Queen's Own Fool

by Jane Yolen

The king and his people were performers traveling from one place to the next, and the next, in the great play that was the court. Oh, we were warmer and better fed than Troupe Brufort. We did not worry about bedding or a roof over our heads. But we were just as often on the road.

  “Travel,” I said one time to the queen, “however it is done, is tiring. The brain simply longs for familiar things.”

  “Oh, my wonderful fool,” she told me, “that is exactly why we take along those things which remind us of home. The cook has his pots. The king has his dogs. And I—well now that my dear royal sister Elisabeth has gone to her king in Spain, I have you! To remind me...”

  “That thou art but a mortal?” I said.

  She clapped her hands happily. “Exactly.”

  What a great train the traveling court made. As well as the king and queen and their family, there were other nobles who traveled with them and served as ministers and these, in turn, were served by dozens of clerks and scribes. There were priests, chamberlains, doctors, pages, porters, valets, stable hands, maids, barbers, laundresses, soup makers, musicians, seamstresses, guards—and fools. In fact there were more folk in the traveling court than in the village I had lived in with Maman and Papa.

  One would think that with all of these folk I would have found at least one good friend amongst them. But I was neither a servant nor a noble, only somewhere in-between.

  “Neither fish nor fowl,” Maman used to say of such situations. Whenever I found myself moping, I remembered that. And forgot it again each time the queen called me in to play her fool.

  It took me some time, all through winter and into spring, but at last I understood: I would never truly be Marie-in-the-Ashes, for at story’s end she turns into a princess, and that did not happen in real life. However, I would never again be put out in the rain and cold like a traveling player. What I had lost in the exchange were good friends like Pierre.

  At the time it seemed a reasonable trade.

  Still, the queen constantly asked for me, and that was all that mattered.

  She even surprised me by giving me gifts. Once it was three dresses.

  “One for your lovely singing voice,” she told me. “One for your laughter. And one for your wonderful peasant stories.”

  The first dress was of tufted velvet, the second, a grass-green silk with embroidered leaves vining across the bodice, and the third of a lighter green velvet over which embroidered flowers were sprinkled. I spent hours trying them on and staring at myself in the glass.

  “You are my Jardinière, and so you must look like a garden,” the queen said several days later, handing me a green velvet cap.

  I had been so astonished at the dresses, I had hardly even thanked her. But when she gave me the cap, I blurted out, “You are the sun, Madam, and flowers always turn toward the sun.”

  She shook her head at me. “Now you sound like a courtier, Nicola, while I would have you say the truth.”

  “The truth, Your Majesty, is in the listening, not in the saying.” It was something Papa had once said.

  We traveled back to the castle at Blois for the beginning of Lent as winter was giving way to the first promise of spring. As all the châteaus and palaces, Blois was a maze of hallways, a puzzle of doors.

  I was always lost and constantly asking directions from servants who seemed annoyed with me. The cook had long since taken to calling me “Madam Underfoot.” The king’s valet christened me “Little Wrong Turning.” And the king’s dog boy named me “Little Mademoiselle Gone Missing.” I answered them back in kind.

  It made them all laugh but it made me no friends.

  As I settled into my own chamber, not far from the queen’s apartments, I thought about how few friends I had. Only, in fact, the queen. And she had not recently called for me.

  Hanging my dresses on hooks, I suddenly got a cold chill down my back, a strange forboding. It felt exactly as if a dead fish had been laid against my spine. I shivered but could not think what such a chill might mean, except that I had lost the queen’s favor.

  I turned and looked out of the tiny window at the slight green haze on the far fields. If she deserted me, where would I go? How would I live?

  Just then one of the chamberlains knocked on my door and ordered me to report to a study in the west wing of the palace.

  “What for?” I asked.

  He shrugged extravagantly, and then silently led the way.

  It was lucky for me that he took me or I would have been lost for certain. Blois—like all the many châteaus we had stayed in—had its own logic, but I did not know it yet.

  It was obvious from the dust that the study was but little used. There was a small desk, a pair of wooden chairs, and some shelves. Other than that, the room was bare. For a brief moment, I remembered the room into which our troupe had been ushered in the cardinal’s palace—the one without wall hangings or rushes on the floor. This room had that same empty feeling.

  I shuddered again, my back cold-fish clammy once more.

  The chamberlain left me as silently as he had led, and I was all alone. I went over to the latticed window and looked down at servants scurrying across the courtyard below. How I envied them their busy-ness.

  Just then a noise made me turn around. Entering the room was a thin-faced woman in a somber dark dress, the high collar closed tight with aglets. She carried a book and some paper which she set down on the dusty desk, then fixed me with a glare. Her black hair was parted in the middle and tied back so tightly under her hood, her eyes were pulled into slits.

  “So you are Nicola the fool,” she said without any niceties. “The one they call La Jardinière.”

  “Yes,” I said with a nod of my head.

  “I am Madam Jacqueline,” she told me. “The cardinal has summoned me to be your governess.”

  Madam Jacqueline looked like my maman’s old soured ewe, who had stopped having lambs and was bound for mutton. What lessons mutton could impart I did not know.

