Chapter 13
Paris
August 1636
On performance night, as if to spite everyone’s nerves, things went well. Rotrou had indeed written the script in such a way that in the last scene, the “young king and queen” did not dance, but had the remainder of the cast dance around them. Nymphs floated around in billowing, if salaciously knee-length, chiffon skirts. Muses in classical draperies struck attitudes. The Scion’s crown was so immense that it shadowed his face nicely. God sang and the leads processed off the stage with great dignity.
The dignity held until they were well in the wings. Then Gerry took a firm grip on Marguerite’s wrist and scampered as fast as he could move in order to get her safely outside in the course of the after-performance confusion.
Marc and Susanna were already on their way out of town with the first carriage. It also transported Tancrède and most of the supplies for the trip. They planned to wait at a predetermined location for the second carriage to catch up.
Bismarck, reins in his hands, waited at the stage door at the back of the theater until the older duchess came out.
Raudegen and Ruvigny would follow on horseback as soon as they were reasonably certain that there had been no slip ’twixt the cup and the lip.
The fireworks were a success.
The royal party exited from their boxes, there being too many to fit in a single box.
There was a lot going on outside the theater. The crowd went “oooh!” and the crowd went “aaah!” at every detail of the dresses and hair styles.
Cinq-Mars saw the Rohan ladies leaving, the only person to notice, but why should he care? Once the choreographer told him he wouldn’t be needed in the last scene, he had made his own plans to take advantage of the after-performance confusion. He slipped into a dressing room and formally accepted an offer of employment at the Théâtre du Marais. He would act under a pseudonym like all the others, of course, but he had a vision. Someday he would become a tremendous success, adored by all of the literati of France, a power to be reckoned with. He would become the pet of all the salons. He would make and break careers. Until then, he and Isaac were going out for a late supper, and he would never again have to listen to his mother rant and rave at him about his behavior.
Outside the theater, “We have a problem,” Ruvigny said.
Raudegen grunted.
Four Royal Guards had been paying attention to what they were supposed to instead of the distractions that had been laid out for them. They were trotting down the street, positioned to keep the carriage Bismarck was driving in sight.
“Good men,” Raudegen said. “They have enough sense not to try to stop it until they’ve figured out the size of the opposition. I hope they get commendations. But for right now, let’s spook their horses.”
Ruvigny had been more in demand by the Rohan ladies, which meant that Raudegen had the experience with the little smoke-and-sparks-spitting firepots. Gerry called them oversized sparklers.
“A half dozen should be enough.” He hefted down one of the saddlebags and reached inside his buffcoat for a flint—the new kind with the little fuel reservoir and small roller.
Ruvigny led their own mounts around a corner, since a man’s own horse was as subject to spooking as anyone else’s.
Raudegen lit the first fuse and went to toss the ersatz Molotov cocktail down the street toward the riders.
“What? Oh boar piss! Shit on this fucking fuse!”
The first firepot went off while he still held it, throwing sparks in all directions before the clay cracked, split, and spilled the spitting gunpowder out on his hand. He had lined up the other five neatly on the ground next to him. The closest caught a spark from the first. That fuse also ran much too fast and hot. The pot exploded, throwing potsherds rather than just cracking, and ignited the rest. He fell to the ground, nauseous with pain.
“They didn’t work as reliably as I had hoped,” he groaned, once Ruvigny had pulled him up, shouldered him around the corner, and boosted him onto his horse.
Ruvigny walked around the horse’s head to the other side. “How’s the bleeding?”
Raudegen glanced down. “It’s mostly cauterized, I think.”
“You’re lucky you throw overhand. If that first pot had been on a level with your head, you might have lost your eyes instead of your hair. Use this hand to hold the cloth against the cuts on your scalp above your ear unless the burns are so bad that you can’t stand the touch. Otherwise, try to balance in the stirrups. I’ll put him on a lead rein.”
Raudegen grimaced. “They worked, though. Those guards are riding some thoroughly spooked horses, if they’ve even managed to keep their seats. City slicker horses with no battle experience.”
