Mistress of the Sun

by Sandra Gulland

  “Your Highness, Your Highness,” the Marquis said in a low voice.

  These were the Duke and Duchess? Petite was astounded that this man in a sagging ruff was the son of King Henry the Great.

  The Marquis made an extravagantly subservient bow. Petite and her mother, likewise, made deep reverences. When Petite looked up, she saw that the Marquis was still bowing. How did his wig stay on? Finally, he straightened and cleared his throat.

  “I understand that congratulations are in order, Saint-Rémy,” Monsieur le Duc d’Orléans said, admiring a smoke ring that emerged from his lips. “This must be your wife and…her daughter? Very well. Your wife will work with you, I presume? As for the girl—” The Duke looked Petite up and down. “How old is she?”

  “Ten, my Lord. Unsoiled in her routine and trained at a convent in Tours.”

  “The Ursuline convent?”

  The Marquis glanced at Françoise, who indicated that it was so.

  “I was once summoned there,” the Duke said, fussing with his pipe, “to dispel an infestation of demons.”

  “A prodigious quantity of time ago, my Lord,” the Marquis said. “The girl had not even been birthed—in Tours, I might add, to the august la Vallière family, renowned throughout the land for religiosity.”

  “What sign was she born under?” the Duke asked, inhaling sharply, trying to get the tobacco to relight. “Is she Scorpio? She has that look about her, something…irregular.”

  Françoise glanced at Petite in alarm. “Your Highness.” Her trembling hands causing her skirts to rustle. “I beg you, permit me to speak.”

  The Duke nodded his assent.

  “My daughter was born under the sign of Leo. She is devout as well as dutiful.”

  “Our Marguerite is Leo,” the Duke noted, blowing a smoke ring and watching it float, disintegrate, disappear.

  “Exactly, my Lord: an auspicious auspice,” the Marquis said with a stutter. “A most portentous indication. And—in that Princess Marguerite necessitates an auxiliary chamber attendant—I thought perchance that the girl might…furnish attendance on Her Highness.”

  “How many attendants does Little Queen have now?” the Duc d’Orléans asked.

  “Ten and one,” the Marquis stuttered, “together with the two pages, but barely one waiting maid, the girl Mademoiselle Nicole de Montalais, my Lord.”

  “The noisy one,” the Duchesse d’Orléans said dreamily, selecting a sweetmeat from the china platter beside her.

  “And nosy,” the Duke added, knocking his pipe embers into a bowl. “Well, perhaps you have a point. Marguerite is six now—one waiting maid is insufficient.”

  “Marguerite is ten,” came the ghostlike voice of the Duchess as a footman stepped forward to usher them out.

  “Back out,” Petite’s mother whispered as they exited, then collapsed onto an upholstered bench. “Mon Dieu!” she gasped, pulling her fur-trimmed tippet close around her shoulders.

  “You are not to relinquish your senses, Madame. I shall revisit you presently,” the Marquis informed his wife, handing her a sweat-cloth and signaling Petite to follow.

  Petite shadowed her stepfather back down the circular stairwell and across the courtyard, climbing yet another stairwell and going down a vast gallery before coming to a halt before a vaulted door. A guard with a rusty halberd snapped to attention.

  The Marquis, perspiring, turned to face his stepdaughter. “The Duke and Duchess are graced with three daughters,” he said, clearing his throat. “Princesses.”

  Petite nodded. She’d never seen a princess.

  “Princess Marguerite is the eldest. She has attained the epoch of nine.”

  “I thought the Duchess said she was ten,” Petite said, puzzled. She’d noted it because she was ten herself.

  “You’re not to discourse if not discoursed to.”

  “Are you not discoursing with me?”

  “Discoursing with and discoursing to are not an identical identity.” The Marquis cleared his throat again. “Princess Elisabeth is fifteen months younger, followed by Princess Madeleine at an additional span of two years.”

  “Isn’t there an older princess as well?” Petite asked. Not long ago, during the Age of Conflict, this warlike princess was said to have climbed the wall of the palace at Orléans all by herself and even to have fired cannon from the tower of the Bastille prison in Paris.