  “It is very kind of the cardinal,” I said, “but I have nothing to pay you with. And no room in my quarters for anyone but myself.”

  Madam Jacqueline frowned, as if uncertain whether I was teasing or as truly as ignorant as I appeared.

  “You do not pay me, you stupid girl. I am no servant of yours,” she bristled. “I am here to take charge of you.”

  “Take charge of me?” I repeated. “But I am quite capable of taking charge of myself. I am no infant. I can dress myself. And except for getting lost within a new palace, I am quite capable....”

  Madam Jacqueline let out an impatient sigh. Then she let loose a volley at me. “It is not enough to be properly dressed and washed. And we all get lost within a new palace on occasion. Though I understand that you have made such lack of direction a character trait. However, you are now part of the court, and it is well past time you were educated. Why I was not sent for before, I do not know. You must be taught whom to address and when. You must learn manners. Moreover, since you are the queen’s fool, someone must be responsible for setting a limit to your folly.”

  “But if one puts limits on foolishness, it ceases to be foolishness at all,” I said. “You might as well try to keep the wind in a box.”

  “The wind in a box!” she tutted, her face the color of the skimming off milk. “That is just the sort of nonsense we must stop.”

  “But it is my nonsense the queen loves,” I said.

  “I have no doubt she has sometimes found your rustic prattling amusing, an antidote to the more sophisticated wit of the court. And your tumbling and singing somewhat entertaining. But even she is tiring of it, which is why her uncle sent for me.”

  I must have looked shocked, for madam softened for a moment. But only a moment.

  “Tell me, girl, have you any letters at all?”

  “No, madam, I cannot read anything but the weather and people’s faces. ” I pointed out the window. “I can see that it will rain before the day is out. And ...” I paused for effe
ct, “I can see in your face that you carry a great sadness.”

  Cold anger flared in her eyes. I knew at once—but too late, of course—that I should have kept my mouth closed.

  “My only sadness is that I should be burdened with so ignorant a girl,” she snapped. Her lips got as thin as her slitted eyes. “But I shall teach you, no matter how long it takes.”

  She looked around the room and her mouth got even thinner with distaste, though I wouldn’t have thought it possible. “I will have one of the maids clean this place up tomorrow, but it will have to do for today.” Then she returned her gaze to me, looking no more pleased with me than she was with the state of the study.

  “Do you know your catechism?”

  “My what?”

  “The doctrines of the faith.” She clasped her hands primly in front of her.

  “I know we are made by God to love one another. My mother taught me that.”

  “You must learn more than that modest sentiment, because our faith needs to be defended against its enemies at all times.”

  “Defended?” I was surprised, and my head cocked to one side. “Like a castle?”

  “Exactly like a castle.” She nodded, pleased with my first lesson.

  “But I do not understand. How can the faith of Christ possibly be besieged?” I was truly asea.

  Madam Jacqueline smacked a hand down on the table and the sudden noise made me start. “Foolish child, it is under threat at this very moment from the Huguenots and their heresies.”

  “What are Huguenots?”

  She hissed at me like an adder in the field, and I understood that we were off to a very bad start. “How little you know. How far we must go.”

  “Then, please madam, start by telling me how anyone can threaten faith,” I said. I smiled in what I hoped was a winning way. I really did want to know. “That would be like ... like threatening the sun or the moon. Surely not even Huguenots—whatever they are—could do such a thing.”

  But Madam Jacqueline was clearly not taken by my smile. “The Huguenots are heretics who have brought over their pernicious doctrines from Switzerland,” she said, her voice, like her lips, thin and hard. “They deny the teachings of the church and the pope and that puts all of us in danger.”

  “I’m sure it is very foolish of them to go against the church,” I agreed, “but how are they dangerous? Doesn’t the church have soldiers to guard it? And the pope his own guard?”

  “How little you understand,” said Madam Jacqueline. “I can see that a long hard task lies ahead of me.”

  For all of madam’s complaints, I could not help but feel that it was I for whom things were going to be hard.

  11

  MORE LESSONS

  I soon learned that like Uncle, Madam Jacqueline had a cane. It was not grand like his, with a gold knob on the end, but only a rod of plain wood. While Uncle’s stick was meant to impress the public, the only purpose of Madam Jacqueline’s rod was to impress me. When I made mistakes in my work, she laid that rod hard over my shoulders. When I spoke to her in a way she did not care for, she brought it down across my knuckles.

  I was determined to give her no reasons to whip me.

  Still she found them.

  “Huguenots are villainous, not just misunderstood,” she said one day, and whap, down came the cane.

  “The catechism is to be memorized word for word, not sentiment for sentiment,” she said the next day. And whap, again down came the cane.

  On the next day and the next, she disliked my manner. Or my mode of speech. Or how quickly I answered. Or how slow. Not a day went by that my shoulders and knuckles went unreddened.

  But I learned things nonetheless.

