by Karleen Koen
She did as she was told, naked to the afternoon light coming through the windows and naked to his eyes. Her face was somber as she walked toward the bed.
Yes, he thought, I didn’t imagine it. There is a slight limp.
“Do you hate it?” she asked when she was at the bedside.
“Back into bed, my beauty.” He leaned over to examine her leg, stroking it. “How did you come to hurt it?”
“I fell off a horse when I was little. And it never healed properly.”
“How old were you?”
“Three.”
“You were riding at three?”
“Even before. I rode wedged between my father and the neck of his horse. It’s one of my first memories, being lifted atop his horse, looking at the world from there.”
The urge to talk about the viscount was in his throat, to tell her his fears and his ambitions, but he stopped the words and allowed himself to be sidetracked by the way her waist moved so beautifully into the swell of her hip, and then he had to turn her over to look at her buttocks, and caressing those led to other things and before either of them knew it, they were entangled and straining against one another again in that age-old joining of a man and a woman, and the feel of her was so supple in his arms, the knowledge that he could love with complete safety was so alluring, that he cried out like someone killed, surprising himself and her.
“Do I displease?” she said into his mouth, knowing she didn’t.
And all he could do was kiss her into silence and follow along like flotsam on the huge wave this pleasure made. He insisted on taking her down to the bath chambers with him. He’d had to plan for it as if he were invading a country, and he’d lain awake in bed envisioning their route. They crept down secret corridors and halls, finally down a secret staircase, he in his breeches, she in nothing but the sheet he’d grabbed from the bed, a musketeer ahead of them, both of them collapsing now and then with laughter at the chance they took. Once there, Louis sent his musketeer away and insisted on bathing her in the great marble tub cut into the floor.
She was upset. “It isn’t seemly. You are the king.”
“I want to know every inch of you.”
He was determined in his washing, thorough, stopping to kiss her in places that called to him, the blade of a shoulder, the soft middle of the back of the neck, the space between thumb and forefinger. He saw that she was looking at one of the portraits on the wall. An ancestor of his had been quite a collector of paintings, and the bath chambers were a private gallery that only kings might admire.
“Do you like her?” The portrait was of a woman, a hint of a smile on her face. “She’s called the Mona Lisa, and a man named Da Vinci painted her. If he were alive today, I’d have him paint you. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll have a portrait made of you and put it in my closet.”
He’d cover it with drapery, so that no eyes should see it. He wanted one of her dressed in her finest and one of her naked in this marble bath. He stepped into the bath with her and one look at her slitted eyes led to kissing, but he was too aware of passing time, of obligation. Half-naked, but sure-footed, he rewrapped her in the sheet and led her back up the secret stairs. They surprised his valet fussing with the covers on the bed.
“We’ll hunt tomorrow before noon,” Louis said to her. “Do you have a proper horse? And I’ll see you tonight. I’ll ignore you except for one dance, but only because I don’t want anyone remarking on my attention to you. My every thought will be of you.” He talked on as his valet dressed him.
La Porte tied the ribbons of the tight red leather doublet Louis wore and allowed himself one glance at his master’s face. There was something radiating from the king’s eyes, happiness, some new self-possession and assurance. He looked the young god. This one gives him the passion he craves, the valet thought, and the passion lights an indomitable flame. He smiled a little smile to himself that only the pillows saw.
Dressed beautifully, Louis pulled Louise forward. The sheet fell from her breasts, and he touched one as he set the sheet about her shoulders again and held her face in his hands. “I love you,” he said. “A note every night, beginning tonight.”
Once he was gone, La Porte went to another door and allowed Sandrine inside. He ignored them as they began to dress Louise, his eyes on the chamber, checking it over. There must be no sign that his majesty had ever been here. He began to unfold clean linens across the bed.
When Louise was at the door, one hand on its latch, La Porte pointed to a box on the table, near the meal neither his majesty nor she had touched.
“For me?”
Her artlessness touched him. La Porte sniffed, to cover his growing softness for her.
