Murder at Fontainebleau

by Amanda Carmack

  Kate was most confused by Queen Catherine’s request. She glanced at Celeste, who shrugged. Kate could only follow the Queen Mother as they strolled onto the pathway, the rest of the royal attendants following behind. Queen Catherine moved surprisingly fast for such a short lady, her steps quick and graceful, almost gliding.

  Kate remembered hearing tales of how Queen Catherine was once an avid rider, galloping to the hunt at her husband’s side. It was the only time she could be alone with King Henri without the royal mistress, Diane de Poitiers, with them.

  Now Madame de Poitiers was exiled, and Queen Catherine had taken charge of the kingdom. She no longer rode to the hunt, but followed in a chariot, her eye on everything around her. They said she knew all.

  Did she even know what had happened to Amelia? It had been her party at the pavilion, after all.

  “Do you like the pretty avenue of trees just there, Mademoiselle Haywood?” Queen Catherine asked as she gestured to a line of silvery beech trees leading down the wide pathway away from the terrace. “Do you have such things at your English palaces?”

  Kate studied the gardens, so peaceful and quiet in the winter cold. In the summer, she knew they would be bursting with emerald green life. The shores of the pond would be concealed by flowers and the marble pavilion hidden from view. “Most of Queen Elizabeth’s gardens are smaller, Your Majesty, and more compact. I am sure everyone would agree that the gardens here at Fontainebleau are beyond any compare. They are so lovely now—I can only imagine how they must be in summer.”

  Queen Catherine gave a satisfied little nod. “Gardening is one of my great pleasures. But it was my father-in-law, the great King Francis, who first planted those trees for his first wife, Queen Claude. Neither of them ever saw their full flower, but he knew how it would one day be. He knew the great importance of beauty in all its forms. He was willing to have patience to make his court perfect in every way.”

  The queen glanced back over her shoulder, and Kate wondered if she studied the palace or her ladies, who waited several steps away. Both of them were indeed beautiful, the pale stones of the palace in the winter light, the windows sparkling like diamonds, the ladies tall and elegant in their satin and furs, whispering together. Celeste watched the queen, her hand raised to shade her eyes from the light.

  “Before my father-in-law’s time there were not many ladies at court,” Queen Catherine said. “Yet King Francis saw women could be a great adornment to a civilized palace, could bring color and laughter and interest, refinement. He even had his own attendants, his petite bande, as he called them, who rode with him and danced for him at balls. They were of much use to him in so many ways.”

  Kate nodded. She could see what Queen Catherine was telling her, perhaps what Queen Mary had been trying to say as well. Ladies could be as lethal at court as men, or even more so, with wounding words and whispers rather than swords. Queen Catherine had spies everywhere, and no enemy would be allowed to pass. France had powers England could not match—yet. “I see, Your Majesty.”

  Queen Catherine gave her a small, tight-lipped smile. “I believe you do see, mademoiselle. I think my father-in-law was disappointed I was no beauty when I first arrived from Florence, a frightened little fourteen-year-old. Yet we soon found we could learn much from each other, and he became my greatest friend. They say your Queen Elizabeth, though she is but a woman herself, does not care greatly for the friendship of other females.”

  Kate bit her lip. Elizabeth did have ladies she trusted: Kat Ashley, who was like her mother; her cousin Catherine Knollys; Robert Dudley’s sister, Mary Sidney. But most of her ladies were merely for show in the rooms of the court. Would Kate herself be so trusted if she had not grown up at the Tudor palaces or had not proven to be the queen’s secret Boleyn cousin? “Queen Elizabeth does have many ladies waiting on her and is most fond of those she has known a long time.”

  “And she keeps a lady as her favorite musician. Most unusual. She would certainly do well to always remember the power we women can have, which is even greater for being hidden sometimes.” She looked back to her own chattering attendants. “I fear poor Mademoiselle Wrightsman has reminded us of that.”

  Before Kate could say anything, Queen Catherine walked onward, summoning her ladies to follow with a wave of her hand.

