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Chapter 28

Laubach

February 1637


“It’s too slick to ride this morning,” Käthe protested. “Too slick for a hunt up in the hills. Why don’t you put it off? Take a rifle and walk.”

“I want to take advantage of this bright weather. Conditions won’t improve until spring and spring’s been coming late these last few years. Today’s frost will go off as soon as the sun gets a little higher.”

“No, the cold is too sharp; there will still be slick spots in the shade.”

“Glänzer is sure-footed, even on the narrow trails.”

“He a horse, not an acrobat.” She didn’t care for her husband’s showy gelding. But she bit her lip. Anything else that she might say would just make him more determined to go out.

The gamekeepers came back late that afternoon with the news that they had to shoot the horse.

And with Albert Otto’s body on an improvised stretcher.

She had been fully prepared for a broken leg.

Not for a broken neck.

At least the lawyers had insisted that he draw up a will.

She sent one of the footmen for the minister, another for the steward, and started to reckon up mentally how many letters of notification she would be expected to write in her own hand and how many she could leave to Albert Otto’s secretary.


Besançon

February 1637


“Why did the grand duke have to send them off again?” Marguerite pouted. “They had scarcely gotten back.”

Carey Calagna sighed. “You friends are employed by the grand duke. They go where he sends them. In this instance, to Savoy.”

She thought that Ruvigny’s Danish “king’s daughter” had not been sorry to see her new husband removed from the immediate orbit of la petite Marguerite, who was more than slightly possessive about her old friend. Much in the way a sister might be possessive when an older brother who had spoiled her all his life decided to marry, but still possessive. Noticeably possessive. There had been some tension during the holidays. Mild, but real. By the time the Savoy expedition returned in the spring, Marguerite would have adjusted. She hoped.


Paris

February 1637


“She has never liked her sister-in-law,” Raudegen said. “At present . . . ”

He and Marc were talking in a tavern. Not a low tavern. Not a dive, filled with suspicious characters. Nobody was skulking around. It was a quite nice, middle-class, tavern in one of the suburbs of Paris, with most of the tables taken by quite nice middle-class people who were entirely preoccupied with their own business and discussing the price of construction bricks, their sister’s most recent miscarriage, how long it was going to take the bishop to assign a new priest to the parish of Ste. Barbe, or boring the rest of the diners with repetitions of what a clever thing little Mimi said the day before.

For surreptitious discussions, it was ideal. Nobody for at least a quarter-mile in all directions cared in the least about what someone else might be talking about, whereas the things the residents did talk about on a daily basis were so utterly tedious and repetitious that even Gaston’s most dedicated snoops, having acquired much more information than they ever wanted about baby Marie’s teething agonies, the cheap hors d’oeuvres served after Madame Clisson’s funeral, or the low quality of service being provided by Jeanson’s Hinges now that young Pierre had taken the business over from the old man, had long since given up in despair and gone to exercise surveillance in low dives along the docks of the Seine where there was more hope of detecting villainous spies.

As long as Marc and Raudegen stuck with pronouns, using “she” in place of “Mademoiselle Anne de Rohan” for example, there was no way to distinguish the subject of their conversation from any of the other conversations rattling along at the surrounding tables. So Raudegen paused a moment and then repeated, “She has never liked her sister-in-law at all.” Within a space of fifteen minutes, he managed to convey that the duc de Rohan’s rather lamentable wife, who had been openly keeping company with the comte de Candale for the past several months, was most recently spotted at the rural château of her father, the very wealthy Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, and, moreover, was believed to be pregnant by Candale. To be pregnant by Candale again, given the son she already had.

All of which Raudegen said in such a way that he could well have been talking about the reprehensibly-behaved sister of a local wax chandler or textile merchant.

Marc occasionally interjected a suitably shocked, but mild, exclamation, as if he were a youthful nephew being introduced to the local scandals.

* * *

There was nothing mild about the things that Anne de Rohan was saying about her older brother’s wife. Even “furious” scarcely applied. “At least, there is no possible way that she can assert that this coming bastard is a legitimate Rohan heir.” Mademoiselle Anne was, in her early fifties, still a vigorous woman who retained all the stubbornness that had led her to insist on being imprisoned with her mother after the end of the siege of La Rochelle several years earlier.

“There is only one blessing I can see,” she said to Soubise, “namely, that Henri has sent a letter authorizing me to begin the process of searching for a suitable bride for you. I don’t have the slightest idea what finally moved him to agree to your marrying; he’s always wanted to see Maman’s estates fall back to his own heirs after your death rather than let you establish a permanent cadet line of the family. I remember how grudging he was about accepting her will. He can’t have already heard about that woman’s pregnancy when he wrote: I hadn’t heard it myself before Christmas. I know the genealogies of every Huguenot family of appropriate lineage in France and I will begin at once, but there’s a sickening shortage of eligible unmarried and potentially fertile women among them. I may be reduced to praying for the untimely death of someone’s current husband.”

