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Chapter 19

Besançon

December 1636


“Henri is married!” Marguerite looked at her father with shock. “Married to a daughter of the king of Denmark! I’m surprised, but that’s just . . . ”

Shae Horton supplied the necessary word. “Awesome!”

“I can’t believe it,” Marguerite repeated.

“Surely you knew that he would marry someday,” Rohan answered.

“Yes. But he kept saying that he needed a girl with the right dowry, but he didn’t have anything to offer her. So I supposed that it wouldn’t happen for a long time.”

“He had something to offer Christian. A face-saving escape from a difficult political dilemma. The dowry was included.” Rohan handed the newspaper from Amsterdam across the table.

Dominique Bell let out a surprised whistle. “I should say so. I wonder who leaked the amount.”

“Honestly, Marguerite, I’m surprised you didn’t have a crush on Ruvigny yourself,” Dominique said later that morning.

“Crush?”

“Oh, umm. That you didn’t think you were in love with him. Since, you know, he was really the only young guy you actually knew and all that sort of thing.”

“Oh, then, I did have a crush, for years and years. He had been wounded when he came to Venice. I was 12 years old. I thought it was romantic. I thought about him with hearts and flowers in my head, dreamed about him as my hero, and wrote, ‘Mme. de Ruvigny’ in the margins of my cahiers when I was studying languages.”

“What made you stop? Or have you stopped?”

“Yes, I stopped.”

“Did you, umm, find out that there was something wrong about him—something that made him unsuitable to be a hero?” Shae asked.

Marguerite shook her head. “He’s brave. He has good sense and honor; he is upright and prudent. I stopped dreaming that dream the day I became old enough to realize that even if by some improbable constellation of the stars, my father gave permission for me to marry him and the royal court concurred, I would never be a ‘Mme. de Ruvigny.’ Anyone who married me would have to become Rohan. I’m pretty sure that he wanted a wife who could be, will be, ‘Mme. de Ruvigny’ for him. In many ways, he is conservative.” She smiled slyly. “Not that a Danish king’s daughter is likely to become a domestic little Mme. de Ruvigny, any more than I was. Does somebody else here have a crush on someone, perhaps?”

“Not me!” Dominique disclaimed in a hurry, pointing a finger at Shae. “Her!”

“I don’t mean do you have one on Ruvigny. On someone else?” Marguerite asked. “Bismarck, maybe?”

“Oh, no, no,” Dominique said. “I want to be a doctor. Since I’m too old for school now, I follow Kamala Dunn around when I’m not being your lady-in-waiting and learn as much as I can from her, and the Padua doctors when they will let me. But to become a real physician, I’ll have to go back to Grantville, to work some of the time at the Leahy Medical Center while I do the course at the University of Jena, and I’m not sure that I’d have a warm welcome there. Or even a neutral one.”

“It sounds to me,” Marguerite proclaimed, “as if Grantville is a very narrow-minded, petit bourgeois, kind of town.” She drew a deep breath and looked at Shae. “Who do you have a crush on? Is it a down-timer?”

“None of your business, really. But why?”

“Because, if any man is going to make a successful career, he needs a wife with a dowry, and I can hear your mother now. ‘A dowry? They expect me to bribe some guy to marry my daughter? If he doesn’t value her for herself, he can simply go to hell!’”

Shae winced. “Yeah, I can hear her now, too.” She rested her chin on the heel of her hand, her face gloomy. “I can see that. To tell the truth, though, even if Mom didn’t freak out at the word ‘dowry,’ she’d never be able to come up with one. A lot of people think that all up-timers are rich, but we aren’t. The grand duke pays her a really good salary, but . . . ” She started to count on her fingers. “There’s housing, food, saving for our education. All that adds up. With Dad executed for treason, there’s no way I’ll ever qualify for a scholarship in Grantville, any more than Dominique will.”

Shae turned around, pointing a finger. “You’re nearly eighteen now and unless Carey can come up with the money to send you to Magdeburg, you’re in a bind.”

Dominique nodded.

Shae lifted another finger. “My brother Shaun will be ready for high school in a few years—then maybe some university, if he starts taking his school work more seriously. It’ll have to be some university other than Jena, which is too tightly tied to Grantville now . . . ”

“Stop!” Marguerite waved a hand in front of Shae’s face. “Tell me, why are the Grantvillers so upset about Suhl and your dad? Or Dominique’s father and that money he embezzled? There probably isn’t a noble family in France that doesn’t have at least one member who has been beheaded for treason, or imprisoned for malfeasance, at one time or another. That’s a normal part of participating in politics. Some other member of the lineage will come into the king’s favor at the next turn of events. So explain!”

Shae couldn’t even think where to start.

Dominique managed a save. “The grand duke hired my mom to explain American government to his staff,” she said. “I think you ought to ask her, since the duke works for the grand duke, and you’re the duke’s daughter, and she’s temporarily your chaperone. Maybe you should ask her about Bill and Monica and impeachment, too, since we’re even younger than Gerry Stone and remember even less about it than he did.”

Marguerite nodded solemnly. “Yes, I should make a special appointment with Carey, just for this. I honestly do not understand this ‘impeachment’ at all. Especially not for having sex. It’s not as if it was your president who was wearing the blue dress and the beret. People take lovers all the time and she, this Monique, wasn’t even from an important family of the opposition party.”

Dominique grinned. “I’ll put it on your calendar. And I want to listen in, to see how Mom gets through this one.”

“Me too,” Shae said.

Carey heaved a deep sigh. Explaining Monica Lewinsky to a seventeenth-century French noblewoman, aged nineteen, was easy compared to explaining Dr. Seuss to a seventeenth century French nobleman, aged fifty-nine. He had titled his book-in-the-making Les Futuriens, with a subtitle of A treatise on these people from the future (ces gens du futur) and how their ideas and philosophy of life may be expected to influence our times.


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