“Madame? What is it?” he asked, coming to the edge of his chair.
Diane managed to set the goblet down without spilling it on the small carved table beside her. “It. . .it is nothing. I am just feeling a little tired. I hope that Your Highness will forgive me, but perhaps I should retire.”
“I will go with you!” Henri declared, springing to his feet.
Catherine rose more slowly. She watched Henri leave her room trailing after his whore as a dog does his master. She was careful not to laugh before they had gone. The plan had definitely unnerved Madame Diane, there was no question of that. It had been a grand idea. She would have to thank her mystic, Ruggieri, with something special for this one. She chewed her thick painted lip as her mind filled with evil thoughts. Then she lowered her hand over her belly, feeling the life with which Henri had filled her.
THAT EVENING, Diane stood beside Henri near the copper glow of the fireplace hearth. They were dressed, as everyone had come to expect, in costumes of fine black velvet. The sleeves of her gown were edged in white fur. His shirt sleeves were slashed with white silk. They watched across the crowded ballroom as the King made his entrance into the banquet to celebrate the Ides of March. The trumpets blared. The tune began for a stately Pavane. Everyone bowed. But His Majesty no longer paraded through an entrance as he once so elegantly had done. Now he passed into a room with a low studied shuffle and leaned heavily on a jeweled walking stick.
His once majestic face was covered with a thin patina of perspiration from the exertion. François’ physical symptoms mirrored his political decline. He was now weak and acquiescent; a shadow King, ruled by the powerful orb of his mistress, Anne d’Heilly, and her small collection of aides.
The past two years had been difficult for the King, and his body bore the scars. Wars with the Emperor. A new battle with England over Boulogne and Scotland. Both of these hostilities had exhausted the royal treasury. Equally ruinous to the image of François’ reign was the domestic situation. Poverty from excessive taxation had increased. There was discord among the people. François’ religious indecision was now blamed for the permissive heretical climate rampant in France. Like a pendulum, he had sought, in his later years, to right the wrongs of his early reign by pursuing Protestants with a vengeance. Books were publicly burned. The accused were hung in chains from the Pont Saint-Michel. Many were burned alive at stakes in the Place de Grève. Despite the extremity of the measures, it was widely acknowledged by both sides that Protestantism was now out of control in France.
Diane felt an unexpected burst of sympathy as she looked at the ailing King. One need not love him to pity such a humble end, she thought. Then she turned away, and the moment passed. She could not afford to care for a man who had not lifted a finger in her defense for nearly fourteen years. She looked around the room. Tonight it was filled with her own allies. She must concentrate on them. Henri did. Indignant over still not being included in major decisions as Dauphin, he confined himself to this small faction of intimates. He felt safe among them, and so did Diane, even when confronted by the even smaller but vicious faction of the Duchesse d’Etampes.
Among the rising powerful about whom all of France now whispered, was Jacques de Saint-André. He stood chatting with Charles and François de Guise, who were also counted among the inner elite. Charles, Archbishop de Rheims, had just returned from Rome and had come back a far more handsome young man than when he left. He had matured, Diane thought, as she studied the smooth lines of his face and the soft waves of blond hair that rose to a heart-shaped peak above his brows.
She smiled when she recalled her first impression of Charles as a young man. How ill-fitted he had seemed to a life in the clergy. He was the epitome of what the Protestants ridiculed so viciously; he had recently admitted to having fathered a child. He had also brought back from Rome a more apparent ambition. He and his brother, François de Guise, had already garnered great power with the future King; enough to surpass her with very little effort if they so chose. For now they were her friends, but she must take great care with them, she thought.
On the other side of Henri stood two more of his trusted friends, Charles de Brissac and Antoine de Bourbon. This was indeed a night of celebration. Henri was here and her two daughters had been invited to Court. But for the daughter they secretly shared, her family was together.
Diane looked out across the crowded room. Against one long wall, sitting on a sculptured wooden bench beneath the window, was her daughter Françoise and her husband Robert. They were whispering and laughing together like children. Diane smiled. Robert de La Marck was a good man. She had made a good marriage for her eldest child. They had been fortunate; they had managed to find love in their match. But perhaps it was not so much luck as it was logic. Françoise was as wise as she was pretty. That someone like Robert de La Marck should have fallen in love with her did not surprise Diane in the least. Françoise was tall and thin and just turned twenty-eight. She was, she realized for the first time, nearly the same age as Henri. She shuddered at the thought, and turned her face back toward the Dauphin and his entourage. I will not think of that, she thought. Not tonight.
At the moment, she had far more important concerns. Though Françoise was married, her second daughter, Louise, was not. Good matches for her daughters not only secured their future, but her own. If she chose carefully, there would always be a place for her should she ever fall out of favor with Henri. It was not easy to think in such terms now with so much love between them, but she had grown wise in her years at Court. Preparation, she had learned, could one day quite well save her life.
“POISON? What do you mean poison?”
Henri gripped her elbow after she had whispered the words. She had not wanted to tell him what she had suspected earlier that day in the Dauphine’s apartments. At least not here, and certainly not like this. But he had insisted. He was pestering her relentlessly. She had no choice. He detested it when she kept anything from him and he would be cross when he discovered it. He was bound to find out sooner or later.
