The Shadow Queen A Novel (2 page)

THE SUN WAS
about to set when we found the opening to a cave. Remnants of a wolf carcass, charred logs, and a sharpened stick were evidence that the site had been home to humans before. An overhang offered protection from inclement weather.

The slope was wreathed in frost-withered vines, clematis, and primulas. On the far side of the valley, atop a rocky height, I could see the city of Poitiers. Church steeples rose above a cloud of smoke.

“Perfect,” Father said, regarding the vista. At the edge of a steep incline, we wouldn’t be taken by surprise.

The floor of the cave was wide and dry, the walls smooth. Holding a rush candle, I saw crude images of large animals painted onto the stone.

Gaston made echoes in the cavern as I hauled in the basket of bedding. “Come help, Turnip,” I sang, for he understood words best when put to tune. He ran to me, stumbling. “Doucement, mon petit!”

Outside, Mother set the tiny wood statue of the Virgin in a rock nook and arranged her tokens around it: a bouquet of dried carnations, a corn-husk doll, a chipped teacup, a rusty key. “How delicious is pleasure after torment,” she recited in a deep and melodic voice, quoting a line by the great playwright Corneille.

The familiar words rang out across the valley. We might suffer from want, but at least we had poetry.

CHAPTER 2

T
he next morning, Father and I set out back down the mountain, picking our way around boulders and rugged outcrops. “Tracks,” Father noted as we passed a pond ringed by trees and bushes. Deer tracks: we would be back.

Our intention was to go into the city and approach the Court, offering to perform lofty passages from the Great Corneille as well as some light entertainment. The young King—no older than I—would likely be bored and desirous of amusement. If we succeeded, we would be rewarded well.

As we got closer to Poitiers, we saw caves much like our own, many of them occupied. Some had gardens and plank doors, but most were hovels. Bone-thin children held out their hands. I delighted them with a flip; at least I had that to give.

Soon the path widened and we were joined by others—peasants going to market, three youths on a mule. We followed a road edging a river until a bridge came into view. Six heads were set on pikes at the top of a tower.

Father hung a tin cross conspicuously around his neck. “I’ve only five deniers,” he told me—not much in the way of a bribe. We pushed through the mewling beggars to join the long line of people waiting to get into the city.

“Where are you from and what business do you have here?” a pudgy guard asked when we finally got to the gates.

At least that’s what I thought he said. Every town and village spoke a different patois.

“French, Monsieur?” Father suggested as the guards took our satchel for inspection.

Another guard, this one with a thick black moustache, made a so-so gesture. “This Christian town is,” he informed us in broken French, regarding us suspiciously. “No beggar, no Jew, no Roma.”

Father explained that we had come to the fine town of Poitiers to visit his old aunt, who was breathing her last. He made a sad face and pressed the cross to his heart, miming grief. His best shirt of embroidered cambric showed under his jerkin.

The moustached guard shrugged at his partner, who had opened our satchel. He held up my slapstick with a puzzled expression. My heart jumped, fearing he would take us for players.

“To amuse my cousins,” I explained. The wood slats, held together at one end, made a splendidly loud noise, perfect for comic skits. I demonstrated the motion with a snap of my hand.

The guard copied my gesture and jumped at the
clack
the sticks made. He laughed and gave it to the other guard to try.
Clack! Clack! Clack!

The plump guard wanted to do it again himself.
Clack! Clack!
He laughed like a child with a new toy.

I was relieved when he put the sticks back in the satchel and waved us through.

WE HEADED UP
the hill, through the narrow, congested streets and into the heart of the ancient city. I paused at a stable yard. “Should I change?”

Father nodded. “I think we’re close.”

I slipped behind a wall, taking care where I stepped. My breeches were baggy around my hips—I stuffed my skirts into them and slipped on the short jacket, pulling up my stockings and tightening the twine on my big boots. Last, I applied a cream of chalk powder mixed with egg white to my face, then patted on just a bit of (precious!) flour. I secured the wig under my chin with a frayed ribbon.

I did a duck walk back out to the cobbled street and saluted my father. He grinned, every part of his face smiling, his brows lifting like the outstretched wings of a bird. Mother told me I looked just like him. I had his thick auburn hair.

