Courtesan (12 page)

“Be that as it may, Your Majesty, he is still a Prince of France; from the same house of Valois as the Dauphin. Is that not really what is of foremost importance to his Holiness the Pope?”

François scratched his beard as he considered it. “Henri,” he pondered, and then lost himself in the image of his second son. “What a delight he was to his mother; but oh, what a plague he has been on me. I fear he shall never forgive me for sending him to prison in my place.”

“Then perhaps Your Majesty should consider the possibility that marriage would settle him, give him direction.”

“Your Majesty, please!” Montmorency sprung to his feet, growling like a bear. “Surely you could not consider such a disastrous thing for His Highness in his tenuous state! He is so fragile!”

“Grand Master Montmorency, I shall thank you to remember that I may do as I please! It is I who am King! Besides, I think Henri is not fragile so much as he is insolent. I thank God every day of my life that he is not my first son; not the Dauphin.”

Philippe Chabot let a smile pass across his lips for only Montmorency to see, but the Grand Master would not be put off.

“Your Majesty, if Suleiman does come back with the necessary support against the Emperor, you shall be able to conquer Italy and you shall have surrendered your son for nothing!”

“Oh, do shut up!” Chabot snapped.

François sat expressionless, toying with his rings. He studied the face of each of his advisors. Both had their points. If he chose to side with Suleiman, it would be the first real offensive since the disastrous defeat at Pavia. So many lives had been lost. Such a price had been paid. By the power of God Almighty, he alone had been made King. It was up to him to make the final decision and to live with the consequences. But Montmorency was right. Like it or not, Henri too was his son and the boy was troubled. He would ask him to sacrifice no more for France. At least not for the moment.

“And to think,” he whispered, slowly stroking his beard. “Sweet Milan; it was mine once.” He held up his hand to the others. “I had it right here. . .right here in the palm of my hand.”

“So Your Majesty will again,” said Duprat. “One way or another. And when that day comes, then there shall be no limit to the glory of France.”

O
VER THE TOP OF THE
garden hedge
,
Prince Henri had a perfect shot at his brother. Like a cat in wait, he perched silently, scarcely breathing, for the precise moment in which to strike. Metallic black eyes glimmered in the sunlight beneath thick waves of ebony-colored hair. Charles, his full-faced younger brother, stood beside him peering through a break in the hedges.

“Henri, stop it. I don’t want to watch anymore,” the boy whined.

“Then be gone with you, you whiny little toad, before I decide to beat you senseless. Go on!”

After his brother had gone, Henri returned his gaze to the other side of the hedge where the tall, thin Dauphin, the very mirror of the King, groped and pressed himself tightly against the raised gown of Marie, the daughter of the Comtesse de Sancerre.

“Please, Your Highness, it is not proper,” she moaned as he skillfully raised her skirts still higher, his other hand pressing deeply into the cleavage between her two breasts.

“But I will it, and I am to be King!” he muttered as he plied her neck with moist, ardent kisses. “Besides, no one is to know. Just let me do it a little,” he persisted as she weakly tried to free herself from his large groping hands.

Henri raised himself over the hedge, observing his brothers’ curious bestial behavior. He had seen the stud in the stables last spring as he had persisted in mounting the King’s prize mare, but this human encounter was foreign to him. Even more, it was repugnant.

He could not believe that people could actually enjoy committing such an uncivilized act. It was an odd thing to watch, all the skin and sweat, and Henri found himself taken from his own mission. He watched as his brother coaxed the young girl into submission between the boxwood hedges.

“Splat!” The stone reeled from the sling shot, pelting the Dauphin on his bare, rising buttocks.

François shook his head, and without needing to identify the offender, yelled, “Great Zeus, Henri, I shall get you!”

He faltered as he raised his puffed-velvet trunk hose, and then charged through the bushes after his younger brother. Henri was faster. He ran like the wind between the neatly cropped hedges and through the maze of tall yews and rose bushes. Only a stray bramble impeded Henri’s speed, and he finally tumbled to the ground. The two brothers wrestled in the dirt. Henri’s fierce anger overcame his older brother’s agility. Henri pulled François’ arm behind his back and screwed it tightly. Both boys were panting hard from the run.

“Petty little bastard! No wonder Father despises you,” the Dauphin muttered, trying to catch his breath. Henri twisted the arm tighter and his brother wailed with pain.

“Does not!”

“Does too!”

“Take it back, François!”

“I will not!”

