Why Kings Confess

by C. S. Harris

  Chapter 58

  Saturday, 30 January

  The babe might have turned, but Hero labored hard all that night and half of the next day. At first, Sebastian helped her walk back and forth before the fire as the storm outside whipped wild gusts of wind and driven rain against the house. Then, when the pains came so hard and fast she could no longer walk, he sat beside her, her hand held fast in his. If he could have taken her pain into his own body, he would have done so. After a few more hours, he thought that if he could give his life to stop this endless, inhuman agony, he’d do that too.

  And still the babe refused to come.

  “Mother of God, why don’t you do something?” he raged once at Alexi Sauvage sometime around midafternoon. Gibson had insisted on deferring to the French doctor, saying she’d delivered more babies in the past year alone than he had in his entire career. But as the hours dragged on and on, and Hero labored in grim-faced, silent endurance, Sebastian had to doubt his friend’s wisdom.

  The Frenchwoman looked at him, her own face flushed and etched with lines of exhaustion. “Your son will come when he is ready, my lord.”

  “First babes do have a habit of taking their own sweet time,” said Gibson softly.

  How much time? Sebastian wanted to scream. But somehow he swallowed it and plastered a facade of calm over a cold, soul-destroying terror.

  Occasionally he could hear the voices of Hendon, Jarvis, and Lady Jarvis, waiting together in a tense vigil downstairs. Claire Bisette kept bringing food that Gibson and Alexi both ate with a hearty appetite that Sebastian found revolting. And then, just when Sebastian thought Hero could surely endure no more, Alexi said, “It’s coming.”

  He couldn’t look. And so he looked instead at Hero’s face. And he knew that any man who’d ever arrogantly boasted of the male sex’s superior strength, endurance, and courage had never watched a woman give birth.

  “You did it, my lady,” said Alexi, her voice thick with a rare emotion.

  Hero clutched Sebastian’s arm, her fingers digging deep into his flesh, her entire body shaking and heaving with exhaustion and triumph. “Is it all right? Please tell me it’s all right.”

  She was answered by a lusty squall that brought a sting of tears to Sebastian’s eyes, so that he had to bury his face in the sweat-soaked tangle of Hero’s hair.

  “You’ve a fine son,” said Alexi, holding up a kicking, screaming infant smeared with a hellish mixture of blood and something white and waxy.

  Hero gave a tired, shaky laugh, her arms opening wide to receive her son.

  She lay smiling down at the screaming infant for the longest time, an expression Sebastian had never seen before softening her features. Then she looked up, her gaze meeting his, and he fell in love with her all over again.

  “Told you it was a boy,” she whispered. “The next one can be your girl.”

  Just the thought of putting her through this again made his legs suddenly feel weak, and he found he had to sit.

  “Have you decided on a name?” asked Alexi.

  “Simon,” said Hero. After months of wrangling, they’d finally reached a compromise: She could name the boys, while he would name the girls. “Simon Alistair St. Cyr.”

  She shifted the babe to face Sebastian, so that he got his first really good look at his son. He had a head of thick dark hair plastered to his skull, but his eyes were screwed shut, his face contorted and flushed red with his howls.

  “What color are his eyes?” asked Gibson.

  “I don’t know,” said Hero. “He’s screaming so hard I can’t see.”

  And then, as if aware of the intense scrutiny directed upon him, Simon St. Cyr drew in a shuddering breath, ceased his cries, and opened his eyes.

  “The Lord above preserve us,” said Gibson.

  They were yellow.

  Tuesday, 2 February

  The day dawned gray and blustery, the clouds heavy with the threat of more rain.

  Paul Gibson stood beside the grave of Damion Pelletan. A small hole had been dug down through the grave’s soft, recently filled earth. Alexi stood at his side, a small wooden box containing her brother’s heart held in her hands. The wind whipped the hair around her head and flapped the black skirts of her mourning gown. Her face was pale but composed, her head held high. He wondered if she was praying, and realized he didn’t even know this about her—if she believed in a God, or sought solace in her religion.

