Mistress of the Sun (22 page)

After a few hours, they stopped at an inn on the outskirts of a village. Petite dismounted and tied her horse’s reins to a hitching
post. Louis, Lauzun and the men circled around to the back of the inn. The gentler and the guards turned their backs, relieving themselves by the road. Petite paused, unsure, then ducked into a thicket of bushes.

Emerging, she saw three of the men going into the inn and followed them inside. The hall was full of trestle tables lined with travelers eating from wooden bowls. The place smelled of sour beer and seared meat. The men of the King’s party were standing beside a table in the corner.

Petite heard Lauzun’s voice from behind. “Your Majesty, the men have—”

“Criminy, it’s the King,” a man cried out, and suddenly there was a great scraping of stools and chairs as everyone stood, bowing in a chaotic fashion. An old woman beside the fire was helped to her feet.

“Be seated,” Petite heard Louis command.

Lauzun cleared a path for the King to the corner table, and people slowly returned to their bowls of mutton and pitchers of slow beer, the buzz of conversation filling the room once again.

Lauzun spotted Petite and gestured to the chair beside the King. Louis held out his hand, palm up, summoning her. Pressing her wide-brimmed hat to her heart, she sidled through the crowd and into the empty place.

“I’m having the stable boy beat the stuffing in my saddle,” Lauzun was saying.

“Your horse is galled?” Louis asked.

“Damn nearly,” Lauzun said. “His withers are wrung.”

“My withers are wrung too,” Louis said with a sidelong glance at Petite. He pressed his thigh against hers.

Petite took a slow and careful breath as the serving girl placed a tankard of beer and a bowl of stewed beef in front of her.

T
HE ROAD CONDITIONS
were passable until they left the high road, circling back onto a rutted laneway heading east. The terrain turned scrubby, marshy in the valleys, the road washed out in two places. The first flooded stretch was shallow, posing no difficulty, but at the second, the horses balked.

Louis studied the torrent of water, then spoke to Lauzun, who nodded and turned his horse. “His Majesty suggests you lead the way across,” he told Petite. “He thinks you might be able to get Poseidon to go over.”

Petite walked her horse to the water’s edge. It was December; the water was cold, but not icy. She pressed her horse forward, but he reared up. She turned him in circles, stung him sharply on the flank with her crop and spurred him on again. He flattened his ears but surged into the water. “Good fellow,” she said, stroking his neck. Midway, the ground fell off. She was relieved when at last he gained purchase and struggled up onto the bank.

“There’s only the one deep spot in the middle,” she called back, but Louis was already across, his horse scrambling up behind her onto the bank.

“Ride beside me,” he told her once everyone was safely across. The men fell respectfully behind, at a distance.

They entered a wood, crossed a valley and climbed a hill.

“A boar bog,” Petite said, pointing off to the left.

“My father hunted here when he was only six,” Louis said. “He bagged a levret, five quail and two partridges.”

Petite whistled.

Louis regarded her with astonishment. “I didn’t think women could do that.”

Petite whistled again, then laughed. “Race?” Her horse surged ahead, galloping as if the Devil was at his heels.

Breathless, with their horses lathered, they crested a hill. Below, in a marshland clearing, was a château. Close by was a church and a huddle of poor houses: a small village. Smoke rose from one of the château chimneys.

“It’s so isolated,” Petite said, gazing out across the low forested hills.

“Does that disturb you?”

“I love it.”

“I thought you would.” He reached for her hand.

T
HE HUNT CHÂTEAU
was like a fairy tale house: slate roof, wroughtiron balconies, marble courtyard and a little dry moat. Made of red bricks and white stone, it reminded Petite of the château at Blois, but in miniature, and all of a piece.

“Welcome, Your Majesty!” A stout, red-faced man with a drooping mustache cried out greetings, waving his hat about in a confusion of etiquette. “We were told that the road was washed out.” He held the reins of Louis’s horse as the King dismounted. “We feared you might not get across.”

“Nothing stops this rider,” Louis said, indicating Petite.

“Get this young man’s horse,” the stout man called out to a boy sprinting across the cobblestones.

“I think he’s a girl,” the boy said, studying Petite as she dismounted.

