Chapter 11
Chapter
Louis of Orléans would have done anything to get himself out of Bourges.
It had taken all his training, and all his will, not to kneel before Marguerite like a soft-minded fool and say, Yes, anything.
I’ll do anything when she made her offer.
He suspected Marguerite had known regardless. Mind like a wolf-trap, that woman.
Orléans had tried everything he could think of to escape, or to get word to Charles, who might have thwarted his sister.
But Marguerite had chosen her people well and they remained deaf to his stratagems. When Marguerite came to his tower to ask questions about Anne of Brittany, he’d been as close to despair as he’d ever been in his gilded, eventful life.
The tale was preposterous, though he’d kept his incredulity hidden. Unicorn-hunting? A captured lock of a unicorn’s mane? Unicorns were not unheard of, but on the rare occasions they were sighted, they were hunted and brought to bay and killed, not—whatever the duchess was supposed to have done.
Who had charge of her now? De Rieux? His cousin Dunois might have a voice at court.
Or Comminges. That old satyr D’Albret had wanted to marry her once.
Francis had agreed, but Francis was the most persuadable man Louis had ever known.
D’Albret was a man of ripe years and repellent face, with eight legitimate children and four illegitimate.
Anne had threatened to bury herself in a convent and her father had relented. Louis grinned at the memory.
How old was the duchess now? It was years since Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier.
He hardly remembered what she looked like.
All his memories of those years were distorted by the stress of that time.
The chroniclers were already calling it the Mad War: he and Francis trying to hold their seigneuries against the overwhelming fist of France, he and the council trying to hold Brittany together when its docile duke had already let it slip away.
How poor Francis had held to the idea of a free Brittany even as any hope of it faded.
He’d spoken eloquently of gathering up all Armorica, as the Romans called the lands from the Loire to the sea, under his banner of black ermines.
But Francis had been dragged into war, menaced by a vast neighbor under a flint-souled and clever king, and even as he dreamed, his banner was being trampled in defeat. There would be no free Brittany now.
Part of Orléans’s heart did whisper that he was about to betray everything he and Francis had ever fought for.
But ideals became cold, abstract things when a man sat with them, day after day, behind four obstinate walls and a door that might never open.
Let her marry France. There are worse things than to be queen.
Two days out from Nantes, Marguerite had a letter from one of her agents, a chandler by trade when he was not doing errands for the crown of France. He had frequent business at the castle of the dukes of Brittany, and his letter astonished her so much that she took the matter to Orléans.
Whatever the duke’s excesses before his capture, there was no sign of them now.
On the road from Bourges, he was punctilious, organized, withdrawn.
She’d no idea what money he’d scrounged or what kind of credit he was buying on, but his clothes had gotten steadily better as they rode, and when she summoned him that day after her prayers, he came to her like a very prince, in tooled leather and silk hose and a black doublet embroidered with clusters of lavender grapes. He made his bow and stood waiting.
Marguerite mistrusted his silence just as much as she disliked the excesses of his falchion-edged tongue. But she’d already had her secretary decipher the letter; she proffered it and said, “Read this.”
Louis skimmed quickly down the page and then laughed.
“The best thing I shall hear today, I am sure. Your informant is to be congratulated.” This letter related an astonishing rumor from Nantes: that in Brocéliande, during her unicorn-hunt, the duchess had met a stranger who had sojourned in the Lost Lands and who had come away with no memory at all of this interesting place, except for a single message whose gist was that the king of the korriganed—whose name and style no man knew—meant to wed the duchess of Brittany.
Louis said, still laughing heartily, “His Majesty of France has competition for your unicorn-hunter.”
She was impatient. “Yes, yes, very droll. But my informant is reliable. He would not invent a rumor.”
Louis was unmoved. “Someone whispered a tall tale into a credulous ear and so on.” He handed her the letter back with a bow. “What have you to do with pretty fictions?”
She shoved it into the fire. “Nonetheless I will have her betrothed and out of Nantes as soon as may be. One odd circumstance may perhaps be discounted, but the odd circumstances are proliferating, and I dislike it.”
