Courtesan (37 page)

“I wonder what his name shall be. . .” he whispered. When Diane did not reply, he looked up, thinking that perhaps she had fallen asleep. She was perfectly still and staring up at the canopy above them.

“Plans must be made,” she said in a voice of resolution delivered just above a whisper.

“What sort of plans?”

“For the child.”

“He. . .or she is our child,” Henri smiled. “His future is secure.”

Diane sat up and leaned against the carved oak headboard. Henri reached up and took a long strand of her blond hair between his fingers but he could not make her smile.

“Henri. . .I will not be the mother of a bastard child. I could not live with the guilt of what he would be forced to endure on my account. This child was conceived in love. In that, he deserves more than you and I can give him. He deserves respect. The way things are here with you and the King. . .myself and the Duchesse d’Etampes. . .he will never have that if the world is to know he is our child.”

Henri’s smile faded. “What are you saying?”

“I am going home to Anet. When I return to Court, to you, and I hope with all my heart that you will still want me. . .he can have all of the titles and honors you wish to bestow upon him as your son, but on this I will not bend; no one can ever know that he is our child.”

H
ENRI CHARGED HIS HORSE
through the thick woods around Fontainebleau, but he felt a million miles from the thundering hooves and the churning dust beneath him.

The plan would need to be executed without flaw for it to succeed. As Henri sat in disbelief that night in Diane’s darkened bedchamber, she weaved for him the elements of an intricate deception. In the intervening months, she had successfully negotiated the marriage of her daughter, Françoise, to Robert de La Marck. Her presence now was required at Anet to supervise the details of that union. It would be a convenient explanation for her abrupt departure, one that would go unquestioned by the Court. Meanwhile, she proposed that Henri should confess to the King a battlefield liaison with a village peasant. The King was to be told that the girl was now pregnant by him. She reminded Henri that as offspring of the Dauphin of France, the King would insist the child be brought to Court and raised with the other royal children. He would also predictably insist that the child’s mother be installed in a good convent to avoid further embarrassment to Catherine. This would remove from them the fictitious paramour. Tales of extramarital children, and the need to make adjustments for them, were not new at the Court of France.

“I wish there was another way,” she had said, as he had listened in horror to the plan. “But I cannot allow this child. . .our child, to be born into this kind of danger. In England they are still calling Anne Boleyn’s daughter ‘the little bastard.’ At least this way, without me. . .he, or she, will have half a chance at a respectable life.”

There were responsibilities. There was honor. Despite his protestations to her that night in her chamber, Henri knew that she was right. He also know that he must have a child with Catherine. France was vulnerable without a legitimate heir. When he was not with Diane, near her. . .beside her, he could see the obligation; see his responsibilities. But he was obsessed with this woman who meant life to him.

He had agreed to her pleas only because he loved her, but even now the prospect haunted him. By her plan, the child could be near to them both at Court and legitimatized as a natural child of France. Natural children, as bastards were delicately called, were an incidental element of royal life. The King had several. Infidelity was an expected course of events among nobility where marriages most often represented political alliances, not matches of the heart.

As he wound through the meadow and past the village, pushing his horse ever harder, he thought how cruel, once again, fate had been to him; as though he were a joke; a toy whose life was to be bandied about for no other reason but for the mere enjoyment of a mighty god. To have given him this woman, the woman he adored. To have given him her love. Now, a child, and yet being made to promise never to acknowledge to another living soul that the child was not only his, but theirs! What purpose could there be in such a fate? Who could find pleasure in such cruel irony? How, in the name of God, could he find the strength to overcome it?

Henri pulled the braided reins and stopped near the river in a meadow thickly carpeted with green grass and bluebells, his chest heaving from the exertion. He tasted the salty tears on his lips; felt the heavy pain of futility. Then the rage began to fill him like Vesuvius and he sprung from his horse. He drew his dagger and began to pace back and forth as though stalking imaginary prey. In his rage his face went purple; his body rigid.