  Celeste caught Kate’s arm and walked with her as they let the rest of the queen’s attendants hurry ahead. “Queen Catherine seems to like you, Mademoiselle Haywood. Everyone likes you.”

  Kate shook her head, baffled by the twists and turns of the French court. “Does she indeed? I cannot read her at all.”

  Celeste laughed. “No one can. It is one of her great powers. We have much to learn from her. What did she speak of to you?”

  “Trees,” Kate murmured.

  Celeste gave her a puzzled glance. “Trees?”

  “Aye. She said her father-in-law planted this row, yet knew he would never see them in their full glory. But beauty rewards patience. Or something of the sort.”

  “How odd. Did it have something to do with music? Or mayhap with suitors? You must have many.” Celeste strolled onward, pointing out different spaces that would be filled with flowers in the summer, and Kate went with her in silence. Yet she wondered about Celeste and about Queen Catherine’s beautiful ladies. Her own petite bande, watching where she could not?

  “Mistress Haywood! Mademoiselle Renard!” Claude Domville called. He was playing at a game of boules with a few other gentlemen in a lane of trees, but left them to greet Kate and Celeste on the pathway. He looked rather pale under the shadow of his beard, and he wore a black band around the sleeve of his slate gray doublet. “I am glad to see you here today. I have not been able to get a message to Toby this morning and have had no news. They say he might have quarreled with Amelia before she died, that he has been sequestered in his chamber. I hope that is not true. How fares Lady Barnett?”

  “She is sleeping now but is quite grief-stricken. Master Ridley is confined to his chamber, he was so crazed from the loss.”

  “Ah, but Toby was surely not the only man caught by Amelia’s fair charms,” Claude said in a dark tone. He waved toward the boules players. One of them was Jacques d’Emours, clad in black, his face shaded by the brim of a velvet hat. A diamond pin flashed on its crown, but Kate could not see its design. “Many shall mourn her passing.”

  “Perhaps one in particular?” Celeste said sharply.

  Claude’s jaw tightened. “D’Emours, you mean? I know he fought a duel for her once, but . . .”

  “A duel would mean naught to a man such as that,” Celeste said, walking on so quickly, her hem caught on the gravel underfoot. “No Guise would ever let their heart rule their head.”

  “Ah, but what of a Guise in name only?” Claude said with a small, sly grin.

  Celeste whirled around to face him. “You mean that old tale? I do not like the man, but surely that is mere gossip. It has been whispered over and over, but none dare say it to his face. Or to the Duc de Guise.”

  Kate’s curiosity, that dark little thing that so often led her where it should not, rose inside her and she could not help but ask, “What old tale?”

  Celeste and Claude exchanged a long glance, and Claude shrugged. “For many years there was a little rumor.”

  “A foolish rumor,” Celeste muttered.

  “But an interesting one,” Claude answered. “D’Emours is kin to the Guise through his mother, who died years ago but was a most proud, fierce lady. She had no other children and was very ambitious for her son.”

  “As he is for himself,” Celeste said. “There were a few whispers he was to be promoted to a marshal before young King Henri died, and young King Francis liked him as well. Until he was sent away for the sad business with Amelia.”

  “And now he has returned to court,” Kate said. “Does he still hope for such a post?” Could Am
elia’s death have wiped away the old, scandalous past? Or mayhap he hoped it would?

  “The Guise would do anything to put their allies in any court positions now,” Claude said. “Even one with a questionable past and a bad temper.”

  “His temper is no worse than that of any other young courtier,” Celeste said. “Though these days, a cool head would serve everyone better. Queen Catherine never loses her calm.”

  “But his past—the old rumor?” Kate said, her curiosity still burning. “What was it?”

  “There were whispers that his Guise mother might not have been his true mother,” Claude said. “She left court after she announced she was enceinte and went far away to a house in Normandy, where no one saw her for many months. When she returned to Paris, she had a healthy, strong son. A blond son—when she and her husband were both dark.”

