Mistress of the Sun (34 page)

“Don’t for one minute think I haven’t suffered. Imagine what would happen if my husband were to find out.” Athénaïs made a fearful expression, her eyes wide.

The lunatic husband. Petite suddenly understood the logic behind his rage. She felt such a fool. “How much does he know?”

“Only suspicions.” Athénaïs’s face quivered with tics. “He would kill me if he found out about…And God only knows what he’d do to the child.”

The child. Her own children’s half-sibling. Petite felt caught in a web. “I can’t forgive you,” she said. It was a small thing, yet it
was one truth she could hold on to—one truth in a maze of lies.

“Come,” Athénaïs said, “I love you both. The Queen is with child and you have been unwell. Would you have preferred that His Majesty go to a common trollop, bring you back some horrible disease?” She smiled charmingly. “I begin to think you should thank me.”

Petite stood abruptly and cracked the glass neatly against the mantel. “You mistake me,” she said, holding the splinter. She thought of the animals she’d hunted down and killed. She wanted to see that look in Athénaïs’s eyes.

She threw down the glass. “I curse you,” she said, and stumbled out the door.

P
ETITE HAD TO GET AWAY
. She had been talking with her brother about making the journey to Vaujours to see her duchy—and now was the time. Her mother—free now that she was widowed—wanted to come along as well, and bring Marie-Anne, who was now old enough to go on excursions. They could stop at the farmstead in Reugny on the way, make it an outing. Petite agreed; she needed her family around her.

“What’s bothering the King?” Jean asked, handing his portmanteau up to the driver. “He’s hardly speaking…not just to me, but to anyone.”

Petite relinquished baby Tito into the arms of his plump nursemaid, who jiggled the eleven-month-old and then headed back to the château. “We’ll talk in the coach,” Petite said, taking Marie-Anne’s hand, “after this one goes to…” She closed her eyes to indicate sleep.

“What did you say?” the girl demanded, looking up at her mother. She wasn’t yet two, and she was not only talking, but interrogating. The Little Advocate, they sometimes called her. “What did she say?” she asked her grandmother Françoise, her uncle Jean.

“Just that you’re going on a very long trip,” Petite said.

“I know that,” she protested. “And I’m not going to go to sleep.”

They had been in the coach for only a few minutes when Marie-Anne fell asleep in her grandmother’s arms.

Jean gave Petite an inquiring look. “Well?”

Petite stared out the window. She didn’t want a scene. “Promise you won’t get upset.”

“I promise.” He placed his right hand over his heart.

“I’m considering leaving the King.”

“What!”

“What?” Françoise echoed.

“Breaking off,” Petite said. Suddenly it felt very real.

“You
can’t
,” Jean said.

“I have reason,” Petite said evenly.

“Even if you did have reason, you couldn’t. One: His Majesty wouldn’t allow it. Two:
I
wouldn’t allow it. Three: you’d have to leave your children.”

“I’d take them with me,” Petite said. They were passing the rock cliffs. She thought of the families living in caves. She felt she was in a cave herself, searching for a glimpse of light to show her the way out.

“Oh, and estrange them from their father the King,” Jean said, taking a pinch of snuff, “ruin their lives, their future. That would be kind of you.”

“Don’t mock me, Jean,” Petite warned, but she was discouraged by the truth of what he said. The children weren’t hers—they belonged to Louis. Even a peasant woman had no right to her children: the law was the law, and the King’s law even more so. Her daughter and son were of royal blood; they belonged to France.

“
I
happen to have an interest in this, remember?”

“Mother has a pension and you have Gabrielle,” Petite said sharply. “And I have a duchy now.” Truth was, she was considering living there. It was one of the reasons for the trip. She wanted to see the château, the estate, see what life there might entail.

“Jean, give her a chance to explain,” Françoise said, moving Marie-Anne onto the seat between her and Petite. The girl moaned in her sleep, but nodded off again, her head in her grandmother’s ample lap.

“Thank you, Mother,” Petite said, putting her shawl over the child. “The King and I, we’re—” She stopped, blinking back tears. “We’re not…” Not
what?
What words could possibly describe such a rupture?

“Does this have to do with another woman?” Jean asked. “I certainly hope that that’s not the case,” he persisted, “because if that were just cause, there wouldn’t be a marriage left standing.”

Including your own
, Petite wanted to say—but didn’t. “Madame
la Marquise de Montespan is with child by the king,” Petite said evenly.

“Criminy.” Even Jean sounded shocked.

“Isn’t she married?” Françoise asked.

Petite nodded.

“Sacré Dieu,” Jean said, shaking his head. “And to a madman.”