“Never! Do you hear?!” He tipped his head heavenward and howled, full of anguish. “Damn you! Damn you all! You may have forced me into this hell! You may force me to stay here! But I have survived with one last shred of dignity and, by God in his Heaven, I shall not bed her! That one thing you can never. . .never make me do!!”

T
HROUGH THE HOT SUMMER MONTHS,
the relentless battle between the King and the Emperor flared again. Henri returned to his place beside Montmorency at the end of August while Diane went to Anet to await the birth of their child. She would send word to him, she had said, when it was time.

Summer turned to fall with no sign of an end to the siege. Despite his personal quest for peace, Montmorency pushed on in the name of the King, forcing his way along the Val di Susa. More towns fell. More death. More destruction. The garrison of Savigliano. Pinerolo and Turin. The King himself had followed behind with the rest of the army, against the ardent pleadings of his sister and his mistress. He had joined Montmorency for the taking of the Piedmont region, as far as Montferrat, the prize at the border between France and Italy. François had wanted to spare nothing for this assault as the brass ring of Milan, not far beyond, dangled glittering before him.

But the heavy financial burdens of war on the country, and his own failing health, dampened the King’s spirit. By November he was tired again. He was not the same relentless war horse who had claimed Milan for France twenty-three years before.

So, as the burgundy-gold fall leaves blew aimlessly across the courtyard, François returned home to Fontainebleau. Home to his Anne. He was tired of the struggle. Of the deaths. Of the meaningless war that seemed to have no end and was leaching his country dry of its money, its patriotism, and its pride. As he returned this time, he had so little to show for all of the losses that ambition had cost him. The Dauphin, his François, was dead, His daughter, Madeleine, too. Provence lay in ruin from the siege, the royal coffers were nearly dry, and the troops were worn down. There was little chance now that he could ever regain Milan by force. For the first time in years, François began to consider more than an armistice; a legitimate truce with the Emperor. Much to his surprise, he was advised that the Emperor was equally receptive to such an accord. Montmorency was dispatched immediately to Leucate along with the Cardinal de Lorraine, to pursue the idea of peace.

“N
EWS FROM
E
NGLAND,
Your Majesty, “announced Guillaume Poyet, as he strode into the royal apartments waving a crumpled communiqué.

Poyet was the newly named Chancellor of France who had received his post through his connection with Montmorency upon the death of Antoine du Bourg, earlier that year.

“King Henry requests a selection of French brides be sent to him in England, Your Majesty, and his Ambassador suggests that the King would not be opposed if Marie de Guise were among the contenders.”

François was sitting for a portrait in his private drawing room at Fontainebleau. Clouet, the official Court painter, daubed the canvas with short strokes and continued to admonish the Sovereign. If he continued to fidget, the lighting across his face was sure to be ruined. On the other side of the chamber, near a long casement window, the young Archbishop de Rheims studied a chess move against him just made by the King’s third son, Charles.

François scoffed at the news. He thought of Henry VIII. Queen Jane Seymour had not been dead a month. Three wives and all of them gone. One divorced. One beheaded. The other dead in childbirth. A selection of brides from France indeed!

“Our good brother is a pig!” he snapped. “We do not send French women for the choosing; not even for a King! As to the Cardinal de Lorraine’s niece, you may inform the English Ambassador that We have approved her marriage to Our Scottish brother, James.”

François stood and began to cough from the exertion. A steward rushed in with a goblet of wine; another with a silver jeweled walking stick. The portrait sitting was over. Clouet said nothing but began packing up his brushes and oils as the King brushed past him.

The Archbishop ran a hand through his full blond hair and smiled the sharp Guise smile. He watched as the King’s son moved a knight across the marble chessboard and pretended not to notice the exchange between the Sovereign and his Chancellor. So it had been decided. . .his sister a Queen! This was the first he had heard of a confirmation. He knew his uncle would be pleased. He must be told at once!