  “Was that all there was?” Kate asked. She thought of her own mother, Eleanor Haywood, who had been the daughter of an Italian musician and Thomas Boleyn, though none knew that—except for tiny rumors, now grown still and quiet. “Surely many babies are born thus. If the father claimed him . . .”

  “They say there was a maidservant who went around declaring she saw a village midwife deliver a covered basket to the back door of Madame d’Emours’s country retreat in the middle of the night,” Claude said. He seemed to relish relating old gossip, or mayhap just discrediting Jacques d’Emours. “The next day there was a baby.”

  “To whom did the maid tell this tale?” Kate asked.

  “Someone who must have court connections, for the tale did spread. But the maid herself vanished,” Claude said.

  “It is like a story from some overwrought Italian play,” Celeste scoffed. “And an old, dull one. I think he should be sent away from court, but for his own foolish actions, not for old gossip.”

  Claude shrugged. “You usually do not seem to mind a bit of gossip, Mademoiselle Renard.”

  Celeste laughed. “Of course I like gossip. Without it, we would be lost here at court. Yet we must also learn to tell the true from the false. And now I should return to Queen Catherine. You have heard about Queen Mary’s proposed hawking expedition tomorrow? She thinks some brisk exercise will bring forgetfulness, if her health permits.”

  “I have heard of it. I’ll be there. Perhaps Lady Barnett could be persuaded to go riding, too.”

  “I do hope so, the poor lady. I shall see you there, Mistress Haywood!” Celeste gave an airy wave and drifted toward the palace on a cloud of satin. Claude quickly made his excuses and followed her.

  When Kate found herself alone, she studied the sparkling palace. Lady Barnett’s grief waited around every corner there, and Kate’s thoughts could not be organized into anything resembling a recognizable pattern. Something was tugging at her memory, but she could not draw it forth.

  She left the crowded pathways and made her way through the thick pine trees to the edge of the pond. It looked so very different during the day, with the boats gone and the pavilion merely a stone building. Its pale shadow was reflected in the water, wavering until it cracked and broke before re-forming again.

  She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for, so she went back to the spot where she had found Amelia’s fur muff with its missing diamond brooch. The mud was churned there, but she could see nothing of the brooch or anything of Amelia’s. Only a tiny scrap of vellum that could have been torn from anything.

  Sighing with frustration, Kate brushed the dirt from her hands and turned back toward the palace. A page met her at the door of her room, bearing a message from Queen Catherine’s physician, Dr. Folie. I am sorry to distress a lady thus, mademoiselle, the note read, but Her Majesty suggested you might be of some assistance to me in my work today. . . .

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Kate followed Dr. Folie down a winding flight of stone steps that led down to one of the storage chambers deep beneath Fontainebleau’s kitchens. The air was even colder there than it was outside, with a damp, clammy quality that made her shiver as she followed the flickering torch the doctor held high.

  She wanted to turn and run back up the stairs to the light above, to the bustle and noise of the kitchen as they prepared for the palace’s large banquet, but she knew she had to keep going down and down. If something foul had indeed befallen Amelia, something beyond a tragic accident, Kate felt she owed it to the lady to find out what it was.

  And if it had something to do with Queen Elizabeth’s own enemies there in France.

  There was also that wretched spark of curiosity, that deep desire to know how and why that would never quite leave her.

  “Are you prone to swooning, Mademoiselle Haywood?” the doctor asked.

  “Not very often,” Kate answered, and he gave a snorting laugh.

  Dr. Folie ushered her into the arched doorway and into the room, which was completely dark until he used his torch to light others in the heavy iron frames affixed to the stone walls. Kate didn’t know if she preferred the unknown darkness over the sight that greeted her.

  The chamber was usually used for storing vegetables and preserved fruits, or mayhap for game caught in Fontainebleau’s forest and hung on the dangling hooks overhead. But today it housed a dark wood casket propped on two tables beside the rough stone wall. Under the unpleasant musty dampness, she smelled a hint of violet perfume.

