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Chapter 26

Besançon

December 1636


As soon as breakfast was over, the girls stormed Carey with a wish to go out for a walk on the ground that there was absolutely nothing to do. She couldn’t think of any real reason why they shouldn’t. It was cold, though, and she had no intention of going out if she didn’t absolutely have to. After standing through Traill’s sermon, she had every intention of retreating upstairs to the duke’s study with its nice little Franklin stove and putting her feet on a couple of hot bricks.

Still . . . three girls, four if Susanna got back from mass in time, and two sturdy footmen. People in the streets.

“Sure,” she said.

They got their coats.

Traill and Hamilton went upstairs.

About an hour later, Susanna ran into the study, her hands full of chips and scraps. “I just got back and I found it like this. They smashed it,” she wailed. “My nativity scene from Marc. They smashed it.”

Upon investigation, Mr. Traill proved to be in the room he shared with Hamilton, reading. He protested that he had not in any way damaged the girl’s blasphemous idols, popish though they were.

Carey was inclined to believe him.

Hamilton was nowhere in the house.

“I’m going to look for him.” Susanna put on her cloak and was out of the house before Carey could say, “Take one of the footmen with you.” In any case, Susanna wasn’t usually accompanied by a footman when she ran errands in town by herself.

After about fifteen minutes, Susanna saw Shae and Dominique, with one of the footmen, headed toward the upper town. “We thought we’d watch a mass at St. John the Baptist,” Shae explained. “Just to see if they’re as naughty as Mr. Traill says. They weren’t up-time. We had joint Girl Scouts meetings at St. Mary’s in Grantville every now and then and nothing interesting ever happened at them. Except that the church had stained glass windows, which he thinks are abominations before the Lord.”

“Good grief,” Susanna said. “You could come to mass with me any time you’re interested.”

“It’s not exactly the same if we’re allowed to,” Dominique said.

Susanna looked around. “Where’s Marguerite?”

“She didn’t think she should come with us. Sneaking into a mass—if she did that and somebody found out, it could get the duke into real political trouble with his supporters. She stayed down by the Latin School. We’ll pick her up again on the way back.”

“But she’s not there,” Susanna said. “I just came by. She wasn’t there, nor her footman either.”

“She can’t have gone far.”

Susanna threw up her hands and shrieked. “Ducos. Do you remember? Guys with knives! Look at your arm, Shae! It’s still in a cast! Do you mean to tell me that you let the little duchess wander off by herself? Are you insane? Are you fools? You’re ladies-in-waiting! That means that you’re supposed to stay with her absolutely all the time! Now where in this godforsaken pit of vipers is she?”

This tirade aroused the footman from his contemplation of the sky. “We’d better go look,” he said. “Now, young ladies, there’s no need to panic, but we’d better go look.” They started back down toward the main part of town.

They found her in front of the Convent of the Poor Clares, waving her hands at the footman who had stayed with her. Not a single assassin was in sight. Hamilton was sitting on the bottom step, holding his head in his hands, with one of the young men who had come to the morning sermon with Lisa Lund’s family standing over him. The other young man was standing further out in the street, obviously keeping an eye out for them. He waved them down.

Susanna pulled away from the rest of the group and ran for the Quartier Battant, to bring Ruvigny and Bismarck to contribute what they could to the general confusion.

Everybody started to talk at once, which didn’t help much.

“He was pressing unwanted attentions upon her,” the footman said.

“He was actually trying to persuade me to marry him now rather than waiting for his father to write to Papa,” Marguerite screeched.

“Good grief!” Shae exclaimed. “As if! Whatever gave him the idea that you would even think about marrying him?”

“Marriage without consent of the parents is an old Scottish tradition, I’ve heard,” the man who had been standing in the street said. “Elope, have a blacksmith marry you over his anvil, and leave the families to deal with it, whether they want to or not.”

“But Marguerite doesn’t want to elope with him,” Dominique said. “And anyway, even if it’s a Scottish tradition, you can’t do that in Burgundy. Or in France. Or in the USE. Scotland is a long way away from here and, anyway, he’s Irish.”

“I am not Irish.” Hamilton recovered enough to lift his head and make that point. “I’m a Scottish Ulsterman. I will never be Irish.”

“That’s one thing you certainly have right.” The man who had been in the street looked down at Hamilton. “I’m Con, by the way. That’s my brother Dan over there, the one who isn’t talking. He’s a little shy about meeting new people. As for what you say, Mistress . . . ” He nodded at Dominique, who hastily said, “Bell. Dominique Bell.”

