The Wild Queen Page 6

  “Non, I have not seen the baron,” I replied, adding innocently, “but King Henri visits Lady Fleming quite often, to discuss my education.”

  The uncles looked at each other, smiled, and thanked me. I later learned that they had immediately carried my thoughtless remark straight to Diane de Poitiers. Even with her broken leg, the duchess rushed from Anet to Saint-Germain. That same night, after I finished my prayers and was preparing for bed, Sinclair discovered Madame de Poitiers sitting outside Lady Fleming’s door.

  “Who is she waiting for?” Sinclair wondered aloud, extinguishing all the candles but one. Soon Sinclair was snoring loudly, and I fell asleep quickly after her.

  We awoke sometime later at the sound of a door being slammed. We heard voices, first the startled exclamation of King Henri followed by Madame de Poitiers’s shrill cry. “Good sir, what were you doing in there?” the duchess demanded loud enough for everyone to hear. Sinclair tiptoed to our door and knelt at the keyhole so as not to miss a word.

  “You and that woman, Lady Fleming! Sir, you have betrayed the entire Guise family; your wife, the queen; and your son the dauphin! And the dauphin’s future wife, Queen Marie, who is so unfortunate as to have that disgraceful woman as her governess! I have nothing more to say to you on the subject, good sir, for I love you as sincerely today as I always have.”

  There followed a stunned silence, and then the king’s mumbled reply.

  “The king insists there was nothing evil going on,” Sinclair reported to me in a whisper.

  Diane de Poitiers’s voice rang out clearly “You have dishonored the innocent child sleeping behind that door!” she cried. I supposed that I was the innocent child to whom she referred. “The niece of the Guise family is being brought up by a woman who is nothing better than a whore!”

  Sinclair gasped. “Now that is going a bit too far,” she said, shaking her head.

  The duchess’s shouting and the king’s mumbling went on for a while longer, and then all became quiet again. “I wonder what Queen Catherine will have to say about this episode,” said my nurse, settling onto her pallet near my bed. “Seems that King Henri has two mistresses. I’ll wager the queen will get a bit of pleasure from learning that her rival has a rival of her own.”

  Sinclair was soon snoring peacefully again, but I lay awake thinking of my friend Marie Fleming. No doubt La Flamin would quickly be hearing about her mother’s transgressions. But then I, too, fell asleep. It would be some time before I learned the rest of the story.

  Chapter 10

  Maman's Arrival

  THE MONTHS CREPT BY with unbearable slowness as I waited for my mother. In my impatience I exasperated the duchess and my governess and everyone else within hearing with my constant questions. When will the queen my mother leave Scotland? How long will the journey take? When do you think she will arrive? Will she come here immediately after she leaves the ship?

  Near the end of August Madame de Poitiers announced brightly, “You have not much longer to wait, Madame Marie. The king has dispatched six French galleys to Scotland to fetch the queen mother.”

  Have the king’s galleys arrived in Scotland? How long will they stay? When will they return?

  My brother François, duke of Longueville, would be sent to meet her, but I would not. I received this news with tears of bitter disappointment. “Why may I not go too?” I asked Madame de Poitiers, who replied in a soothing manner, “The king believes it is better this way. Your mother will likely be very tired after her sea voyage. When she has rested and recovered, she will be all the more ready to greet you.”

  I had no more success persuading Queen Catherine, though she did seem sympathetic. “Dear child, if it were up to me, you would be the very first to throw your arms around your beloved mother and receive her grateful kisses. But the king believes it is the son’s duty and privilege to greet his mother first. Then it is the daughter’s turn.”

  “But I am a queen, and my brother is only a duke!” I protested. “I should take precedence.”

  Queen Catherine gave me a long, searching look. “Sometimes,” she said, “precedence is everything, and sometimes it means nothing at all. Be patient, Marie. You will soon see your mother, and you will forget this little delay.”

  I agreed, though reluctantly, for I saw no reason why a son should be more important than a daughter, especially when the daughter was a queen.

