“Will you agree to it?” Madeleine asked.
“Why have they offered? If France had word of Maximilien coming, they would make immediate trial of our defenses, not take time for play.” The comb caught on a snarl in her hair and she winced.
“It’s a mark of their confidence, maybe,” said Madeleine grimly, working loose the tangle.
But Anne didn’t think that Marguerite of France cared for such marks of confidence as that. What was their plan? She felt Maximilien’s absence as a panicked hollow deep inside.
Anne made Madeleine no answer, but a new voice answered from the doorway. “I fear their confidence is justified. Maximilien is not marching. At least, not anytime soon. I have his letter.”
Anne looked up and her breath caught.
His hair was matted, his face dusty, his eyes heavy-lidded with weariness and smoldering anger. Henri was behind him, ushering him through the door of the garderobe, looking pleased with himself. “See what I fished out of the moat!” he crowed. “Would there be any supper at all?”
“Orléans,” said Anne to Louis, trying to draw a full breath. His eyes traced the line of her loosened hair. She didn’t know what to say. He had come back. Against hope, common sense, all expectation. He had come back. “Of course it isyoudemanding supper, glutton,” she told her brother, trying to hide her confusion. “Not the man who has ridden here these hundreds of leagues.”
“Perhaps we should feed him too,” said Henri magnanimously, clapping Louis on the back. “Orléans got through the French lines on foot and we brought him over the wall. Like landing a pike.”
“Charming. We shall add a pike to his standard in memory of theoccasion,” said Anne, finding her tongue. “Put it with the hedgehogs, in quarterings. I think it would look well.”
“As you say,” drawled Louis. Something in his eyes had lightened. “But I have not money to change all the standards, I assure you. Jeanne endowed a power of convents in the early days of our unprosperous marriage. Lately I pass my days galloping about God’s creation, trying to stir to action a man under enchantment.”
At that, every eye in the room swiveled toward him. But he looked only at Anne. “Enchantment?” she said.
“Supper first, I beg; the leagues were long from Flanders. And,” he added darkly, “it is a tale that I hardly know how to tell.”
Anne was still searching for words. It was Isabeau who said soberly, “You should take off your cloak—it is very dusty. And then sit there, Monseigneur.”My sister has grown up,Anne thought.
“Demoiselle,” he returned, politely, and sat. Anne went to the ewer and poured wine into her own cup and brought it to him.
Isabeau said, still serious, “You saw my brother-in-law?”
“I saw him,” said Louis, leaning his elbows on his knees with a grimness that made Anne’s heart sink. “Do you wish to read his letter before supper comes, Highness?” He drew it out, sealed with the Roman eagles, and handed it to Anne. She held it, felt the soft grain of the paper, the brittle wafer of wax. But she did not break the seal. “After supper, I think,” she said. She saw now how truly tired he was.
“Thank you, Highness,” he said. “I’ve not had a bite since daybreak.”
They ate, then took more wine. Louis drained his second cup more slowly. He leaned back, looking more human now, with new color in his sun-glazed face. “My lord of Austria is in Ghent,” he began. “He will not leave, for he has been seeing the ghost of his dead and beloved wife in the corridors of the palace.”
Anne stood abruptly and went to the window.Thatwas the reason for his absence? He had chosen his dead wife’s ghost over her? She could feel her family watching. She imagined the pity in their eyes. She had known that Maximilien loved Mary of Burgundy, but Anne was alive and Mary was not.
Louis was still speaking quietly.
“Yes—I kept watch with Maximilien one night, at his insistence. He waits up in his own chamber, with the fires burned low, and sometimes his lady walks past. When I saw her, she was”—a delicate hesitation—“dressed for bed and smiling. I have never seen such longing in a man’s face. At other times she is in court-dress when she comes. This dead lady does not speak, nor does she tarry, and she vanishes when he tries to touch her. He is as a man lost. I tried to change his mind, but eventually he became angry and refused to receive me. He has convinced himself that you will wait for him, Highness, that your difficulties are not so great.”
Anne felt ill. After all her planning, it had come to this.
Louis went on, “I left my horse near Rennes, and came the rest of the way on foot to avoid the scouts. Avaugour and I had arranged a signal in case of need, and the men on the wall knew it and hauled me up.”
“Has Moreau done this?” demanded Isabeau. “Made the dead lady appear? Can he do that? He made a sea-drake appear.”
Cold to the heart, Anne answered, “I do not think the apparition of this dead lady can be an accident.”
No one spoke. A king enchanted was something out of a story, not, God in Heaven, a part of modern statecraft.
Finally, Anne cracked the seal on her husband’s letter and read it.
Henri shifted restlessly. “What does it say?”
She said, in a colorless voice, “My lord of Austria begs me be patient.”
