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Chapter 30

Besançon

May 1637


The beginning of May brought a huge sack of mail with all sorts of news. Mademoiselle Anne wrote that she had found a suitable chaperone for Marguerite.

“A Madame de la Rochefaton,” Rohan said. “The family is from Poitou, old Protestant nobility. That makes her a good choice, in the sense that no other family will take too much offense at the appointment. She is a childless widow; her husband, who was from a cadet branch, served under my command in the 1622 campaign. Anne has also chosen three girls as ladies-in-waiting: de Brémond, d’Albin, and des Brisay—all suitable families but not of sufficient importance to threaten the status of anyone else. Anne says that they should arrive within a month.”

Marguerite looked . . . hostile to the prospect.

“Kamala Dunn has made some decisions also,” Carey said. “Shae’s going to the University of Prague.”

“I don’t want her to leave,” Marguerite said.

“If I may say so, it’s not something that you can control. She’s been doing a favor for you; not you one for her.”

Rohan motioned his daughter to silence with his head and motioned Carey to continue with the hand that wasn’t holding a coffee cup.

“It will work out. Kamala’s also sending Shaun to her parents in Grantville. She won’t need a nanny at all anymore.”

“You will stay with me, though, won’t you?” Marguerite asked. “And Dominique.”

Carey shook her head. “Dominique’s going to Magdeburg. I’ve cobbled together the first year’s tuition by selling my up-time barber kit to some really rich collector named Fugger whose agent was willing to pay through the nose. She’ll board with the Washaws. Between the Imperial College of Science, Engineering, and Technology and the up-timer-designed new hospital there, she can get her medical degree without having to run the gauntlet in Grantville. It won’t be as prestigious as Grantville/Jena, but the stress reduction will be worth it.”

“But . . . ”

“She was doing you a favor, too, Marguerite. Just as Shae was. It was temporary that they were here. Temporary.”

“You could stay, though.”

Carey shook her head. “Ashlyn’s old enough that she would be okay as a latchkey kid, but Joe’s just turning four, so I still need full time childcare. I’m keeping Ashlyn here. I’m not ready to send her off to a boarding school, though I’ll have to, I guess, in two or three years. If I can find the money. For now, she’s doing fine in the day school for girls. So I’m going to have to find an apartment and a babysitter once your new chaperone arrives. It would be a real imposition if I asked Kamala to continue to share and keep having my kids underfoot once she’s an empty-nester.”

“Bring your children here,” Rohan suggested. “I’m going to have to rent the other half of this house in any case, with more people coming. My absentee wife managed in the course of her peregrinations through the French countryside, before she settled in with her father a couple of months ago, to run down and collect a lot of the back rents and dues owed to us from the estates in Brittany and forwarded a bank draft, so I can manage the expansion—just barely, but I can manage it.”

“Won’t Madame de Rochefaton resent that?”

“You aren’t here as my household’s chatelaine. You work for the grand duke. You are correct that your chaperonage of Marguerite was described as a temporary measure from the beginning. We will simply make that clear to Madame de Rochefaton that you are a special tutor in English and up-time matters. I will locate your family’s apartment in such a way that she cannot imagine that you are in any way her subordinate. What is your term? ‘Gover’?”

“Gofer,” Carey corrected absentmindedly. “To go for something or someone. A runner of miscellaneous errands.”

He patted her hand. “See how impossible it would be for me to remain au courant in regard to the modern, post-Ring of Fire, world without my resident expert on all things up-time. So that is settled.

“Now as for the rest of what Anne has been doing, so far, she has been unsuccessful in finding a bride for my brother. She complains that there is a real shortage of marriageable daughters among Huguenot families of ducal and princely rank. She is almost hoping, I believe, that some suitable lady will soon be widowed in an untimely fashion.”

“Maybe she should cast her net wider. Too much inbreeding isn’t a good thing. You could tell her to look in the Netherlands, or think about some young noblewomen of less than ‘ducal and princely rank.’ Up-time we used to tell each other, ‘get your priorities straight.’ Do you want him to get married for prestige or do you want him to get married to have kids and have a lot of little Rohan toddlers to bounce on his knees?”

“Soubise toddlers,” the duke said, looking at his daughter. “Marguerite is the heiress of Rohan.”

