In the Name of the King Read online

  There was a little silence. A log hissed in the grate.

  André lifted his head. ‘Not quite. There’s an alternative.’

  She nodded. ‘Exactly. The Cardinal has agreed to support M. Gilbert’s legitimation, and if we can keep him clean of this business there is no obstacle to his inheritance. But of course he will have to remain in Paris, and we must disassociate him from you in every way.’

  The words blurred, it was only André’s sharp intake of breath that was real. I said ‘I can’t. You can’t ask me that.’

  She smiled tightly. ‘You asked for the rights of a gentleman, these are the responsibilities that go with them.’

  I said ‘I don’t want it, I’m not having it.’

  She sighed. ‘It may not be for long. These people will act, the Cardinal will obtain his evidence and the Chevalier will be cleared. But we cannot count on it to happen in time, which is why I must rely on you.’

  I stood and blundered over to the fire. ‘I won’t, I’m not leaving André.’

  ‘You must,’ said André. He came and put his hands on my shoulders. ‘Think what it would mean if you don’t. It’s not just my grandmother or the servants. Think of Dax. If the Crown takes it they might give it to one of my accusers. They might give it to Bouchard.’

  My mother was there. My mother, my little sister, my friends, everything we’d bloody fought for those four long years. I looked blindly round the room, trying to wipe out the picture of Bouchard strutting round Ancre, treating my mother the way he’d treated Bernadette. I turned desperately back to André, and saw there were tears in his eyes.

  ‘It’s not for ever,’ he said, and tried to smile. ‘My grandmother’s right, I’ll be cleared somehow. But you must do it, Jacques. Please.’

  I said ‘You’ve got nowhere to go. You’ll be alone.’

  His grip tightened on my shoulders. ‘Then you’ll do it?’

  I said ‘Yes, all right, bloody yes if I’ve got to,’ and I think I was crying too.

  Bernadette Fournier

  No, Monsieur, I did not blame him. Yes, he had said he was free to love me and now he was not, but he parted from me with great tenderness and I knew he did not do so willingly. When they drove him away in the carriage with Charlot and Madame, his face was wet with tears.

  ‘What now, laddie?’ asked Grimauld cheerfully. Madame had given the Chevalier gold before she left and Grimauld was clearly happy to stay with him till it ran out.

  The Chevalier had difficulty wrenching his mind back to our situation. ‘We’ll stay here tonight, and then tomorrow … tomorrow …’

  I said ‘I have an aunt in Compiègne, she will take us in while you decide.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and nodded firmly. ‘Compiègne. Thank you, that’s what we’ll do.’

  He walked back to the farmhouse with Grimauld, but I stood a moment and looked back towards Paris. There were fewer street lanterns in those days, and to me she seemed a great black monster in the distance, smelling of evil and corruption in every way there is.

  I was no one to judge it, Monsieur, I was a girl in a borrowed dress and nothing beneath it but my naked self, yet I looked at the city and spoke as if it could hear me. I said ‘You think you have beaten him, but one day he will come back and you will tremble at what you have done.’

  Above me the nightbirds called, and a fresh wind stirred the apple trees, but Paris was silent as stone. ‘Do you hear me?’ I whispered again to the darkness. ‘He is coming back.’

  PART TWO

  The Fugitive

  Nine

  Jacques Gilbert

  They hanged him in effigy, did you know? I had to stand on the Place de Grève and watch them read a long denunciation then hang a dressed-up straw figure they pretended was André de Roland. When the judges had gone Bouchard and his friends batted the figure about between them to make it swing.

  It was meant to stay hanging for a week, but I sneaked back that night with de Chouy and his friends to cut it down. We took it home, removed the clothes to make it just straw again, then burned it in the courtyard on a kind of pyre. I gave away the clothes too. It was a shame, André loved that doublet, but I could never see him wearing it again.

