep, healing sleep.
IN THE MORNING, Monsieur de Maisonblanche offered to take me into the village to get the mail coach to Paris. My heart aching, I kissed my baby good-bye and climbed aboard the wagon with the basket of provisions Gaby had packed for me. I dared not look back for fear of weeping. I had chores to attend to in Paris, I reminded myself: purchases to make, Madame Catherine to see—Gaston to see.
“I have to go into town anyway,” Monsieur de Maisonblanche said, clucking the horses. “Your beau will be coming in a week and we always like to have some beer on hand for him.”
“My beau?”
“That stout fellow—rides a black mare with a white blaze.”
“He’s not my beau,” I said, my cheeks burning. Monsieur de Maisonblanche thought Xavier was Sweet Pea’s father!
Monsieur twiddled his moustache with a puzzled expression. “Are you sure?”
I laughed, nodding.
“Well, I’ll be. The wife and I had him pegged: he carries on with the baby, just as if … just as if he were … you know.” He blushed in consternation. “Well, it’s none of my business, as the wife would say. You’re a fine woman and that’s good enough by us.”
“Monsieur de Maisonblanche … If you don’t mind my asking, is everything looked after? Are all y
our expenses covered? With respect to the baby, that is.”
“Mais oui—Monsieur-not-your-beau makes sure that everything is paid for.” He pulled the wagon into a lot by the main square. “And if he’s not your beau, Mademoiselle, he sure as sunshine is a very good friend.”
CHAPTER 51
It was nightfall by the time I arrived in Paris. The swans the King had recently installed on the Seine were sleeping, some standing on one foot at the water’s edge, others floating like clouds on the water, their beaks tucked back under a wing.
I sat in my attic room staring into space, slowly eating one of the toothsome cakes Gaby had packed for me. Thinking of my baby, so healthy and lovingly tended.
I fell into a reverie, imagining living in that charming château with Monsieur de Maisonblanche and Gaby, working in the gardens together—raising Sweet Pea. A simple life, enriched by love.
THE RECEPTION ROOM at Gaston’s humble monastery was scented with incense. A door opened and Gaston emerged, standing before me in hemp sandals, his long beard now almost reaching to his waist. He smiled to see me dressed as a man, in travesty.
“It’s for travel,” I lied. Later I would be going to pick up a parcel from Madame Catherine. “You’ve put on weight.”
“You,” he teased. “Too.”
“I have a baby!” It was out before I could stop myself. “A little girl.” I hadn’t planned to tell him. I didn’t know what he would think or how I would explain. “She’s with foster parents in the country.”
“Uncle?” he said at last, pointing at himself.
I nodded.
He did his happy dance, which made me laugh with joy.
“You are well? You look well.” He had started as a novice and was now a choir monk. “The abbot wrote that you had something you wanted to show me.”
He took my hand and led me through a series of schoolrooms, the public areas of the monastery. Boys of all ages sat at long tables, at work on hornbooks. They whispered amongst themselves, regarding us with curiosity. A few waved to Gaston as we passed. He was clearly well liked, which made me proud.
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