Enchantress of Paris

by Marci Jefferson

  Hortense held a finger up to her lips. “Shhhhh!”

  I grinned. “Amazing what you can get your hands on in a convent by bartering silk stockings.”

  Some of the courtiers pretended to look shocked. Most laughed. Olympia shot me a warning look.

  Hortense didn’t seem to notice. “Marie never forgets a word she reads. Go on.” She pointed to the book. “Test her.”

  The king considered this, but Olympia spoke first. “Shouldn’t Marie be reading prayer books while keeping vigil for our dear Mamma?”

  King Louis nodded, never turning from me. “My sympathy. Has your mother improved?”

  “The cardinal’s physicians say she has not.”

  “I shall send my own physicians again.”

  I glanced at the curious faces behind him, not wanting to say too much. “What she needs is hope, for I’m afraid she’s given up.”

  “That she must not do,” said the king.

  Hortense grasped my hand. “Mamma clings too much to our father’s prophecy.”

  Olympia glared at Hortense and tried to change the subject. “Your Majesty, shall we go in to visit now?”

  But the king looked into Hortense’s innocent face. “What prophecy?”

  Hortense must have been frightened by Olympia, for she moved behind me.

  So I explained with a half-truth. “Our father predicted long ago, based on the alignment of the stars, that our mother would die before the end of the Year of Our Lord 1656.”

  He looked skeptical. “Who can trust the stars?”

  But our father had used more than astrology to make such predictions. “Our mother’s faith in the stars gives the stars power. Thus she robs herself of hope.”

  “How serious you are, Marie.” He stared.

  I didn’t know how to reply, and there were no giggles.

  Finally, he nodded. Hortense and I curtsied as he entered our mother’s chamber. Olympia fluffed her skirts to the sides, blocking anyone from taking her place directly behind the king. The courtiers followed in step as if they were one body, slithering like a colorful, silken snake.

  * * *

  Hortense was asleep, head on my lap, when the king left with his train an hour later. Olympia insisted on waking her and taking her to a supper banquet. Olympia didn’t invite me, and I didn’t beg to go. I needed to wait.

  I had fallen asleep myself when the summons came. My uncle opened the chamber doors and eyed me. “Marie.”

  Bleary-eyed, I leapt to my feet. Huge candelabra stood aglow in every corner, doing little to cheer the black-cloaked walls. My mother lay on a wide gilt bed. She stared at me, searching my face as she used to do, then held open her arms.

  I rushed into them. “Mamma,” I cried. Why do you seem to fear me? Why am I always the last one you call?

  “My child,” she muttered in Italian. She stroked my hair as I buried my face in her neck, breathing her scent. “You mustn’t be sad for me. You mustn’t cry.”

  But I would. “Yes, Mamma.”

  “When I am gone you must obey your uncle.”

  I sat up. “You must hope to recover.”

  “My time has come. Accept it as I did long ago.” She glanced at my uncle. “You will be pleased at His Eminence’s generosity.”

  I turned to him, almost hopeful. “Have you found another potential husband?”

  He glanced at the maids. Without a word, they gathered their water basins and cloths and slipped from the room. The physicians followed, gripping their bloodstained tools. His Eminence leveled his glare on me. “Offering you to Meilleraye was merely my way of testing him. I counted on his refusal, and now he believes he owes me. I never intended for you to marry, but you shall have a handsome settlement.”

  All my dread of the convent returned.

  Mazarin cleared his throat. “When your mother dies, you will not only rejoin the Convent of the Visitation, you will take holy orders.”

  “Become a nun? Please, no!”

  Mamma put her hand on my arm. “It is the safest course for you.”

  “My heart breaks at the thought of leaving my sisters.”

  His Eminence said to my mother, “You must tell her.”

  She gripped my hands, and I listened intently. “Your father was a great oracle. Each of his predictions proved true, from your oldest brother’s death right up to his own. He made predictions about you. They will make you understand why you must take holy orders.” She rose on her elbow, breathless with sudden passion. “He drew up your horoscope the day you were born, then redrew it countless times, always coming to the same conclusion. He consulted the waters, he read the entrails of animals, even called on the spirits of the dead. Every sign confirmed it.” She took a shaky breath, and I started to sweat. “You were born under an evil star. One day you will disgrace your family in ways no woman has ever done before.”