  “Yes, la Grande Mademoiselle. However, the Duke’s offspring by his original mate is a celebratory and lives away.”

  “The warrior one.”

  The Marquis raised a warning finger. “It is deeply erroneous, Mademoiselle, to reference la Grande Mademoiselle in this mode. I will have Abbé Patin edify you on the theme of titles and accurate appellation.” He frowned, doubling his chins. “Endeavor to be perpetually cognizant that Monsieur le Duc and his progeny are the descendants of King Henry the Great.”

  Petite nodded, fingering the tangle of ribbons at her waist. Often her father had told her tales of the brave and honorable King Henry, a great horseman. Bucephalus was the name of his favorite stallion, a White like Diablo.

  “All of his daughters, even the girls, are King Henry the Great’s granddaughters. The princesses hold the most uppermost grade in France,” the Marquis went on, making his eyes wide for effect, “an echelon bestowed by the supreme Almighty.”

  Petite put her hand to her cheek pretending a gesture of awe, but in fact surreptitiously to swipe at the spots of spittle the Marquis had showered upon her.

  “Subsequently, Mademoiselle, they are under no circumstances flawed.” With a shaky sigh, he raised his head, made the sign of the cross and commanded the guard to open the door.

  It was not yet nightfall, yet the room was ablaze with candles and lanterns. The air smelled of smoke, candle grease, and—regrettably—urine. Three girls were stooped over a game table, silhouetted in front of a blazing fire. The eldest had a long face and prominent chin. Her plump lips were dark, her lower lip drooping. Her hair was curly, to judge from the strands poking out from under her nightcap. The middle girl had a wandering eye, and the youngest unsuccessfully disguised an enormous nose under a hooded linen night rail. All three of them were hunchbacked.

  “No!” the youngest screamed.

  A buxom maid in a window alcove and an older woman sitting to one side of the fire took no notice.

  “Spin it,” the eldest commanded, tossing a bone top onto the felt-covered table. “Ha, ha, you lose,” she said, scooping up coins.

  Put-and-Take? Petite wondered. They were playing with real coins. In the convent, no games had been permitted, and certainly not this gambling game played by ruffians on the street.

  “Your Highnesses,” the Marquis stuttered.

  The girls turned to stare.

  “Princess Marguerite, Princess Elisabeth, Princess Madeleine,” the Marquis intoned, “may I have the honor of introducing Mademoiselle Louise-Françoise La Baume Le Blanc de la Vallière…my wife’s daughter.”

  “Your turn now,” Princess Marguerite said, pushing the bone top over to the middle sister.

  The Marquis turned to the elderly woman knitting by the fire. “Madame de Raré, it is the aspiration of the esteemed Duke and Duchess that Mademoiselle de la Vallière adhere to Princess Marguerite in the function of waiting maid.”

  “The Princess already has a waiting maid,” the woman said, her chin buried in an old-fashioned figure-of-eight ruff.

  “The esteemed Duke and Duchess deem that the Princess is of an epoch to necessitate further than one, Madame.”

  The buxom maid stepped forward. “Then perhaps I should be introduced, Monsieur le Marquis?” She was a tall girl with thick black braids, each tied with a wide scarlet ribbon. “I am that other waiting maid, Mademoiselle Nicole de Montalais.” She made a pert curtsy.

  Marguerite, the eldest princess, jumped up and grabbed hold of Nicole’s braids. “Go, horsey,” she commanded, as if holding reins.

  Nicole yanked away
and drove the Princess off using one of her braids as a whip.

  “Oh, stop. Please stop,” the woman by the fire said faintly.

  “Stop, stop, stop,” the princesses sang out in chorus as the Marquis bowed out, abandoning Petite to the chaos.

  Chapter Eight

  PETITE GAVE WAY to tears in her garret room that night. Her introduction to the princesses had been raucous, and she was filled with confusion. She had expected a castle not to stink and nobility to act…well, noble. She had a new father, a new home, responsibilities: it was all too much. She longed for the convent, Sister Angélique, the silence. What did a waiting maid even do?