They couldn’t move rapidly, but the carriage Bismarck drove was proceeding through the moonless gloom with even less speed. When they caught up, Ruvigny transferred Raudegen into it. Gerry winced, straightened the mangled fingers as well as he could, and improvised a splint.
“That’s all I can do here. My med kit’s in the duffel. Marc and Susanna have it.”
It was still dark when they caught up with the other carriage. The new splint reached from beyond the tip of Raudegen’s middle finger to above his wrist. Gerry sprinkled the mess with a powder from his duffel bag and wrapped it in a clean bandage. “That’s the best I can manage until we get some daylight and I can see what I’m doing. Even these new-model lanterns with the mantles flicker.”
Ruvigny looked at the splint and bandages critically. “That hand will never grasp a sword, or anything else, again, despite the best care that our angel of mercy can provide you.”
Raudegen also looked at the splint and bandages. “There goes my career.”
“Nah,” Gerry said, tying the final knot. “Don’t go all ‘if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all’ on me. You’re already too high up the totem pole. The grand duke will just kick you up higher. He’ll probably assign you to Erlach for planning and logistics, with your own private secretary to write down what you think for you.”
He lifted a beaker to Raudegen’s lips. “Now drink this. It’s not like you’re some ordinary person, like a tailor, who actually needs to use his hands to earn a living. It’s not like you’re a clockmaker or a lens grinder. Or a blacksmith, for that matter. No matter how well it heals, though, that hand will ache in bad weather and be a constant nuisance. You’ll remember tonight every day for the rest of your life.” He put away the med kit, shuddered, and then shuddered again.
“I can’t help it,” he said to Bismarck a couple of hours later. He still had his arms clutched across his chest, shaking and shivering as if it were February rather than August. “Ever since Rome, when I shot Marius after he shot at the pope, I can’t help it. I did fix Raudegen’s hand before I lost it, but I can’t help it. My gun was at Marius’ throat and it went off. The blood sprayed out of him, all over everyone. It almost took his head off. I’m sorry guys, but it was my fault, too. I changed the fuses after Raudegen tested them the last time, trying to get more bang for my buck. I know you’re soldiers; you’ve seen worse, but I can’t help it. Marius’ head sort of exploded and now Raudegen’s hand blew off and it’s my fault again because I didn’t tell him that I changed the fuses. Nurses and doctors see worse all the time, I know. I’m a disgrace to Lothlorien Pharmaceuticals. I’m okay with vaccinations, but when I have to look at the insides of someone’s body I can’t help it, and it’s all my fault again. He’s just lying there on the carriage bench because I gave him some opium; he’s just lying there.”
It was not the most opportune moment for someone else to join the party. Candale was fortunate that neither Ruvigny nor Bismarck shot him when they were alerted by Marc’s sudden sharp Pssst! from the lead carriage.
“The duchess invited me,” didn’t go far as a rationale with anyone other than the duchess.
“See, I am already dressed in the guise of her husband, an Alsatian country gentleman,” didn’t go much farther.
“With all due respect, Monsieur le Comte,” Ruvigny said, “You are just what we don’t need.”
“It’s my fault,” Gerry moaned. “If I hadn’t blown up Raudegen’s hand, we would be two hours ahead of him by now.”
Candale turned his horse and looked into the carriage that was now occupied by two duchesses and one comatose colonel.
“Shouldn’t you be going back to your regiment?” Marguerite asked him. “I’m sure it misses you.”
“If you people wake up this child or disturb Colonel Raudegen,” Susanna hissed through the window of the first carriage, “it will not matter because all of you will find yourselves dead before morning.”
Bismarck took Gerry up on the driver’s seat as they headed out of the city through what was left of the night.
“What were you chanting?” Susanna asked him when they stopped for a rest. “It sounded like you were chanting while you drove.”
“I was reminding Gerry. ‘The just shall live by faith. Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, died for our sins and was raised again for our justification.’ He needs to remember that now and always.”
“Do you believe it?” Marguerite asked. “Actually believe it?”
“I do.” Bismarck bowed his head. “In joy and happiness, in suffering and sadness, help me at all times, Christ the salvation of my life.”
