Enchantress of Paris (3 page)

Different.
Not charming like Olympia. Not beautiful like Hortense. Not angelic like Victoire. Not witty like Marianne. Each had potential where I posed a threat. I stood and hoped they wouldn't notice the bottle of lung-wort syrup bulging in my hanging pocket. “You want me out of the way.”

He looked aside. “It is something in your manner. You don't take correction. You have too much command of yourself, and others tend to follow commands you make.”

The wary look on the cardinal's face reminded me of the time I had stolen fresh cannoli from the kitchens of Palazzo Mancini back home on Rome's Via del Corso. Cook had slaved over them. When she caught me with their sweet nut paste on my cheeks, she chased me outside to the courtyard herb garden and cornered me behind the rosemary hedge. She raised a hand to hit me. In my terror I did what came naturally. I pointed and whispered,
You cannot hurt me.
As she brought down her arm, she cried out. She cradled her hand, curled in an ugly cramp.
Strega!
she cursed.
You little witch!
She'd looked at me then the way the cardinal and my mother looked at me now.

“You are wrong.” I thought of the charm in my pocket. “My sisters never do a thing I say.”

Mamma fell back on the bolsters.

My uncle's words were a drop of honey in a bowl of vinegar. “We want to protect you.”

I frowned at him. “You want to protect
yourself
from superstitions you claim have little merit.”

They glanced at each other, and the pain in my mother's face made my heart drop. I had gone too far.

She closed her eyes. “This fuss is making me worse.”

My uncle tried to usher me away, but I threw myself on the bed, kissing her hands. “Mamma, forgive me. I would never disgrace you. At least make His Eminence give me time!” My tears showered her frail skin, and I longed to give her the syrup. She cupped my face; I met her eyes.

But then she started coughing. My uncle jerked me back so hard I nearly fell on the floor. The physicians rushed in. The women reappeared, darting around, fighting fear and death with cloths and basins of water.

“Insolence,” said my uncle, pushing me toward the door.

But I called past him, “Don't die and deprive me of my sisters, too!”

I heard sobs between coughs, and the door slammed before my face.

 

CHAPTER
2

I left the Palais du Louvre in a haze, throwing myself facedown on the seat in the cardinal's waiting carriage. I wanted to cry and scream, but there were no more tears. I needed my sisters. The cardinal's six horses made the coach fly down the rue Saint-Honoré. An extravagant number of horses for such a short distance, but His Eminence wouldn't have a Mazarinette ride in anything less splendid lest it reflect poorly on him.

They carried me past the gardens of the Palais-Royal, through the arcade of Palais Mazarin, and stopped in the court. I rushed into the hall. There was not one block of marble here, not one crystal sconce, not one painting worth less than a blacksmith's or a butcher's life savings. I'd seen Mazarin's coffers full of gold in the dungeons of the fortress of Vincennes when we'd stopped on our way to the convent two years earlier. My uncle had amassed wealth not only by ordinary landholding, like nobility, but also like a true Italian. He'd played moneylender, sold offices, and controlled the price of treasury bonds, buying them low and selling them high. How did I know his secrets? I glanced down the gallery toward his library, which housed more books than any other in France. In his adjoining study, where he hid the most important books, I'd stumbled upon Mazarin's private ledgers.

Might my father's papers be hidden there?
I took a flickering taper from a sconce and tiptoed into the vast library and beyond, into the study. It swallowed up my small light, and I closed my eyes. I had explored this room every night since my return, devouring the philosophers on the shelves on the west wall, the mathematics on the southern shelves, and the explorers on the east side. But a locked case against the northern wall held the real treasures: forbidden books. Burned by ordinary churchmen, they were coveted by ambitious ones. Books about the stars, written in Arabic symbols that I couldn't yet decipher. Books on astrological medicine, with diagrams of the dissected human body's inner organs. Volumes on alchemy with colorful symbolic illustrations. Handwritten grimoires with spells to cure and to curse. And my favorites, the earthy-smelling herbals, which I felt contained the real magic.