  They were good friends to me that night, de Chouy, Lelièvre and de Verville. They said I was one of them now, they made me call them Crespin and Gaspard and Raoul, and came to see me every day. Even the Comtesse liked them. They were young and silly, but they brought a gaiety to the Hôtel de Roland I think she’d missed. She mocked them sometimes and called them ‘the Puppies’, but they thought that was the most wonderful joke, and started using it themselves. They’d greet each other with ‘Good morning, M. le Puppy,’ like it was an exclusive society anyone would want to join.

  It made the loneliness less awful having them around, but really we were just passing the time while we waited for news. Every day we hoped the conspirators would move, the Cardinal would pounce, then André would be cleared and come home. Nothing ever happened.

  We knew he was all right, he sent a letter under cover to Crespin to tell us he was at Compiègne, but it made me ache to read it. He tried to sound brave, he said he was growing a beard and moustache that made him very handsome, but I could see the pain in every line. At the end he just wrote ‘I miss you’, and that was the only thing that felt real. I went into his room that night to feel him sort of near, but it was all still and silent, there was dust on the bedcover, and his water jug had dried till there was nothing in it but a dead spider. It was hard to believe he was ever coming back.

  Anne du Pré

  Extract from her diary, dated 12 February 1641

  I am locked in my room again. It is my own fault, I know how rigidly Florian insists on my courtesy to his friends, but I simply could not keep my temper.

  Bouchard provokes me on purpose. He has no need to come to the salon, he always conducts his business in private with Florian, but he loves to see me sitting quietly in the corner, compelled to smile and make polite responses he must know are insincere. Today was worse than ever, for he had just heard the news that Jacques is to be legitimated and decided to relieve his bitterness by abusing André. He laughed at his being brother to a stable boy, and said had he known it he would never have sullied his sword with such filth.

  I said ‘Then it is fortunate it was only the Chevalier whose sword was sullied.’

  The look on his face was almost worth it. Florian apologized so effusively I almost blushed myself, but I said ‘It’s true, isn’t it? What can be wrong with saying what is true?’

  I should have known better. Florian compelled me to make a humble confession to that loathsome Père Ignace, who I know perfectly well is Bouchard’s friend and will undoubtedly tell him everything I was forced to say, and now I am confined to my room for a week. There was no point appealing to Father. He never even speaks to me these days, and the only reason he hasn’t sent me to a convent is that he still hopes I can give him an advantageous marriage.

  Jeanette thinks he might do it yet. She was allowed in to braid my hair for bed, and was insistent I should be more careful. She said ‘It’s a miracle you get away with what you do, Mademoiselle. I’ve known a lady put away just for speaking to the wrong man.’

  I said ‘I don’t care. What kind of life is this, Jeanette? I can’t even stir outside without Florian or my father, how can anything be worse?’

  But it could, for then she gave me her own news and with it the death of my last hope. My letter to the Comtesse has been returned unopened, and Jeanette’s messenger said they’d asked nicely for me not to trouble them again. I cannot blame them, I know what they must think me, but tonight the unfairness hurts.

  ‘Oh, it’s not so bad, my lamb,’ said Jeanette, brushing out my hair with long, soothing strokes. ‘The Chevalier will know the truth one day, he’ll come and help you in the end.’

  I said ‘I’m not asking his help, Jeanette, how can I? It’s we who should be helping him.’


  For a moment there was only the purr of the brush. Then she said ‘Perhaps we can. What would the Chevalier give, do you think, for a friend to be living right in the house of the enemy and learning their secrets?’

  I said ‘They’ll never trust me enough for that.’

  She started to plait. ‘Well and perhaps they won’t, Mademoiselle, with you sitting glaring as if you wanted to eat them. But now I ask you, what harm would it do to make yourself a little more pleasant? If you were to hint to M. Florian you were coming round to his way of thinking, mightn’t that make it easier for him to confide in you?’

  I said ‘That would be dishonest.’

  She jabbed in the first pin. ‘And what would you call it when your brother reproaches you for disloyalty, or sends you his confessor to tell him what a bad girl you’ve been? What would you call it when their friends tell lies about our Chevalier and get away with it because nobody finds the means to bring them down?’