On the Road Again . . . and Again . . . and Again
To avoid Candale, who usually paced his horse next to the duchess’ carriage, Marguerite decided to ride with Susanna.
“Have you read the Bible?” she asked.
“Mostly only the parts in my missal.”
“People are supposed to read it for themselves. Grand-mère Rohan read a great deal of it to me when I was a child, and of course the preachers read it in the temple when we went to church, which wasn’t often because the Edict of Nantes prohibits Protestant churches within five leagues of Paris, so it takes a whole day to go and come back even when the weather is good. You haven’t missed much, though. It’s a disappointing kind of book.”
“What?”
“Oh, it’s true. It’s supposed to be the story of God’s chosen people, but they were horrible, smiting one another all the time. The sons of Adam must have married their own sisters, because no one else was alive, and Abraham certainly did, for it says so. There was the man who cut his concubine in twelve pieces and distributed them to the Twelve Tribes. They were supposed to be God’s people, but they were not one bit better than we are, and some of them were worse. Even Henri IV only had a dozen or so mistresses besides his wives and less than two dozen bastards that we know of. David and Solomon had lots more wives than two, and at the same time instead of divorcing the first one, plus all those concubines. If the preachers want to denounce libertines, then they ought to denounce those. Don’t you think?”
Susannah was about to reply, but Tancrède woke up.
“Are we there yet? Tell M. von Bismarck to stop the carriage, please; I gotta go. I’m hungry; when’s lunch? These turnips are nasty. I’m a boy. I don’t care if you’re older; you’re nothing but a girl. I don’t want to sit still. Read me a story. Can I ride in the carriage with the lady who used to visit me at the LeBons? Why can’t I go visit the LeBons; they were always nice to me. Will you read me another story, please? I’m hungry; when are we going to stop for supper? I liked the first story better. Read it again, pleeease! I gotta go. I don’t want to behave myself. If you had brought books with short words, I could read my own stories. Are we there yet? I gotta go right now.”
Closer acquaintance reinforced Marguerite’s already ingrained hostility toward Tancrède.
“There are four of us,” Bismarck said to her while Susanna followed the boy to his chosen spot behind a tree. “Four boys born within a space of six years. With my sisters, eight of us born within twelve years. I believe that we may owe our lady mother an apology for existing.”
“It’s a farce,” Marguerite proclaimed. “In a just world, Candale’s old valet would not have been surnamed LeBon. LeMal would make a lot more sense for this one.”
Tancrède, by fate and fostering surnamed LeBon, showed up in time to regard her with a defiant pout. “I don’t like you. I want to ride with the other lady.”
Marc put an end to the impasse by picking the boy up and plopping him in front of Candale, muttering, “I understand that you’re responsible for his existence, so you deal with him for a while and give Susanna a break.”
“Merci, M. de Candale, for letting me ride your horse. Am I going to get to ride a horse the rest of the way? I like Susanna better than I like Marguerite. I want my own pony to ride. I wanted a pony before, but the LeBons always said that there is no room for a pony in Paris. Do you live in Paris? No? You’re in the army? Do you have armor? Do you have a sword? Do you have a pistol? Can I shoot it? Hey, look at those cows. I gotta go. Honest, M. de Candale, I gotta go right now. If you don’t let me go right now I won’t be able to hold it.”
Candale did his best to ignore the child, but the boy wiggled. He squiggled, wriggled, and upon occasion lunged toward something that caught his eyes. Two hours later, he started to cry.
“His legs hurt,” Bismarck said. “Marc, you can’t put a child who has never ridden on a horse and expect him to stay there all day.” He picked the boy off, motioned for the coachman to halt, followed him into the bushes for yet another ‘gotta go,’ and returned him to Susanna.
“Do you always pay him so little mind as on this trip?” he asked when he pulled his horse up next to Candale’s again.