* * *

Carey had no intention of precipitating a crisis with her suggestion, but by that casual remark, she achieved it unwittingly. If anything in this whole process had seriously interested her, it would have been the idea that they might dump a bit of their preoccupation with rank—not only look beyond the high nobility of the Huguenot community in France to consider someone from the Netherlands, perhaps, but, even more, that they might even consider a young woman of less than “ducal and princely” rank.

Rohan, however, passed on the suggestion in his next letter to Anne with the stipulation that, of course, the suitable young woman must be Calvinist and of appropriate rank, but as head of the family, he would not require that she be French in order for the match to obtain his approval. If he himself had contemplated the possibility of Eva of Anhalt-Dessau’s brother for Marguerite, then someone from the Low Countries or the German Calvinist high nobility for Soubise was worth considering.

* * *

Later that month, Ruvigny with his Danish Sophia, Matt Trelli and Marcie Abruzzo, Bismarck, and a former cardinal of Lorraine trailed into Burgundy from Savoy, several weeks later than they had been expected, foiled in their return plans by lingering cold weather and excessive snow cover.

He found Rohan maintaining his daily routine as one of Grand Duke Bernhard’s loyal cadre of administrators and continuing to stalk the deep inner meaning of the works of Dr. Seuss as he completed the manuscript revisions.

Ruvigny suspected that the duke’s calm was only on the surface. Henri de Rohan could do a good public face. Amiable he might be, and restrained in his exhibitions of bad temper, but that also was “learned behavior” as Gerry Stone would say. Below the surface was the inborn assurance of someone who knew most thoroughly who he was. Not the king; not an independent ruler like Bernhard; not in essence a feudal subordinate in France; just the embodiment of being Rohan.

There was enough going on that if Rohan’s public face ever wavered, he would have reasonable excuses. They had already seen la petite Marguerite’s young up-time ladies-in-waiting out into the world, and Carey Calagna was preparing to bow out of her role as chaperone for Marguerite, though not, it appeared, to the considerable resentment of Benjamin Priolo, out of Rohan’s household. The secretary had come to regard the up-time woman as a potential obstacle to his ambitions should something happen and the duke return to France.

La petite Marguerite was seriously unhappy with the prospect of an unknown Mme. de Rochefaton arriving from France as an “appropriate” chaperone (her Tante Anne’s word, Tante having chosen the lady) and the selected young, equally unfamiliar, noble Huguenot ladies-in-waiting who were looming upon her horizon, also chosen by Tante.

Carey Calagna, ably seconded by Kamala Dunn, kept pointing out that there was no way that Dominique and Shae could have stayed, that the ambivalent and ambiguous status of Susanna Allegretti in the household was only possible as long as it was both small and not particularly socially active, so she, too, would go as soon as someone appeared to escort her to the USE capital city, and that, ultimately, the little daisy of a Rohanette should grow up and get over it.

Marguerite’s freedom of movement was greatly curtailed by having no ladies-in-waiting to accompany her. She complained at supper one evening that if the Huguenot ladies were unavoidable, she at least wanted to get married to someone, anyone at all, before they arrived, because as a matron she could give orders to her companion rather than being under her chaperone’s supervision.

Rohan just looked at her, a tired, tense, stressed expression on his face.


Paris

May 1637


Anne de Rohan was calculating some odds. She had not found a satisfactory wife for Soubise yet, but her mind was already circling around the possibility that if she did, and if Soubise should beget a son, they might have Henri’s alleged daughter Marguerite declared illegitimate. It might have to wait until after her older brother’s death, but according to the up-time encyclopedias, that would happen next year—albeit in a battle that was unlikely to be fought in this timeline. Still, a fair number of people were nonetheless rather fatalistically expecting that he would drop dead on schedule. From what she had heard, he was among them.

Just in case, she notified Mme. de Rochefaton and the three highly appropriate potential ladies-in-waiting to delay their departure for Burgundy until certain circumstances clarified themselves.

And that was not the only possibility. The ploy with Hamilton had been fairly successful. Perhaps she could once again insert herself into the matter of Marguerite’s marriage prospects. She picked up her pen.