  During the long days of waiting, Monsieur Amyot hovered over me as I prepared, memorized, and rehearsed a formal address welcoming my mother. After two years in France, this would be my first public speech. In flowery language, I was to inquire about the state of the church in Scotland. Next, I was to turn to the Scottish nobles in her retinue and exhort them to be loyal to our country and grateful to the king of France for the protection he offered me and my realm. When I had finished, I was to step aside and allow the queen mother to reply.

  We learned that the French fleet carrying my mother and her entourage had encountered foul weather. Then, after a harrowing journey of twelve days, the French galleys sailed into the harbor of Havre de Grace on the north coast. It was the nineteenth of September. Six days later my mother and her court, accompanied by my brother François, rode into Rouen.

  At my first sight of my mother, every word of my fine speech flew out of my head. I heard my tutor nervously prompting me, but I remained dumb. My mother smiled encouragingly At last I found my voice and had managed to stammer only the first two or three phrases when my mother uttered a loud cry, reached out, and pulled me to her bosom. Half suffocating in the brocades and velvets of her gown, I heard the shuffling of the startled dignitaries nearby. After a time, we regained our composure and I finished my ridiculous speech. I cared about none of this! I simply wanted it to be over! When the ceremonies finally did come to an end, we rushed into each other’s arms and wiped away our happy tears.

  Everyone said I had played my role to perfection. Only two years ago the child did not speak a word of French that anyone could understand. My mother’s pride in me was evident. She could not let me out of her sight.

  The king had taken care to arrange every kind of fête and pageant to honor my mother. We watched from a gilded pavilion built on the banks of the Seine and decorated in brilliant blue silk. Dozens of colorful banners fluttered from gilded poles. Horses pranced by, wearing headdresses that transformed them into unicorns. Men in slave dress pushed wheeled platforms carrying tableaux portraying King Henri as a Roman emperor surrounded by his children. Costumed actors fought make-believe battles. Giant papier-mâché elephants thrilled the children, who believed they were real.

  The crowds seemed immensely entertained by the pageantry. Out on the River Seine a mock sea battle was set to take place when disaster struck. Without warning, a barrel of gunpowder exploded on the deck of a ship. The ship sank, drowning members of the crew. I was painfully reminded of the collapse of the drawbridge when I first arrived in France. I had wept then at the loss of life, and I wept now.

  Many of those who witnessed the spectacle did not realize it was a terrible accident, and they cheered and applauded wildly and cried out for more. The organizers arranged another sea battle for the next day, and the same awful accident occurred—another keg of gunpowder, another explosion, another ship down, more lives lost. King Henri ordered a stop to the sea battles, and Maman hurried me away from a scene that upset me dreadfully. I could not rid myself of the feeling that I was in some way responsible for the terrible things that happened, though Maman tried to assure me I was not.

  ***

  Once the fêtes were over, my mother, my brother, and I traveled to Joinville to visit my grandmother. It was the first time Grand-Mère had seen her daughter since Maman left France, eleven years earlier, to marry my father. It would have been a brilliant homecoming and reunion if Grand-Père had been alive, but as he was not, there was far more sorrow than joy.

  Grand-Mère appeared thin and pale, almost ghostly, in her mourning clothes. S
he received us solemnly, embracing my mother and greeting my brother and me with dry kisses. She seemed an entirely different person from the lively woman who had so loved to entertain friends and family at the Château du Grand Jardin. During our visit we never went to the banqueting house my grandfather had built, or even strolled in the once beautiful gardens that now lay neglected. Instead, we sat quietly in Grand-Mère’s gloomy apartments, where black cloth on the windows blotted out every glimmer of sunlight. The little dogs that had once greeted me with joyful barks had been banished. The cages of exotic birds were gone.

  “I have considered withdrawing to pass my last days in a convent, away from this cruel world and its wicked ways,” Grand-Mère told us.

  “What have you decided, dearest Maman?” my mother asked. She was distressed to find her mother in such dark despair.

  “That I am needed here, to oversee the welfare of my family,” my grandmother said. I wondered whose welfare she meant.

