Girl on the Golden Coin: A Novel of Frances Stuart Read online

  My sister sighed. “If only I could go with you.” She studied me with big blue eyes, the only feature we shared. With her plain features and no dowry, she would need my help to secure a good marriage.

  “Go now. I shall see you downstairs.” I watched her leave, Walter at her side, and turned to Mother. “Thank you for allowing me to go.”

  “I … no choice was left to me.” She took one step toward me, and then studied my face for a long moment. “At all times remember: gossip always follows disgrace. We exist at court by the charity of Lord St. Albans and the Queen Mother. This will end if you force secrets into the open. Secrets about me. You must, must behave above reproach.”

  I nodded, confused. I could not reveal secrets I did not know! I lifted my arms to embrace her, but she dropped her rosary, and I caught the cold beads in my hands. The next moment she pulled the chamber door open and gestured for me to exit.

  Princess Henriette Anne stood in the gallery holding her black velvet cloak. “Bon,” she said. “We can go down together.”

  My mother stepped from behind me. “Princess.” She curtsied, then handed me a black wool cloak, frayed and worn. I placed it around my shoulders and tied its strings at my neck.

  “It is Madame,” said the princess.

  “Pardon?” asked my mother.

  Henriette Anne shot her a haughty stare. “Now that I am married to the prince, you must style me simply ‘Madame.’ It is my new title. An honorific.”

  Her tone surprised me. She had never spoken to my mother in such a way.

  Mother lowered her head and curtsied like a practiced courtier. “Of course, Madame.” When she rose, her face was polished marble. “Shall I go down to wait with the others for your farewell?”

  Madame nodded.

  Without looking at me, my mother slipped away.

  “The one good thing about my marriage is power,” Madame said, as she held her cloak out to me. I wrapped the garment around her shoulders and tied the thick silk ribbon at her neck. “My brother Charles lives as he pleases. Surely I can garner the freedom of my marriage and still capture King Louis’ heart.”

  I tried to keep my tone light. “Your mother would beat you if you did.”

  “It’s her own fault that I love my husband’s brother. All my life she campaigned to form a betrothal between the king and me.” She slumped. “Having that crown would have changed my life. It would have put me over my mother once and for all.”

  “This marriage does put you over your mother. It makes you the second-highest-ranking woman in France.”

  “She was a queen of England. Nothing is the same as being a queen.”

  Oblivious to my worry, she scanned the gallery, and I, too, gazed at the high walls, broken and bare. They still bore hack marks where sconces and carvings were once attached. I remembered waking one cold night to the shouts of frondeurs rioting in the Paris streets. I’d peeked out of my chambers to see two Royalists tear down an oil portrait framed in silver gilt. They lit a roaring fire in the hearth the next day and served a hearty stew: both were rare treats. I shivered and pulled my cloak tighter around me. “We can leave these cold memories behind.”

  She turned toward the stairs. “We need never be cold again.”

  Hand in hand, we descended the staircase to the hall, black cloaks slipping down gently from step to step in our wake. Madame made a great show of appropriate farewell tears at the threshold. There was weeping and clinging and kissing until Monsieur swept her away, ushering us into his massive white coach.

  I sank into plush velvet in the far corner as Madame perched beside me. When Monsieur fell into the seat across from us, the crystal sconces clinked and chimed. He raised his jeweled fist to thump the wall and his flowery perfume filled the space. “Allez!” he cried.

  The coach jolted forward. When I craned my neck for one final look at the palace, at my childhood of little happiness, I realized I could not see out.

  Madame did not even try.

  CHAPTER 3

  Palais des Tuileries, Paris

  End of April

  I was the picture of négligence. Wrapped in a robe de chambre of mantua silk and propped upon a tufted bench, I had one servant rubbing almond oil into my toenails while another dotted rose water on my shoulders. It was nearly noon, and fruit tarts and dismantled pastry pyramids on silver platters were scattered about the floor. I soaked in the glow of the hearth’s crackling fire, which Madame insisted on burning despite the warming spring season. I brought a dish made of porcelain, a delicate ceramic from faraway China, to my lips and sipped the costliest commodity in the chamber.

