Enchantress of Paris

by Marci Jefferson

  “Of course.” He glanced at me. I refused to meet his eye.

  The queen mother gave a short nod. “I expect regular dispatches.”

  He kissed her again. “As you wish.”

  * * *

  We played cards until Monsieur and King Louis started discussing ammunition. That’s when I ushered my sisters back to the cardinal’s lodging on the northern reaches of Calais.

  In the hall, maps and charts and muster rolls were spread across half a dozen tables. Messengers came and went constantly. My uncle’s command center. “Stay out of the way,” he barked when he saw us.

  I leaned to Moréna. “Order my equerry to ready Trojan before dawn. I will sleep in my black riding jacket tonight.”

  “You can’t go to Mardyck,” said Moréna, for once reserved.

  “Nothing in heaven or on earth will stop me from going to Mardyck.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “Nothing in heaven or on earth will induce me to let you come to Mardyck.” King Louis dismounted his horse right in front of his cavalrymen and moved toward me in the predawn glow. I’d ridden Trojan from the stables into the ranks before the first trumpet blare.

  My feet never touched the ground. His arms encircled my waist, and he tossed me over his armor-plated shoulder. Philippe watched helplessly from the ranks of musketeers. The king marched inside and deposited me on the reception hall floor, skirts in disarray around my ears. I pushed them down, glared, and scrambled to my feet.

  He dragged me through the command center, where two sleepy footmen jerked to attention. He kicked open the door to my bedchamber. “Out!” he commanded. In a flurry of sheets and robes, Madame Venelle, Hortense, and Marianne scurried away.

  King Louis slammed the door and threw me on a bed. “Stay.”

  I jumped up. “No!”

  He pushed me down, pinned my wrists by my ears. “There is no place to quarter a woman at the front. I share a bunk with General Turenne, you understand?”

  “I cannot let you go alone.” I fought it, but tears filled my eyes.

  “I have men with muskets.”

  I stretched to kiss his chin.

  He shook his head. “I—I wouldn’t be able to focus, let alone command. I can hardly breathe around you—” He kissed me with a hot fury then, hungry, angry, demanding. He buried his face in my chest. Shameless, I wrapped my legs around him, pulling him closer, anything to keep him, to trap him. But he pulled away. My skirts fell back, and he kissed the inside of my knee.

  It felt like fire. “Damn that armor.”

  He laughed quietly, covering my knee with his hand. Trumpets sounded outside. The cardinal pounded on the door. “Majesty!”

  I reached for the handle of the king’s saber and pulled it out. I lifted the blade to his neck. He studied me cautiously but didn’t stop me. I grasped one of his curly locks and cut it off.

  He pointed to the gap between his armor and his neck. My silver chain. “Your amulet goes with me.”

  Pounding sounded at the door again. “Majesty!”

  He rose, sheathed his saber. I stood, but he pushed through the door.

  The cardinal looked at my riding habit and shook his head. I hid the lock of hair in my hanging pocket. The trumpets blared, and kettledrums began a steady roll. I flew to the window in time to watch the king mount his horse. He charged to the head of a long line of cavalry, thrusting his arm in the air, signaling the move forward. The thunder of a thousand horses and battle wagons and foot soldiers shook the ground, and my only love disappeared in dust on the horizon.

  Mazarin muttered behind me, “Did you convince him to execute Condé?”

  Cold-blooded execution seemed a breach of war protocol. Worse than heralding Condé’s downfall with witchcraft? “King Louis will do what is right.”

  Mazarin grabbed the front of my neck, turned me, and pinned me against the casement. “I wanted him to leave intent on spilling Condé’s blood. Instead you sent him off with poetry in his head and lust coursing through his veins.”

  The image of my uncle slapping Olympia in the carriage flashed through my mind. I reacted. I dug into his hand with my nails. I clawed until my fingertips grew slippery with blood. He finally released me, staring at his hand in disbelief.

  “He’ll do what I ask simply out of love. You should try that sometime.”

  He covered his wounds with his other hand. “He wouldn’t even stay in Calais for you. You overestimate yourself, and you underestimate him.”

