Courtesan

  “But how shall it look to everyone if I do not win? I have dedicated this match to Madame Diane.”

  Before Montmorency could reply, Henri turned his horse away and trotted back out onto the field.

  “A new lance, Monty!” he shouted without lowering his visor and trotted back to his place on the field.

  “Good Lord, what is he doing?” Catherine muttered.

  “It would appear that His Majesty wishes to go another round,” replied the Duke of Savoy.

  “He cannot! He must not. He is tired. Can no one see that? He must be made to stop!”

  “And who would have the courage to insist that he did?”

  “You shall do it!” she said, turning to her eldest son. “François, call your father. Remind him of my dream. Beg him not to run again!”

  The pallid young Dauphin stood beside his mother.

  “Do it, boy! Do it now! There is no time to spare!”

  DIANE SHIFTED IN HER SEAT as another lance was brought for the King. Even though the sun had nearly set, the air was still warm and thick with flies. She opened her fan and began to wave it before her face, trying desperately not to think of the prophecy or of Gabriel de Montgommery. But there was one coincidence even she could not ignore. She had heard the verse.

  The young lion will overcome the older one. The words of the prophecy echoed back at her. . .On the young man’s shield, God help them all, was the face of a lion.

  “Soon,” she muttered. “It shall be over soon.” Tonight she would scold him for being so obstinate and for insisting on another round when it was so warm and so late.

  The two men, poised in opposition, readied their horses again. Their lances were lowered. Henri had refused to receive a message from the Queen through his son. He could not afford to break his concentration, not when he was feeling like this. He was dizzy and he had not managed to steady himself completely after Montgommery’s blow. He began to falter again, and he leaned more heavily on the pommel of his saddle. The Queen sprang to her feet and the crowds were hushed. Montmorency and François de Guise stood and began to move toward the field but the King waved them away. Then the two horses charged full speed at one another. Dust blew in a great cloud around them.

  Diane felt her heart stop. She sat motionless, not even breathing as both men shattered their long lances against one another nearly at the same moment. Henri’s fell from his arm, as it should. Montgommery’s did not. Instead, the splintered end of the long wooden weapon, which had broken against the King’s breastplate, flew upward. It caught on Henri’s unlatched visor, which he had lowered but forgotten to fasten, and large jagged splinters of wood plunged full force into Henri’s right eye.

  Diane leaned against the Cardinal and watched in horror with the rest of the Court. Blood sprayed from his visor as he faltered on the still-charging horse. He then grasped the braided mane and began to fall.

  “Oh, dear God, no. . .Henri, no. . .”

  She could not move. She could not breathe. The sense of alarm spread through her before the comprehension. Then, all around was white, blinding light. No sound.

  Guise and Montmorency rushed forward, both jumping across the barrier catching the King as he fell. They helped him to the ground. A great flood of frenzied onlookers rushed onto the field. The hushed cries and the incredulous moans echoed through the pewter sky for their beloved Sovereign. The Dauphin fainted into the hands of his new wife, the Queen of Scots. Catherine cried out and gripped the arms of her chair as Henri was lain in the dusty yard.

  “The prophecy!” she wailed. “The prophecy!”

  When she saw that he lay motionless on the ground, Diane rose from her chair and began to scale the railing of her tribune trying to get to him. Halfway over the wall, her foot caught in the black velvet banner. Tears streamed down her cheek as the Cardinal de Lorraine rushed from his seat, his own face stricken with horror, and helped her from an instinct born of twenty years of service. He held her hand as he jumped down onto the field, not knowing how to stop her. The shocked crowd surged around her and she was swallowed up in the sobs and cries; their shoving arms and legs all clambering toward the King. As she struggled, she felt her gown tear. Someone stepped on her train. Her headdress was being pulled from behind. An elbow plunged into her ribs. As though pulled by the strong current of a great wave, she felt herself steadily consumed.

  “Please, let me pass!” she cried, but her voice was lost to all of the other sounds of terror. This cannot be! It cannot! Tears filled her eyes and streaked down her face so quickly that she could barely see.