“There’s no way under the law that I can make him my heir and I have no intention of raising false expectations by making a fuss over him. It’s not as if I’m a king who can furnish his légitimés with titles and estates the way Henri IV did for Vendôme and the others. Or even as much as Maurice of Nassau did for his illegitimate brood. I’ve provided him with foster parents since he was born. I’ve paid LeBon and his wife. If the duchess wants to send him to Saumur when he gets a few years older, I’ll pay his school fees. Not,” he added, “that she can’t afford to pay them herself.
“If my father ever dies and I succeed to the title, maybe I can do a bit more, a commission or something, but that will depend on the fates. My father may be immortal. The odds are against it, but he will manage it if any human can, or at least achieve a personal return to the era of Methuselah.”
Several days later, Tancrède squirmed his way up from the floor of the carriage and stuck his head out the window. “Well, if we aren’t there yet, when will we be there?”
“It’s about two hundred and fifty miles,” Susanna said. “We have been on the road for eleven days. I think it will take at least another week. We will be in the County of Burgundy, though, before we come to Besançon. We will follow the Doubs River, more or less, until we reach Grand Duke Bernhard’s capital city. It is a very twisty river.”
“May I go fishing when we come to the river? I love to fish.”
“Perhaps you can go fishing once we get to Besançon. I don’t think there will be time until then.”
“I want to fish now!”
“There isn’t any river now,” she pointed out.
“What worries me most,” Marguerite said, “is that we are driving along—well, the men are riding along—without any opposition. We haven’t been pursued, as far as any of them can tell and all of them except Marc and Gerry are accustomed to military campaigning and knowing who is chasing you and finding the people you are chasing. Marc has been asking questions at every inn and stable. Even when we came through Auxerre, there was no more than the normal in the way of checkpoints. We haven’t even had to use the elaborate fiction about being a household from Alsace.”
Susanna nodded. “Why does this worry you?”
“Because, I think, there must be problems in Paris that make even the disappearance of the Rohan heiress and her mother unworthy of immediate royal attention. Under the circumstances it is good to be insignificant, but I can’t imagine what is causing it. The only reason I can think of that the king would not have sent people to find us is that—really, I can’t think of any at all. I don’t have any idea what may be causing it. How can I even guess, when I am riding and riding and riding in this carriage with no news at all?”
Marguerite was not alone.
“I haven’t heard a single word about the court,” the duchess told Candale. “Not a single word since we left Paris. I didn’t even manage to buy a measly, out-of-date, provincial newspaper when we came through Auxerre. Raudegen, curse him, says it would not fit with my persona. You could get one for me. Even the most countrified of country gentlemen might occasionally buy a newspaper. It’s maddening. I know in my heart that Soubise is ruining everything. The next time I do hear something, it will probably be that Soubise has lost what minuscule remnants of royal favor that I had managed to retrieve for the family.”
Candale ducked his head toward the window. “Have you seen those new kaleidoscopes that are coming out of Augsburg?” he asked. “Fascinating. When I was in Nancy, I attended a lecture on how they are made. Mirrors, and a few little specks of colored glass. Every design is made with the same pieces, but it changes every time you turn the tube, which amounts to an object lesson on how the court functions. The pieces remain the same, but from one turn to another the picture alters a great deal. The Rohan piece will still be in the little compartment, no matter where it falls at each turn, and another turn will always come.” He smiled. “Also, I think you underestimate your brother-in-law and Mademoiselle Anne. It’s possible that a lot of royal interest is currently directed toward the old Rohan holdings in Brittany.”
* * *
The conditions in eastern France had not changed significantly since Ruvigny and Bismarck had observed them on their first trip to Paris the previous October. The villages were still half-depopulated from plague that passed through the region in the summer of 1635. The road was better than it had been in January, if one considered dust better than half-frozen mud, but it was not better because anyone had been doing maintenance on it. Trade, Marc reported after a few chats with local shop owners, was down.
Innkeepers warned of wandering bands of ex-mercenaries, most of them men who left Lorraine after the grand duke and the king in the Low Countries started to make a real effort to restore order there. They weren’t huge bands of bandits, the townsmen emphasized, but rather small groups, six to a dozen men, enough to steal some livestock or fall upon a farm wagon, but even a small village was safe enough from them if the inhabitants were determined and well-armed, which most of them were, since after this many years of war almost every peasant had managed to steal some kind of a musket or take a long-barrel from a former soldier who lay passed out drunk. Never call it theft. The French were law-abiding people. However, the Lord assured his children that He would provide, and if he chose to provide by making soldiers careless with their weapons, who were they to question His will?
