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Chapter 35

France

July 1637


As the buffet tables emptied, the immediate male relatives of the late duke began to gather themselves into proper order to follow the bier to the cemetery, the less exalted guests starting to form up behind them. It was not customary for women to attend interments, so the ladies of the ducal family began to stroll slowly toward the narrow gate that provided entrance to the château, the female guests drifting gradually after them, protocol so engrained in women of the aristocracy that they automatically sorted themselves into the correct order of precedence.

Raudegen, in position alongside and a little behind Soubise, spotted movement among the spectators by the roadside. A couple of dozen men who had been standing among the crowd of onlookers were rushing the funeral party, throwing grenades.

Not many grenades. It looked like each man was carrying only one of them; at most, two.

Not even grenades, Raudegen thought as he backed up and positioned himself between the attackers and Katharina Juliana. Smoke pots. Cheap, amateur, smoke pots like the ones Gerry Stone had cobbled together from small storage crocks and a few fireworks at the extravaganza in Paris. Smoke pots like the one that had taken away the use of his hand. Smoke pots for which many newspapers had published the simple formula. Unless one accidentally made a direct hit against someone’s face or unprotected limb, they wouldn’t do significant damage. But . . . oh, how he hated matches. Shitty up-time matches that made it so easy for almost anyone to light a fuse in no time and with hardly any preparation. That was one innovation that he could happily have done without.

The danger would come . . . He looked around, spotted Soubise, who was still moving toward his assigned place in the funeral procession, and grabbed his arm, dragging him back toward where the ladies were standing. There! While most of the men who were running out of the crowd toward the château were throwing pots, a few others, perhaps a dozen, were drawing knives and daggers.

Not swords. These men, to judge by their clothing, did not belong to the social classes that were permitted by the sumptuary laws to carry swords. Nor did they look as if they had the money for anything on the order of a sword cane or purpose-made hollowed-out walking stick. Lacking those, a decent-sized sword was an awkward thing to disguise.

Soubise jerked away from him, drew his own sword, and attacked the attackers. A person tended to forget that behind his carefully cultivated façade of an aging, grumpy, man, there was a competent military officer who, back in the day, had trained under Maurice of Nassau in the Netherlands and commanded armies in the field.

Raudegen turned back to the ladies, hustled Mademoiselle Anne, the duchess, and Katharina Juliana to the buffet tables, overturned one, and pushed them behind it before he paused to check on the overall situation again, blinking his stinging eyes. The smoke pots made it hard to see—hard to breathe, for that matter—but at least they were neutral. Once thrown, they disadvantaged the attackers as much as the targets.

Candale and d’Orval were back-to-back, both fighting and perfectly competent to take care of themselves. Soubise was sensibly coming up on one of the attackers from the rear. Mirepoix, who had a lot of gall to have shown up, given the bitterness that accompanied his separation from the duchess’ late sister Louise, though they had to invite him, of course, was . . . Raudegen glanced toward the edge of the lawn . . . circling around, trying to keep the trunk of a much too small tree between himself and a man with a long knife while shielding his ex-mother-in-law. With a rough, “Stay put, all of you,” to the three ladies, Raudegen headed that way at a run.

Several of d’Orval’s retainers came dashing out of the manor house. Armed, but armed with guns, which were useless unless they didn’t mind taking the risk of hitting as many friends as foes. They appeared to realize as much, but . . . no, no, no. One dropped his gun on a buffet table in order to pick up a heavy tureen to use as a weapon, making it available to any of the attackers who might see it. Raudegen, aware that his skills with the left hand were far from first rate, simply slashed as hard as he could at the side of one knee of the man who was chasing Mirepoix around the tree, then tripped him and pushed Sully’s widow toward the overturned table. Then he dashed for the dropped gun.

Too slowly. One of the attackers would get there before he could.

But not before Mademoiselle Anne could. She snatched the pistol up by the barrel and with an ululation that she must have learned from her once-upon-a-time Scottish tutor, bashed her opponent in the temple with the grip. Then, sinking back behind the overturned table, she said, “I’ve wanted to hit someone back ever since La Rochelle,” and vomited all over her sisters-in-law.

Occasional sounds of “clink” and “plink” came through the black soot that floated in the air. Many of the attendees at the funeral, probably most of them, well aware of the history of Huguenots in France, were wearing chain mail between their underwear and their outer garments. After all, given the current unstable political condition of the country, if a marriage had provided the opportunity for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, it was not impossible that the funeral of Sully might become the site of a modern equivalent.

The hacking and coughing caused by the smoke took away, he thought, from the romanticized fictional depictions of duels shown in stage combat, where it often seemed that the participants might as well be dancing a ballet choreographed by Benserade. But given that probably ninety percent of the male guests had, at some point in their lives, served as army officers, and also that they were much better armed than their assailants, not to mention that there were probably ten times as many of them . . . it was not an equal fight.