  “Let me pass, I command you!”

  Her heart crashed against her rib cage and she began to strike out at the people around her with the aimless fury of a madwoman. A scream clawed in her throat and she cried out to everyone, and to no one.

  Then, before her on horseback, she saw that a royal guard was trying to clear a path through which they might carry the King from the field. She could see him struggling to part the frenzied crowd.

  “You there! Guard!” she shrieked. “Help me get to the King! It is I, the Duchesse de Valentinois!”

  But her words were in vain. The guard never looked at her; never acknowledged her cries as anything more than one of the collective grieving howls of the other anonymous masses who swirled around him. Then the crowds surged again, pushing her farther and farther from the path. The harder she struggled to advance, the farther away she was pulled. She was crying now, blinded by her tears, but finally, through the sobbing and the whispers of horror, she saw Henri’s lifeless body, pulled from his armor and soaked in blood, pass before her.

  “Oh. . .oh, dear God in Heaven, let me by. . .I beg you, please! You must let me by. Do none of you know who I am?”

  “OH, JACQUES, THANK God you’ve come!” Hélène cried as she ran to the door of L’Hôtel de Graville and gave in to Saint-André’s open arms. “Is it over?” she whispered into the safety of his dearest friend’s heavy blue doublet.

  “No. But they say it shall be soon.”

  “Oh. . .God save us!”

  “It has been nine days. The wound has begun to abscess.”

  She led him into the receiving room to a small couch covered over in black leather and studded with silver. He then lent her his handkerchief and she daubed at her eyes, but it did no good to stop the tears.

  “How is Madame?” he finally asked.

  “Her life is over. How can she be?”

  “Oh, this is just so hideous. If I could only do something. . .anything at all! But we are so helpless!”

  “Can you get her in to see the King?”

  Hélène’s tear-filled eyes were hopeful. Jacques could not bear the sight of them. They had become dear friends in twenty-six years’ service to each of their masters. Both of them had lived a lifetime through the love of Henri and Diane. He lowered his head, unable to reply.

  “It is just so unfair!” she cried. “He is still so young. They are so much in love.”

  She fell back into his arms and began to sob again. “Now everything will change,” he said quietly as she cried. “Her old friend, the Cardinal de Lorraine, has already had her apartments taken over in his name at Saint Germain-en-Laye and Fontainebleau.”

  “I should expect no less from him, barbarous hypocrite!”

  “Shh! Mon amie, be careful how you speak. He, with his brother, shall control the country for the boy King now.”

  “There is no need for worry. There is no one here with her but myself. They have all gone; all of them running to the Queen; and His Majesty is not even dead! Oh, is there any hope at all that he may live through this?”

  “None.”

  Jacques said the word and the pain of it tore at his heart. Until that moment he had not allowed himself to consider what would surely come to pass before another day had ended.

  “He has always been so good to us,” he whispered. “He is my friend. I cannot imagine him gone. What will life be like without him for me. .
.for Madame. . .for all of us?” He turned to Hélène. “She must go away. It will not be safe for her here when he is gone. She does know that, doesn’t she?”

  “Madame waits only for word that the King is dead.”

  “Will you go with her?”

  “I must. My place is with her.”

  “Yes.” He lowered his head again.

  “And what will you do?”

  “I must stay. As Marshal, I can see that the will of our great King is not forgotten. I must do that for him; for both he and Madame.”

  In his arms she wept openly, unable to control the tempest of sorrow. The intensity between them was broken by the sight of Diane, who stood silently in the arched doorway. Her face was drawn and her eyes were glazed. Jacques and Hélène both rose to their feet when they saw her.

  “Is he. . .dead?”

  “No, Madame. Not yet,” Jacques whispered in reply.

  “Then it was good of you to come. His Majesty shall be told of your faith when he recovers, and you shall not go unrewarded,” she managed in a voice rough and strained from screaming.