  He’d asked her last night as they lay in each other’s arms if she was truly certain that Damion Pelletan was her father’s son and not the Lost Dauphin of the Temple. She’d looked at him quietly for a moment. Then her gaze shifted to someplace far, far away. She shook her head, her breath catching, and said, “No.”

  He supposed they’d never know the truth. Perhaps some questions were never meant to be answered. He wondered if anyone would ever know or even care how many millions had lost their lives in this endless war that raged from one end of Europe to the other. Some died filled with that oddly altruistic hubris known as patriotism; some died for glory or God or money to buy ale and whores; others for a dimly understood—or misunderstood—principle. But most died simply because they were in the wrong place, or because they were doing what they were told.

  He figured arrogant men of overweening ambition and insatiable greed would always manage to convince or coerce others into dying for them.

  He watched Alexi nestle the small wooden box containing Damion Pelletan’s heart deep into the space that had been dug for it, then take a handful of dirt from the pile beside it and release it in a rush of falling earth.

  Gibson nodded to the sexton, who began to fill the hole with heavy shovelfuls that quickly hid the box from their sight.

  The heart of an uncrowned king or a simple physician’s son; did it matter which they buried? Gibson wondered. He thought not, although he knew that for questions such as this wars were fought and men died, and other men such as he limped through life on mangled limbs.

  They stood together side by side until the last of the earth lay heaped upon the grave and the sexton walked away. And still they stood, her hand creeping out to take his, their gazes meeting as the wind snatched at her hair and her lips curved into a trembling smile.

  Author’s Note

  The district of St. Katharine’s and the evocatively named Cat’s Hole and Hangman’s Court were real places that have now disappeared. In 1827, the old church and monastic buildings, along with the surrounding streets, were knocked down to create what is now St. Katharine Docks. More than eleven thousand poor people were rendered homeless by this early urban renewal project. Most were not compensated.

  For a look at childbirth practices in England during the regency, see Judith Schneid Lewis’s In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy, 1760–1860. Lewis’s account is slightly skewed in support of her premise that the rise of male accoucheurs was a good thing; thus, she ignores the harmful effects of the abandonment of the birthing stool in favor of more “modest” delivery positions, and downplays the lives lost to heavy bloodletting and the disastrously reduced diet advocated for expectant mothers (particularly deadly for those such as Princess Charlotte, who suffered from porphyria). However, she does an excellent job of showing the extent to which upper-class women continued doing things such as attending the opera and giving dinner parties up to within hours of labor, and explodes many myths and misconceptions. Sebastian’s presence at his son’s delivery was normal; Prince Leopold remained at Princess Charlotte’s side throughout her fifty-hour ordeal. It was also typical for various family members to await a birth in a nearby room, as Hendon and Lord and Lady Jarvis do here.

  Richard Croft was indeed London’s most esteemed accoucheur at the time (he became “Sir Richard” in 1816 after the death of his elder brother). He attended Princess Charlotte’s botched childbirth and tragically committed suicide after her death.

  The English distinction between surgeons and physicians dated back to th
e Middle Ages, when most physicians were clergymen and the church forbade churchmen from engaging in the kind of activities practiced by surgeons. Interestingly, that distinction was not common on the Continent, where the medieval clergy had never dominated the practice of medicine.

  The invasion of Russia in 1812 was a disaster for the French forces, and there was a real coup attempt against Napoléon in December that year. But Vaundreuil’s peace delegation to London is my own invention.

  The practice of burying the bodies of the French royal family at Saint-Denis and sending their internal organs to various other churches was well established. Most of these cardiotaphs were melted down during the Revolution, and their contents burned. However, some of the hearts were actually sold to artists. For example, the heart of Louis XIV was sold to the landscape painter Pau de Saint-Martin. Some speculate that the red coats of figures in the foreground of his View of Caen, now in the museum of Pontoise, owe their unusual pigmentation to the royal heart.