Petite closed her eyes: the implications were overwhelming. Were Athénaïs’s husband to find out, were the public to know…

“Are we there yet?” Marie-Anne asked, sitting up.

“Not yet, sweetheart.” Petite pulled the child onto her lap and held her close. “But soon,” she added, relieved to put an end to the discussion.

They rode in uncomfortable silence down the once-familiar roads, pulling, at last, through the gates of their old homestead. Petite surveyed the courtyard in wonder. It was both familiar and strange.

“Look how the trees have grown,” Françoise said.

“And the weeds,” Petite said.

“That should change now that I’ve found a good tenant,” Jean said, jumping out. He kissed Petite’s hand as he handed her down. “I seem always to be asking forgiveness,” he said with a woebegone look.

“Oh, Jean,” Petite said, moved by her brother’s awkward apology.

He put his arm around her and they trekked across the weedy courtyard to the door of their childhood home.

M
OST OF THE
furnishings had been sold off and replaced with items of lesser quality, spare, but functional.

Françoise threw the mouse nest out of the old kitchen stove, and—once Jean got a spark going with a flint—she managed to start a fire. “Go down to the river for something to cook,” she told her son as she cleaned off the familiar white table.

“Want to catch some eels?” Jean asked Marie-Anne, looking for something that might serve as a fishing stick.

“Yes!” the child said.

“Just like her mother used to do,” Jean said with a wink, heading out.

“Watch her by the water, Jean,” Petite called out after them. Marie-Anne was swinging on her uncle’s arm, the two of them laughing.

P
ETITE
’
S OLD ROOM
in the attic had been taken over by bats, so she made a bed for herself and Marie-Anne on a pallet in the sitting room. Late that night, she lay beside her daughter, listening to the gentle wheezing of her breath, feeling its warmth on her cheek. The night was still, silent but for the chorus of crickets. She stared into the dark. Her mother had taken the one lantern with her upstairs and they had no night candle. She thought she heard a noise, something moving. She remembered lying in the dark in her room under the eaves, listening for the Devil, fearing
he was lurking under her bed, waiting for a chance to pounce. She thought of bone magic.

She felt for the locket she slept with, the locket with the bit of Marie-Anne’s birth cord in it now, together with a strand of Tito’s hair and Diablo’s mane. Her trinity.

I
N THE MORNING
, Petite slipped out the back door and into the courtyard. The team of six coach horses standing in the paddock regarded her with curiosity. She stroked the nose of one of the horses and turned toward the barn.

The door hung off its hinges. She took a step inside. It was dark, the small window in the far wall boarded over. It took a moment for her to be able to see. The splintered walls of Diablo’s stall had fallen in, and wood crates were stacked over the spot where her father had died. The cross was gone, the twitch. She heard creatures scurrying and backed out, into the light.

She walked around behind the barn: there, where her “convent” had been, was a pile of stone. It made her sad, seeing it thus, recalling her childish quest to follow in the footsteps of Saint Teresa. (How she had strayed.) She remembered her fright, burying the pin case. Was it still there? She crouched, pushing aside shriveled leaves, looking for something she could use as a tool. There was only a bent iron nail, but it was long. It would suffice. She stabbed it into the dirt. It glanced off stones. She sat back on her heels, checking her bearings—the wall of the barn, the stone outline of
her hovel. She moved some of the rocks that had fallen in and tried again. She hit tin.

Petite brushed off the case and studied it. At times she’d wondered if it had been a dream, but now it all came back to her clearly: killing a toad and burying it under an anthill, taking its skeleton to the river at night. She had been only six years old—how did she have the courage? She’d been desperate to save Diablo’s life. Now she was desperate once again, but it was her own life that needed to be saved.

She pried the case open. There were still traces of oil.
Bone magic.
Slowly, she made the sign of the cross over it. It was the Devil’s power—but power, nonetheless. The power to tame, to make things right.

T
HEY LEFT FOR
Vaujours shortly after, Jean riding his horse alongside the coach with his sword drawn—“for safety.” They were heading into unknown parts. The rocking of the carriage quickly seduced both Françoise and Marie-Anne into sleep, leaving Petite with her thoughts. Obsessively, she reviewed the past in her mind—lies, she now knew. What
were
her choices?

The landscape was flat and barren, war-scarred still. They passed through a quarry and the remains of what must once have been a great forest. Men and women in rags worked the fields, children in tow. They stopped to stare, mouths agape to see the coach of a duchess go by.

They stopped at a ramshackle inn to refresh the horses. “The driver isn’t sure which way to go from here,” Jean said, leaning in the window.

