Queen's Own Fool (9 page)

They paused in the doorway and the king looked back. He whistled for his dogs and they scampered after him.

For a moment, the cardinal scrutinized me closely. Although he was not as lean as his brother, there was a sharpness in his eye that led me to believe he was quite as capable of leading men into battle as the duke.

“Child, if you are to have the ear of the queen, you must be properly educated,” he said. He started towards the door, then glanced back. “I will see to it.” Then he was off in a swirl of rich crimson.

Educated? Me? I was only astonished that I had not been instantly beheaded for insolence. Even Uncle would have battered me senseless with his cane for such answers. But evidently as the queen's fool, I served at her pleasure. And her uncle, the cardinal, seemed to honor that.

For now.

 

The minute the men were gone, the four Maries—who had been silent the entire time—began to talk in a mixture of French and Scottish. I scarce understood one word in ten.

Looking secretly pleased at something, the dowager stood and held her hand out to Princess Elisabeth. “Come, daughter,” she said. “We have much to do before tomorrow's progress.”

The princess got up immediately, and she and the old queen walked out of the door without so much as a nod to the others.

“Your Majesty,” Regal Mary began.

The queen waved her away with a flick of her hand. “Leave me. All of you. I am tired of chatter.” Then she looked at the dwarf. “You, too,
ma Folle.”
When I started after them, Queen Mary said, “Not you, Nicola. Sit here by me.” She gestured to one of the chairs near her.

I sat.

“So what do you think, Nicola?” the queen asked.

“I think, Majesty, that all uncles have some things in common, whether they are nobles, priests, or showmen.”

“And what is that, my Jardinière?” asked the queen.

“They do not like girls who talk too much.”

“But that is exactly why I want you here,” she said, lifting one finger. “To talk and talk and talk as much as you please.”

“Even if it is all nonsense?”

“Especially
then.” She leaned forward as if confiding in me. “If burning down houses is sense, then the more nonsense we have the better.” She picked up her embroidery frame and looked at it critically, before plucking out one of the threads that made up the tail of a little monkey.

For a long moment we were silent, and then I sighed.

She shifted in her chair but did not look up from her work. “Yes?”

“Madam, is it true that we leave in the morning for the royal palace?”

“We leave for Blois, if that is what you mean.”

Was there more than one royal palace then?
“Is that the one where everything is made of gold and silver, even the knives and spoons? Like in the fairy stories my mother told me.”

“I'm afraid there is nowhere as grand as that.” The queen laughed. “Not even in France. But I am sure you will like the château at Blois when we get there.”

10

LESSONS

I
did
not
like Blois, which was a great château in the valley of the river Loire. Or at least we were not there long enough for me to learn to like it. Soon after, we moved on to another château named Varteuil. Then to Chateau Chatelherault. And then to somewhere else.

I should have been happy. Did I not have all that I could possibly want and certainly more than I had ever dreamed of? Clothes as beautiful as a princess in a fairy tale. Food at my command. A soft bed. And the companionship of a queen.

Well—not quite all.

Perhaps it was foolish of me, but I had thought that once I became part of the court, my wandering days would be at an end. But it seems that the royal court is not a building. It is a great crowd of people who never stay in any place for more than a few months at a time. Where Troupe Brufort had followed a trail of fairs and festivals in search of coins, the royal court moved for its own reasons.

“It is too cold,” the king would say, and off we would go to the south.

Then “It is too hot,” he would complain, and off we traveled, like geese in summer, to the north.

Sometimes we stopped to host the Grand Council of France, where all the great men of the realm gathered. Then we would be gone again to some new place where there was good hunting to be had, or there was a special wine that did not travel well.

The king and his people were performers traveling from one place to the next, and the next, in the great play that was the court. Oh, we were warmer and better fed than Troupe Brufort. We did not worry about bedding or a roof over our heads. But we were just as often on the road.

“Travel,” I said one time to the queen, “however it is done, is tiring. The brain simply longs for familiar things.”

“Oh, my wonderful fool,” she told me, “that is exactly why we take along those things which remind us of home. The cook has his pots. The king has his dogs. And I—well now that my dear royal sister Elisabeth has gone to her king in Spain, I have you! To remind me...”

“That thou art but a mortal?” I said.

She clapped her hands happily. “Exactly.”

 

What a great train the traveling court made. As well as the king and queen and their family, there were other nobles who traveled with them and served as ministers and these, in turn, were served by dozens of clerks and scribes. There were priests, chamberlains, doctors, pages, porters, valets, stable hands, maids, barbers, laundresses, soup makers, musicians, seamstresses, guards—and fools. In fact there were more folk in the traveling court than in the village I had lived in with Maman and Papa.

One would think that with all of these folk I would have found at least one good friend amongst them. But I was neither a servant nor a noble, only somewhere in-between.

“Neither fish nor fowl,” Maman used to say of such situations. Whenever I found myself moping, I remembered that. And forgot it again each time the queen called me in to play her fool.

It took me some time, all through winter and into spring, but at last I understood: I would never truly be Marie-in-the-Ashes, for at story's end she turns into a princess, and that did not happen in real life. However, I would never again be put out in the rain and cold like a traveling player. What I had lost in the exchange were good friends like Pierre.

At the time it seemed a reasonable trade.

Still, the queen constantly asked for me, and that was all that mattered.

She even surprised me by giving me gifts. Once it was three dresses.

“One for your lovely singing voice,” she told me. “One for your laughter. And one for your wonderful peasant stories.”

The first dress was of tufted velvet, the second, a grass-green silk with embroidered leaves vining across the bodice, and the third of a lighter green velvet over which embroidered flowers were sprinkled. I spent hours trying them on and staring at myself in the glass.