“I think so too,” Louis said with a laugh. “Messieurs, please pay your respects to Mademoiselle de la Vallière,” he announced, swiping off Petite’s hat and wig, allowing her golden curls to fall to her shoulders. “Mistress of
this
château.”

T
HE CHÂTEAU WAS
more than a simple hunting box, as Gautier had described it, but small nonetheless. Petite was surprised, in fact, when the keeper’s wife—Madame Menage, a hunched-over woman—informed her that there were twenty-six habitable rooms.

“Although not much in the way of furnishings,” Madame Menage said, “and that suits me fine. I’m the only woman here year-round, not even a chambermaid.” She spread a toilette over a table and set a tin bowl of water on the cloth. “Will you need help dressing?”

“No, thank you.” Petite had thought to pack a sensible gown that laced up the front.

“Maybe I should have put finer linens on the bed,” Madame Menage said, lighting a candle, “but my instructions are to take you to the King, so I didn’t think he would be coming here to do his courting.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Petite said, flushing. “But perhaps you could take me to him now.”

L
OUIS TOUCHED THE
small of Petite’s back. “These were my father’s rooms,” he said, holding a lantern aloft. He was wearing a squirrellined green velvet gown—his father’s, he told her—which smelled disagreeably of wormwood. “And this was his study.”

It was a dark room, taken up largely by a billiard table covered with a patched cloth. Louis held up the lantern the better to show her the leather-topped writing desk at the far end. Along the near wall were two trunks, with a smaller chest stacked on top.

Near the door was a four-pillared game table, bone chess pieces arranged on a chequered board, ready for play. The knight was the head of a unicorn, Petite noticed, intricately carved. She had the urge to pick it up, feel its weight.

“Your father must have liked to play,” she said, glancing over the games stacked on a shelf: backgammon, trou-madame, chess, tourniquet, renarde, moine, spillikins.

“I don’t think of him as a playful man,” Louis said, leading her into the next room, the bedchamber, “but how would I know?” A
fire burning in the grate threw off little heat. He placed his hand on the back of her neck, his fingers lightly caressing.

The moon cast a cold light through the leaded windows. Petite looked up at Louis, his high cheekbones outlined by shadow. She longed for the familiar security of his arms.

“He died when I was four.”

“That’s young to lose a father,” Petite said with sympathy, leaning into him.

“He wanted to die here, in this bed,” he said, nodding toward the massive four-poster structure, draped in green damask curtains. “But he breathed his last at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.”

Petite was relieved. She didn’t like the thought of sleeping in a deathbed, especially a historic one.

“So he didn’t get his wish,” Louis added, his tone sad now, “although he did manage to hold on until the fourteenth of May, the day his own father died.”

Louis’s grandfather, Henry the Great. How often had her father told her stories of “the gallant Green”? It awed Petite to think that Louis had this celebrated king’s blood. There was much of Henry the Great in him, she thought: his forthright manner, his courage, his
goodness.

“It’s best to die in a bed,” Petite said, thinking of her father, lifeless on the stable floor. She wanted to ask Louis how he felt on May fourteenth, whether he feared Death on that day, but she wasn’t sure how he might take it. “Are there any ghosts here at Versaie?” Every village had its ghost, every château.

“You’ll have to ask Madame,” Louis said with a laugh. “Although I doubt it. Nobody but a member of the royal family is allowed to die here.”

How comforting, Petite thought, to be able to rule such things, to be so…so godlike. She recalled the stories she’d been told, of Louis curing the Evil with a touch. How wonderful (and scary) it must be to have such power, the power to heal suffering.

“Have you ever seen one?” she asked.

“Only once. My father’s ghost, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, but in the new château by the river.” He smiled, recollecting. “In the room in which I was born, in fact. It was long past nightfall. My brother and I were having a fight with pillows, feathers everywhere. Our father appeared and told us to go to sleep.”

“How like a father,” Petite said, laughing with him. She would love to see her father again, even if he scolded her. “Did he look real to you?”

“Yes, strangely—though we could see through him.”

“Just as people say.”

“And then he vanished—a very proper apparition.” He threw up his hands. “But then, of course, we couldn’t sleep at all,” he said, closing the shutters and pulling the drapes against the night spirits. “This thing stinks.” His voice was muffled as he pulled the green gown up over his head. He threw it into a chest and shut the lid.