“I don’t recall,” one innkeeper who doubled as a village maire commented to Marc, “that I’ve seen a single probate settlement in this district in the past five to ten years in which the deceased did not have a gun included in his inventory.” He looked the party over. “Three women and a child, but also six men, all mounted. Don’t worry about them. They won’t even think of coming near you.”
The ambushers, when they came, were neither ex-mercenaries nor bandits. The ambush did not take place in a dramatic vale with overhanging cliffs, nor in the face of an oncoming storm. The landscape did not feature abandoned medieval ruins; neither were they lured into it by a piteous cry for help. As Marc would say later, it wasn’t an ambush that would furnish anyone with a good after-dinner story. It took place in the middle of the morning, in full sunlight, on the edge of one of the half-depopulated villages. No riders on thundering mounts drove down upon them. In point of fact, they had halted, dismounted, or climbed out to stretch their legs, and were wandering around the vicinity of the well for one simple reason.
“I have to go,” came the shrill cry.
“If you ask me,” Bismarck commented to Gerry, “he’s figured out that having to go is a way of getting out and running around for a bit.”
“Well, can you blame him? It’s not natural for a boy to be cooped up like this. Dad let us run around and scream all we wanted to.”
“Even if he is crying ‘wolf’ on occasion,” Marc added, “nobody else has volunteered to run the risk after that interesting episode suffered by M. de Candale the second time the boy rode with him for a while.”
“Again! How many times this morning does that make?” Marguerite asked.
“The bright side,” Susanna said, “is that at least he doesn’t wet the bed.”
“Anybody else who needs to go, go now,” Raudegen ordered, an implacable tone in his mild baritone voice. He looked at Ruvigny. “I can’t believe I said that.”
As a point of fact Tancrède was behind a hedge, going.
The attackers took out Candale and Ruvigny first. They were standing next to one another and got bashed on their heads by villagers wielding a couple of pieces of window frame. They didn’t get bashed tremendously hard, nothing like a cavalryman with a saber could have done in battle, but it was enough to knock them down and daze them temporarily.
Raudegen turned and, in spite of the practice he had been doing at every opportunity, reached for his sword with his injured hand. Another attacker swept a bladeless scythe handle at his knees.
Bismarck scrambled up, pushed the two duchesses into one of the carriages, and stood at the door, his weapon out.
Marc, at the well where he had been lowering the bucket to get water for the horses, pulled the bucket up, pivoted, and threw the water on someone’s head; then ran to grab the reins of the horses on the front carriage, thinking in a disorganized way that if the riding horses spooked, they’d be able to chase them down, but a runaway team could destroy the carriages before anyone managed to catch them. Susanna came around from where she was standing in the bushes to keep an eye on Tancrède and grabbed the reins of the horses harnessed to the carriage that the duchess usually used. It was a neat trick, since she had to keep holding onto Tancrède with her other hand.
Gerry, still in the coppice where he had retreated for his turn at taking care of private business, pulled his harmonica out of his shirt pocket and made it wail. Ghost Riders in the Sky produced a sound effect that bore no resemblance to the plinky little flute-like separate notes he had played to provide the melodies for the extravaganza, even when the instrument was in the hands of an utterly incompetent musician. He hoped that none of the attackers headed in his direction. He still had his pants down.
Tancrède pulled his wrist out of Susanna’s grasp and ran toward Marc at the well. She was about to start after him, horses or no horses, when an appalling shriek arose from behind its low mortared wall, resembling the sound of a soul in torment, the drawing of fingernails over a slate board magnified by a thousand, or, perhaps, an untutored six-year-old blowing into a harmonica with all the power of his breath.
With two sets of shrieks coming at them, Ruvigny picked himself up to come into the fray. Candale immobilized the boy that Marc had drenched with water, and Marc stuffed his harmonica into his jerkin in order to demonstrate the usefulness of a small but practical dagger. With Raudegen now having a businesslike sword in his functional hand, the attackers hesitated and faltered.