Then there were the dangerous books, ones that once belonged to my father. The
Key of Solomon,
written by King Solomon himself, and the
Sworn Book of Pope Honorius
explained how to conjure and command demons.
Heptameron
was no safer, with its instructions for conjuring angels. Being caught with these would have condemned my father to burning at the stake for necromancy. Papa had been a respected Roman noble, too clever to get caught. Now my uncle kept them with
Picatrix
and occult books by Agrippa for purposes unknown.

I opened my eyes, stuck the taper in a candleholder, and snatched the key from beneath a marble bust of Julius Caesar.
If Mancini papers are anywhere, they are in that case.
I opened the glass doors, running a finger over worn spines until I touched a leather-covered casket in the corner. Always preoccupied with the books, I'd ignored it before. The lock gave easily, and papers spilled to the floor.

The first two dozen packets were letters with a unique seal: intertwined initials encircled by the letter
S
repeated four times. I scanned them. They seemed to be letters written by my uncle and the king's mother, Anne of Austria, Queen of France. They were …
love letters
! I took them to the taper, reading expressions of passion and affection, shaking my head in disbelief. I read whole passages of instruction, written by my uncle during the Fronde, on how the queen mother should guide the king
his son.

I had heard the rumor. Every Parisian pamphleteer had circulated the claim that Mazarin was the king's real father, but nuns at my convent dismissed it as gossip. Now I thought through physicians' ledgers and other letters I'd read in this study that supported the story.

I stacked the letters with shaky hands and dug into the casket for the last item. A book more than a hundred years old titled
Strife of Love in a Dream
by Francesco Colonna. Had he been a member of the powerful Colonna family in Rome that had supported my uncle in his childhood? I flipped through the pages and caught my breath. The lettering was like none I'd seen, the woodcut illustrations highly detailed, the language Latinate Italian. It told the story of a man in a pagan dreamworld, encountering mythic gods as he strove to find the woman he loved. As I read, a folded parchment fell from its pages to the floor.

I picked it up, recognizing Papa's handwriting.
My horoscope.
Inside a great square were twelve triangular houses, and the symbols within explained each planet's position at the time of my birth. My eyes welled up as I read his notes in the margins.
A brilliant mind, but disobedient.
I admitted to both of those traits. Faint scribbles said,
A mysterious star in Libra suggests she will abandon her husband.
The star wasn't named. The last note shocked me.
Her gifts in divination may cause her downfall.

Not if I could help it.

I held the parchment over the taper until it caught fire. I walked it to the empty hearth, remembering a time my father had stared into flames. He had carried me from my bed and bundled me in front of him on horseback for a midnight ride out of Rome. On an open hill beyond the city walls, he had scratched a magic circle into the dirt. He had warned me not to leave his side, uttered strange names, and thrown pungent herbs on an altar fire. I had been too tired to understand why the night shadows dancing beyond his flame seemed to gather together like phantoms, descending on us and terrifying me. I'd closed my eyes tight and remember nothing more. Had those spirits confirmed I would cause trouble?

My horoscope burned wildly, singeing my fingertips, ashes falling on the hearth.

*   *   *

Moments later I slipped into the apartment I shared with my sisters. They paused. Victoire held a brush over Marianne's head, Hortense looked up from her book, and Olympia turned from the fireplace and said, “Where have you been?”

“Mamma wishes me to become a nun.”

Olympia shrugged and turned back around.

But Victoire beckoned me to the dressing table. She gestured for Hortense to take over brushing Marianne's hair, then unlaced my bodice. “What did Mamma tell you?”

With my laces undone, I took a deep breath. “One of our father's predictions. He said I would disgrace you all.”

Olympia didn't look at us. “Oh, that.”

“You knew?”

Victoire nodded. “We never thought much of it. You could never disgrace us.”

Olympia snickered. “She disgraces us every day when she goes out in those convent rags.”

I stared at my bodice, gray wool trimmed with black velvet, as Victoire tossed it aside. She helped me step out of the matching skirts. “I've had no need for court dresses.”