Louise picked up the velvet box. In it were earrings, diamond earrings in a cluster shape long enough to reach her shoulders. They were beautiful, absolutely beautiful, but it was too much. She shut the box abruptly. She could never wear these. She already had bracelets. Everyone would notice. Questions would be asked. Whispers begun. Who courted le Blanc? Who gave her diamonds? And even more to the point, what had she given to obtain such jewels? “I can’t accept these,” she said to La Porte.
He was frost itself. “That, my lady, you must take up personally with the generous giver of such largess. You there—”
Sandrine froze where she was.
“Stay a moment, if you please. I have instructions from his majesty.”
When Louise was gone from the chamber, the valet pointed to a neat pile of soft linen chemises, handmade lace at the sleeves and throat. “These are for her. The lace, you see it? It was woven by nuns in Spain.”
IN HER BEDCHAMBER, Louise opened her trunk, put the velvet box in the toe of a shoe. There under a shawl was the gold Choisy had given her and the ring from Madame. How long ago that seemed, but it wasn’t. The boy was in his majesty’s hands. All would be well, and all would be well, and all manner of things would be well. It was a prayer the nuns had taught her. She said it quickly for the boy, then she had a happy thought. She’d sew a coat for his majesty. She was an excellent seamstress. She’d have La Porte take one of his jackets for a pattern. She’d use the gold to purchase the handsomest, softest velvet from Venice or Genoa and she’d stitch fur on the end of the sleeves and along the opening and perhaps she’d line the inside with fur, too. It would be very expensive. It would likely use up many of these coins, and that would be a good thing. Something in her wanted them gone.
On her bed lay three roses and a nearly ripened orange, jasmine tying the roses together. She hadn’t seen them when she first walked in. Suddenly she wanted to dance, to cry out to the world her incredible good fortune, that the most wonderful man alive loved her, sent her roses, and gave her diamond earrings. She grabbed the roses and crushed them to her as if they were Louis himself. That he should love her was a gift from God. It was worth the guilt that seeped in at night. It was worth the penances her confessor would give when she finally confessed, though she was avoiding that task for as long as she could. It was worth the knowledge that if the world knew, she’d be labeled dishonorable and disgraceful. I can bear anything, she thought, for the sake of his love.
IN ANOTHER HOUR, she was in Madame’s bedchamber arranging the princess’s curls, her happiness locked tight inside so that she shouldn’t betray herself. She could see that the princess was fretful and heavy-eyed again. Guilt pinched, but she willed it to disappear. And then, as if sensing something, Henriette slapped at her hands as she worked to make a curl lie in perfect grace on Henriette’s shoulders, and, startled, Louise stepped back.
“I don’t like my hair that way! That’s not the way you did it last time. If the Princess de Monaco were here, she’d tell you. I look like a hag,” and as Louise, eyes downcast, curtsied to leave, “No. Don’t go.”
Henriette rubbed her forehead. “Forgive me, Le Blanc, I just don’t feel myself anymore.” But as Louise’s hands touched her hair again, she grabbed a wrist, held it. “The bracelets again today?�
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“I’ll take them off. You have only to say so.”
Their eyes met.
“Please, Madame, let go,” Louise whispered, and Henriette released her wrist and waited until she was out of the chamber before bursting into tears. Louis didn’t love her, and Philippe was acting so awful these days. He didn’t love her either anymore. Everything was spoiled, everything.
“OH, DO STOP!”
Catherine pushed her cousin away, and before he could protest or fall to his knees and ask her forgiveness, again, she opened the door and was out in a broad hallway of the palace of this seacoast kingdom that was hers by marriage. Silly to have started anything with him, Catherine thought, standing before a pier glass in the hallway and repinning a curl his groping had loosed. That’s what came of a halting, lurching journey in a carriage to visit a husband one didn’t truly wish to see. She missed Nicolas, she really did. Insouciance was so much more beguiling than begging. Climbing stairs that would take her to a tower with a favorite balcony looking out on the sea, she thought of her husband’s ill-disguised dismay at her appearance, his clumsy lovemaking when she’d all but demanded that he bed her. He had a mistress. Her cousin had learned that for her, a little countess in this tiny dot of a kingdom who was on another balcony somewhere doubtless pining for the Prince de Monaco, who was doubtless counting the days until Catherine would be on her way back to Fontainebleau. She and her father had been ships passing in the night, he leaving the day she arrived, giving her little more than a nod when she’d come all this way to please him, to quiet his fears. Well, her fears.