  “I’m going to handle the king my way.”

  He assumed a snide expression. “And your crown?”

  I turned back to the window. He left without another word.

  Skirts rustled behind me. It was Hortense. “I hope Louis gets Condé this summer, or the cardinal will target you next.”

  “I hope we get Condé for entirely different reasons.” I took out the king’s lock and bundled it with a ribbon from my own hair. “If Condé escapes, the cardinal will expect me to convince King Louis of the Naples Plan.”

  * * *

  “Stay in this château and stay out of the way,” Cardinal Mazarin warned us sternly the next morning. “Step one foot outside and you are at the mercy of soldiers.”

  Venelle, Hortense, Marianne, and I sat in chairs by the front door in the hall and spent our days watching the comings and goings of the cavalry leader, the head of the Cardinal’s Guards, and Charles, comte D’Artagnan, reporting for the King’s Musketeers. Everyone marched right past us to the command center and reported to my uncle. It infuriated me to think they brought intelligence King Louis might need, yet he was risking his life at the front.

  Dining held no ceremony. We took meals in the hall, and the men ate rations in their camps. Tents, shanties, cook wagons, and campfires covered the meadows. Captains drilled regiments in the fields. Men and goods flowed constantly to the front and back. Yet I could not go.

  Days turned into weeks. I lived for dispatches. Messengers came flying in on horseback several times a day. They marched inside shouting updates, waving sealed missives in the air. Saying they’d constructed roads to travel the sodden landscape. Saying the stench of last year’s bodies rotting in shallow graves permeated everything. Saying the wet ocean air spoiled the soldiers’ biscuits. Saying, finally, the Spanish had arrived outside Dunkirk earlier than expected, and Turenne attacked earlier than planned.

  I nervously watched my uncle’s expression. He pointed to the great map on his table. “If Turenne fails to capture Dunkirk, this fortress in a line of fortresses, he will be left surrounded by the enemy.” He pushed a row of tiny model ships close to the coast. “Cromwell’s fleet will create a blockade.” And that afternoon we heard cannon fire from the fleet echoing down the coast.

  At last a messenger rode in, kicking up gravel, running inside before that gravel returned to the ground. “Turenne and Cromwell’s forces whipped the Spaniards on the dunes! Dunkirk will be ours.”

  Mazarin jumped up. “And Condé?”

  “On the run!”

  I couldn’t look at Mazarin. Hortense spoke for me. “When will the king return?”

  The messenger shrugged. “After he addresses the troops. A day. Maybe two.”

  * * *

  But two days later the same messenger came with a different dispatch. “The king has a fever.”

  “How bad?” asked Hortense as I clutched my stomach.

  “High, and getting higher,” said the messenger.

  I paced. “What have they done for the king? Uncle, demand a report.”

  * * *

  The next day’s report said they’d bled my poor king to no avail. The queen mother summoned my sisters and me to join her at mass. All of Calais prayed for the king, and orders went out for Paris churches to expose the Holy Sacrament. Monsieur stayed in his chambers, and a line of courtiers formed outside his door, lips full of flattery for the man who might inherit France.

  * * *

  I sat by the door, weeping, waiting for dis
patches. Each day it was the same. Fever.

  When one messenger refused to speak, I ripped the dispatch from his hands and read it as I ran to the cardinal. “His body is bloated and he has lost consciousness.” My voice cracked. “He is near death. Saddle Trojan! I am taking a concoction of senna to the king.”

  My uncle grabbed the red zucchetto from his head and hurled it on the table. “If you set one foot outside of this château, my men will shoot you on sight.”

  “If the king dies, I will run straight into your firing squad. At least send a local physician who might be more familiar with this ailment.”

  He did it to placate me.

  I refused supper. I refused to change my gown. I refused to go to bed. I kept to my chair by the open front door and waited, praying over the king’s lock of hair.

  “Take a bath and eat a proper meal,” said Hortense. “At least dry your tears. You’re scaring Marianne.”

  “Tell her a bedtime story. Tell her there was once a girl who loved a king so much she vowed not to sleep until his health was restored.”

  “You’re mad.”