* * *

Jean had been put out of commission by the man he was trying to push past to get to Rosny. Claude had lost hold of his knife. It wouldn’t be long before he was down, but he had the brute strength of someone who had hefted sacks of grain, day in and day out, since he reached his adult height and he had also wrapped his arms in strips cut from a leather apron. Ignoring the probable eventual outcome, he stood there with a stubborn two-handed grip, holding the sword arm of his shorter opponent up in the air. Renaud, after his own knife went “clink” on someone’s chain mail and flew away into the grass, grabbed the Venetian stiletto that Claude’s opponent had in his left hand, turned, and went directly after Rosny.

The grip was small and fiddly. He clenched his fist around it. The triangular stiletto proved to be an admirably functional device. He had enough time to admire its effectiveness in penetrating chain mail before his own death.

Most of the larger group of attackers vanished into the smoke and crowd. Once they had thrown the smoking pots, there was no way to distinguish them from any innocent bystander—and almost all the innocent bystanders in the sizeable crowd were also moving away from the fight. Rapidly, in every possible direction. They weren’t hemmed in.

* * *

Raudegen took another look around, as well as he could. There was very little breeze, so the smoke was not clearing.

The marquis of Rosny, Sully’s older son, who appeared to be the focus of the attack, was down, but he was a debauched drunkard. If he was dead, no one would miss him. He had been duc de Sully for all of five days, and his son was of age.

He moved back toward the buffet tables, checking on the ladies in Soubise’s party. They were his responsibility; not pursuit of the escaping attackers. That was d’Orval’s problem.

* * *

In the end, Raudegen reported back to Bernhard and Rohan, the best one could say was that it had been equal opportunity chaos. D’Orval’s staff apprehended only those few who had entered the lawn proper and were too badly wounded to run away and blend in. Or who were dead.

“Candale recommended to d’Orval that he request my assistance which, with permission from M. de Soubise, I was glad to render. The first thing that came to everyone’s mind, of course, was ‘Ducos.’ However, there was no shouting of slogans. The attackers did not in any way discriminate between known partisans of King Gaston and known partisans of Anne of Austria. They made no distinction between Catholics, not that there were many in attendance, and Huguenots. The attackers moved aggressively, it appears upon my speaking to those who were in the densest of the smoke and participated in the fighting, mainly for the purpose of pushing past those guests who, being in their way, resisted their advance. The target, from the beginning, was Rosny. It was not an absurdly unequal attack of a dozen poorly armed and trained villagers against ten times their number who were better armed and trained. It was an absurdly unequal attack of a dozen poorly armed and trained villagers against one specific nobleman. The rest of the guests were, for them, only the chorus in a play.

“The up-time matches proved to be stolen from a Catholic church located some seven leagues from the château. A parishioner who visited Lyon brought them back as a gift for the priest, to be used for lighting votive candles. The priest bragged about them quite a bit, so everyone in the neighborhood knew that they would be in the sacristy.

“There were surprisingly few dead on the scene. Seven men: five of the attackers and two guests, including Rosny. Also, one of the men who was holding the team that drew the bier, but that was probably unintentional. The minister who preached the funeral sermon is among the more seriously wounded of the surviving casualties but will probably recover.

“Mademoiselle Anne states that she has wanted to hit someone hard ever since her experiences in and after La Rochelle but had not realized quite how a man’s head would sound when she hit it. The new duchesse de Soubise was disconcerted by the attack but did not panic. She appeared to be more distressed by the disorderly nature of the event than by its violence. The duchesse de Rohan has been of great assistance to her brother d’Orval in managing all the things that had to be done in the aftermath.”

He paused, re-reading the letter to be certain that he had covered all essential points.

“The duchess has not yet been brought to bed of her child.

“The three living attackers who were captured have been hanged. Every one of the men taken into custody was local to Sully’s estate or from one of the nearby villages. It was, as I determined at the request of d’Orval as described above, a matter of a personal grudge, arising from a long-ago situation in which no justice was done.”

He looked at the chicken-scratchy handwriting that was all he could manage now that he was what Gerry Stone called “a lefty.” Stone’s guilty conscience about the injury had not prevented him from producing, as time went on, a plethora of bad multi-lingual puns incorporating such concepts as sinister and gauche.

He added a postscript. “I had M. de Soubise point out the lack of prior justice to Rosny’s son, the new duc de Sully. He is barely of age and at first was inclined to level the whole village from which the known attackers came, plow the ground, and strew it with salt, on the model of the Romans’ treatment of Carthage. Or, at the least, pressure the magistrates to execute the entire families of the captured and dead assailants, including an old woman who does not have use of all of her mental faculties and her backward daughter. I did not perceive those measures to be a reasonable application of force, much less a necessary one, in this instance.

“You may want to ask Bismarck what he has learned about the French Revolution that took place in the up-timers’ world. I do not think it would be desirable to live through some equivalent of that in ours, if it can be averted.”

His next letter, to Madame Cavriani in Brussels, expanded somewhat more on that train of thought and suggested that a closer acquaintance with the political theorist Scaglia and the “soft landing” concepts he had advanced in Political Methods and the Laws of Nations might benefit the Cavriani firm. “Not,” he concluded, “that my hopes are high.”


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Framed