She walked out onto the stone balcony, the wind from the sea whipping those curls she’d just so carefully arranged, but she didn’t care. If this little kingdom had nothing else, it had its splendid sweep of mountain and rock right to the sea, quite spectacular, this mountainous curve on the edge of the Mediterranean. Hard to believe dreadful pirates were just out of sight, beyond the waves lapping against rock and here and there at a bit of beach as silvery as the strands in Nicolas’s hair. Nicolas said every time a French galley sailed from Marseilles it was a gamble as to whether it, and its goods, would make port.
She really hadn’t needed to come. Her husband was perfectly satisfied with their arrangement and his no-doubt-plump mistress. What a bore. Now she would have to be rattled in every tooth and bone to return to court, and there was her cousin Péguilin to deal with, all heavy hands and even heavier sighs.
Something below caught her eye. A small troop of horsemen were gathered in a side courtyard, and to her surprise, they were king’s musketeers. The color on their tunics was unmistakable. She leaned over the thick stone edge of the balcony. There was Lieutenant d’Artagnan himself, talking with her father-in-law and her husband. She’d have him take a secret letter back to Fontainebleau to Nicolas.
Running downstairs, composing the letter in her mind with every step, she flew into the courtyard, but no one was there. The broad gates were closed, as if they had never been opened. She ran up outside stairs, to a rampart at the top of the wall, and there they were, riding away. She stamped her foot. Damn it all. Well, she was sending a letter to Nicolas if some messenger had to ride the legs off his horse to catch up with them. Inside she flung an order at a servant and ran up to her chamber, sitting at a table, pulling paper, and ink and a quilled pen forward, dashing off words about her boredom and her desire to see him again.
At a knock, her husband, rather than the servant she’d expected, entered, and she pulled a piece of paper over the one upon which she’d been writing. “I’m almost done,” she said. “I’m writing an important letter to Madame. May I send her your regards, my dear?”
Her husband sat down in a chair without answering as she folded the letter, melted wax, pressed a seal into its softness. “I would have liked to have placed it in Lieutenant d’Artagnan’s hands myself,” she complained. “I ran as fast as I could, but they were already gone. Riding away as if their lives depended upon it.”
“Lieutenant d’Artagnan wasn’t here, Catherine.”
“Nonsense. I saw him with my own eyes. Don’t you think I know his majesty’s lieutenant?”
“He wasn’t here, and you didn’t see him.”
Something in his voice caught her attention, and she turned around in her chair so that she could see his face.
He held out his hand for the letter. “I will, of course, have your letter delivered, and by special messenger if it’s that important to you.”
“Is it a secret? Some sort of state secret?” She began to laugh. “Oh, I must know.”
“No, you mustn’t.”
He wasn’t going to tell her. Intrigued, she knelt in front of him, wedging her body between his legs, leaning her elbows on each of his thighs, tilting her head to one side, looking at him through her lashes. “I can keep a secret.”
“No.”
She moved closer, put each hand at the groove where his clothed thigh met hip. “I’ll tell you a secret if you’ll tell me a secret.” She batted her eyes at him. “A group of us went to see Ninon de Lenclos. It wasn’t my idea. The Countess de Soissons invited me, and I couldn’t say no to her, as you well know. Ninon told us the most interesting things, showed us a way she’d kept her many lovers satisfied. I was shocked, of course.” Ninon de Lenclos was a famous courtesan who’d been lovers and then friends with most of the men of the king’s father’s court.