  In the midst of many tears, I started to feel mad. The messengers all stared at me. I knew everyone was talking about the girl who wouldn’t stop crying for the king.

  At long last, on the tenth day, a messenger appeared in the distance, waving his dispatch. He dropped it in my hands on the threshold.

  “His fever broke!” I ran to the cardinal, waving the report like a woman crazed. “Long live the king!” And I collapsed on the floor in a heap.

  CHAPTER 20

  No man was ever wise by chance.

  —LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA

  I slept for twenty-four hours straight. When they finally brought the king in on a litter, I had bathed and eaten and sprinkled his bed with rosewater. His men moved around the room, setting up tables of medicines, hanging the royal tapestries, laying out reports for him to read. I knelt by his bed.

  When the room quieted, I felt his hand gently stroking my hair. “They tell me you’ve done nothing but cry.”

  “I prayed,” I said. “That if you died I would follow you.”

  “I prayed that if I lived, I might never leave your side again.”

  “And here you are.” I kissed his hand.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  There I remained while the queen mother and her ladies, Monsieur and Mademoiselle, my sisters, my brother and his officers, and all the courtiers streamed in to pay their respects to the king and kiss his ring.

  * * *

  The king was weak and thin and had no appetite. I sat by the window and played my guitar and hummed and let him drift off. After the first week he became more alert. By the second week he was humming along. By the third week he was sitting up, gesturing for me to sit by him on the bed.

  In the fourth week, Mazarin walked in while King Louis and I were both sitting in his bed, singing and playing my guitar. Mazarin frowned. “Turenne is advancing on Furnes, then Dixmude. By the grace of God, we might even force Gravelines to surrender before the season is finished. But Condé escaped.”

  I had pondered this issue. The downfall of Condé was essential. Not for Mazarin but for peace, for the king’s security, for the French people. “It would be easer to defeat the Spanish if you cut off Condé’s access to fresh soldiers from Naples.”

  “Could that be done?” King Louis asked Mazarin.

  Mazarin didn’t hesitate. “It will depend on cooperation from Savoy.” I didn’t like his expression.

  The king nodded. “Do whatever it takes. Soon I will be strong enough to ride out with Turenne.”

  “No,” said Mazarin. “You’re traveling south to Fontainebleau by way of Compiègne.”

  The king and I looked at each other. So long as we were together, I didn’t care where we went. If away from Mazarin’s watchful eye, all the better.

  * * *

  We bypassed Paris on the slow journey to Fontainebleau, where the king summoned me to his chambers every day. “No troops. No siege. No battle. Marie, I will grow thoroughly bored this summer,” he grumbled.

  I swatted him. “I don’t feel sorry for you. Pity me. I have the greater task. More difficult than distinguishing oneself in battle, more arduous than defeating boredom … I shall improve your mind.”

  The king laughed, accepting my challenge affably.

  Courtiers stepped aside when they saw me coming with my guitar and my stack of books. I could almost hear their thoughts. Why in the world does King Louis prefer her?

  The queen mother came straight from hearing mass one morning. “You’re looking better by the day, my son.” She gave me a grateful smile. “Mademoiselle Mancini, I owe this to you.”

  Thus I basked in royal favor all around.

  When King Louis was at last dressed and strong enough to venture out, it was to my chambers that he came. I showed him history books he’d never heard of, and we covered politics he quickly grasped. He wouldn’t touch a pamphlet on astrology but spent hours over a book by Seneca. We talked of what he might do with his power, of building hospitals for the poor, opening a new university, building bridges, and setting up grain stores for times of famine.

  I summoned Lully, who brought his musicians, and I ordered up a platter of foods to be kept near the king always. King Louis reclined in an armchair, nibbling oranges from Portugal, while my brother and sisters and I danced for him.

  Olympia even brought her husband. “You must have been terrified lest he die and all your royal favor evaporate,” she muttered, holding her belly. She was with child again.

  “Favor be damned,” I said, pulling her to the center of my chamber, trying to make her dance and laugh. “It’s the royal I wanted!”

  She did laugh, thank goodness. And the king laughed, too.

  “We are so merry without the cardinal,” she said. “If only there were some way to live independently from him.”