  I thought of André driven into hiding in some faraway country, and all because he trusted me and met me when I asked. If anything in my useless life can help him then suddenly it would have both purpose and meaning. I said ‘Just tell me, Jeanette. Tell me what I can do.’

  She looked up from the braid and in the mirror our eyes met. ‘Lie, Mademoiselle,’ she said. ‘You must learn to lie.’

  Jacques Gilbert

  Nothing’s worse than doing nothing. The Comtesse kept saying ‘Leave it to the Cardinal,’ but I needed something to fight.

  The Puppies were the same. They’d come bouncing round every morning asking if we’d got orders from André and obviously we never had. Raoul used to pass on every scrap of gossip he heard at court, saying ‘Does it help, Jacquot?’ so yearningly I was desperate to say ‘yes.’ Crespin and Gaspard even took to visiting Le Pomme d’Or, but they never saw any of the people we were interested in and guessed they were meeting somewhere else. We weren’t getting anywhere at all.

  My only hope was my uncle. He was poxed, of course, but he’d got battle experience, he’d been the deadliest swordsman in Paris in his day. I thought he’d be like an older and wiser André, and just the person to guide us. He spent most of the winter in the Auvergne having a new kind of mercury treatment, but he came back that February and my grandmother finally arranged for me to meet him. It was only meant to be about getting his permission for the legitimation, but what I wanted was a leader and a plan, and as I set off for the Place Royale I was hoping to find both.

  I’d been warned what to expect, but it was still a shock when I was finally shown into his room. It was kept warm and very dark, the walls rippling and flickering in the light from the enormous fire. There was sweet apple wood burning on it, but it couldn’t quite disguise the other smell, a faint, sickly sort of rottenness like badly cured pork. The Comte sat in a padded chair by the hearth. There was a little table beside him with a decanter of carved glass that twinkled and sparkled in rainbow flashes in the firelight, but he himself was in shadow.

  I made polite noises and waited.

  He leaned forward and I saw the mask. It wasn’t a full one, just a thing like a bright blue bird’s head with a big beak where his nose should have been, and ending abruptly at his upper lip. His mouth and chin looked quite normal, he could have been just an ordinary person at a masked ball.

  He said ‘Sit down, Jacques, it’s good to see you at last. I was beginning to think you were avoiding me.’

  The shock snatched my breath away, because it was my father’s voice. This great hunger I hadn’t even known was there leapt almost babbling into my throat.

  ‘Don’t be nervous,’ he said, pouring us both wine. ‘I’m not going to refuse you, am I?’

  His beard even looked the same, I wanted to snatch the mask away and see my father’s face. I sat down quickly and said ‘It’s a lot to ask, to make me your heir.’

  ‘Is it?’ he said. His hand trembled as he passed me the glass, and a little drop of wine spilled on to his black glove. ‘Poor André seems to have ruled himself out, doesn’t he?’

  It was one of those Spanish fortified wines, a kind of Jerez, and it walloped through my head in a warm buzz. I said ‘It wasn’t his fault though, was it, Monseigneur?’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’ he said, and his mouth smiled. ‘Tell me, would you have handled this the way André did?’

  Of course I wouldn’t, but I was going to be a Roland, so I said ‘I hope so, Monseigneur.’

  ‘A pity,’ he said. ‘This family could do with an injection of common sense and I rather hoped you might be it.’

  The wine caught in my throat and sprang back out again. I wiped my chin furiously, but when I looked up he was still regarding me with courteous attention. I said cautiously ‘You don’t think André’s sensible?’

  He looked into the fire. ‘I think he’s a very fine young man.’

  It wasn’t an answer. I didn’t think I could say that, though, I mean he was Comte de Vallon, so I sipped my wine and tried to look wise.

  He said ‘I knew André was doomed as soon as I met him. Honour’s a great thing, but not when it blinds you to your own survival.’

  It was all right for me to think that sometimes, but I felt uncomfortable hearing it said in my father’s voice. I said ‘You think he should have left the whole thing alone?’

  He sighed and rumpled his hair. ‘I would have. So I think would you.’