“It was naughty of me, I know,” Catherine continued, “but I thought perhaps I’d learn something that would be of interest to my husband. Is it of interest?” Catherine unbuttoned him, enjoying the power that was hers at this moment. She put her mouth on him, a trick Nicolas assured her that every man adored, and her husband gasped and held tightly to the arms of the chair. After a while, she grew bored, stood, lifted her belling skirts, and, naked underneath, sat down on him. He grabbed her, and they ended on the floor, tangled together like rutting beasts, she beginning to enjoy herself, biting and gasping, until, too suddenly, he was done. She lay with her skirts bunched and gathered at her waist, showing everything a woman was never supposed to show. “Did you like my secret?”
He smiled, and she snuggled against him.
“Give me your letter, Catherine, and I’ll see it reaches court,” he said, patting her bare rump.
He wasn’t going to tell her. Catherine clenched her fists. “It doesn’t seem so important, now,” she said.
He laughed a little.
Fool, she thought, sitting up and pulling down her skirts. He hadn’t even waited to see if she was satisfied, and she wasn’t, on any number of counts. He kissed at whatever was nearest him. “You’re pleased with me, with us, with my position at court?” she asked. She was a fool, too, believing her father’s frets that her husband might be unhappy.
“Oh yes,” he said. “Not that I want you visiting courtesans, but still … May I visit you tonight, my dear?”
She forced a smile. Doubtless, he’d want this little variation repeated. That settles it, she thought. I am leaving here as soon as I can arrange it. She found Péguilin later, dragged him to a bed, and bucked against him until she began to weep, and her own release was there. He was all loving and sweet strokes with his strong hands, but she moved away from him, sat on the edge of the bed. It was all of it too boring. Her cousin was useful, but clumsy. If he said he loved her one more time, she’d scream. “I saw Lieutenant d’Artagnan today,” she said to the wall, more to distract him from his lovemaking than anything else.
He grabbed her shoulders, forced her to look at him. “He was here on the king’s behalf, Catherine, and you didn’t see him.”
“You know about it?” she exclaimed. “Tell me!”
“There’s nothing to tell, except that his mission is a secret one.”
“What is the secret?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“When I heard it was on behalf of the king, that was enough for me.”
&
nbsp; “Get out of my bed!”
“Catherine—”
“Get out!”
That night, the Prince de Monaco, her father-in-law, got drunk at supper, and she moved to sit next to him and asked in a low voice, “Why was the lieutenant of the king’s musketeers here today?”
“Prisoners,” he slurred. “Secret prisoners.” He put his finger to his lips. “Hush. Mustn’t tell.”
And then her husband was behind her, and a servant was helping her father-in-law to stand up, and she was on her husband’s arm, going into one of the palace’s galleries, where the nobility of Monaco had gathered for dancing because of the honor and excitement of her visit. One of the locals leered at her, and she noted that all the women’s fashions were at least two years old. She managed to elude both her husband and Péguilin and locked her bedchamber door hours later, shaking her head at the excitement over their lodging of criminals, as well as at the lack of finesse here, never mind that the furniture came from Italy and that the galleries had been built in the last reign and that her father-in-law had an excellent collection of art.
She slept with the letter to Nicolas under her pillow, and the next morning, she walked to a cliff overhanging the sea and tore the letter to shreds and threw the shreds into the wind. Now here was a secret. The most powerful man in the kingdom was her lover. He’d toss a necklace of emeralds at her as if it were a mere bauble when next he saw her, and there’d be a private feast with rare wines and oysters and other delicacies that he’d hand-feed her, both of them naked. He was giving a fête in a few weeks that would be talked about for years. She’d been there as he planned the fireworks, the fountains’ spray, the playlet by Molière, the fold of every drape, the placement of every vase in his majesty’s magnificent bedchamber. The grounds of his new country château were splendid, an order and unfolding presence about them that was extraordinary. More than five thousand people were invited to his fête. His chef was going to feed them two suppers. Even her father-in-law and husband were invited. Should we go? they’d asked her. It’s such a journey. Bumpkins. Anyone who was anyone would be there. How could they even ask? Well, tomorrow she’d be on her way back to Fontainebleau. The day couldn’t get here fast enough.