  “Is that tea?” asked Françoise-Athénaïs de Mortemart, one of Queen Marie-Thérèse’s maids of honor, visiting from Fontainebleau. She was one of many nobles who’d traveled to the Tuileries to pay her respects to the newly wed Monsieur and Madame. She sat up from her giant pillow on the floor and accepted the dish a servant handed her. “Thank God.”

  Louise de La Vallière, Madame’s maid of honor, lifted her head from the rumpled coverlets of Madame’s bed where she’d fallen back asleep after eating. “You drank too much wine last night.”

  “You should talk,” retorted Mortemart, pushing wheat-colored curls away from her face. “You were so drunk the Comte de Guiche never left your side. I do believe he was trying to get up your skirts.”

  La Vallière stumbled out of bed. “I only spent so much time with him because Madame asked me to.” She plucked a leftover sweetmeat from a platter near Mortemart. “She was too busy entertaining the other guests.” She stuffed the bite into her mouth. “Madame bats her lashes at every lord and noble; you’d think she was trying to make the whole world fall in love with her.”

  Madame, sitting quietly at her toilette table while her maid applied cosmetics, laughed. “I don’t need the whole world to love me. Just one man.”

  “L’amour.” La Vallière’s dreamy smile matched the look in her eyes. “I hope to have true love when I marry.”

  But Madame didn’t mean her new husband. I waved my attendants away.

  Mortemart snorted. “You don’t marry for love, stupid. You marry for money.”

  Mortemart was twenty-one years of age, from a French noble family nearly a thousand years old, and a member of a fashionable Parisian ruelle, a salon for intellectual women. She was so witty, so well informed with ballroom gossip, and had such a distinguished heritage, she expected us to hang on her every word. She’d abandoned the name Françoise and insisted her friends call her Athénaïs. She did not insist I call her this, which didn’t bother me at all.

  The cosmetics maid finished and Madame stood. Her mantua gown of pale green silk hung low on her shoulders and cascaded to the floor. A series of emeralds clasped it together at her chest, and her linen chemise peeked through, sweeping down to the tops of her slippers. “A woman can also gain freedom in marriage if she can rule her husband.” She shot me a glance. “If she can rule him, she can find love with whomever else she pleases.”

  La Vallière made choking sounds. Mortemart slapped her on the back.

  “Madame!” I said. “If your mother heard you—”

  “What?” She waved her hand around the room to encompass the dozen dress forms, mounds of fabrics, stacks of shoes, piles of black face patches, feathers, and ribbons. “I couldn’t have gotten us all this unless I knew how to rule him.”

  “She meant the part about having a lover.” La Vallière plopped down on a pillow, white-blond hair fluttering on the breeze she made. She, too, was from an important French family. But with a deformed leg and a provincial upbringing, she had an unassuming air. She was most comfortable at mass or on horseback, praying or hunting. “Marriage or no, I shall have love in my life.”

  Given her limp and the lack of money in her family, she had about as much chance of marrying well as I.

  “I don’t know about love, but Madame is right,” said Mortemart, not to be outdone. She held her tea dish above her head for the
servant to collect. “If you can rule your husband, you can do any scandalous thing you want in this world.”

  I stood, wrapping my rich gown around me with the sash. “You said if you can rule. If you can’t, a jealous husband will make you miserable.”

  Mortemart only smiled, reflecting the confident and careless demeanor of the entire French court. She pulled La Vallière to the toilette to brush her hair.

  Madame moved to me, emeralds winking. “Do you want to know the real reason I wanted La Vallière to distract Guiche? Because my husband is attracted to him.”

  I glanced at the other girls, the servants. Father Cyprien foraged for gossip whenever he visited the Tuileries, and he’d certainly carry it home to our mothers. “Hush. They’ll hear you.”

  “They will see it for themselves soon enough. And they will accept it as a matter of course,” she whispered. “Guiche likes me. I have to keep him away from me to prevent my husband from growing jealous. Thus have I learned to rule my husband.” She crossed the chamber and called through the door. “Send in the seamstresses!”