Now that her suspicions were revealed, Henri’s face was stricken. He had asked her again what had taken her so quickly from the Dauphine’s apartments earlier that afternoon. Nothing could have prepared him for her reply. As he realized the implications of what she had said, his eyes narrowed.
“I will kill her! So help me God, I will kill her myself!” he raged through clenched teeth. His eyes darted around the room for sight of Catherine. The movement of his head was swift, his body tensed. Diane put a hand on his arm with considerable force. Then she too looked around, but with a casual smile, as though their conversation had been only of the lightest nature.
“Henri, please. It is nothing that she has done,” she whispered, still smiling. “At least nothing of which I am aware. It was just simply a feeling that I had there in her apartments. She gave me a goblet different from both of yours. There was even a different wine. I know how much she detests me and, well, I could not help but. . .”
Henri could see that, though they tried not to stare, others around them were straining to hear the exchange. Finally, his anger at a flashpoint, he gripped her hand and pulled her through the crowded ballroom with such ferocity that it was whispered that the Dauphin and his mistress surely must be engaged in some heated discord. Once they were halfway through the crowded room, Ruggieri, the Italian mystic, turned to the Dauphine.
“Well, well well,” he said with a wry smile. “What do you suppose that is all about?”
“With any luck, Monsieur Ruggieri, it is a lover’s quarrel,” Catherine replied coldly before she turned away.
MAKING HIS WAY through the crowded room was like wading through mud. The faster Henri tried to walk, the more entrenched he became. Hooped skirts of heavy velvet and brocade impeded his path, but he forged ahead, clutching Diane’s hand until it began to throb. He pulled her out into the corridor, past the stone-faced guardsmen in their red and blue livery. A group of the King?
??s guests, who had gathered there, stared and whispered as they passed. Henri did not notice. He dragged Diane behind him through the two long doors and out onto the grand horseshoe staircase. She nearly fell twice on a thin sheet of ice that had formed on the edge of each of the stairs. He was snorting wildly and she could see his breath in the cold evening air.
“Henri, please! You’re hurting me!”
“You cannot say something like that to me, m’amie, and then expect me to sit blithely by, doing nothing in your defense!” he shouted as he took the stairs, not caring who heard them.
The night air was cold. There was frost on the lawns and tiny crystals dripped from leaves on the trees. There was no one else foolhardy enough to brave the weather, except two guards, who spoke to one another in low tones as they headed toward them at the base of the horseshoe staircase. Before they were near enough to identify their future King, and perhaps perpetuate the gossip, Henri pulled Diane into the small alcove beneath the massive stone stairs. By now she was shivering. Diane wrapped her arms around herself, and then closed her mouth so that her teeth would not chatter.
“Henri, please,” she said after she had caught her breath. This time her words were soft. Controlled. She waited for him to really hear her before she finished her sentence. They were facing one another. He was angry. He had been, as he often was in matters that concerned her, blinded by his rage. “Yes, chéri,” she continued. “I fear her wrath, but what might we do? I must live here if I am to be with you, and yet her faction of allies has grown. In that there will always be a threat.”
“That is not acceptable! There can be no threat to you!”
He turned away from her, not wanting to be brought so quickly from his anger by the look in her eyes. “From now on, you shall have a bodyguard. I shall also be arranging an official food taster, just as the Emperor had when he was in France. There shall be someone to go before you in everything. There will be no risks. Do you hear me, no risks!”
“Henri, I cannot live like that, and it would be cruel to put another man in harm’s way to protect me.”
“Oh, rest assured, there will be no serious threat to your new servants. Once Catherine and her entourage discover that I have made these amendments, they will not, I am certain, be willing to risk any action against you that would so clearly lead back to them.”
After he finished speaking, she could see his tense expression fade, his rigid body relax. His lips parted. She could feel his warm breath against her face. He pulled her closer.
“I am sorry if I was cross. It is only that I could not bear for anything to happen to you. . .you know that. . .” he whispered. “The thought of. . .well, you know that I will do anything, and I do mean anything, to protect you!” He kissed her gently, and then pressed his lips more firmly over hers.
After another moment, Diane no longer felt the cold.
WHEN THEY RETURNED to the grand ballroom, Henri took her hand and squeezed it. It was a small movement down by her side where, in the crush of velvet and silk, he knew it would go unseen. He meant it as a show of support, a movement that said that she need not be afraid. He was there with her. Now and always. Diane glanced quickly around the room before she advanced farther into it.
Antoine de Bourbon came up beside them and began asking Henri something about the stag hunt that was planned for the next morning. Diane nodded a greeting to Bourbon and then turned away. François de Guise had caught her attention. He was laughing garishly over near the windows. He was drawing attention to himself with the exaggerated laughter. His companion was a woman, though between the plumed toques and the ornate headdresses around them, Diane could not identify her. She could, however, clearly see Guise.