  “Well, first, you must be well turned-out,” Clorine said, looking around their tiny room, her hands on her hips. She pushed Petite’s trunk into one corner. “I’ll do you up in ringlets every day.”

  “I hate ringlets,” Petite said. Plus, she was ravenous. Clearly, from the extraordinary size of both the Duke and Duchess, there was food in the château—but where? She threw herself down on her bed—a crackling sound startled her. The mattress was straw? She could hear her mother and the Marquis talking downstairs, something about the fireplace smoking. She didn’t like that the floor was so thin. She didn’t want to hear them talking…or worse. “I’m starving.”

  “I found out that the last sitting for the higher staff was about an hour ago,” Clorine said, digging around in her basket and handing Petite a length of jerky. “In the morning it’s at prime—they’ll ring a bell when the table is laid. That will give you plenty of time because the Princess doesn’t rise until terce, just before Mass.”

  “But then what am I supposed to do? Do I put her fire on?”

  “No, the butler does that.”

  “Do I take out her chamber pot?”

  “No, there will be a chambermaid for that.”

  “Do I wake her?”

  “I believe her nurse will be the one to do that.”

  “Does her nurse help her dress as well?”

  “That’s the job of the mistress of the wardrobe, but you or the other waiting maid may be asked to tie a ribbon, or comb out the Princess’s hair, for example.”

  “I can do that,” Petite said, reassured. “Do princesses ever eat?”

  “Of course. You’re to stand behind her commodité de la conversation when she’s at table.”

  “A commodité de la…what?”

  “Conversation. That’s what they call a chair here.” Clorine rolled her eyes in exasperation. “You may eat what’s left on the Princess’s plate after she’s finished.”

  “And then what?”

  Clorine shrugged. “And then you just stand around waiting. You are, after all, a waiting maid.”

  Chewing on the jerky, Petite gave this some thought. She could do a lot of things passably well, but waiting was not one of them.

  “YOU ARE TO CALL ME Little Queen,” Princess Marguerite informed Petite the next morning. The Princess lifted her skirts and sat down on a necessary, a padded open seat over a tin chamber pot. “Everyone does.” Broken strands of gold thread glinted on her underskirt.

  “Yes, Little Queen,” Petite said, clasping her white-gloved hands behind her back. She shifted her hands to the front, and then let them hang down by her sides. There was a correct posture, no doubt.

  “Aren’t you going to ask why?”

  “Why, Little Queen?” The Princess was wearing ear-rings made of bone buttons. Petite had known only a few girls of her own age, and certainly none of them ornamented. A foul smell filled the room.

  “Because I’m going to marry the King.”

  Petite took in this astonishing news. “I didn’t know that.” Was it permissible to admit such a thing? “Little Queen,” she added.

  “I’ll be ten on July twenty-eighth, so when the King and I marry in four years, I’ll be fourteen and he will be twenty. How old are you?”

  “I’m ten. Little Queen.” Petite calculated that she was one year and eleven days older than the Princess.

  “I was born with the sun in Leo.” Marguerite put out her hand.

  Unsure, Petite placed her hand in the Princess’s.

  “No, fishhead—a cloth.”

  Petite looked around, then handed the Princess a cloth from a stack on a side table. The Princess cleaned herself and stood, handing Petite the soiled linen. Petite took it by one corner.

  “The astrologer said I’ll make a good queen because I’m proud, dignified, commanding and powerful,” Marguerite said. “The King is a Virgo, but his moon is in Leo. What sign are you?”

  “I’m Leo as well,” Petite said, tucking the soiled cloth into the waistband of her apron. “Little Queen. But with a Cancer ascendant.” The astrologer present at Petite’s birth had written out a full report. According to his calculations she was sensitive to others—attuned, even, to mystic vibrations—and although rational by nature, he’d written that her “affective sensibility tended to overheat,” concluding with the warning that her mild manner veiled a voraginous passion. Petite had yet to discover what voraginous meant, but because of a line in the Aeneid (“Neptune came upon them, with all his vorages and his waves full of scum”), she thought it might have something to do with a whirlpool.

  “Cancer ascendant? Tant pis! We shall never get along,” Princess Marguerite said cheerily.