“You don’t feel the chill?” Petite asked, her voice thick with love-longing. He was down to his under-linens and already in a manly state.

“I rarely do,” Louis said, opening the bed curtains and sitting down, testing the stacked fustian mattresses. He held out his hand. “Hot-blooded, I guess,” he said with a teasing smile.

Petite kicked off her mules and sat beside him. She wondered if she would be staying the night.

“May I undo your laces, Mademoiselle?” he asked, gently tugging on the silken cord. It knotted, and they groaned.

“Here,” she said, untangling it, her bodice falling open.

He pulled her to him, into the bed.

P
ETITE WOKE IN
the dark room, curled naked around Louis, her cheek on his chest. She listened to his slow breathing and nuzzled into him. He moaned and turned, pressing against her, one hand cupping her breast. She felt him harden against her buttocks. She was wet still, slick with seed. They fell into a slow rhythm.

“I love you, Louise,” he rasped, clasping her breathlessly. They fell into sleep enjoined, and woke twined in each other’s arms.

P
ETITE RODE WITH
Louis and his men the next morning. He smiled to see her sitting Poseidon so proudly. The stallion arched his neck.

Louis motioned Petite to come forward, to ride at the front with
him. The men backed up their horses to give her room. He gave a signal and they all set out, ambling at first, then trotting and cantering.

Entering an open plain, Louis’s horse lengthened into a hard gallop. Petite crouched over Poseidon’s neck, pressed him forward. Soon they had outdistanced the others. Racing back to the château, Petite won by a length.

“She’s a devil,” Louis said, handing his reins to the gentler.

“He’s not even damp, Mademoiselle,” Azeem said, feeling the horse’s chest. “If you wish, we could—” He nodded toward the fenced-in arena.

“I’ve asked Azeem to teach me how to stand on a horse’s back—while it’s moving,” Petite told Louis. “He used to train trick riders.”

“This I’d like to see,” Louis said, leaning on a fence rail.

“So far I can only do it at a walk.” Petite opened the gate and led the stallion in.

“First I just lunge him, Your Majesty,” Azeem explained, fitting the horse with a snaffle bridle and cavesson, and then a surcingle around his chest with leather loops sticking up—something Petite could hold onto if needed. “To get him going smoothly,” he explained, removing the reins. He raised his hand and the horse moved to the perimeter. “Walk.” Azeem raised his right hand and Poseidon circled. Azeem sent a wave through the lunge line and the horse stopped.

“You’ve got him listening nicely,” Petite said, studying the gentler’s method.

“He’s strong-willed,” Azeem said. “One must assert authority.”

“Like with my kingdom,” Louis said, and they laughed.

Azeem signaled the stallion to come to him. “Ready, Mademoiselle?” he asked, tightening the surcingle, checking to see that it wasn’t rubbing the horse’s withers. “It’s best without boots and stockings.”

Petite glanced down at her feet. Her corset stays prevented her from bending over.

“Allow me,” Louis said, kneeling to unfasten her buckles and slipping off each boot and stocking. He held one naked heel and looked up at her—teasing. His hands were warm on her skin. Desire inflamed her; they hadn’t coupled since morning. Petite smiled and poked him with her toe, but he was strong; she couldn’t topple him.

“Azeem, how does one gentle such a woman?” Louis made a playful swipe for Petite, but she dodged him.

“Your Majesty, I believe you know that very well,” Azeem said, leading the horse to the rail.

Petite started out at a walk, kneeling on Poseidon’s back and holding onto the leather loops on the surcingle. The stallion’s pace was steady and his back broad, so that soon she could stand without holding on.

“Isn’t this boring to you?” she asked Louis, but a sideways glance made her lose her balance. She grabbed mane, and he laughed.

“Stand on the rail this time, Mademoiselle,” Azeem said. “As the horse comes by, step on.”

Petite landed steadily. “Well done.” Louis applauded.

“This is the easy part,” she said.

She progressed quickly through the walk and trot.

“Mademoiselle, I believe you are ready for the canter,” Azeem announced.

“I don’t think so,” Petite protested, yet climbed back onto the rail. Poseidon’s gaits were vigorous.

The first time Poseidon went by, she held back and missed.