  I eyed the king, and plans for Philippe’s future formed in my mind.

  As the king left my chambers that night, he showered me with kisses that suggested he was very much recovered. “Let’s ride in the forests tomorrow,” he said. “I want to be in the fresh air with you every day.”

  “You mean you want to go hunting.” I tipped my head.

  He grinned. “That, too.”

  I laughed. “How shall I punish you for trying to fool me?”

  “The worst penalty would be to leave me.”

  I stroked his cheek. “Let us ride and hunt, then, for I’ll never do that.”

  He bowed on his way out. “And you must tell me the details of your uncle’s Naples Plan.”

  I closed the door behind him, remembering my uncle’s strange expression when King Louis had approved the plan. Mazarin was up to something, and I dreaded what it might be.

  CHAPTER 21

  Fontainebleau

  Autumn 1658

  Trojan pranced beneath me, impatient to burst into a canter. “Wait.” We held our ground in a game-park clearing in the forest not far from Fontainebleau Palais.

  The chief huntsman had taken the king’s best bloodhound to locate a red stag, note the size of his antlers, and initiate the hunt. Five pages each held a dozen leashed hounds that bounded over one another, barking, tugging, dripping saliva. Forty carriages lined the dirt avenue, cleared especially for spectators and the hundred or so hunters riding horseback. The queen mother watched from her open calèche with a disinterested frown. Hunting was not for her. But every courtier not at the front attended to make today’s hunt the spectacle King Louis enjoyed.

  Trojan nudged the king’s horse in the flank.

  “Trojan,” I scolded.

  King Louis just grinned, excited. He’d regained his healthy glow, praise heaven.

  Then we heard it. The huntsman’s great horn-call. The stag is on the move!

  The horn-blowers sounded their brass and ran.

  The Master of the Hounds cracked his whip, and the pages unlea
shed the dogs. “Halali!” called the Master. “Halali!”

  The pack went wild, jumping over each other, tails wagging, noses in the air and noses to the ground. They followed the sound of the horns, spreading out to cover more ground. When we heard their baying cries, we knew they had the scent.

  King Louis nodded once to me, then dashed off. “Tayaut!”

  Trojan hardly waited for my heel and tore after him. The carriages, hunters, handlers with extra packs of hounds, grooms, and quartermasters reeled into motion behind. Trojan put distance between us.

  Mine was the only steed fast enough to keep pace with the king. We cut through the trails, following the cries of the hounds as they chased the scent through the woods and underbrush. After hard riding for more than a mile, we came to a crossroad, and the king stopped. The hounds had quieted, and he stood in his stirrups, listening.

  Trojan circled him as I put my ear to the wind, soon hearing the distant horn-call. “Westward!” I cried, and trotted before the king. He caught up with me at a handler’s building. We halted while the grooms there unleashed a fresh pack of hounds. A slew of hunters caught up with us. We heard the horn-call again, and the dogs gave chase. The trail led us to a stream, where the dogs lost the scent by the bridge.

  “The stag must have escaped the hunting grounds,” said King Louis. “We should wait for the other hounds to bring it back.”

  “Our quarry is west.” Trojan reared up, hoofs pawing the air. “Tayaut!” I called, and let Trojan cross the stream with a glorious splash.

  The king followed me. “Westward!”

  The dogs soon caught the scent and chased it for miles. At last we heard the special horn-call nearby. We cut through the woods, coming to a clearing by another stream. Handlers kept the dogs back with a signal from their whips so we could watch. The stag stood on the opposite bank, panting, lapping the water, something rarely glimpsed on the hunt. We’d run him to the point of exhaustion, too spent to continue the chase. More hunters found us and some of the carriages rumbled over a nearby bridge. The handlers released the hounds and they splashed across the stream, howling and barking and snapping at the stag until it was surrounded. The Master of the Hunt crossed the stream, took hold of the stag’s huge antlers and brandished his knife. That’s when I closed my eyes. The horn-blowers sounded a magnificent fanfare. The Master opened the animal’s belly and threw out the entrails to feed the dogs to the applause of hunters and onlookers alike.