  King Louis XVI of France, his Queen, Marie Antoinette, and their two surviving children, Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Charles, were in August of 1792 thrown into a tower of the Temple, a prison that was once the medieval stronghold of the Knights Templar (the building was later destroyed during the Restoration). Also incarcerated with them was Madame Elisabeth, Louis XVI’s young sister, although I have restricted references to her to avoid confusion. The King was sent to the guillotine on 21 January 1793, with the Queen following in October, and the Princess Elisabeth soon after. The summer before the Queen’s trial, the little Dauphin was separated from his mother, aunt, and sister and locked in a separate cell beneath theirs.

  The Dauphin, Louis-Charles, was just seven years old when first thrown into prison. By all reports he was a happy, healthy boy with chubby cheeks, who enjoyed the family’s forced seclusion at the Tuileries because, as he once confided to a courtier, it meant he got to see so much more of his parents than he had at Versailles. His treatment in prison was actually worse than described here.

  Interestingly, the physician who first treated the Dauphin, Dr. Joseph Desault, is reported to have said that the child in the Temple did not resemble the prince he had seen before the Revolution. Desault died suddenly on 1 June 1795 after hinting at dark deeds afoot. His wife insisted he had been poisoned.

  After Desault’s death, Dr. Philippe-Jean Pelletan was brought in to treat the boy. When the child died, Pelletan was brought back to the Temple to perform an autopsy. At the end of the postmortem, Pelletan did indeed wrap the boy’s heart in his handkerchief and smuggle it out of the prison in his pocket. He preserved the heart in alcohol and kept it in a rock crystal vase in his study.

  The history of the heart after that is long and convoluted. At one point, one of Pelletan’s students stole the heart. The student soon died of tuberculosis, so Pelletan was able to retrieve the heart from the student’s widow. After the Restoration, Pelletan tried to give the heart to Marie-Thérèse, and then to the newly crowned King Louis XVIII and to several other royals, but no one would accept it.

  Finally, nearing death, Pelletan gave the heart to the Archbishop of Paris. The heart was in the Archbishop’s Palace when it was looted by rioters during the Revolution of 1830. The crystal vase was smashed, and the heart thrown on the floor.

  However, some days after the riots, Philippe-Jean Pelletan’s son, Gabriel, who was also a physician (the real Pelletan had two sons and a daughter; Damion and Alexi, however, are my own inventions), went to the palace with one of the rioters, a man named Lescroat, and is said to have found the heart amongst the debris. The heart was put into a new vessel and ultimately given to the Bourbon claimant to the French throne.

  After that, the heart traipsed around Europe, from Spain to Austria and Italy, threatened repeatedly by war and destruction, before finally being entombed in 1975 at the Basilica of Saint-Denis outside of Paris, the traditional burial place of French kings. But controversy over its authenticity continued. Recent DNA tests on the heart have shown that, despite its shaky provenance, the heart did indeed come from a descendent of Marie Antoinette’s Hapsburg maternal line.

  However, that evidence is not as conclusive as it might seem, for (amongst other possibilities) Louis-Charles had an older brother, Louis-Joseph, who died in 1789. His heart was buried at Val-de-Grâce and lost during the Revolution. The Archbishop of Paris, to whom Philippe-Jean Pelletan gave the heart in his possession, also had in his collection another heart, said to have belonged to Louis-Joseph. So it is possible that during the riots of 1830, the hearts were confused. At any rate, the Dauphin’s heart now has its own book: The Lost King of France: How DNA Solved the Mystery of the Murdered Son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, by Deborah Cadbury.