  We accompanied Grand-Mère through a dimly lit gallery to offer prayers in her private chapel. The only sound was the whisper of skirts and our hushed footsteps on the stone floor. We passed an empty coffin with an ornately carved lid and a lighted candle at each end. The sight startled me. “Whose coffin is that, Grand-Mère?” my brother asked, his voice echoing in the gallery.

  “Mine,” she said. “I pass it every morning on my way to hear Mass, and several times each day when I come to pray, and I am reminded of the transitory nature of our lives here on earth.”

  I loved my grandmother, but I was relieved when this doleful visit ended. Promising one another to meet again soon, my brother left for Amiens and my mother and I rejoined the French court at Blois, the château with the wonderful staircase. We would spend the winter in the Loire Valley My mother’s brothers, my Guise uncles—François, who had inherited the title duke of Guise when my grandfather died, and Charles, the cardinal of Lorraine—soon joined us.

  My mother and my uncles often retired to the privacy of a small library in the suite of rooms my mother had been given for her stay Surrounded by leather-bound books, they discussed certain matters that were not of interest to me. But once, as I came to beg my mother to settle an argument with one of my friends, I heard her declare firmly, “I will not rest until Arran is out of the picture and I am the sole regent for our little queen!”

  She was talking about me, la petite reine. Naturally, I stopped to listen. A Scottish nobleman, the earl of Arran, had been named regent by the Scottish Parliament to rule Scotland until I came of age, with my mother serving as co-regent. My mother did not wish to share this duty with him or anyone else, that much I understood. She and my uncles decided that I should be declared fully of age at eleven plus one day, four years earlier than the usual age of fifteen. “Then I will serve as queen regent,” my mother said, “and Arran will be out!”

  Such matters were far beyond my comprehension, but I liked the idea of being declared of age when I was eleven—even if I did not know just what that involved. I turned and left quietly.

  On another occasion, when the discussion seemed more interesting, I did not leave. My mother and her brothers were discussing what should be done about Lady Fleming. I hid myself behind a heavy drapery and listened.

  “Lady Fleming is creating a scandal,” said my uncle Charles. “She is having an affair with the king, and she is not even discreet about it! Madame de Poitiers is furious.”

  “Queen Catherine is angry as well, but not nearly so angry as the duchess,” Uncle François remarked. “I think she rather enjoys Diane’s humiliation. The queen has had to sit by quietly all these years while the king openly acknowledged Madame de Poitiers as his mistress. Now they have a common enemy—Lady Fleming.”

  “There is more to the story,” my mother told her brothers. “I have learned from Sinclair, who has an unerring ear for court gossip as it is being discussed among the servants, that Lady Fleming is expecting a child.”

  Expecting a child? I strained to hear better, nearly falling out of my hiding place. Does La Flamin know?

  “How very interesting!” my uncle François exclaimed, and I could imagine him stroking his silky beard as he spoke. “King Henri himself confided to me just days ago that the queen his wife is also with child.”

  A chair scraped across the floor. Someone might leave the reading room at any moment and find me there. Not wanting to be caught eavesdropping, I scurried away—and nearly collided with La Flamin, who had come looking for me.

  “Let us ask the cooks to make us some sweets!” she proposed.

  I was happy to agree. Poor girl, I thought as we ran off together, hand in hand, to the kitchens. She probably has no notion of the trouble her mother is in.

  Chapter 11

  Frittered Pears

  AS MARIE FLEMING and I hurried away from my mother’s rooms, the other Maries caught up with us. We were soon joined by the dauphin, François, and Princesse Élisabeth, and our little group made its way, laughing and talking noisily, down the elegant staircase. All of us loved to spend time in the royal kitchens, where we no doubt made nuisances of ourselves but were tolerated by the cooks. Matteo Panterelli, the Italian pastry chef brought to the French court by Queen Catherine, always welcomed us. Even when he was busy preparing for a banquet, he never turned us away. Chef Matteo said we reminded him of his grandchildren back in Florence—he called it Firenze—where he hoped to return someday. I was fond of Matteo, but not of his assistant, Lucas, a dour man who said little but was clearly annoyed by our presence.