  A train of women streamed in with pincushions, boxes, tapes, and ribbons. Everyone scrambled to pull out unfinished garments. Swirls of silk and the snip-snip of scissors filled the chamber. Box lids landed on the floor and the smell of fabric mixed with perfume-scented leather gloves blossomed. My favorite seamstress handed me a box and draped my latest bodice around a dress form. “Choose the passementerie for this.”

  I took the box and balanced it on the edge of the bench. Grosgrain ribbon spilled out when I opened it. I rummaged through a rainbow of bobbin and needle lace, gimp, eyelets, glass beads, tassels, and spangles. Finally, cream parchment lace wrapped itself around my fingers, and I handed it to the seamstress. I’d sent baskets of trinkets and cloth home with Father Cyprien for my family, but today’s gown was just for me, fashioned after the important ladies flocking to pay court to Monsieur and Madame. “Cut open panes in the front of each sleeve, and cover the panels with this. Then apply it along the front boning of the bodice busk here.” I traced the deep V where it came to a point below the waistline.

  She shook folds from the petticoat, making a pretty whip-snap sound with the fabric, and waited with an expectant, ready-to-please smile.

  I leaned down. “And some down the front and along the hem.” Yet the cream tissue fabric, silk woven with silver metal threads to give it a moiré effect, seemed to call out for more. I tapped my lip. “Add a darker overskirt that I can pull back to reveal the lace-covered petticoat.”

  “Frances!”

  I spun around just as Madame tossed a pantofle to me. I caught the flat slipper and inspected it. The light brown velvet covered in silver embroidery was a perfect match. “But I want higher heels. Can I order it as a mule?”

  She nodded. “Now catch this!” She hurled two great handfuls of silver ribbon into the air.

  Everyone squealed. I twirled around, laughing as the shimmering trim streamed down around me. I let Madame’s confidence envelop me. She made everything fun. A herald cleared his throat and called from the door. “Son of France, Monsieur Philippe, Duc d’Orléans.”

  The chamber echoed with more squeals. Mortemart dove behind a screen and knocked over a box of feathers just as La Vallière whipped a gown over her half-finished bodice. Feathers fluttered across Monseiur’s entrance.

  “Merveilleux!” He planted his hands on his hips and smiled broadly at our tableau of fashion misrule.

  The Chevalier de Lorraine and the Comte de Guiche entered behind him. Lorraine went directly to Madame’s toilette and poked around for her ceruse pot, while Guiche leaned against the wall, studying Madame.

  Monsieur’s ensemble, more embellished than any gown, filled me with envy. The full sleeves of his blue figured-silk doublet were slit with long, thin panes. A shoulder sash with gold fringe held his sword at his back. I longed for garments as unrestrictive as his pantaloons. As he pranced around the chamber inspecting everyone’s creations, he grinned and giggled. When he reached me, I noticed the fine texture of expensive cosmetics on his face. I wondered that a man, free to do whatever he pleased in this world, wanted nothing more than to dress and act like a woman. If clothes could truly change our place in life, I’d gladly trade my skirts.

  “Bon.” He plucked up my cream parchment lace. “You should add this to the tip of each bodice tab around the waist.”

  “Your Grace, those tabs go under the skirt to make it flare out. No one will see the lace there.”

  “Oh, someone shall see it.” He waggled his polished fingertips up in the air by his ear. A knot of ribbon loop galants around his shirtsleeve rustled. “Someday.”

  When he reached Madame, he twirled her around and kissed her cheeks. “It worked,” he said to her, eyes twinkling. “Word of our dazzling entertainments has reached my brother. He summoned us to Fontainebleau for the summer.”

  Madame clapped her hands. “See! Our efforts give fruit. He knows you were wiser than he in choice of wife. He will realize you are far more fashionable, too.”

  “I’ll rise to favor for certain.” He practically skipped to the door. “Prepare for departure and spare no expense. None. I want him to see how spectacular we are.”

  When the door closed behind the men, Madame shot me a smug grin. “Thus do I rule.”

