Queen's Own Fool (10 page)

“Exactly
like a castle.” She nodded, pleased with my first lesson.

“But I do not understand. How can the faith of Christ possibly be besieged?” I was truly asea.

Madam Jacqueline smacked a hand down on the table and the sudden noise made me start. “Foolish child, it is under threat at this very moment from the Huguenots and their heresies.”

“What are Huguenots?”

She hissed at me like an adder in the field, and I understood that we were off to a very bad start. “How little you know. How far we must go.”

“Then, please madam, start by telling me how anyone can threaten faith,” I said. I smiled in what I hoped was a winning way. I really did want to know. “That would be like ... like threatening the sun or the moon. Surely not even Huguenots—whatever they are—could do such a thing.”

But Madam Jacqueline was clearly not taken by my smile. “The Huguenots are heretics who have brought over their pernicious doctrines from Switzerland,” she said, her voice, like her lips, thin and hard. “They deny the teachings of the church and the pope and that puts all of us in danger.”

“I'm sure it is very foolish of them to go against the church,” I agreed, “but how are they dangerous? Doesn't the church have soldiers to guard it? And the pope his own guard?”

“How little you understand,” said Madam Jacqueline. “I can see that a long hard task lies ahead of me.”

For all of madam's complaints, I could not help but feel that it was
I
for whom things were going to be hard.

11

MORE LESSONS

I
soon learned that like Uncle, Madam Jacqueline had a cane. It was not grand like his, with a gold knob on the end, but only a rod of plain wood. While Uncle's stick was meant to impress the public, the only purpose of Madam Jacqueline's rod was to impress me. When I made mistakes in my work, she laid that rod hard over my shoulders. When I spoke to her in a way she did not care for, she brought it down across my knuckles.

I was determined to give her no reasons to whip me.

Still she found them.

“Huguenots are villainous, not just misunderstood,” she said one day, and
whap,
down came the cane.

“The catechism is to be memorized word for word, not sentiment for sentiment,” she said the next day. And
whap,
again down came the cane.

On the next day and the next, she disliked my manner. Or my mode of speech. Or how quickly I answered. Or how slow. Not a day went by that my shoulders and knuckles went unreddened.

But I learned things nonetheless.

My real education began with the alphabet, and for all that I did not care for madam, oh, I was pleased to be learning to read. I greatly missed the stories Maman used to tell, ones she had learned from her own mother. Once I was skilled with my letters, I was determined to find at least one book in the queen's library filled with those sort of tales. And once I knew how to write, I would send word to Pierre about all that had happened since we took leave of one another, for he was still my one true friend. I thought of him often.

So I embraced my lessons. I think madam was more surprised by this than pleased.

Sitting side by side at the table, she taught me each of the letters as they were written large on the page of a book and surrounded by pictures of things that began with that same letter.

“A,” she said clearly, making faces as she pronounced each letter. “A for apple and arbor and acrobat.”

I repeated them after her, making the same faces.

“B,” she said, “for ball and baton and bear.”

I said the B words.

“You have such a peasant's pronunciation.”

“That is because I am a peasant,” I answered.

The cane hit my knuckles. “I will make you sound like a lady,” she said. “If it kills us both.”

Some days I was afraid it might.

She made me repeat each letter over and over, concerned that my mouth should form the right shape as I spoke. I think she cared more how my mouth looked than what came out of it.

But in spite of her stick, I learned.

And in spite of her dislike of me, madam admitted, though grudgingly, that I was doing well. She forced the praise through her thin lips, like icing through a pastry bag: “It will not be long, Nicola, before you are reading with ease.”

“Will I read more than the ABC's?” I asked. “Will I be able to read a book of stories?”

Her stick came down on my hand. “You will read the catechism,” she promised. “For it is the truth. Stories are all lies.”

I thought to myself:
Once I know how to read, you shall not keep me from reading what I will. No one shall.

 

Learning to write, however, was altogether different. Try as I might, I could not please madam. She insisted on my holding the pen in a way that made it difficult for me to form my letters properly.

Time after time she took the pen and jammed it into my right hand, forcing it between my thumb and forefinger.

“Madam, if you would just let me hold the pen in my left hand, I could manage much more easily,” I protested.

“The devil lurks in the left,” she said, whapping the cane down so hard that my fingers went numb and I could not have held anything with the left then, even if she had given me leave.

I picked up the pen with my right hand and made the letters for
cat and dog.

“What an ungainly scrawl,” she complained. “Your letters must be elegantly formed, else there is no reason to make them.”

I could not resist saying, “Surely, madam, what we write is more important than how we write it. Is not a hastily-scrawled truth better than a beautifully-penned lie?”

She rapped her cane so hard across my knuckles for that, the pen fell to the floor. Then she snatched the parchment away.

“There is no sense in going any further with this,” she said. “It is a waste of paper.”

“But I had hoped to write a letter to my cousin one day,” I said, making my eyes round with innocence.

Madam Jacqueline raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Really? And do you suppose he will be able to read it?”

I smiled at her. “He has promised to learn from a priest.”

She clasped her hands primly before her, the rod still clutched between thin fingers. “Even if your writing improves and he learns to read, paper is far too expensive to be wasted on whatever fiddle-faddle you scribble. No, we shall move on to other things.”

And we did.