* * *

Raudegen informed Marc as to every wealthy Huguenot household he knew that the duchess and Candale had visited on their peregrinations of the past few months and how each of them had responded to her constant fund-raising efforts. “If only,” he said, gritting his teeth, “she and Candale had not peeled away before we got to Besançon from Paris last fall, but had continued to accompany the rest of the group the way she was supposed to, it might be possible to produce some coloration that she was temporarily reconciled to Rohan and the child is legitimate. As things stand, it is generally known to everyone interested in the matter that she never showed up in Besançon at all.”

Raudegen clearly still took their failure to deliver the package containing one recalcitrant duchess in early middle age to its prescribed address as a serious dereliction of his duty and an insult to both his honor and his competence, even though Ruvigny and Bismarck were the ones who had actually been sent to do the job.

“You know,” Marc said mildly. “There’s no way the little seed pearl would ever have stood for that.”


Besançon

March 1637


In early March, Marc Cavriani wandered unheralded back into Besançon from wherever he had been. He refused to either confirm or deny that it was France, but delivered a large packet of correspondence from Soubise, from Mademoiselle Anne, from Raudegen.

He was glad that he wouldn’t have to be in the room to see the duke’s face when he read what they had to say.

He hoped fleetingly that the Creator was as merciful as Gerry Stone believed Him to be, rather than more along the lines advocated in Geneva. If so, perhaps la petite Marguerite would not learn the latest disillusioning stories about her mother. Not that she harbored many illusions, but these might impinge not only on her emotions as a daughter but also on her status as the Rohan heiress. If Raudegen’s suspicions in regard to what Soubise and Anne were planning panned out . . . Things could get dicey.

He only managed a few hours with the object of his affections, given everything else people were wanting him to do. He spent quite a bit of time meeting with the grand duke. He did finally have time to tell her that he and his father had found a perfect placement for her in the USE, in the household of Amalie Elisabeth, regent of Hesse-Kassel, Calvinist.

“She is politically influential and has many friends,” he said with enthusiasm. “Her surviving girls are a bit young yet, but within a few years, when you should be at the height of your abilities as a designer, they will be coming into society. In Magdeburg, you will have access to all the latest up-time fashion influences. And the landgravine is willing for me to use her household as a place to stay when I have errands in the USE, so we’ll see each other more. Part of the time you will have to follow her to Kassel, of course, but much of the year she is in Magdeburg, and Papa will try to persuade her to make you a permanent part of the establishment she maintains in the national capital.”

“What’s going to happen,” Susanna asked, suddenly off-topic, “given all the rumors, if Cardinal Richelieu gets resurrected, goes back to the Palais-Cardinal, and the Real Cat suddenly comes running out from under a bush and welcomes him home? Considering the cat who was in all the newspapers.”

Marc cocked his head to one side. “I hope that the newspapers will have forgotten all about the cat in such an eventuality. At least, Denis and I bought back quite a few sort-of-Siamese cats and, with all the publicity, he made a good profit on selling the extras. Everything could be sort of smudged, if necessary, the way that artists do with charcoal drawings. Or, sometimes, Gerry calls it airbrushed. Fuzzed. Fogged. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I think you can pray Psalm 32:7 on my behalf for a while, because I suspect I’ll need it.”

Carrying even larger packets of confidential correspondence, he kissed her several times and went back to France, shrouded in paternal admonitions not to do anything to bring himself to the attention of Gaston’s men or cause them to sharpen their focus when they looked in his direction. He called upon Soubise only to discover that Raudegen was in Brussels.

* * *

The weather stayed horrible. The girls mostly stayed indoors, Marguerite busy with lessons from her father, Shae busy with the materials she needed to prepare for her correspondence course final exams to get a degree from Calvert High School in Grantville in June, and Dominique because her mother told her so.

“It would have been nice,” Susanna said, “if Marc had asked me if I wanted to be in the landgravine’s household. He treats me like a package that needs to be delivered: pick it up here and drop it off there. I guess I should go, though, since his father has taken so much trouble over it.”

The follow-up letter from Leopold Cavriani contained detailed information, and indicated that someone would be in Besançon, probably in early May, to act as Susanna’s escort.

The girls debated quite a bit as to whether the coming escort might be Colonel Raudegen, but as they had no data whatsoever on which to base their discussions, even that topic of conversation petered out, and they went back to enduring a spring that promised to be as dreary as the winter.


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Framed