  Nicole, the other waiting maid, jumped into the room.

  “Where have you been?” Princess Marguerite demanded.

  “Out spying.” Nicole gave a sly look. “That harlot from Tours is here.”

  “Mademoiselle de la Marbelière?”

  “And she’s got her son with her. Your half-brother.”

  “The bastard.” Marguerite sounded horrified.

  Petite flushed, understanding. Once, in Tours, on the way to the surgeon, Sister Angélique had shielded her from seeing a woman in a passing carriage—this same Mademoiselle de la Marbelière.

  The Princess sank down to the floor, her skirts wafting out around her. “She’s not here to see my father, is she?”

  “I’ll find out,” Nicole said, leaping back out the door.

  A maid of the wardrobe entered with a wicker basket containing a sable snug and a blue velvet cape trimmed with swan’s down. As the maid secured the enormous cape to the Princess by means of an ivory button at the neck, Petite tucked the soiled cloth under the pale green carpet of uncut pile.

  The Princess took a handful of sweetmeats from a bowl and stuffed them into the snug. “You have to carry my train,” she told Petite, pulling toward the door.

  Petite scooped up the train as best she could. Holding it high, she hurried after the Princess, down the stone stairs and along the chilly arcades, sidestepping the piles of feces left by dogs.

  The chapel abutted the unfinished wing. It looked as if part of it had been destroyed and then patched back together. The Princess entered a small door and climbed a narrow circular stair, emerging onto a balcony that overlooked the chancel and nave. The little chapel had stained-glass windows and a vaulted ceiling, and the altar was covered with a dark velvet cloth trimmed with silver lace. Pews in the front by the railing were already full, a crowd standing behind—shopkeepers and townsfolk, Petite guessed by their attire. Incense failed to cover the scent of sheepskin and damp wool.

  “We’re early,” Marguerite said with disgust, dipping her fingers into a baptismal font set into the wall. She crossed herself, bent a knee to the altar and climbed up into the single chair.

  Petite wasn’t sure what to do. The Princess would likely be offended if she were to dip her fingers into her holy water—but wouldn’t God be offended if she didn’t?

  “My cape,” the Princess said, swinging her feet. Petite arranged the fabric so that it wasn’t wadded in a lump behind the Princess’s back.

  The balcony beside theirs was crowded. Petite recognized the two younger princesses, sitting at the balustrade. The youngest stuck her tongue out, then collapsed into a giggle.

 
“My mother the Duchess says that you’re not to smile in the chapel,” Marguerite said. “Nor are you to frown. You must maintain a beatific expression.”

  Petite tried to look beatific, but it was difficult with her teeth chattering. She wished she had brought a wrap.

  “I get my own balcony because I’m Little Queen,” Marguerite said, making a face back at her sisters—the bratchets, she called them.

  “That’s good, Little Queen,” Petite said, as a tall comely priest in a patched surplice strode up the aisle. Under his thick wool cassock, he was wearing riding boots with spurs, which kept catching on the hem.

  Those in the pews below stood, but Princess Marguerite remained seated. “That’s Abbé Patin, our tutor,” she said.

  The Abbé crossed himself, his voice booming out, “The Lord be with you.”

  “And also with you,” Petite intoned. The familiar ritual of the Mass was a comfort.

  The Abbé began to read from the Bible in Latin, his voice commanding.

  “We call him the Thunderer,” the Princess said. “He had a wench in Paris,” she went on as the congregation began to sing “Gloria,” “but she died of the Plague. Her servants had to cut off her head so that they could fit her into the coffin. When I am queen, there will be no Plague.”

  Abbé Patin glanced up after the choir finished singing.

  “Uh-oh, I’m in trouble: three Hail Marys,” Marguerite said, as he began the silent prayer.

  A bell sounded and people pressed into the small chapel.

  “Peasants.” Princess Marguerite pinched her nose. “They come to see the Host. Oh, there’s Nicole.”

  Petite recognized the other waiting maid’s blue hooded cloak below.

  Soon Nicole emerged through the balcony door. “She talked to your father,” she reported breathlessly. “Something about money, I think. Oh, speak of the Devil, there she is.”