Olympia stirred a pot hanging from a hook in the fireplace, making the scent of spices swirl through the air. She struck a fetching image in her lace chemise, but this was the sort of potion-making our uncle detested. “You slouch,” she said. “You wear your hair too flat. Your neck is too skinny and your lips are too big. You wear no jewels.”

I glanced in the looking-glass, where I now stood in nothing but my own chemise. I straightened my shoulders and tried to fluff up the tendrils hanging in bundles behind my ears. They fell back, limp and lifeless. “You took my only necklace, Olympia.”

She grinned.
“Borrowed.”

“Then give it back. I want to look my best tomorrow.”

Hortense poked me. “So you can flirt more with the king?”

Marianne gaped. “Did the king flirt back?”

Olympia lifted a spoon to her nose and sniffed. “Even if I give back your measly pearl necklace, the king will never flirt with
you.
”

My face burned as Victoire sat me beside Marianne to brush my hair. “I want the pearl hair pins, too.”

Hortense interrupted. “The king
was
flirting with Marie. I saw.”

Olympia snatched a glass vial from the carved marble mantel and spooned golden liquid into it. “Well, he won't do it again.”

“What's that you're making?” asked Victoire.

“Liquid assurance.”

Victoire dropped her brush. “Not again.”

I gasped. “Another love potion for King Louis? You shouldn't.”

She'd concocted one the day I returned from the convent. Right when the king's carriage had arrived, she'd poured it into the brandy decanter in our salon. She ran away, planning on doubling back through the upstairs gallery to join the king as he entered the salon and then serving his brandy herself. But she tripped on the Turkish carpets and ended up under the stairs crying over a sprained ankle. I had to wrap it with dried St. John's wort to calm her down. King Louis drank the tainted brandy and promptly spent half an hour with the gardener's daughter in an alcove. Alone. Olympia was beside herself. The gardener's daughter had been sent away the next day.

Now Olympia frowned. “It is
not
a potion. It's just a … a little ginseng infusion to encourage his passions.”

“What does that mean?” asked Marianne.

Hortense laughed so hard she clutched her middle. “It means that once King Louis drinks it, he will rub himself against Olympia until she finds herself pregnant.”

“Quiet.” Olympia plugged her vial. “I won't allow King Louis to do
that
until after I'm married.”

Marianne jumped up. “I don't understand.”

Victoire poured water into a silver bowl for me to wash my hands and face. “What Olympia means is, she wouldn't let the king … rub against her
until
she is married. So if she does get with child, society won't realize it's a bastard.” Victoire scrubbed my face with a linen cloth a little too hard. “If our uncle catches Olympia making such potions,
she
will be the disgrace of the family and locked in a convent.”

Marianne clapped. “Get caught, Olympia. I claim your bed!” She ran to Olympia's bed, the biggest, covered with more silk and gilding than the others. She bounced up and down on it squealing, “I claim your bed, your clothes, your jewels, and even the jewels you stole from Marie!”

Even Olympia had to laugh. Victoire kissed each of us and went home to the Hôtel de Vendôme, to her husband and children. We settled to our routine of rubbing almond oil into each other's nails and rearranging pillows. Olympia and I tucked Hortense and Marianne under their coverlets and pulled their bed curtains closed.

That's when I tried to warn Olympia. “Olympia, if King Louis cannot expend the passion you inspire, he will become frustrated.”

“How do you know anything of men?” She took my brush and plopped herself before the great looking-glass, stroking her hair. “I will give him just enough to hold him in thrall until my wedding.”

I decided not to tell her which books I'd read or how I'd gotten them. “You don't love him.”

She waved this comment away. “Intimacy with the king is the loophole to power. He must tell his secrets and desires to no one but me.”

“I don't understand.”

Her expression changed. “You weren't here for the Fronde wars when Paris was a raging mob, burning, raping, pillaging, slaughter in the streets. Our uncle moved us just in time, plotting battles, buying loyalties, subduing the French nobles. He saved us. I
never
want to see that mob rise against us again. You would do well to follow his commands.”