  “Madame,” he began and then moved toward her, feeling a surge of emotion. He had been, he recalled, her very first friend at Court. Now he would be her last. “I am sorry that I do not come here bearing you good news. They say it is nearly over for him. He has endured a great deal of pain and now is only occasionally conscious.”

  He did not tell her the rest of the truth, that through the nine days of half-conscious, drug-induced rambling, he had cried out her name, pleading for her to be brought to him and that the Queen had forbid it.

  Hélène helped Diane into a chair near the fireplace hearth.

  “It pains me to say this, but Her Majesty. . .Queen Catherine, forced me to bring a letter from the Dauphin, who they are now calling the King. She insisted that it be me who bore it to you.”

  Reluctantly Jacques unfolded the royal communiqué. He looked over at Hélène for support, but she was crying again.

  “Please read it,” Diane said as she gazed out of the open window beside the fire.

  Due to your evil influence with the King, my father, you merit severe punishment. But, in my royal clemency, I do not wish to take away further from you than that which, in his death, has already been taken. Nevertheless, you must restore all the jewels that the King, my father, has given you. You must also restore the rightful property of the Crown known as Chenonceaux.

  “The spineless little bastard! How could he?” Hélène cried. “He always loved you so!”

  “You must not blame François. He is a simple boy. He does as he is told by his far more powerful mother. The King always feared he would not outgrow her domination.”

  Losing Chenonceaux was far more painful than she would ever let them know. After everything it had meant to her and Henri, everything he had done to see it secured, she still would lose it to Catherine. But like her grief, that too was a private matter.

  “Well, then. So that is it,” she said with a note of finality but still no hint of tears. She would not, could not give in to them. She was still the Duchesse de Valentinois, and Henri was still King. She must remember that, until the very end.

  “He loved you very much, Jacques,” she quietly said. “He knew that you were a good and honorable man. He would be pleased to know that you had not forsaken him.”

  THAT AFTERNOON, the heavy doors to L’Hôtel de Graville closed behind her, and she rode slowly through the streets of Paris for what she knew would be the last time. Past the Church of Saint-Paul where she had so often gone to pray, past L’Hopital de Saint-Gervais, now gleaming white with fresh paint. Finally, past the lists on the rue Saint-Antoine.

  The horror of the history there was now frozen in her mind, as she looked across the road behind the heavy iron gates now locked to everyone. There in the distance was the grand facade of Les Tournelles behind which Henri, her love and her life, lay dying. She pulled the reins of her horse.

  “Stop here,” she said to Hélène and Clothilde.

  “Oh, but we mustn’t,” Hélène objected. “It cannot be safe here now.”

  Diane looked at her with the same vacant gaze she had had that morning, but her voice was full of pain. “Hélène, I must at least try to see him. Perhaps someone shall have half a heart.”

  Diane stepped down from her white stallion, Amour. He had been a gift from Henri just last New Year. She could have ridden no other. She walked alone toward the gates while Clothilde and Hélène held her horse steady across the road from the palace. Four guards, newly uniformed in crimson and gold, stood at attention at the large iron gates. Behind them another string of guards lined the inner courtyard. All traces of black and white now were gone.

  “I wish to see the King.”

  “No one sees the King,” the guard replied.

  Diane pulled back the hood of her black satin cape to expose her face.

  “You do not understand. I am the Duchesse de Valentinois. His Majesty shall certainly see me if he is told that I am here. I know that there is not much time left.”

  “It is you who do not understand, Madame,” the guard replied without looking at her. “My orders are to admit no one, especially the Duchesse de Valentinois, if she has the courage to come here.”

  The words stung, and yet at the same time, she could have expected nothing else. She took a small step backward.

  “Of course,” she replied and moved to leave. As she did, she turned back around and faced, once again, the stone-faced guard.

  “Perhaps then you could tell me, Captain, does France have a new King?”

  “You shall know it along with the rest of France, Madame. I can tell you nothing more.”

  Diane walked the few paces across the busy street and mounted her white horse again, this time with far greater effort.