There were matters of court etiquette to be mastered: how to enter a room, when to curtsy, when to speak, when to be silent.

Next I was taught how to address a prince or princess (“Your Royal Highness”), an ambassador (“Your Excellency”), the duke (“Your Grace”), and the cardinal (“Your Eminence”).

“Always with the eyes down. Do not stare into a noble's face,” madam instructed.

“Papa always said not to stare at a wild animal,” I said. “Or it would bite. Perhaps nobles are the same.”

Whap! The cane sliced through the air.

“Madam,” I objected, “if I behave just like everyone else at court, I will cease to be a fool and will be cast out into the street.”

Madam continued the lesson in a tone of voice that was even thinner and frostier than before.

 

During those spring weeks at Blois, I grew quite lonely for the queen. Although I was often summoned to entertain after banquets—singing songs from my childhood and telling Maman's tales—I rarely had the chance to speak with the queen alone.

I felt that what Madam Jacqueline had said was true: that Queen Mary was tiring of me. She was losing interest because that which is familiar always loses its glitter. But there was something else—under madam's instruction, I was becoming less and less myself, my peasant wit blunted by my newfound learning.

Even when I was not with Madam Jacqueline, I found myself shying away from any speech or behavior that she might disapprove of. It was as if I cringed not from the rod but from the shadow of the rod.

Only once that spring did Queen Mary have me read to her, from a book of verses, which was quite a change from the dry books of letters that Madam Jacqueline had me practice on.

The day was blustery and a persistent cold had kept the queen in from the hunt. She had a large white linen square which she pressed to her nose.

“Nicola, dear, you see me unlike my usual self.”

“You are never less than your self, Majesty,” I said, smiling greatly. I was sure she could see the joy written large on my face that I was once more in her company. But she acted as if we had never been apart.

She handed me the book. “Read. I would see how well your lessons are going.”

I read, stumbling through the unfamiliar words.

“Brava!” she said after I had struggled through several pages. “Everything sounds so much better when spoken by you.”

“But all my mistakes ...” I began.

She laughed. “Pious and pies do sound alike.”

“And priests and presses?”

“I made the same mistakes when first learning to read,” she said. “To sound-out words is a hazard, is it not?”

“To mistake a priest for a press, perhaps,” I said. “But if one pressed a priest into a pie—what a greasy meal that would be.”

She roared with laughter then. “That's the Nicola I adore. Read on!”

When I finally became adept enough at my reading—no longer confusing priests and presses—Madam Jacqueline resumed the business of my catechism.

“This is what all good girls must learn,” she said, presenting me with a list of definitions of God, His Son, the Holy Spirit, and other matters of our Catholic faith.

“A long list, madam,” I said, my nose wrinkling as if it were not only lengthy but smelled.

“God's length is not measured by man,” she said sniffily. “But you must learn all the definitions. Lest you be taken for a Huguenot.” And shaking her index finger at me as if I were one of their dreaded race, she added, “The Huguenots' entire purpose is to destroy the church and deliver mankind into the hands of the devil.”

“Oh, madam,” I replied, “can they do it?”

“They will,” was her thin-lipped reply, “if we are not vigilant.”

Of course, I had never met a Huguenot. But now I imagined they were like the pictures I had seen of demons and imps, with hairy buttocks and arms dangling by their sides. I wanted to know more. Did they have horns? Did they have tails? Did they eat people? Or did they—as madam said—just infect people with pernicious ideas? Pernicious was a favorite word of hers. But I did not ask, in case it invited another great thwack with her stick.

“Are they close by, these Huguenots?” I asked. The walls of Blois were thick. But all walls have chinks in them. Perhaps the impish Huguenot could scale walls or slip through spaces.

“The Huguenots are a very long way away,” she answered.

“Then why must we worry?”

“Because pernicious ideas can travel faster than a man.”

This was puzzling. I shook my head. Surely it takes a man to carry an idea. So I asked, “Will not the cardinal and the duke set them aright?”

“With God's help, they will indeed.”

 

That led me to hope that the cardinal and the duke would discuss the Huguenots with the king when I was within hearing. But the several times I was invited to be with the queen in the king's presence, no such discussions took place.

To tell the truth, in all the times I had been in a room with the king, he rarely seemed to listen to the things the duke and cardinal or anyone else reported to him. It did not seem to matter if the subject was the armies, taxes, or edicts. He would just blink his puffy eyes, nodding and grunting at the person who brought him news until they left him alone. Then he would go back quite happily to his dogs, his gaming, and hunting. For someone who was so unwell, he certainly loved to ride. Perhaps it was that on horseback he could let the horse do for him all the things his sickly, swollen body could not.

It occurred to me that I might ask the queen about the demon Huguenots. But at Blois, more than any other place, she kept by her husband's side, riding with him when he was well, faithfully attending his sickroom when he was ill. Except for the one time we had read together, it had been weeks since she last sent for me except to entertain in a crowd.

I had no one to pour out my worries to. Madam Jacqueline would surely not care that the queen saw little of me. And the cooks, the maids, the clerks and scribes, chamberlains, doctors, pages, porters, valets, stable hands, barbers, laundresses, roasters, priests, soup makers, musicians, seamstresses, guards—they were none of them my friends and all had duties of their own. Perhaps if the Maries had been there, but, no, they were not. They were still at the convent.