“I have a survey,” Petite said, handing him a rolled-up parchment.

“Holy. All that?” Jean traced the territory with his finger.

“Are we there yet?” Marie-Anne asked, yawning.

Sometime later the coach climbed out of a valley and into a scrubby terrain. A stone structure came into view, looming against the cloudless sky. A shrub rustled as wild creatures scurried out of sight.

“It has towers,” Marie-Anne said. A goshawk took flight at their approach.

“It’s a castle,” Françoise said. “A small castle,” she added as they got a better view.

A very small castle, Petite thought…and in ruins. Moss covered the remains of a stone staircase. Trees filled a roofless chamber and vines hung from the broken arches.

“Now I remember,” Françoise said, taking Marie-Anne onto her lap. “Vaujours was where the Lady in White lived. Didn’t she?”

“Yes, that’s what I recall,” Petite said as the coach jolted to a halt in what had been a courtyard, now overgrown with shrubs. To their right, the tumbledown castle. To their left, a pond.

“So that must be where she…” Françoise mouthed the words
drowned herself.

Petite thought she heard a woman singing. “Did you hear that?”

“The frogs?” Françoise asked, tying on Marie-Anne’s leather booties as the girl squirmed.

The woman’s voice was a deep, sweet alto, both passionate and plaintive. Where was the voice coming from? They were so isolated.

“We can’t stay here, Mother,” Petite said, staring out at the pond, the still water.

“But we’ve come all this way.”

“You can fix this place, you can make it nice.” Jean jumped off his horse and tied the reins to his saddle horn, letting the horse loose to graze. “This turret is still intact,” he added, relieving himself against the stone wall.

“She wants to leave, Jean,” Françoise said.

“We should at least have a look around,” Jean said as he did up his breeches.

J
EAN WAS SHOWING
Petite where an addition could be put onto the back of the structure, when Françoise appeared, a posy of flowers in one hand.

“Where’s Marie-Anne?” Petite called out.

“Asleep in the coach,” her mother said.

A wind picked up. “I’m going to check,” Petite said, a prickly uneasiness coming over her.

She lifted her skirts and ran back to the courtyard. The door of the coach was open, the driver asleep on the roof with his hat
over his face, the horses pulling at weeds. The coach was empty of all but their baskets, their travel clutter. Where was Marie-Anne? Petite scanned the cattails, the shrubby willows, the gently lapping water of the pond. And then she saw something that made her heart stop: a tiny hand, reaching above the surface.

“Jean!” Petite waded into the water, her leather boots leaden, dragging.
O Mary.
“Jean!” Petite felt a tendril, just a touch, and she lunged. She grasped her daughter’s wrist. Marie-Anne was blue. Petite thrashed back to the shore with her child in her arms, praying with all her might:
O Mary, I am pleading, pleading, pleading.

“Give her to me,” Jean said. He laid Marie-Anne on the stones and pressed his hands into her tiny chest. A fountain of pond water spewed out of her mouth, into his face. “Good girl,” he said, wiping his cheeks. “Keep it coming.”

Marie-Anne began to wail.

“She’ll be all right,” Jean said, lifting her and handing her into Petite’s arms.

“You’re safe now, my sweet,” Petite said, pressing the child to her heart. She noticed something clutched in her daughter’s hand. Petite pried it free. Light glinted off the pin case.

“Mine,” Marie-Anne wailed.

With a prayer and a curse, Petite heaved the case into the water, rocking her wailing daughter in her arms as it floated and then sank, out of sight.

“S
O
,
WHAT DO
you think?” Françoise asked, back in the coach, the girl once again asleep on her lap, bundled in Petite’s cloak.

“I don’t know what to think, Mother,” Petite said, her hand encircling Marie-Anne’s thin ankle. Only that she had the Virgin to thank. And Jean. She closed her eyes, wincing against the memory of her daughter’s hand sticking up out of the water.

“She said she saw a lady in a white dress, and that that was why she woke up, that the lady was singing to her—”

“I heard her too, remember?”

“So it must have been the ghost, just like they say, the ghost of the Lady in White.”

“I don’t know, Mother.” Petite closed her eyes. The voice had been angelic. How could that be?

“Well, there’s one thing
I
know,” Françoise said with conviction.

“And what’s that?” Petite asked, after a time.

“I’m never going back there. That’s for sure.”

“Me neither,” Petite said, sniffing.

She felt her mother’s hand on her own.

“Look,” Françoise said, “just be patient. Accept this…this
other
interest. That’s how to win him back. Really, you have to treat men like babies—even kings.”