“I have said I am your servant in this,” said Louis of Orléans.
“See that you are,” she answered.
But to herself, Marguerite thought, Proliferating?
The odd circumstances were piling up like leaves around the duchess of Brittany.
Unicorns and faerie-kings. Let the duchess live in Blois or Amboise before the wedding, safe in the rational seat of Marguerite’s very rational court.
A pox on this wet, green, ghost-addled country.
As she and her escort drew near to Nantes, the first thing Marguerite saw was not the high wall of the city, nor the dazzling spires of the cathedral, nor was it the sunlight on the side of the new castle that Duke Francis had built.
No, it was a collection of silk pavilions pitched in the water-meadow beside the rolling Loire, and among them a great hurry of people.
In the midst of all this stood a tall beast on wheels, like a Trojan horse.
No, not a horse, but a unicorn, built upon a cart, with a large, ornate, throne-shaped saddle. Around the unicorn lay absurd gilded swags made of plaster, and a mess of silk streamers.
Louis was riding at her heel; she heard him say dryly, “Is there a feast-day we have neglected?”
Someone must have seen them; sudden turmoil erupted among the pavilions. A group of riders burst from between the tents, most of them dressed and caparisoned for hunting.
“What on earth?” said Marguerite. Her escort pressed in closer.
Orléans said, “A welcoming-party, I think.” She could not tell if he was amused or dismayed.
A girl on a white palfrey called, laughing, to the others, “I saw them first,” just as she came up with them.
She dismounted, handed someone her reins, and made an extravagant courtesy, strands of hair coming loose.
She straightened, smiling. “Well met, cousin.”
“The honor is mine,” Marguerite said automatically, for this could only be Anne of Brittany, mussed and sweating and modishly dressed; nothing like the stiff paragon of virtue Marguerite had envisioned.
Vast, melting eyes, tender mouth, a figure that owed nothing to the dressmaker’s art.
At least there would be no objections to the match from Charles, she thought.
If Marguerite were the girl’s mother, she’d have been negotiating a marriage for her sooner, not later.
“You have come on a blessed hour, cousin,” the duchess said, looking up earnestly.
Marguerite was off balance, and when was the last time that had happened? “Have we?”
“Oh, yes,” said Anne forthrightly. “Wait, come and ride with me and I will tell you.” She turned back to her palfrey, then frowned. “I do forget it’s harder to remount. Henri—come and help me.”
A tall young man, strapped all over with muscle, wearing a thin silk doublet and an ostrich hat, leaped down from his courser and—without a word, but with a very censorious look—boosted the duchess back into the saddle.
This must be the brother, Marguerite thought.
The one deep in the duchess’s councils according to La Trémoille.
The baron of Avaugour, Francis’s bastard.
“As I was saying, this is a blessed day,” the duchess continued breathlessly as she remounted.
“But— Oh, it is my lord of Orléans!” She kissed her hand to Louis and said, “Monseigneur, you are welcome. We had thought you were in prison.”
Was that a barb? Marguerite wondered. Or was the duchess just very na?ve?
“So I was,” returned Louis. “Decayed, forgotten, the black hole, bread and water. But quite restored now to the bosom of my dear cousins of France.”
What did Orléans mean by that answer? A warning? Or was it mere irony?
The duchess had noticed nothing. She was still rattling away innocently. “It must have been dreadful, languishing in prison, with all your French relations resenting you for betraying them.”
“Present company excepted,” said Louis, with a bow toward Marguerite.
“Of course,” said the girl ingenuously, misunderstanding him. “You never betrayed Father, that is true. Though he was quite angry with you after all those battles were lost. But now all is forgiven. Come, or we shall be late.”
Had the duchess misunderstood? Or was she needling him?
Was she as wholly guileless as she seemed?
Marguerite couldn’t tell. Her gelding stood stolidly, but she still felt she was being heaved along by a runaway horse. “Late for what, Highness?” They put their horses into a trot toward the pavilions.