Three middle-aged women, a boy who might have been coming into his teens, two old men, one of them very old indeed, and a scrawny dog.
“We need the horses,” one of the women explained. “We saw you here. It’s not that we expected anyone to stop at our well this morning. It’s not as if we had time to plan. We saw you, grabbed whatever we could find, and ran out.”
“What do you want horses for? Not to ride, certainly.”
“To sell,” one of the old men said. “To trade,” the other quavered. “To eat,” the strongest of the women answered.
There weren’t any other men. Between the war and the plague, they were gone. Because they were gone, most of the harvest had not been brought in last fall. Because the survivors were starving, they butchered the last ox so that the rest of them might survive the winter, but that meant that this spring they had not been able to plow, but only dug the kitchen gardens with spades, so there would be no grain, not that they had any seed to plant if they had an ox to plow with, because the previous fall’s harvest had rotted in the fields, as they had already told milords. The cows had been bred last year; two of the calves had survived, but the only bull calf had died, so there was no prospect of having them bred again even if they waited two or three years, which they had hoped to be able to do. They had no money to pay stud fees to the village three miles over, which still had a bull.
“Yes, we knew we might have to kill you to get the horses,” the strongest woman said. “But what more right do you have to be alive than we do? How is it different for you to be dead than for the six of us and the children younger than Jean over there to be dead? If we don’t do something, we will all be dead by winter. Eight of you; thirteen of us counting the other children. We could survive for a year, live well for a year, on what you are taking with you on a drive down this road from some place we have never been to some place we will never go.”
“You have fine animals,” the oldest man added. “Just one of your horses sold in Auxerre would bring the money for a blacksmith to put blades back on our tools, with some left over. The foragers stripped off all the metal. I know how to bargain. I don’t walk well, but Jean here could put me on the most docile one and lead us to Auxerre. The price of that one horse would buy us metal for the blacksmith and a donkey to bring me home. Then we would have a donkey.”
“Why don’t you leave?” Gerry asked.
“What would we do?” The second man snorted. “We are serfs, yes, and tied to the land, but that means that this land is also tied to us and we have the right to farm it. If we leave, we won’t have a right to farm anywhere else. All we know how to do is farm.”
“We ought to have done something for them,” Gerry insisted that evening. “There was a man who fell among thieves . . . ”
He leaned back against the wall. This inn was surprisingly good for eastern France—clean and tidy, if not spacious. The proprietor, a German from the Palatinate, had managed to get out, with some of his money, enough to buy another inn, ahead of the Imperials back in 1622. He kept chickens and rabbits to feed his guests, a couple of goats for milk, and his wife cultivated a good-sized garden. The village was strong enough to keep random marauders away. Recent events, the death of the king and the troubles, he said, he had caused him to question his decision to settle in France, but in the end no man could defy the will of God. If he was destined to die a pauper, then he was destined to die a pauper. At the moment, he delivered a second round of beer to the table.
“We didn’t punish them. Beyond that, what can a person do?” Raudegen lifted his good hand, counting off on his fingers. “If we left a horse with those people, we would be short a horse and perhaps that would cause us to fail in our charge. If we left a horse in that village, there would still be other villages, behind these hills.” He gestured to the left side of the road they had come in on. “ . . . and behind those.” He gestured to the right. “Villages where the people are living in equal misery. You can’t help them all. You can’t even find them all.”
His logic was, in its own way, inexorable.
“I’m wondering about that maire,” Gerry continued. “The one who told us that all the estate inventories that he recalled included guns. How many inventories do you think he’s seen, this past year, with the plague and stuff? When it comes to defending their homes, dead men can’t shoot guns, even if they owned one when they were alive.”
“In the matter of weapons,” Susanna gave Tancrède a nudge. “Now, before you have to go up to bed.”