His costume was fashioned of a very expensive brocade. The color perfectly matched his waves of reddish gold hair and the triangular-shaped beard at the point of his chin. Monsieur de Guise, it seemed, was newly betrothed, and that fact had dramatically improved his disposition over the past few weeks. It was a match so advantageous that everyone had come to treat him with a respect almost akin to reverence. His powerful family would have accepted no less for the eldest son. It was clear that his time had come.
His younger brother, the Archbishop, who now garnered powerful influence throughout Europe, had arranged the match. Guise himself had told Diane that he was greatly pleased by his prospective bride. Diane, however, doubted that now. As she gazed across the room, she could finally see the girl by whom he was, at the moment, transfixed. It was her own younger and unmarried daughter, Louise.
Henri felt the change in her posture. He followed her eyes until he saw them. “Brissac,” he said with a hand over his mouth to mask the words, “would you be good enough to retrieve Guise.” He pointed across the room. “And find Saint-André as well. I wish for all of you to meet me in the west wing in half an hour. And you are to say nothing of it to anyone.”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, you have nothing prepared?” Anne d’Heilly’s eyes flashed with fury at the poet, Clement Marot.
“Well, Madame, I only thought—”
The man who had once been one of her most staunch allies now stammered out a weak reply. Along with Jean Vouté, Marot had composed many cruel verses to slight Diane de Poitiers. But that had been before she had begun her rise to power beside the Dauphin. When he tried to finish, she interrupted him.
“You thought?!” Her eyes were combative and their emerald-green irises brilliant as she repeated his words.
“Yes, I thought that, well, that perhaps now with the King so ill and all. . .” Again he stammered. “That, well. . .perhaps the timing was not as, shall we say, opportune, as it once was, to deliver the same insults to her.”
“Was not as opportune?” Again she repeated after him, her indignation growing. “Monsieur Marot, I pay you, and handsomely I might add, to entertain me with poetry, not advice. If you feel that you can no longer rise to the vocation for which you were selected, perhaps you should consider taking your services elsewhere!”
This was not the first time, of late, that Anne d’Heilly had been forced to defer to the power of Diane de Poitiers. But she could not, for all of the signs, allow herself to acknowledge her diminishing influence. She looked back at Marot, his words ringing in her mind. She caught him looking cautiously around the room. She knew he was trying to avoid being seen in secretive conversation with the fading favourite. Many others had begun to desert her in the same fashion. It was slow at first, with several of them playing both sides of the fence. But there was less need for pretense among them now. They saw, as she did, the inevitable. Even her one staunch ally, Philippe Chabot, had had the unbearable lack of grace to die on her, leaving her alone, in favor with virtually no one but the slowly dying King.
“Monsieur Marot, you are a poor excuse for a poet,” she seethed, casting her wounded eyes upon him. “And you are an even poorer excuse for a friend. I want you out of here!” Then, as she turned away from him, someone pushed her from behind so that the wine she held splashed onto her very expensive green velvet gown.
“You imbecile! Now see what you’ve done!” she cried, but as she turned around, the reality of her own demise finally flashed before her, and with a vengeance.
“Why, did I do that?” said Diane, as though she were surprised. “Oh, I am so dreadfully sorry. Please, accept my humble apology.” Diane looked down at the soiled beaded velvet gown that it had taken six months to create and an instant to ruin. She had not meant to do it, but when it was done, she found that she could not help herself; she gave in to a very uncharitable burst of joy. “It is just so terribly crowded in here,” she continued, fighting a smile, “with everyone pushing and shoving. Oh, and your lovely gown, and now it is ruined. Velvet never dries the same, does it?”
Anne d’Heilly’s painted face went white with rage. “You are a stupid woman, Madame! As stupid as you are clumsy,” she declared suddenly and turned away from her. She knew better than to accuse the future King’s mistress of hav
ing orchestrated the slight intentionally. She no longer possessed the kind of power necessary to support it.
Diane watched her leave. After Anne had escaped into the crowd, she turned back around to see Clement Marot standing alone, holding his sides, nearly doubled over with laughter.
“Oh, thank you! Thank you! A thousand times, thank you! I never thought I would see it in my lifetime, but it was well worth the price of admission!”
“And what might the price have been?” Diane asked of the poet who had so often and so publicly sought to humiliate her with his cruel verses.
“I have paid the greatest price, Madame. The loss of your favor,” Marot finally replied and then punctuated his words with an expression so humble that she nearly believed him. Nearly. Marot had been the poet bold enough to have written only against Diane one New Year when all the rest of his poems to the King’s petite bande had been compliments.
What do you wish, Diane fair
What can I bring you?
You did not have, so I am told,
As much good fortune in the spring
As you are having in the fall
“Madame de Poitiers, if you please, I have been foolish and I believe my carelessness may well have hurt you. For that I am profoundly sorry.”
“Yes, well, none of us can change the past, Monsieur Marot. What is done, is done.”
“But then perhaps, if I am fortunate, what they say will hold true, that time heals all wounds.”
“Platitudes from a poet?” Diane asked with half a laugh.
He cleared his throat. “I am afraid it is the best one can hope for from an unemployed dilettante on such an unexpected moment.”