  My real education began with the alphabet, and for all that I did not care for madam, oh, I was pleased to be learning to read. I greatly missed the stories Maman used to tell, ones she had learned from her own mother. Once I was skilled with my letters, I was determined to find at least one book in the queen’s library filled with those sort of tales. And once I knew how to write, I would send word to Pierre about all that had happened since we took leave of one another, for he was still my one true friend. I thought of him often.

  So I embraced my lessons. I think madam was more surprised by this than pleased.

  Sitting side by side at the table, she taught me each of the letters as they were written large on the page of a book and surrounded by pictures of things that began with that same letter.

  “A,” she said clearly, making faces as she pronounced each letter. “A for apple and arbor and acrobat.”

  I repeated them after her, making the same faces.

  “B,” she said, “for ball and baton and bear.”

  I said the B words.

  “You have such a peasant’s pronunciation.”

  “That is because I am a peasant,” I answered.

  The cane hit my knuckles. “I will make you sound like a lady,” she said. “If it kills us both.”

  Some days I was afraid it might.

  She made me repeat each letter over and over, concerned that my mouth should form the right shape as I spoke. I think she cared more how my mouth looked than what came out of it.

  But in spite of her stick, I learned.

  And in spite of her dislike of me, madam admitted, though grudgingly, that I was doing well. She forced the praise through her thin lips, like icing through a pastry bag: “It will not be long, Nicola, before you are reading with ease.”

  “Will I read more than the ABC’s?” I asked. “Will I be able to read a book of stories?”

  Her stick came down on my hand. “You will read the catechism,” she promised. “For it is the truth. Stories are all lies.”

  I thought to myself: Once I know how to read, you shall not keep me from reading what I will. No one shall.

  Learning to write, however, was altogether different. Try as I might, I could not please madam. She insisted on my holding the pen in a way that made it difficult for me to form my letters properly.

  Time after time she took the pen and jammed it into my right hand, forcing it between my thumb and forefinger.

  “Madam, if you would just let me hold the pen in my left hand, I could manage much more easily,” I protested.

  “The devil lurks in the left,” she said, whapping the cane down so hard that my fingers went numb and I could not have held anything with the left then, even if she had given me leave.

  I picked up the pen with my right hand and made the letters for cat and dog.

  “What an ungainly scrawl,” she complained. “Your letters must be elegantly formed, else there is no reason to make them.”

  I could not resist saying, “Surely, madam, what we write is more important than how we write it. Is not a hastily-scrawled truth better than a beautifully-penned lie?”

  She rapped her cane so hard across my knuckles for that, the pen fell to the floor. Then she snatched the parchment away.

  “There is no sense in going any further with this,” she said. “It is a waste of paper.”

  “But I had hoped to write a letter to my cousin one day,” I said, making my eyes round with innocence.

  Madam Jacqueline raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Really? And do you suppose he will be able to read it?”

  I smiled at her. “He has promised to learn from a priest.”

  She clasped her hands primly before her, the rod still clutched between thin fingers. “Even if your writing improves and he learns to read, paper is far too expensive to be wasted on whatever fiddle-faddle you scribble. No, we shall move on to other things.”

  And we did.

  There were matters of court etiquette to be mastered: how to enter a room, when to curtsy, when to speak, when to be silent.

  Next I was taught how to address a prince or princess (“Your Royal Highness”), an ambassador (“Your Excellency”), the duke (“Your Grace”), and the cardinal (“Your Eminence”).

  “Always with the eyes down. Do not
stare into a noble’s face,” madam instructed.

  “Papa always said not to stare at a wild animal,” I said. “Or it would bite. Perhaps nobles are the same.”

  Whap! The cane sliced through the air.

  “Madam,” I objected, “if I behave just like everyone else at court, I will cease to be a fool and will be cast out into the street.”

  Madam continued the lesson in a tone of voice that was even thinner and frostier than before.

  During those spring weeks at Blois, I grew quite lonely for the queen. Although I was often summoned to entertain after banquets—singing songs from my childhood and telling Maman’s tales—I rarely had the chance to speak with the queen alone.

  I felt that what Madam Jacqueline had said was true: that Queen Mary was tiring of me. She was losing interest because that which is familiar always loses its glitter. But there was something else—under madam’s instruction, I was becoming less and less myself, my peasant wit blunted by my newfound learning.

  Even when I was not with Madam Jacqueline, I found myself shying away from any speech or behavior that she might disapprove of. It was as if I cringed not from the rod but from the shadow of the rod.

  Only once that spring did Queen Mary have me read to her, from a book of verses, which was quite a change from the dry books of letters that Madam Jacqueline had me practice on.

  The day was blustery and a persistent cold had kept the queen in from the hunt. She had a large white linen square which she pressed to her nose.

  “Nicola, dear, you see me unlike my usual self.”

  “You are never less than your self, Majesty,” I said, smiling greatly. I was sure she could see the joy written large on my face that I was once more in her company. But she acted as if we had never been apart.

  She handed me the book. “Read. I would see how well your lessons are going.”

  I read, stumbling through the unfamiliar words.

  “Brava!” she said after I had struggled through several pages. “Everything sounds so much better when spoken by you.”