“Neither are such marriages fully legal in the Low Countries, Austria, the Italian states, or the Spanish Empire, to the best of my knowledge. Nor under the English law that governs Ulster, although the validity of clandestine marriages is still a matter of some controversy, particularly when one or both of the contracting parties is under the legal age of consent. The young duchess was expressing her opposition to the entire concept quite loudly. We heard the argument and came to the rescue, but were scarcely needed, as you can see from the condition of the young man’s head.”

“How did she do that?”

The question was reasonable, since Hamilton was probably double Marguerite’s weight.

“Jumped off the fourth step up and knocked him over by landing hard against his shoulders,” Con said. “We saw the whole thing. He wasn’t expecting it and gave his skull a pretty good knock against that stone lion. Her footman kicked him to keep him down, but he dragged himself part way up anyhow. He must have a pretty hard head.”

“Not for beer,” Shae commented. “He’s a sloppy drunk.”

“Not a drunk,” Hamilton growled. “I stick to beer. I don’t like wine, nasty stuff, and Traill says that I can’t have whisky.”

Susanna came dashing back, Ruvigny and Bismarck in tow.

“Hi, Henri,” Shae said. “Hamilton insulted Marguerite. Don’t you have to have a duel with him now?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Marguerite said. “Henri has outgrown dueling.”

Ruvigny frowned at Shae. “I don’t have any intention of fighting a duel with him. I’ve fenced with him quite a lot in practice and he isn’t good enough to go through with a formal French duel to first blood. He has no finesse but he does have a lot of brute strength; no speed, but a pretty long reach. If we fought, it would be altogether too likely that one of us might kill the other because of his sheer incompetence.”

“But he insulted her.”

“I did not insult her,” Hamilton said to Shae. “She is the Rohan heiress. Thus, I respect her, and I want to marry her. Even if I had to carry her all the way to Scotland to find someone willing to perform the wedding, I would not so much have touched her on the way. After all,” he concluded, pleased with his own logic, “my future wife must be a virgin on her wedding night, and for me to violate her person before our marriage would make that impossible. I just wanted to make sure that there would be a wedding night.”

The rest of them stared at him, each in his or her own way enraptured by this feat of logic.

“Maybe he didn’t insult the duchess,” Susanna said in a low, menacing, voice, “but he did smash the nativity scene that Marc gave me. I found it when I got back to the house after mass. I left the scraps with Madame Calagna. Mr. Traill says that he didn’t do it, so there’s no one else who might have.”

“I don’t just admit that,” Hamilton said. “I take pride in my action, which follows in the footsteps of the great Presbyterian iconoclasts of the last century who were inspired by the sermons of John Knox.”

Everyone else stood there silently for a minute.

“You know,” Con said to Hamilton. “What you really need is a few whiskies.” He looked at Ruvigny and Bismarck. “Things will obviously be unpleasant in the duke’s household if you return there with him right now.”

“Oh, yes,” Marguerite said. “Please, don’t anybody say a word about all of this to Papa or Madame Calagna. Papa will never let me set foot out of the house again.”

“Also,” Dominique added, “Shae and I will get in a lot of trouble for not being proper ladies-in-waiting and leaving you alone, and that will make trouble for Mom because she’s in charge of us, and she’s the one who said we could take a walk, and the duke might complain to the grand duke, and then he might decide that it’s too much trouble to have up-timers on his payroll and Lisa and everyone could lose their jobs.”

One of the footmen started to open his mouth.

“Don’t,” Dominique said. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t say it. You would be in trouble, too.”

“Did anyone see you knock Hamilton over?” Bismarck asked Marguerite.

“Nobody was close. Except us, that is. Nobody else. There haven’t been many people out and about this morning. None close enough to hear that we were arguing. All the Catholics and Lutherans are probably at church or at home having Christmas dinner or something.”

Ruvigny frowned. “All right,” he said. “Those of you who were out for a walk, go home like nothing unusual happened. August and I go back to work, giving a most virtuous impression of two men who are completely unaware that anything unusual has happened. These two . . . ” He nodded at the other men. “ . . . will take Hamilton down to the Quartier Battant and give him a few shots of whisky. Tomorrow will be another day and we can figure out what to tell Rohan about all of this then.”


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