  Marie-Thérèse’s ordeal in the Temple is much as described here. Whether she was raped in prison is not known, although most people at the time suspected or even simply accepted that she was. There are also letters in existence that hint at a resultant pregnancy. The most recent biography of the Princess Royale, as she was called, is Susan Nagel’s Marie-Thérèse: The Fate of Marie Antoinette’s Daughter. Nagel is a professor of humanities rather than a historian, and her book is frustratingly thin on footnotes. She is also extraordinarily sympathetic to her subject, which tends to color her account. But the story of this unhappy princess’s life makes fascinating reading.

  Napoléon did indeed refer to Marie-Thérèse as “the only man in her family,” but the comment was made in 1815.

  For years after her release from the Temple, Marie-Thérèse was besieged by pretenders claiming to be the Lost Dauphin. Very real plots had indeed been hatched to smuggle the boy out of prison and replace him with a dying deaf-mute, which naturally gave credence to the persistent belief that one of those plots had actually succeeded.

  A gravedigger at the churchyard of Ste. Marguerite in the rue Saint-Bernard in Paris, to which the Dauphin’s body was sent, buried the prince’s body to one side and marked the grave. Later in the nineteenth century, that grave was twice dug up (in 1846 and 1894) and its contents autopsied. Both autopsies came to the conclusion that the remains were those of a boy who had indeed died of tuberculosis but who was older than ten at the time of his death. Those remains have never been DNA tested.

  Hartwell House, owned by the same Lee family as that from which Robert E. Lee was a descendant, was indeed hired by the Bourbons, who essentially trashed the place. It is now a hotel.

  Louis Stanislas, the portly Comte de Provence, reigned as King Louis XVIII of France after the Restoration until his death in 1824 (with a minor hiatus for the brief return of Napoléon from Elba). Provence’s comment about the “ninety-eight percent,” while sounding startlingly modern, was actually a point often made at the time. He was succeeded by his brother, the Comte d’Artois, who reigned as King Charles X. Charles’s ultraroyalist, pro-Jesuit policies—encouraged by Marie-Thérèse—helped spark the Revolution of 1830.

  Marie-Thérèse died childless in 1851 and is buried at the Franciscan convent of Castagnavizza in what is now Slovenia. She reigned as Queen of France for twenty minutes in 1830.

  The small French chapel near Portman Square was real but is no longer in existence. Originally dedicated to Notre Dame de l’Annonciation, it was later renamed in honor of St. Louis. At one time, there were some thirty bishops and eight thousand French priests living in exile in London.

  The outstanding authority on homosexuality in Georgian England is Rictor Norton. He has most generously published his material online, at http://rictornorton.co.uk. His articles on the molly underground in London are fascinating and provided the background for my portrayal of Serena Fox.

  There actually is a legend about a Dark Countess who was reputed to be the true Marie-Thérèse. Known in German as the Dunkelgrafen and in French as the Comte et Comtesse des Ténèbres, the “Dark Counts” were a wealthy, reclusive couple who took refuge in Thuringia. The man called himself “Count Vavel de Versay,” but the woman’s identity was
kept a secret. When the “Countess” died in 1837, she was buried with unseemly haste. The doctor who attended her death reported that she appeared to be about sixty years of age, which would have put her birth around that of Marie-Thérèse.

  The count was eventually shown to be Leonardus Cornelis van der Valck, a Dutch diplomat at one time attached to the embassy in Paris. But speculation about the identity of his companion persists. Rumors linking the Dark Countess to Marie-Thérèse began as far back as the Princess’s 1799 marriage to the Duke of Angoulême. The mysterious pair are enduringly popular in Germany; there is even a Madame Royale Historical Society dedicated to them, complete with lecture symposiums.

  A word about titles of nobility: While it might seem strange to American ears, the wife of a duke’s younger son would indeed be known by “Lady His-First-Name,” or Lady Peter. Likewise, although logically one would expect Hero to be called “Hero St. Cyr,” in conversation she would actually be known by her own first name combined with her husband’s title, “Hero Devlin.” Consider, for instance, the famous “Sally Jersey,” who was the wife of George Villiers, the Fifth Earl of Jersey.