Chapter 25 #3
On that night he sat upon his carved chair, tensely waiting. The small circle of his intimates sat near him, waiting too, as was their duty. Polhaim thought of Anne of Brittany, even now far away besieged, and he was ashamed. Maximilien had pledged his word and he had broken it.
Then Polhaim thought his restless mind had actually conjured Anne of Brittany in some wild-eyed vision, for she had just stepped out of the shadows into that room’s candlelight.
No, it could not be. Was this that damned inconvenient ghost of Mary of Burgundy?
But Mary had been tall and fair. This apparition was short, and her hair was brown.
It was Anne. He could not mistake her face.
His heart turned over. She must have died and this was her pitiful ghost, come to blame her husband.
But then his staring eyes met hers. In all those nights of vigil, Mary had never once looked at them.
Mary had walked past, smiling, unspeaking, lit by unseen fires, staring at unseen things. A very ghost.
Anne’s gaze went from him to Maximilien. “Who are you?” said Maximilien of Austria, like a dreamer jerked awake.
The girl’s face flushed and paled by turns; her eyes caught the firelight, and she was very beautiful. How could she be here? How?
“It is Anne of Brittany,” murmured Polhaim.
This room was finer than any chamber of Anne’s castle in Nantes, filled with furnishings of rare wood, hung with tapestries of the hunt, lit by pillars of beeswax.
She locked eyes with her husband.
His face was thin and haunted, his hair coming in gray at the temples. She ought to have pitied him in his grief, and she supposed she did. But she was angry too.
Let him believe her an apparition.
She held her husband’s gaze. In Latin, she said, “Why are you here, Sire?”
He looked tired and lonely. Suddenly the impersonal reality of her task—I must make him help me—collided with this glimpse of a grieving man. He had not abandoned her out of cruelty. Perhaps this was her desert, for using his grief to win his hand.
“You are not Mary,” he said.
She said nothing.
He said, “Where is Mary? Can Mary speak to me too? Why has she not?”
There was no time for pity. Anne let her voice knife into him. “She has not spoken because you are forsworn. You married Anne of Brittany, then gave her no protection.”
For an instant it seemed that the forest of beeswax candles was in fact ancient trees, and that between her and Maximilien, like the spring memory of snow, stood the unicorn. The unicorn’s eyes seemed to summon her back out of her own world altogether. Stop playing these games.
This is what I was born for. Anne stayed where she was. A hoof scraped the unseen earth; the beast wheeled and vanished—had never really been there—and the trees were merely pillar-candles.
Anne, shaken, tried to concentrate. “Sire, succor your living wife. For the dead, you must wait upon the Resurrection.”
Maximilien’s face was blank; he looked lost.
Lost? Anne remembered her glimpse of him at his wife’s bedside.
Now she saw that the shadows lay wrongly on his face; he still stood half in the incense-hazed smog of his Mary’s death-chamber.
In the story, King Gralon Meur went into the Lost Lands looking for his dead wife.
How many people drift away from the world thus, propelled by longing?
Anne added more gently, “I fear you have sickened with grief. Your lady would wish me to heal you.”
“Heal me?”
Anne put out a hand. This might be a terrible mistake. His attendants were exchanging frightened looks. What if she took his hand and he would not let her go?
Maximilien’s lips firmed and he crossed the room. He hesitated and reached for her outstretched hand. “You are a fair apparition,” he whispered.
She dared not speak. But she drew him forward into the proper candlelight of his own hall and away from the gray, incense-filled haze that clung around him.
Abruptly his eyes cleared, and she saw the fierce, hawklike face of the man who had commanded armies.
He frowned. His hand tightened and tightened again, so she could not pull free.
Panic spiked through her. In a moment he was going to understand she was not an apparition at all and demand to know what she was doing, how she got there.
Polhaim’s voice cut through the room. “Sire!” he called sharply.
Maximilien was startled; his hand opened.
Anne hastily stepped back and back again, fastening her eyes on the pillar-candles, trying to see them flickering in her own bedchamber in Rennes.
She tried to hide the whistle of her frightened breathing.
Her eyes met those of Polhaim. She saw them full of silent wonder, regret, farewell.
He had known her.
Anne whispered, “It is not meet to dwell only in memory, Sire.”
Maximilien’s eyes mirrored the fire and she realized they were wet. “But I love her beyond death, fair messenger.”
“She knows,” said Anne.
“You let her do what?” Henri was saying to Louis.
It was at that opportune moment that Anne stepped back out of the shadows and stumbled, sweating, to a chair and collapsed into it. She was almost paralyzed with headache.
They surrounded her. Louis was too overwrought to keep his distance then; he knelt before her, pushed back her tangled hair, looked into her face. “What happened?” he asked. “Anne, what happened?”
“I found him,” she whispered. “God, my head.”
“Of all the insane notions,” Louis said. She didn’t open her eyes. Madeleine had fetched a cool cloth; she hesitated, then gave it to Orléans and he pressed it to her aching face.
Anne said, “I had to. My husband was enchanted. It was my duty. I think he is coming now. I do not know if he will be in time. But he will try. We shall ask the diviner tomorrow if there is a message for me.”
She wanted very badly for Louis to hold her, to take her to bed somewhere safe.
She sat still, eyes closed. “But I am still afraid of Moreau, for I think he knows more of sorcery than anyone has known since the Age of Enchantment. And his longings have driven him wholly beyond reason.”