  Chef Matteo wiped his hands on an apron covering most of a great belly and led us to the table he kept set up for us, out of the way of the other cooks and their apprentices and helpers. “What shall we make today, my lady Queen Marie? My lord the dauphin? Gracious ladies?” Matteo asked jovially. His round head was wreathed in a halo of fluffy white hair. “Are you yearning for frittered pears?”

  My favorite dish was frittered pears, and Matteo often helped us make them. Afraid we might harm ourselves using knives, Matteo peeled the fruit and cut out the core and the seeds. I sliced the pears, and Beaton dipped each slice in a batter mixed by La Flamin under Matteo’s watchful eye. Seton and I presided over the skillet of melted butter in which the battered pieces were fried to a golden brown.

  But on the day that I heard my mother and my uncles discussing the scandal of Lady Fleming, I asked instead for pâte à Panterelli, the pastry puffs that were his specialty. I knew they were La Flamin’s favorite.

  Matteo allowed us to mix water, butter, flour, and eggs together to make a stiff paste. He showed us how to mold the paste with spoons so that the blobs formed the most enchanting shapes as they baked—swans, for example. The results seemed almost magical. Princesse Claude, who insisted on joining us though she was only three, always made a great mess. Princesse Élisabeth could not bear to have her hands sticky La Flamin wanted to try anything new, and the other Maries followed her lead. The dauphin, meanwhile, waited to be served, as a king would do. When our pastry swans emerged from the oven, puffed and golden and somewhat lopsided, Matteo helped us fill them with sweetened custard. “Shall we save them for later?” Seton suggested, but of course we did not. We ate every one of them immediately.

  Delicious as our pastry swans were, frittered pears remained my favorite—until they were nearly my undoing.

  This is what happened. In March of 1551 during the spring of my mother’s visit, the court left Blois and moved to nearby Amboise on the opposite side of the river. Overlooking the Loire and surrounded by Italian gardens, Amboise was a favorite of Queen Catherine’s. We arrived the week before Easter, and the king ordered a grand feast to mark the end of the long Lenten fast.

  After Mass in the cathedral on Easter Day, as we made our way in a formal procession back to the château, we heard loud noises and became aware of a sudden disturbance. The captain of the Garde Écossaise, the Scots Guard, specially appointed to protect the king and the royal family appeared and
whispered to King Henri. I saw them both glance at me before the captain saluted the king and left, and then the procession continued on to the banquet hall. I was curious—Why did they look at me?—but there were so many people gathered that I soon forgot about it.

  The royal family, my Guise uncles, my mother, and my brother the duke of Longueville were present. Grand-Mère had ended her formal period of mourning and come out of seclusion for the first time since Grand-Père’s death. Diane de Poitiers absorbed the king’s full attention, and Queen Catherine pretended not to notice. The great hall of Amboise was crowded with French noblemen and their wives as well as the Scots courtiers who had accompanied my mother to France and now followed her as she moved from château to château. Everyone of importance was there, with one exception that I could not fail to notice: Lady Fleming. It was not like my governess to miss a big event like the Easter feast. La Flamin and the other Maries had been assigned to sit in a distant part of the hall, and I would not have a chance to speak to my friends until later. I wondered if La Flamin now knew what I knew: that her mother was expecting a child.

  King Henri gave the signal for my uncle Charles, the cardinal, to bless the feast, first in Latin and then in French. A dozen trumpeters blew a fanfare, and a parade of servants in brilliant blue and red livery entered carrying silver platters piled high with every kind of festive dish, one course after another of roasted meats, grilled birds, baked fish stuffed with herbs, and vegetables I had never tasted before I came to France, such as one called broccoli, which looked like a miniature tree and had been brought from Italy by Catherine de Médicis. Queen Catherine had told me a few days earlier as we sat at our needlework that she had ordered frittered pears to be included on the menu, especially for me.

  I was always a hearty eater, but on that day I forced myself to eat sparingly as I eagerly awaited the frittered pears that had been denied me since the beginning of Lent six weeks earlier. An array of tarts and pastries and other sweets appeared—oranges from the Holy Land, preserved figs, apricots in syrup—but no frittered pears. I was disappointed but said nothing. Later, after the banquet had ended, my mother, pale and shaken, explained the reason.