At the Cardinal Lorraine’s private instructions before his departure to Narbonne to help negotiate peace, Marie’s name was discreetly withdrawn from the list. She would not be a replacement for the Dauphine of France. Following the confrontation between the King and Henri, discussions of a divorce between he and Catherine were also discontinued.

A discreet period of time passed. In October, Marie had been formally proposed as a new bride for Scotland. Charles de Guise knew that King James was pleased with the choice of his sister. Their uncle’s spies had intercepted a communiqué from the Scottish Monarch. He had welcomed her as replacement for the Princess Madeleine. François needed to maintain the new bond with Scotland. There would be no impediment to a wedding. Marie would be Queen of Scotland. Charles would one day become a cardinal, and his brother, François, the most ill appointed of the three, had gained the confidence of the future King. He had worked that like a true Guise! The house of Guise was, as their uncle had foretold, rising in the shadow of the goddess of the moon.

He moved a piece again across the chessboard. This time it was checkmate. Prince Charles scoffed at his opponent’s victory and stood on the other side of the gaming table. First he stomped his foot, then turned his lip out in a childish pout. He leered at the Archbishop and then advanced toward the King. François slapped his son’s back and they smiled at one another.

“Oh, enough of all this!” he declared. “Let us have a game of
jeu de paume.
Is the match set?”

“Yes, Father,” answered Charles. “You know it is the Dauphin who has agreed to challenge me.”

“Ah, so it is. He is awfully good, you know.”

“But I am better. I can win, Father, I can!”

They embraced and then François smiled and held the boy at arm’s length. “Of course you can. After all, I am unrivaled on the court, and you, Charles, are most definitely your father’s son.”

H
ENRI WAS IN PRISON.

The Court of France was his cell; the King, his captor. He had been back at Court little more than a week and yet the prison of his mind was far worse than any Spanish captivity that he could recall; and it was Diane de Poitiers who held the key. She would not see him;
could not
had been her words.
It is not safe,
she had said.
Until just before the child comes. Then I will send for you.

Each day stretched on into eternity. Each night he met his own private hell.
How was she? How was their child?
He was taunted. Tortured by his own thoughts that something had gone wrong.
I must see her. I will go to her. No! I must wait. I will wait, if only because she has asked.

Henri paced the length of the royal
jeu de paume
court waiting for his brother and his brother’s entourage. The fence around the court slowly lined with courtiers, dignitaries and nobles who found entertainment in the personal rivalry between the two brothers. Henri disliked Charles. He found him arrogant and spoiled. Even though they were the King’s two remaining sons, they had never become close. There was the three years between them. And Charles had always been spoiled. The last son;
l’enfant terrible.
Henri detested that; envied that. The rift between them had only increased after the Dauphin’s death. Charles was now the King’s favorite. This match was really nothing more than a public exhibition to display that preference. It would be an arena for the favored son to please the master. Charles had whined and begged Henri for days for such a challenge. After their father, they were the two best players at Court, Charles said; unbeatable, he said. Henri knew he could defeat his brother playing with his eyes closed.

But since he had been forced to return from the front with a truce in sight, Henri had been seized by an insurmountable melancholy, which in Diane’s absence, only violent exercise could quell. Beating Charles in front of the King would serve to stave off the depth of his despair for a little while.

Jacques de Saint-André stood on the other side of the net with his hands on his hips. He had tried volleying the ball to Henri, to ready him for the match, but he continued to miss it. The Dauphin’s mind was elsewhere. He paced the length of the court. His head was down and his brow was lowered into a scowl. Something was wrong. She was not with him, and yet he knew. There was a bond, not physical or even mental. Something higher. Mystical. When he was not with her, he knew things. He knew if she was ill, or sad. He felt it. If she was in trouble. He felt it. Henri. Diane. Since the day that they had met, he was at a loss to know where one ended and the other began.