“I’m sorry, Gerry.” Tancrède clasped his hands behind his back and dropped his head. “I told you a lie. I didn’t lose the harmonica you loaned me. I just didn’t want to give it back.” He looked up. “That’s stealing, isn’t it? But I took good care of it. I hid it so that nobody else could find it.” He looked down again. “But I almost did lose it, because when Susanna and Marc came to take me away from Paris, I barely had time to get it and stick it inside my breeches.”
“You’re a hero, kid,” Gerry said, his voice rough. “Thank you for being polite and apologizing. That’s the right thing to do when you’ve made a mistake. Keep the harmonica with my compliments. You may need to save the day again some other time.”
It was the duchess who took the boy up to put him to bed. She often did, if an inn was decent.
Gerry watched them go. “We’ve turned into a team, I think,” he mused. “We ought to start calling ourselves something. Teams always do in RPGs and comics, or most of the time, at least. I don’t suppose that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would do.”
“What’s an RPG?”
“What are those, whatever you called them?”
“One up,” Bismarck said with glee. “I’ve seen a comic. It’s like a whole bunch of broadsides bound together.”
“Turtles?”
“Hey, Dad was opposed to bourgeois culture, but we went to public school. He didn’t try to homeschool us or anything. I know about as much about Raphael and Donatello and Michelangelo and Leonardo as anyone else. Not to mention Splinter. I loved Splinter. He sort of reminded me of Dad.”
“Those,” Marguerite said, “are famous artists. Not Splinter, whoever he is, but the rest. Italian painters whose canvases cost a lot if you want to buy one from a dealer. Not turtles. I have at least that much education.”
“The turtles were named for famous artists. They’re still turtles. Mutant ninja turtles.”
This required about an hour of discussion. At the end, Gerry was still of the opinion that the name would not do. He looked around the table. “We could call ourselves the Carrot Tops, after Corporal Carrot, but I’m the only one who’s carrotty. The rest of you have more decent shades of red heads.”
“What do carrots have to do with red hair?” Susanna asked. “Carrots are white, or sometimes purple.”
“Up-time, carrots were orange. Mutations along the way, maybe.”
“What’s a mutation?”
“Remember what I told you about the turtles?” Gerry scratched his head. “There was some Sherlock Holmes story that Dad read to us. He likes the writings of A. Conan Doyle and his philosophy of reading out loud was that it had to be something that he enjoyed reading, too. The Red Headed League. That’s it. We can borrow that. Doyle won’t mind; he was dead even up-time. Maybe we can make Corporal Carrot our mascot.”
“Should we make Cinq-Mars an honorary member?” Marc asked with a grin.
“Why on earth?”
“Well, you said that he did assist us, if only by lounging around backstage and not alerting anyone that Gerry was making off with Marguerite and that the duchess was heading for the hills.”
Gerry was idly twirling his pocket knife around. Suddenly he said, “It’s not relevant to anything, but, Marguerite, when you try to practice English with me, why do you have a Scottish accent? There are a whole lot of Scots in Grantville and I recognize it.”
“Oh. Tante Anne’s English tutor was a Scotsman. He came over to study at Saumur. He was pretty interesting, but went back home to become a preacher. Maybe Papa will find me another one if nothing else interesting happens all next winter.”
Paris
August 1636
When King Gaston and his advisers became aware that the two Rohan duchesses had not returned home after the extravaganza, Soubise and Mademoiselle Anne were left scrambling and scurrying to soothe the government and drop misleading hints about Brittany.
Upon receiving formal notification from the authorities that they could only assume that some unfortunate event had happened during the confusion after the extravaganza, even though no body had been found, Cinq-Mars’ older brother, the marquis d’Effiat, heaved a private sigh of relief behind his public display of grief. The boy’s tendencies were embarrassing and could not have been disguised forever. It’s one thing to have your brother beheaded for conspiring against the monarch, as happened according to the up-time encyclopedias. That could be considered one of the normal hazards of belonging to the French nobility. To have him survive and perhaps later be burned at the stake for sodomy if the dévot party expanded its influence in the court would have caused unpleasant difficulties for his relatives. There was no guarantee that even rank and wealth could have protected him if he became flamboyant enough. He did not push the authorities to pursue the matter.