  My father hid my horoscope from me? “I would never—”

  “When you grew up so headstrong, reading novels you shouldn’t, acting so sullen, I didn’t know how to handle you.”

  “If I was sullen it was because I saw fear in your eyes instead of love whenever you looked upon me.”

  She stroked my cheek. “This is the best way to protect you from your own destiny. Become a nun and counter your evil star.”

  “Your Eminence,” I said, turning to my uncle. “You must not believe this prophecy.”

  “You Mancinis always carry the old superstitions too far. I am a Prince of the Church and cannot condone practices that border on witchcraft. But even Christ’s magi followed the stars. I cannot discount what your father read in yours.” He frowned. “Meilleraye must have seen what I see. You are different.”

  Different. Not charming like Olympia. Not beautiful like Hortense. Not angelic like Victoire. Not witty like Marianne. Each had potential where I posed a threat. I stood and hoped they wouldn’t notice the bottle of lung-wort syrup bulging in my hanging pocket. “You want me out of the way.”

  He looked aside. “It is something in your manner. You don’t take correction. You have too much command of yourself, and others tend to follow commands you make.”

  The wary look on the cardinal’s face reminded me of the time I had stolen fresh cannoli from the kitchens of Palazzo Mancini back home on Rome’s Via del Corso. Cook had slaved over them. When she caught me with their sweet nut paste on my cheeks, she chased me outside to the courtyard herb garden and cornered me behind the rosemary hedge. She raised a hand to hit me. In my terror I did what came naturally. I pointed and whispered, You cannot hurt me. As she brought down her arm, she cried out. She cradled her hand, curled in an ugly cramp. Strega! she cursed. You little witch! She’d looked at me then the way the cardinal and my mother looked at me now.

  “You are wrong.” I thought of the charm in my pocket. “My sisters never do a thing I say.”

  Mamma fell back on the bolsters.

  My uncle’s words were a drop of honey in a bowl of vinegar. “We want to protect you.”

  I frowned at him. “You want to protect yourself from superstitions you claim have little merit.”

  They glanced at each other, and the pain in my mother’s face made my heart drop. I had gone too far.

  She closed her eyes. “This fuss is making me worse.”

  My uncle tried to usher me away, but I threw myself on the bed, kissing her hands. “Mamma, forgive me. I would never disgrace you. At least make His Eminence give me time!” My tears showered her frail skin, and I longed to give her the syrup. She cupped my face; I met her eyes.

  But then she started coughing. My uncle jerked me back so hard I nearly fell on the floor. The physicians rushed in. The women reappeared, darting around, fighting fear and death with cloths and basins of water.

  “Insolence,” said my uncle, pushing me toward the door.

  But I called past him, “Don’t die and deprive me of my sisters, too!”

  I heard sobs between coughs, and the door slammed before my face.
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  CHAPTER 2

  I left the Palais du Louvre in a haze, throwing myself facedown on the seat in the cardinal’s waiting carriage. I wanted to cry and scream, but there were no more tears. I needed my sisters. The cardinal’s six horses made the coach fly down the rue Saint-Honoré. An extravagant number of horses for such a short distance, but His Eminence wouldn’t have a Mazarinette ride in anything less splendid lest it reflect poorly on him.

  They carried me past the gardens of the Palais-Royal, through the arcade of Palais Mazarin, and stopped in the court. I rushed into the hall. There was not one block of marble here, not one crystal sconce, not one painting worth less than a blacksmith’s or a butcher’s life savings. I’d seen Mazarin’s coffers full of gold in the dungeons of the fortress of Vincennes when we’d stopped on our way to the convent two years earlier. My uncle had amassed wealth not only by ordinary landholding, like nobility, but also like a true Italian. He’d played moneylender, sold offices, and controlled the price of treasury bonds, buying them low and selling them high. How did I know his secrets? I glanced down the gallery toward his library, which housed more books than any other in France. In his adjoining study, where he hid the most important books, I’d stumbled upon Mazarin’s private ledgers.