“Your brother shall be here any moment. Please, you must concentrate.”

“I cannot do this!” Henri announced, not looking at anyone and not certain if anyone had heard. When he tossed the racquet to the ground, whispers rose up among the crowd. Jacques jumped over the net and ran toward Henri.

“Your Highness cannot leave now. The match is set.”

“I must go!”

“But what will everyone think if you forfeit now?”

“To hell with the match! Something is wrong. I know it!”

“Madame Diane?”

“I do not know. I only know that I must go to her, and quickly!”

D
IANE JERKED VIOLENTLY
and rolled onto her side beneath the bedcovers. Beads of sweat formed on her brow and above her lip. She tried to relax; tried to slow her breathing, to try and end the torturous pain pulsing through her body. She lay bracing herself against the next spasm, rigid with fear. Hélène sat beside her squeezing her hand.

“Madame, please, just another breath. Just one more.” She held her own breath to help pace Diane. But something was wrong with the child. Diane could feel it. It had not been like her other pregnancies, and this was not like the other births. This child would surely die, or it was going to kill her first. She had known the risk of having this child at her age. It had fought her from the very beginning. Almost as though it was struggling for dominance of her body. The violent jabs. The sickness. The bleeding. He would not come into this world easily. Her fevered mind played tricks on her. It moved to the image of Queen Jane. She had been told only that morning that King Henry in England had lost his wife to childbirth. She considered the irony.
Poor Queen Jane is dead,
she had heard them whispering in the hall outside her door.
Died in childbirth.
She was supposed to have been asleep. Was it a sign? England’s Queen had been half her age. The clock struck six. A deep, stabbing pain shook her. She stifled her screams by clutching the bedcovers.

“Have you called for His Highness?” she gasped, forgetting that she had asked the same question only moments ago; and an hour before that.

“Yes, of course, Madame,” Hélène patiently replied. She looked up at the midwife who stood at the foot of the bed with her red, wrinkled hands at her face. She was an old woman from the village who had spent most of her life delivering babies; and even more time burying them. She was worried, and she took no pains to hide her concern. The labor was taking far too long. There was little else she could do now but pace and pray.

T
HE CLOCK STRUCK TWELVE.

It was midnight and Diane was weak. The child had nearly sucked the last ounce of strength from her body, and still it would not come. She lay beneath the crimson and gold covers on her bed, her face ashen; eyes rolling back in her head, almost to a close. She muttered to herself, whimpered and then lay quiet for a time, only to begin it all again when the pain returned. Pain and cessation. It went on with the heartless drone of a pendulum. By two, it was pain that ground and tore and left her sweat-drenched and pleading for her own death.

Through it all, Hélène had not left her side. She mopped her brow with a cool cloth and in her other hand held a rosary as she whispered prayers.

“I cannot go on. . .”

Hélène was rocked from her prayers. “Oh no, Madame! You must not say that. You must!”

Diane’s maid bolted from the stool beside the bed and squeezed her hand more firmly. The midwife advanced from the foot of the bed and tore back the heavy covers. She placed her hands onto Diane’s swollen belly to feel the placement of the child. Hélène ran a clean cloth through the white ceramic basin on the stand near the bed. She looked back at the midwife who muttered to herself as she continued to move her hands.

“She is going to be all right. . .isn’t she?”

The midwife placed the covers back over Diane and shook her head.

“If it doesn’t come soon,” she said, gnashing her teeth, “neither of them has a chance.”

I
T WAS JUST BEFORE DAWN
when the echoed thunder of galloping hooves broke across the cobbled stones of the old keep at Anet. The white mare snorted pillows of air as Henri brought him to a halt before the main entrance. He left the horse unattended, and in the dull blue-gray of morning, ran into the main vestibule of the chateau. He raced up the circular stairs without taking a moment to assess where he was going. Past the main hall he ran, to a smaller arched corridor that he knew would lead to the bedchambers.