Laubach, Solms-Laubach

May 1637


Käthe looked at her hands. She had bitten her fingernails into the quick. Again. While she was asleep, she supposed, even though she wore gloves to bed at night, trying to prevent it. Maybe if she strapped the gloves on, somehow, so she couldn’t pull them off during those restless, half-asleep, hours before dawn . . . 

Surely the apothecary would have some kind of salve. Also, something bitter to paint on the tips of her fingers, to shock her aware whenever she started to gnaw on them like some little rodent, some vermin.


Besançon

June 1637


At the beginning of June, the grand duke, his wife, and most of their entourage trailed off in the direction of Nancy and the major “What is Gaston going to do and what can we do about it?” conference that had been called by the duchess of Lorraine, and her consort, leaving Rohan once more behind to watch the domestic situation and ensure that all papers were pushed in the direction they needed to go.

Where Rohan stayed, his daughter stayed also. “What has happened to Mme. de Rochefaton and those girls?” Marguerite asked at supper one evening. “Shouldn’t they have arrived by now?”

Rohan thought about it. They should have arrived by now. He wrote a memo directing Priolo to double-check.

* * *

Marguerite emitted a truly impressive squeal. “Susanna, look!”

“What?”

“Tante Anne has found out who I married in the other world. She says he is nice and pleasant. Handsome and an excellent dancer. So not at all resembling Horrid Hamilton. Since he successfully begat children upon my body in that other world, she wrote him and asked whether he would be interested in converting to Calvinism, marrying me, and duly providing those children in this one. He replied and didn’t precisely refuse. She’s enclosed a letter from him to me, and suggests that I answer it.”

Susanna winced. “I suggest . . . in fact, although it is not my place to do so, I absolutely insist . . . that you take this to your father right now.”

“No, I won’t. He won’t let me answer. He insists absolutely that I have to have a Protestant husband. Just because this man is Catholic now, it doesn’t signify that he always will be. According to Tante, he didn’t precisely say that he would never convert. I’m going to answer it.”

Susanna recognized that defiant expression. She grabbed the letter with both hands, opened her mouth, and shrieked, “Caaarrreeeeeyyy.”

* * *

“This last book is very different from the others,” Rohan said.

“It’s the same illustration style, but it wasn’t aimed at kids.”

The duke smiled. “Cicero also wrote on old age. De Senectute. Since the beginning of time, I suppose, men have given thought to becoming ‘the creature that walks on three legs.’ But I would not have thought of You’re Only Old Once as a title.”

“It’s a joke,” Carey said. “It’s a lot more common for people to say that ‘you’re only young once.’ The idea is that you should make the most of it, whatever it is, while you have the chance.”

“That may be a commendable idea,” Rohan said. “Related to carpe diem, I presume. I am afraid, though, that after all this effort I am more inclined to embrace another of Seuss’ maxims: ‘They say I’m old-fashioned, and live in the past, but I sometimes think progress progresses too fast!’ What do you say?”

“He wasn’t the first person to say that. And you’re not that old, either.”

The peace of Rohan’s study was pierced by a shrill, clarion-volume, voice. They dropped everything and ran.

There were no deaths or serious injuries—just two girls, one of them holding a packet of papers.

“Look!” Susanna shook the letter. “Look, look. Look at this!”

“See Jane run,” Carey muttered.

The other three looked at her blankly.

“Okay, bad sense of humor. What’s the matter, Susanna honey?”

“It’s what Marguerite’s aunt is trying to get her to do.” She swallowed. “Err, Your Grace, that is.” She pushed the papers at Rohan as if they were burning her fingers.

He looked at them; then at the girls. “Come into my study,” he ordered.

Marguerite turned. Susanna followed on tiptoe. Except when he was giving lessons to Marguerite, the duke didn’t allow any of the younger residents of the Hôtel de Buyer to enter the Sacred Sanctuary of Seuss, as Gerry Stone had started to call it.

“What do you want to do about Tante’s latest ploy?” An hour had passed and as far as Marguerite could tell, they were no closer to a decision.

Her father frowned. “Perhaps I should let you reply to her and to this Chabot man as if you were going behind my back. That might elicit some information . . . ”

Susanna prudently refrained from mentioning that Marguerite had been prepared to do that without permission, but Carey guessed as much.


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