  Might my father’s papers be hidden there? I took a flickering taper from a sconce and tiptoed into the vast library and beyond, into the study. It swallowed up my small light, and I closed my eyes. I had explored this room every night since my return, devouring the philosophers on the shelves on the west wall, the mathematics on the southern shelves, and the explorers on the east side. But a locked case against the northern wall held the real treasures: forbidden books. Burned by ordinary churchmen, they were coveted by ambitious ones. Books about the stars, written in Arabic symbols that I couldn’t yet decipher. Books on astrological medicine, with diagrams of the dissected human body’s inner organs. Volumes on alchemy with colorful symbolic illustrations. Handwritten grimoires with spells to cure and to curse. And my favorites, the earthy-smelling herbals, which I felt contained the real magic.

  Then there were the dangerous books, ones that once belonged to my father. The Key of Solomon, written by King Solomon himself, and the Sworn Book of Pope Honorius explained how to conjure and command demons. Heptameron was no safer, with its instructions for conjuring angels. Being caught with these would have condemned my father to burning at the stake for necromancy. Papa had been a respected Roman noble, too clever to get caught. Now my uncle kept them with Picatrix and occult books by Agrippa for purposes unknown.

  I opened my eyes, stuck the taper in a candleholder, and snatched the key from beneath a marble bust of Julius Caesar. If Mancini papers are anywhere, they are in that case. I opened the glass doors, running a finger over worn spines until I touched a leather-covered casket in the corner. Always preoccupied with the books, I’d ignored it before. The lock gave easily, and papers spilled to the floor.

  The first two dozen packets were letters with a unique seal: intertwined initials encircled by the letter S repeated four times. I scanned them. They seemed to be letters written by my uncle and the king’s mother, Anne of Austria, Queen of France. They were … love letters! I took them to the taper, reading expressions of passion and affection, shaking my head in disbelief. I read whole passages of instruction, written by my uncle during the Fronde, on how the queen mother should guide the king his son.

  I had heard the rumor. Every Parisian pamphleteer had circulated the claim that Mazarin was the king’s real father, but nuns at my convent dismissed it as gossip. Now I thought through physicians’ ledgers and other letters I’d read in this study that supported the story.

  I stacked the letters with shaky hands and dug into the casket for the last item. A book more than a hundred years old titled Strife of Love in a Dream by Francesco Colonna. Had he been a member of the powerful Colonna family in Rome that had supported my uncle in his childhood? I flipped through the pages and caught my breath. The lettering was like none I’d seen, the woodcut illustrations highly detailed, the language Latinate Italian. It told the story of a man in a pagan dreamworld, encountering mythic gods as he strove to find the woman he loved. As I read, a folded parchment fell from its pages to the floor.

  I picked it up, recognizing Papa’s handwriting. My horoscope. Inside a great square were twelve triangular houses, and the symbols within explained each planet’s position at the time of my birth. My eyes welled up as I read his notes in the margins. A brilliant mind, but disobedient. I admitted to both of those traits. Faint scribbles said, A mysterious star in Libra suggests she will abandon her husband. The star wasn’t named. The last note shocked me. Her gifts in divination may cause her downfall.

  Not if I could help it.

  I held the parchment over the taper until it caught fire. I walked it to the empty hearth, remembering a time my father had stared into flames. He had carried me from my bed and bundled me in front of him on horseback for a midnight ride out of Rome. On an open hill beyond the city walls, he had scratched a magic circle into the dirt. He had warned me not to leave his side, uttered strange names, and thrown pungent herbs on an altar fire. I had been too tired to understand why the night shadows dancing beyond his flame seemed to gather together like phantoms, descending on us and terrifying me. I’d closed my eyes tight and remember nothing more. Had those spirits confirmed I would cause trouble?

  My horoscope burned wildly, singeing my fingertips, ashes falling on the hearth.

  * * *

  Moments later I slipped into the apartment I shared with my sisters. They paused. Victoire held a brush over Marianne’s head, Hortense looked up from her book, and Olympia turned from the fireplace and said, “Where have you been?”