“You are my Jardinière, and so you must look like a garden,” the queen said several days later, handing me a green velvet cap.

I had been so astonished at the dresses, I had hardly even thanked her. But when she gave me the cap, I blurted out, “You are the sun, Madam, and flowers always turn toward the sun.”

She shook her head at me. “Now you sound like a courtier, Nicola, while I would have you say the truth.”

“The truth, Your Majesty, is in the listening, not in the saying.” It was something Papa had once said.

 

We traveled back to the castle at Blois for the beginning of Lent as winter was giving way to the first promise of spring. As all the châteaus and palaces, Blois was a maze of hallways, a puzzle of doors.

I was always lost and constantly asking directions from servants who seemed annoyed with me. The cook had long since taken to calling me “Madam Underfoot.” The king's valet christened me “Little Wrong Turning.” And the king's dog boy named me “Little Mademoiselle Gone Missing.” I answered them back in kind.

It made them all laugh but it made me no friends.

As I settled into my own chamber, not far from the queen's apartments, I thought about how few friends I had. Only, in fact, the queen. And she had not recently called for me.

Hanging my dresses on hooks, I suddenly got a cold chill down my back, a strange forboding. It felt exactly as if a dead fish had been laid against my spine. I shivered but could not think what such a chill might mean, except that I had lost the queen's favor.

I turned and looked out of the tiny window at the slight green haze on the far fields. If she deserted me, where would I go? How would I live?

Just then one of the chamberlains knocked on my door and ordered me to report to a study in the west wing of the palace.

“What for?” I asked.

He shrugged extravagantly, and then silently led the way.

It was lucky for me that he took me or I would have been lost for certain. Blois—like all the many châteaus we had stayed in—had its own logic, but I did not know it yet.

It was obvious from the dust that the study was but little used. There was a small desk, a pair of wooden chairs, and some shelves. Other than that, the room was bare. For a brief moment, I remembered the room into which our troupe had been ushered in the cardinal's palace—the one without wall hangings or rushes on the floor. This room had that same empty feeling.

I shuddered again, my back cold-fish clammy once more.

The chamberlain left me as silently as he had led, and I was all alone. I went over to the latticed window and looked down at servants scurrying across the courtyard below. How I envied them their busy-ness.

Just then a noise made me turn around. Entering the room was a thin-faced woman in a somber dark dress, the high collar closed tight with aglets. She carried a book and some paper which she set down on the dusty desk, then fixed me with a glare. Her black hair was parted in the middle and tied back so tightly under her hood, her eyes were pulled into slits.

“So you are Nicola the fool,” she said without any niceties. “The one they call La Jardinière.”

“Yes,” I said with a nod of my head.

“I am Madam Jacqueline,” she told me. “The cardinal has summoned me to be your governess.”

Madam Jacqueline looked like my maman's old soured ewe, who had stopped having lambs and was bound for mutton. What lessons mutton could impart I did not know.

“It is very kind of the cardinal,” I said, “but I have nothing to pay you with. And no room in my quarters for anyone but myself.”

Madam Jacqueline frowned, as if uncertain whether I was teasing or as truly as ignorant as I appeared.

“You do not pay me, you stupid girl. I am no servant of yours,” she bristled. “I am here to take charge of you.”

“Take charge of me?” I repeated. “But I am quite capable of taking charge of myself. I am no infant. I can dress myself. And except for getting lost within a new palace, I am quite capable....”

Madam Jacqueline let out an impatient sigh. Then she let loose a volley at me. “It is not enough to be properly dressed and washed. And we
all
get lost within a new palace on occasion. Though I understand that you have made such lack of direction a character trait. However, you are now part of the court, and it is well past time you were educated. Why I was not sent for before, I do not know. You must be taught whom to address and when. You must learn manners. Moreover, since you are the queen's fool, someone must be responsible for setting a limit to your folly.”

“But if one puts limits on foolishness, it ceases to be foolishness at all,” I said. “You might as well try to keep the wind in a box.”

“The wind in a box!” she tutted, her face the color of the skimming off milk. “That is just the sort of nonsense we must stop.”

“But it is my nonsense the queen loves,” I said.

“I have no doubt she has sometimes found your rustic prattling amusing, an antidote to the more sophisticated wit of the court. And your tumbling and singing somewhat entertaining. But even she is tiring of it, which is why her uncle sent for me.”

I must have looked shocked, for madam softened for a moment. But only a moment.

“Tell me, girl, have you any letters at all?”

“No, madam, I cannot read anything but the weather and people's faces. ” I pointed out the window. “I can see that it will rain before the day is out. And ...” I paused for effect, “I can see in your face that you carry a great sadness.”

Cold anger flared in her eyes. I knew at once—but too late, of course—that I should have kept my mouth closed.

“My only sadness is that I should be burdened with so ignorant a girl,” she snapped. Her lips got as thin as her slitted eyes. “But I shall teach you, no matter how long it takes.”

She looked around the room and her mouth got even thinner with distaste, though I wouldn't have thought it possible. “I will have one of the maids clean this place up tomorrow, but it will have to do for today.” Then she returned her gaze to me, looking no more pleased with me than she was with the state of the study.

“Do you know your catechism?”

“My what?”

“The doctrines of the faith.” She clasped her hands primly in front of her.

“I know we are made by God to love one another. My mother taught me that.”

“You must learn more than that modest sentiment, because our faith needs to be defended against its enemies at all times.”

“Defended?” I was surprised, and my head cocked to one side. “Like a castle?”