Henri forced his brother onto the ground and pushed his face into the loose dirt. “All right!” he screamed. “I take it back. But wait until Father hears what you’ve done to me. Spying on me like some seething little lecher, and then flogging me to boot!”

Henri freed his grip on François, who wallowed face down in the dirt. “You don’t really want to do that, now do you, brother dear? After all, then I should be forced to confess on whom you were pouncing when I spied you! The King should be most unsettled to know it, since he has been doing the very same thing himself to the same little whore!”

Henri loosened his grip on the Dauphin’s arm.

“You wouldn’t!” François cried. Tears spilled onto his dirty face as Henri grabbed the limp arm and screwed it tighter once again. “All right, I won’t tell him!”

“Then we understand one another, do we?”

The Dauphin shook his head in agreement and, upon being released, made his way back to his feet, brushing furiously at his dusty garments. “What I understand is that I despise you as much as Father does!” François continued to brush at his dirty stockings. “I will tell you what else I understand. I understand that you are going to punish all of us for the rest of your days for what happened in Spain!” He stood erect now and positioned himself in defense. “Well, little brother, it seems that you have forgotten that I was in that spartan prison with you! I faced the same harshness, the beatings, and the same putrid odors; I remember it all as well as you. I, however, have managed to face our obligations as any true man of honor would have, and you do not see me whining on and on about the past, or torturing Father for it!”

“He left us alone there for four years!” Henri cried out. “My God, François, I was six years old! I could not even speak our own language by the time we were allowed to come home! How can you forgive him when he returned to the safety of France and let his own sons bear the burden in exchange?”

“The King was needed here. We endured what was necessary for him and for France,” the older boy stoically replied.

“But how can you be so passive when the mere mention of it incites in me such violence I could likely kill him if he were here! We spent an eternity in that dark, awful smelling place, and God, how I hate him for it!” Henri’s nostrils flared and his eyes welled with tears as he seethed the bitter words.

“I suppose that is what separates the two of us, little brother. Two sons of a great King. One is to be the next ruler of France and the other is destined for a life of banal obscurity. You see, Henri, I have had the grace to forgive His Majesty for what circumstances forced him to do. You are not a child anymore. It is time you tried to grow up and forgive him as well.”

“Never!” Henri seethed. “I shall never forgive him! Never!”

“Poor little bastard,” the Dauphin sighed, shaking his head.

H
ENRI WALKED SLOWLY
toward the palace, taking a different path than his brother had. He did not want to see anyone. It hurt too much, and his mind was still too full. The anger, the bitterness, and the pain were all jumbled together and impossible to separate. He wandered alone through the formal gardens, past the white iron gazebo, and past countless stone benches, until he knew by the scent of fresh basil and thyme that he was near the kitchen gardens.

The kitchens were a sanctuary; so full of earthy smells and all teeming with life. He liked to go there sometimes and just wander among the staff. He could share a mug of wine or a cup of mint tea and a joke with one of the stewards. They were a curiosity to him with their rough hands and their honest faces. He knew that they were not comfortable with him there. He was, after all, a royal Prince and they were his servants. But Henri thought of it as a place to take refuge from the world; a world away from the excesses and hypocrisy of his father’s licentious Court.

He felt himself smile, and then quickened his step. The aroma of freshly baking bread came to him first, then the rich aroma of roasting pheasant. Capon. Partridge. But it was the cake made of pine nuts and marzipan, his favorite, which sent him bolting through the open doors.

As he entered the pantry, he could see the servants gathered around the large stone ovens. They all stood beneath great collections of dead birds that were suspended by the feet from the rafters in preparation for the meal. The walls and low-beamed ceiling were brown and thick with grease. Ropes of onion and garlic hung near the door. Henri pushed aside the servant blocking his view, to see a lifeless bloody mass emerge from the loins of the dog around which the kitchen help had crowded. He was mesmerized by the sight.

“It is so helpless,” he whispered, looking at the wet, pink puppy, its eyes still sealed.

“Just nature taking its course, Your Highness,” said an old woman named Clothilde, who knelt before the dogs.

“Why is the mother not tending to him like the others?”

“She may not, Your Highness.”

“What will become of him?”

Clothilde reflected a moment and wiped her flat nose with a dirty hand before uttering her reply. She rubbed her hand slowly over her chin and mumbled, “Well. . .if she doesn’t open the sack soon, the pup’ll surely die. . .But then she’s got five others to keep her busy.”