  I remembered saying to the Comtesse that it was nothing to do with us, and quickly looked away. ‘But we’ve got to beat them now, haven’t we? It’s the only way to save André.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘We’ve no choice now. But how are you going to do it?’

  I’d hoped he’d tell me. I said ‘I don’t know. I thought of going to see André –’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he said quickly. ‘Do you want to lead them on to him?’

  I stared. ‘The guards aren’t following us any more.’

  He got up and went to the window. I went after him, and was oddly disconcerted to find he was taller than me.

  ‘Look,’ he said, and jerked his head out at the Place Royale. ‘What do you see?’

  There were loads of people wandering about outside, but I noticed one man standing still, holding a horse’s bridle like he was waiting for someone. His mouth was shut so I couldn’t see the jagged teeth, but I knew the squashed nose and mottled face, I’d seen them close enough when I stabbed his arm in that bloody maze.

  ‘His name’s Pirauld,’ said my uncle. ‘He’s valet to your friend Lavigne and a very unpleasant character indeed. Rumour has it he brings his master whores from the streets and they’re never seen again. He hung about here when André was in Saint-Germain, and I had the servants make enquiries.’

  I said ‘But if it’s you he’s watching …’

  ‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘I saw him arrive when you did.’

  He’d been looking out of the window. He’d been watching for me like he really wanted to meet me. Then I realized what he was implying and said ‘Why …?’

  He shrugged. ‘My guess is Bouchard. André’s no danger to them now, but that man has a personal grudge he’ll want paid in blood. Visit André and you’ll bring it on him.’

  I said ‘Maybe Crespin …’

  He was already turning back to the fire. ‘De Chouy? No. He stood next you at the mock execution, don’t use him for anything. Have you other friends they don’t know about?’

  I said ‘Yes, there’s –’

  His hand came up so fast it was like André in a parry. ‘Don’t tell me. Trust no one. Don’t make André’s mistakes, Jacques. If you want to survive you’ve got to forget honour and loyalty and doing anything openly. Stay quiet and out of sight.’

  I said miserably ‘Then what can I do?’

  He sat back down. ‘Get André out of France.’

  ‘He won’t go. He wants to bring down these conspirators.’

  ‘He can’t,’ said my uncle bluntly. ‘Neither can you, neithe
r can I. Forget about saving the state, you’ve got to think about saving yourselves.’

  I hated him for being right. ‘But I want to fight.’

  For a second something gleamed in the dark eyeholes of the mask, then he turned back to the decanter. ‘There’s only one way to fight this one and that’s on the battlefield. Richelieu’s right, the rebellion’s coming, it’s only a matter of months.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘When they’re out in the open we can expose them and André can come home.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ he said tiredly. ‘But don’t you see the flaw in that reasoning?’

  I looked doubtfully at him. He reached for my glass and began to refill it.

  ‘They’re everywhere,’ he said. ‘Outside your house, outside mine, in the bed of the King. They’re in the Sedan. They’re in Soissons territory in Champagne. They’re among the Huguenots, itching to avenge La Rochelle. And beyond the borders lies the Empire and Spain.’

  He handed me the glass. ‘That’s your flaw, Jacques. You’re assuming we’ll win.’

  Carlos Corvacho

  From his interviews with the Abbé Fleuriot, 1669

  Now, this is nice, isn’t it, Señor? Quite missed our little sessions, I have really. It’s been a pleasure talking over old times, remembering my gentleman and yours, and now here we both are again and the story still going on as if it never stopped.

  No, no more it did, Señor, nor for my Capitán. We’d had a quiet few months, but that wasn’t my gentleman’s choice, he’d have been up and back where the action was if it weren’t for the surrender terms after the Battle of Dax. We weren’t to take up arms against the French for a year, if you remember, and that’s a long time in a war.

  But there are other ways, if you understand me, and my Capitán was still the Don Miguel d’Estrada whether he’d a sword in his hand or no. We were set to work in Madrid, Señor, in Rome, in London and in Brussels, but our purpose was always the same, and that was to cause an insurrection in France.