  Kate swallowed against the cold, tight knot in her throat and hurried after the doctor as he made his way across the room.

  “They are to bury her in the Protestant churchyard at St. Sebastian’s tomorrow, but the Queen Mother bade me to examine her first, due to the sad circumstances she was found in,” Dr. Folie said, sliding his torch into a sconce. “You found her yourself, did you not, mademoiselle?”

  “I did, Dr. Folie. Her aunt was worried that she had not returned to their chambers, and sent me to look for her.”

  “And how did she appear to you then?”

  Kate didn’t want to remember that sight, but she closed her eyes and made herself recall every detail. The floating white skirts in the dark water, Amelia’s purple lips and staring eyes. “She was in the water, facedown, borne up by her skirts. Her eyes were open, but there was no expression of fear on her face. I have heard drowning can be a peaceful death. I pray it was so for her.”

  Dr. Folie nodded, his expression only bland and pleasant, as if they discussed the weather. “I think, though, that she may not have drowned.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you will look with me, mademoiselle,” he answered, and slid back the lid of the coffin. The carpenters’ tools were on a table nearby, including thick nails, but it had not been sealed shut yet.

  Kate braced herself and peeked inside. She had seen such things before, of course. Only months ago she had watched her own father be closed away from her forever. Yet she could never entirely accustom herself to it.

  It was not a hideous sight. Amelia had been dressed in a gray velvet gown with black sleeves and quilted underskirt, her golden hair brushed over her shoulders and crowned with a wreath of greenery and herbs. She held more herbs in her folded hands, the sweet scent of them covering the hint of damp decay beneath. If it was not for the grayish pallor of her skin, the complete absence of the flirtatious laughter and frantic sparkle, she could almost have been sleeping.

  “The wound on the back of her head bled very little,” the doctor said. He carefully lifted Amelia’s head to show Kate the gash just at the nape of her neck, now stitched together. “And when I made a closer examination, the water in her lungs appeared to be new. She must have been dead, or dying, when she fell into the pond.”

  Kate bit back a cry and gave a small nod. She remembered the small dark smear on the steps of the pavilion, which could very well have been blood. “You are an—an anatomist, Dr. Folie?”

  He gave her a rueful smile. “I learned much in my apprenti
ceship in Florence, mademoiselle. Artists there as well as physicians and apothecaries need to know much of the body in order to decipher its mysteries.”

  She made herself study Amelia’s pale face closer. Could she have been pushed into the sharp, stony edges of the pavilion steps? Mayhap hit on the head and then shoved into the cold water? She shivered as she remembered the panic of being knocked overboard on the ship. “What mysteries have you discovered from Mademoiselle Wrightsman?”

  “Not as many as I would like. But as I said, I would certainly wager she did not drown. If I had to craft a tale for her last moments, I would say perhaps she grew dizzy, fainted, hit her head as she fell into the water.”

  “What would have made her so faint, then? She was young and healthy. I have heard nothing of any illness or fever here in France.”

  The doctor shrugged. “Even the young can be seized with all manner of afflictions. Queen Mary, for example, is a most energetic lady, but she is often laid low with dizzy spells and pains in her side. Only a few months ago, she fainted in church and had to be revived with a quantity of wine from the altar. There were hopes she was carrying a little prince, but, alas, it was not so.”

  “Was Mademoiselle Wrightsman with child?” Kate said, thinking of Amelia’s suitors, men like Toby and Jacques d’Emours, men who would even duel for her.

  “Non. Nor did it appear she had eaten a great deal before her death, or had smallpox or the sweat. But there was this.”

  Dr. Folie lifted Amelia’s arm and drew away the frilled edge of her sleeve. Her wrist was reddened, blistered, the spots red against the icy pallor of her skin.

  “A burn?” she asked, puzzled.

  “Perhaps. I could not say for sure.” He hesitated for a moment. “Have you ever been to Italy, mademoiselle? Queen Catherine says you seem most educated in the ways of the world. In Italy they do know much of herbal remedies—and more harmful concoctions.”