“No!” he shouted. The kitchen maids, the cooks and stewards looked at him from their crouched positions around the bitch. He had startled himself with his own reaction. “What I mean to say is, is there not something we can do?” The cooks and servants all looked at one another with various expressions of surprise. Clothilde rubbed her nose again.

“We could cut it loose. But then it’s likely that the
maman
won’t have a thing to do with it.”

“Cut it!”

“Your Highness, it needs mother’s milk. It’d be cruel to give it life just to have nature snatch it away.” There was a note of tenderness in her voice as she rubbed the back of her hand on her long soiled apron, which long ago had been white.

“Please! You must do what you can,” he pleaded in a quiet whisper. The old woman, who was hardened by too much work and too many babies herself, was touched by his naiveté. She let a gentle smile pass across her coarse full lips.

“Roland, bring me a knife.”

“Oh, Clothilde—”

“Just do it!” she ordered, and the hulking servant washed in perspiration, rose to his feet. He looked at her one last time and then proceeded with a groping movement into the bowels of the hot kitchens.

Henri knelt by the dog who now tended to all but one of her newborn pups, biting at their sacs and licking up the blood. Knife in hand, Clothilde lumbered with a huffing sound, and knelt beside Henri. As graceful and as careful as the artists upstairs, she raised the pup and began to cut the thick casing around him. The mother dog raised her head and let out an impotent growl. Finally, freed from its amniotic prison, the little wet pup squirmed and squealed. As she had predicted, the mother dog ignored it.

“What would make her choose one of them over the others?” Henri asked.

“Some are just bad seeds, Your Highness. Only God knows why. We’ll feed it sheep’s milk and pray for the best.”

He looked at the mother dog who lay several feet away licking and nursing her five other offspring. The orphan, whose eyes were still sealed, squirmed and squealed so helplessly that Henri felt compelled to pick him up. The animal, which fit into the palm of his hand, instinctively began searching for its mother’s nipple. Henri drew the little mass of wet fur near to himself, then cradled it with the awe and wonder with which one holds a baby for the first time.

Henri had never loved anyone except his mother, whose quickly fading image consisted now of barely more than a few random memories. The sound of her laugh. The smell of her hair, freshly washed with camomile. Yes, he remembered her hair, but he could no longer remember her face, her touch or her love.
What will become of my poor Henri?
she had asked as she lay dying in her bed at Blois. She knew his father had no use for the boy then, nor would he ever. He was too consumed with his heir, the Dauphin; his François.

Since there were no extra crates or rags that were not needed in the running of the enormous kitchens, Henri looked around to improvise a bed for his little charge. He took a large wooden bowl from one of the cooks and set it at the opposite side of the raging kitchen fire. Then he began to remove his doublet and lined the bowl with his costly yellow silk shirt. Clothilde and Roland looked at one another but neither uttered a sound. Henri replaced the doublet on his bare back like a vest. The pronounced muscles of his arm swelled through the sleeveless jeweled vest, more in the manner of a laboring servant’s body than the son of a King.

After the pup had fallen asleep, he was placed near the fire at a distance from the other newborn dogs. Henri looked around the large basement kitchens now that the little creature had been secured, and he sighed. He felt his stomach grumble. All of this and his fight with the Dauphin, and now he was famished.

As Clothilde began to cut a warm cake and Roland went to fetch the sweet wine, Henri sat down on one of the long oak benches at a trestle table in the rear of the low-ceilinged kitchen. He ran his fingers through his hair and watched an old man with no teeth on the opposite side of the bench, rubbing laboriously at a large tarnished-silver urn. Another man sat a few feet away. He and a small barefoot boy plucked feathers from the carcass of a pigeon which the man held between his knees.

“He is a nice enough boy, do you not think?” Clothilde whispered to Roland as she lay three neat slices of cake on a chipped ceramic plate.

“For the son of a King, yes, I suspect he is.”

“Such a nice smile. . .but such terribly sad eyes.”

“T
HERE YOU ARE,
you bastard!”

Henri yelled at Jacques de Saint-André and then charged toward him in the middle of the formal parterre. “Where have you been? The pox on you for hiding from me!”

“Oh, no games with me, Your Highness, not today.
Jésu!
I should flog you myself, instead of saving it for my father to do! The real question is, where have
you
been? You know, he has gone again to the King about you. God save you, will you never learn?”

“Learn to obey our Sovereign King? Let the devil take me first!” he said, and then spat on the ground. “Now come on, old friend, do not be cross. Why not play me a game of
jeu de paume
instead?”