“Don’t move,” he said. There were three men standing in front of a tavern across from the stable yard. They watched as Father shaped my smile with some of the red clay we’d found near Roussillon. Then I did a flip for them.

“Chapeau! Formidable!” they cheered.

A line of hooded men in black appeared in procession, carrying crosses and chanting like droning bees in a hive. The Company? Big, ragged holes had been cut in the cloth for their eyes. One man turned to stare, his eyes rolling ghoulishly. I lowered my head and signed myself, praying in fear as they passed.

THE PALAIS DE JUSTICE
opened onto a crowded square with a scaffold at its center. I clambered after my father, heart racing.

The vast guardroom was like a church: dark, cold, and echoing. Thick tree trunks were burning in four enormous fireplaces at one end, yet they gave off little heat. A long plank table was heaped with the remains of a feast. A wave of longing came over me as I gazed at the leavings: a fish stew, something that smelled like partridge and cabbage potage, a platter of beignets (Mother’s favorite).

Two spaniels and a greyhound snapped and growled under the table. The greyhound’s snout appeared, and a beignet was gone.

Hunger made warriors strong, Father said. Swallowing, I stepped back.

After inquiries, Father was directed to a city magistrate who in turn told him to speak to Monsieur le Duc de Mortemart, charged with arranging entertainments for the royal family. We went through a small courtyard where a number of soldiers were smoking pipes and passing an earthenware crock between them. I stayed close behind Father, following him through an arch into yet another courtyard, and then another. On the far side, four guards leaned beside a double door.

“I wish to see Monsieur le Duc de Mortemart,” Father announced in his aristocratic voice—the voice he adopted for playing the parts of kings.

Yawning, a young guard with a hint of a beard opened one door. I made an exaggerated clown bow, but he didn’t smile.

Flushing, I climbed two steps at a time, joining Father in a dark antechamber off the landing. We waited beneath a tall window of Venetian glass; covered with soot, it let in little light.

One Ave Maria, two, three … On the fourth, a footman appeared and ushered us into an elaborately furnished room with a high ceiling and a great hanging candelabra. Candles had been lit despite the hour. A coat of arms was painted on a china vase: a shield with a menacing blue snake curled in the lower quadrant.

A man in velvet and old lace looked up at us from a desk covered in papers and scrolls: the Duke. The coat of arms must be his, I surmised. His shaved head was covered with a skullcap; a wig hung over the back of a chair. I wondered if he was a knight.

The footman gestured: step forward.

Father put down our satchel, bowing and greeting the mighty Monsieur le Duc de Mortemart formally, in Latin.

“Spare me,” the Duke groaned in French. His lips were stained red and his cheeks rouged. From the cracks in his face powder, I suspected he’d been napping. He had the manner of a man under water.

Father explained in his most melodic French that we were players, members of an acclaimed acting troupe. The tragedies of the Great Corneille were our specialty, but we also excelled in comedy, skits perfectly suited to engage the interest of the thirteen-year-old King.

“With your indulgence, Monsieur?” Father handed me the slapstick and we launched into a skit, one that involved tumbles, jumps, and my thundering sticks. I ended our demonstration with a
triple
flip. I bowed, breathless and triumphant, Father looking on in astonished wonder.

“Get these devils out of here!” the Duke growled, holding his temples.

THE FOOTMAN ESCORTED
us roughly out the door, tossing our satchel after us.

“How tragic to be a humorless man,” Father said amiably at the landing, but I could see the worry on his brow. Our plan had failed.

I put the slapstick back in the satchel. “I’m sorry, Father.”

“Nil desperandum,”
he said philosophically. Never despair. “You were magnificent, Claudette. A triple! I didn’t know you could do that.”

We emerged into the enormous guardroom. The dogs were sleeping on a sunny patch of stone, the table ravaged. Father headed for the doors, but I lingered, snatching a few of the remaining beignets. At least we would not return to Mother and Gaston empty-handed.

“Do you do enchantments?” It was a girl’s voice, directly behind me.

“Excusez-moi?” I concealed the beignets before turning around.