  “Mamma wishes me to become a nun.”

  Olympia shrugged and turned back around.

  But Victoire beckoned me to the dressing table. She gestured for Hortense to take over brushing Marianne’s hair, then unlaced my bodice. “What did Mamma tell you?”

  With my laces undone, I took a deep breath. “One of our father’s predictions. He said I would disgrace you all.”

  Olympia didn’t look at us. “Oh, that.”

  “You knew?”

  Victoire nodded. “We never thought much of it. You could never disgrace us.”

  Olympia snickered. “She disgraces us every day when she goes out in those convent rags.”

  I stared at my bodice, gray wool trimmed with black velvet, as Victoire tossed it aside. She helped me step out of the matching skirts. “I’ve had no need for court dresses.”

  Olympia stirred a pot hanging from a hook in the fireplace, making the scent of spices swirl through the air. She struck a fetching image in her lace chemise, but this was the sort of potion-making our uncle detested. “You slouch,” she said. “You wear your hair too flat. Your neck is too skinny and your lips are too big. You wear no jewels.”

  I glanced in the looking-glass, where I now stood in nothing but my own chemise. I straightened my shoulders and tried to fluff up the tendrils hanging in bundles behind my ears. They fell back, limp and lifeless. “You took my only necklace, Olympia.”

  She grinned. “Borrowed.”

  “Then give it back. I want to look my best tomorrow.”

  Hortense poked me. “So you can flirt more with the king?”

  Marianne gaped. “Did the king flirt back?”

  Olympia lifted a spoon to her nose and sniffed. “Even if I give back your measly pearl necklace, the king will never flirt with you.”

  My face burned as Victoire sat me beside Marianne to brush my hair. “I want the pearl hair pins, too.”

  Hortense interrupted. “The king was flirting with Marie. I saw.”

  Olympia snatched a glass vial from the carved marble mantel and spooned golden liquid into it. “Well, he won’t do it again.”

  “What’s that you’re making?” asked Victoire.

  “Liquid assurance.”

  Victoire
dropped her brush. “Not again.”

  I gasped. “Another love potion for King Louis? You shouldn’t.”

  She’d concocted one the day I returned from the convent. Right when the king’s carriage had arrived, she’d poured it into the brandy decanter in our salon. She ran away, planning on doubling back through the upstairs gallery to join the king as he entered the salon and then serving his brandy herself. But she tripped on the Turkish carpets and ended up under the stairs crying over a sprained ankle. I had to wrap it with dried St. John’s wort to calm her down. King Louis drank the tainted brandy and promptly spent half an hour with the gardener’s daughter in an alcove. Alone. Olympia was beside herself. The gardener’s daughter had been sent away the next day.

  Now Olympia frowned. “It is not a potion. It’s just a … a little ginseng infusion to encourage his passions.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Marianne.

  Hortense laughed so hard she clutched her middle. “It means that once King Louis drinks it, he will rub himself against Olympia until she finds herself pregnant.”

  “Quiet.” Olympia plugged her vial. “I won’t allow King Louis to do that until after I’m married.”

  Marianne jumped up. “I don’t understand.”

  Victoire poured water into a silver bowl for me to wash my hands and face. “What Olympia means is, she wouldn’t let the king … rub against her until she is married. So if she does get with child, society won’t realize it’s a bastard.” Victoire scrubbed my face with a linen cloth a little too hard. “If our uncle catches Olympia making such potions, she will be the disgrace of the family and locked in a convent.”

  Marianne clapped. “Get caught, Olympia. I claim your bed!” She ran to Olympia’s bed, the biggest, covered with more silk and gilding than the others. She bounced up and down on it squealing, “I claim your bed, your clothes, your jewels, and even the jewels you stole from Marie!”

  Even Olympia had to laugh. Victoire kissed each of us and went home to the Hôtel de Vendôme, to her husband and children. We settled to our routine of rubbing almond oil into each other’s nails and rearranging pillows. Olympia and I tucked Hortense and Marianne under their coverlets and pulled their bed curtains closed.