  “Where shall we go?” Hélène asked as they turned their horses from the palace and headed down the cobbled street.

  “Home, Hélène, to Chenonceaux. One last time.”

  THEY HELD A VIGIL over the dying King, but tentative and expectant, they appeared more like vultures than concerned friends. Catherine sat at his side while the Cardinal de Lorraine, his brother François de Guise, and Anne de Montmorency stood behind her looking down at the King much of the time. The room was dark. Timeless. It was full of the scent of medicine and herbs. Death was near.

  At the foot of the bed, a host of physicians, apothecaries and mystics worked feverishly to find anything that might spare his life. Everything had been tried. A potion of rosewater and vinegar to revive him, barley gruel for the fever. Surgery was performed to extract the splinters that they could see, and then he was purged with a mixture of rhubarb and camomile. Over the nine days that had passed between periods of lucid conversations and fitful hallucinations, Henri was also repeatedly bled and purged. But now the grotesque distortions to his face indicated that an abscess had formed. In their desire to combat this turn of events, Catherine ordered the extreme.

  “Then take them all and kill them!” she said. “Do what you must, but we must save the King!”

  André Vesalius, the noted Imperial Physician to Philip II, who had come directly from Brussels and arrived three days after the accident, stood beside the Queen with the King’s surgeon. The notion was to take four prisoners already condemned to death and kill them. If they could re-enact the accident on their skulls, perhaps they would find where the rest of the splinters had gone, and how to retrieve them.

  “It is a gamble, Your Majesty,” Vesalius warned. “We have never encountered anything even close to this sort of injury before.”

  “Then you must try it,” she replied, coming to her feet. “You have no choice. There is no chance that his life shall be spared without it.”

  “I fear that is true,” he conceded.

  “Then do it! Kill as many as you need! I shall authorize it.”

  Catherine sat back down and looked over at Henri, to whose moans and tortured cr
ies she had grown numb over the past nine days. She knew that the pain must be unbearable and yet she was helpless to stop it. The death of four prisoners was the only way. She took his hand once again and rubbed her thumb over the warm but lifeless flesh. So much wasted time, she thought. So many regrets. But now you are finally mine. I finally have you away from her. . .away from her spell, and in the shade of my love, you shall grow strong again. You shall recover and we shall have the life which she has denied us for so long.

  In the days since the accident, before the abscess, they had talked together of many things; their son’s ascension, and of Marguerite’s marriage to the Duke of Savoy. He had insisted on the treaty wedding taking place in spite of his absence. He had given Catherine instructions, now that she would rule France with her young son. But his last request had been the most difficult to hear, and since she had not left his side, there was no way to be spared.

  “I want to see her, Catherine,” he muttered again, his face swollen and covered with blood-soaked dressings.

  “Hush. You must rest now.”

  He tried to smile but the act was full of effort. “I shall have plenty of time for that soon enough. Please, Catherine, do not begrudge me this one thing in my final hour. I beg you, I must see Diane before my last rites. You know that once my final confession is heard. . .I cannot see her.”

  Catherine did not reply.

  “Please,” he repeated, his voice growing fainter. “I shall ask nothing else of you but to see her one last time.”

  Catherine pushed the sound of his pleading earlier that day from her mind once again. Diane’s name had begun to haunt her. But it was not the first time. He had been asking for her and calling out her name since a few hours after the accident. She could not help now but be a little glad that he was no longer well enough to plead with her. She squeezed his hand after Vesalius and the physician adjourned to the end of the bed. Then she lifted it to her fleshy lips and kissed it.

  “M’amie?” he muttered almost incoherently. Catherine shivered. That phrase. It was what he called Diane in their private hours. She knew because, God help her, she had heard it when she gazed at them through the hole in her apartment floor so long ago. She pushed away a fit of anger and the feelings of betrayal. There was no time for that now. She had lost so many years waiting. Odiate et expiate; Hate and wait. But she would not bring Diane de Poitiers back here. Not now.