“I asked if you do charms.” The girl spoke French with a refined aristocratic inflection, somewhat archaic. I guessed her to be ten or eleven, a few years younger than I was. Her long, golden curls were tied up with extravagant silk ribbons, framing an astonishingly pretty face. Spots of pink had been painted on her cheeks and her enormous sapphire-blue eyes were lined with kohl. She looked like a heavenly creature.

“Certainly,” I stammered, disconcerted by her noble bearing. An elderly woman, a governess by her dress, hovered about ten paces back.

I glanced toward the doors. Father was talking with a guard and seemed in no hurry. “And tricks of the tumbling kind,” I said.

“I make faces.” The girl blew out her cheeks and extended her neck, widening her eyes to make the face of a ghoul.

“That’s magnificently ugly,” I told her, and made a wide grimace in return.

“You have good teeth,” the girl said, miming my frightening grin.

We were like animals, courting.

“I live in a magical kingdom,” the girl boasted.

“I live in a magical cave.”

“Oh,” she breathed. “With bats?”

I nodded, of course.

“Do you do magic there?” she asked, switching to schoolgirl Latin.

“Vere,”
I responded in Latin.

“Then you must know how to cast spells.”

“Why?” I asked with a mysterious look.

“I want to kill my governess,” she said, in whispered French this time.

I laughed.

“I do not jest.”

I saw Father’s silhouette in the doors, the light of the sun behind him. His hands were on his hips: he was ready to go. I gestured that I would be right there. “All I can offer is a chant,” I said, to appease, dictating a nonsense rhyme I’d used once in a performance:

We put out the light,

We render its death,

Violent light, the light is dead.

“Ring a bell before you say the words,” I added, bowing and slipping away.

“WE’RE IN LUCK,”
Father told me outside on the wide stone steps. “There’s to be a hanging soon—it would be a good crowd to play to. I found out where to go to get permission. Who was that girl?”

“I don’t know,” I said, looking out across the square. Flags flew from a château slightly down the hill. That would be where the members of the royal family were staying: the King, his brother, and the Queen Mother. I felt awed to be so very close. So close, and yet impossibly far. I had dreamt of playing before the royal family, dreamt of a purse of gold. “She wants to kill her governess.”

Father guffawed. He was still laughing as we left through the city gates.

CHAPTER 3

G
aston sang out when he saw me, throwing up his arms to be lifted. I made our rubbing-nose greeting and he giggled, lightening my spirits.

He’d been lining up objects in order by size outside the rocky cave entrance—a pile of rocks, Mother’s hat, one of my socks, a wooden stirring spoon. His “projects,” we called them. It was a curious diversion, but it gave him great satisfaction, and at least we always knew where to look when something was missing.

“They refused us?” Mother was indignant.

“
He
,” Father said. “Monsieur le Duc de Mortemart.”

“I think he was unwell,” I said, letting Gaston down. From too much in the way of spirits, I suspected. “The sound of my slapstick nearly killed him.” The thought made me smile.

“We can always perform at the market in town,” Father told my mother, reassuring her. “There’s going to be a hanging.”

“I have a surprise,” I said, to change the subject. I didn’t like performing at executions; Gaston didn’t sleep well after.

Mother stepped forward as I withdrew my treasures, four sugary beignets. I tossed one in the air and twirled, catching it behind my back.

“Claudette, you didn’t.” Father’s tone was scolding.
We are players, not scavengers.

“They were going to the dogs,” I said in protest, shamed.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON
, Father and I returned to the pond where we’d seen the tracks. We hid in the bushes on either side, he with his knife and spiked club, me with the pistol, a heavy flintlock that tended to shoot left of the mark.

I got out the horn and shook out some black powder. Only three lead shots left. I opened the pan cover and tipped powder from the flask, filling it carefully to the brim: too much and it might explode—I’d seen the handless soldiers. I closed the pan, blew on it, and gave it a whack to make sure there was no powder on the surface. Finally, I tipped a shot into the end of the barrel, used the ramrod to push it in and pulled back the spanner until the serrated wheel caught, checking to see that the flint was held securely in the beak of the cock piece.