  I cringed. Her first days with her new husband had been a fête of tears. Monsieur was indeed man enough to be a husband, just not a very gentle one. I’d stroked her hair after their first night together, trying to be the comfort she’d so often been for me. Now she seemed so sophisticated I hardly understood her. She’d just steered her husband’s weakness to her advantage.

  “Don’t look so worried. Every important French family will come to Fontainebleau this summer. We shall find a young man just for you.” She eyed me. “Have you considered the Chevalier de Lorraine as a possible husband?”

  Lorraine, with his mincing and his layers of point lace, who had just openly hunted for her ceruse pot! “I can’t be involved in a scandal…”

  She laughed and dropped something into my hands. “Order a mantua gown of light blue silk to match your lovely eyes.” She kissed my cheek.

  I peered down at six sapphire clasps set in gold. “These are beautiful. I can fasten mine just like yours.”

  “I want you to be happy. Just like me.”

  “I shall try.” I kissed her back. Her words “just like me” unfurled in my mind. She was only happy in her pursuit of King Louis. How could my oldest friend think a reckless affair or an effeminate man would make me happy? But if she could steer people so deftly, couldn’t I?

  * * *

  Before the month was out, plumed horses drove Madame’s gilded carriage from Paris while Monsieur rode alongside on a white stallion. Drummers and heralds carrying the Orléans standard led the long train of coaches and carts, and peasants ran to the road, waving and scrambling for the coins Madame tossed from her window. The grounds and forests of Fontainebleau soon opened to us, green and glimmering, and we rolled through the gates into a fairyland palace.

  King Louis and Queen Marie-Thérèse greeted Monsieur and Madame on the massive curving staircase, and then hosted an outdoor banquet in the Cour Ovale, where everyone was formally introduced to the monarch, and the households were introduced to one another.

  Everywhere were women in voluminous satin sleeves and men with jeweled scabbards. Each young man, I noted with dismay, was already married or flounced about Monsieur too eagerly, feeding him cake or complimenting his clothes. The violinist Lully played for hours, lively and deep, even after we dined, and the two households replenished wineglasses as the stars came out. Ladies and lords broke into dance, maidens and gallants slipped into alcoves, and the fête went on still.

  Queen Marie-Thérèse finally retired, and Monsieur departed with Armand, Comte de Guiche. Many noticed, whispered, and pointed. La Vallière leaned to me and muttered, “I fear we will not escape this summer without a scand
al.” As Madame and her brother-in-law, King Louis, fell into close conversation, I knew in my heart La Vallière was right.

  * * *

  “Wake up! Madame ordered us to ready ourselves for a walk in the forest.” La Vallière gestured for her maid to come in to my alcove, which was connected to Madame’s bedchamber, to help. We had been at Fontainebleau for several weeks. “Why aren’t you dressed yet?”

  I threw back my coverlet, raced to my wooden chest, and opened it quickly. So empty when I’d left Palais Royal, it now sat full of shimmering splendors. I tossed the cream tissue bodice at the maid and stepped into the petticoat and skirts. “Madame usually opens our door herself to wake me.”

  “She couldn’t be bothered today. She’s been up since dawn talking to King Louis.”

  I poked my arms through the bodice, pulled it over my chemise, and turned for the maid to lace my back. Night after night, it was always the same. “What time did they retire last night?”

  The maid knelt on the floor behind me to work my laces with quick fingers. La Vallière climbed on the chest and tugged an ivory comb through my hair. “After you went to bed, they ordered more wine, one bottle after the next. They called for dancing music well past midnight, but I had to sleep. I just can’t stay up all night as they do. I hear,” La Vallière whispered while twisting my hair into a knot, “she likes King Louis.”

  The maid gave my laces a final yank. La Vallière jumped down and wrapped lace trim around my bodice so it fell like a gauzy scarf from my shoulders. She pinned it together at my breasts with one of my sapphire clasps. “People are saying King Louis likes her. Can you believe it?” She sounded jealous.

  The maid handed me a glass of wine and water. I gulped it down, then turned around to dig shoes out of the chest. How long did I have before word of King Louis and Madame reached the Queen Mother?

  “You cannot wear high heels,” La Vallière said when she saw my silver-embroidered mules. “In the woods? Put on your boots.”