Chapter Text
Outside they are guillotining people; you could see it if you peered between the iron bars on your window, but why would you want to? Slabs of men being dragged there screaming and away spurting red torrents from their neck-stumps, hysterical women losing their shoes in the struggle, the blade chopping wetly, the rabid onlookers tearing off souveners: a strip of lace here, a fistful of hair there, a ring ripped from a cold exsanguinated finger, an eye spooned from its socket. No, your own eyes are best left averted.
Instead, you unravel the note that has been passed to you by a sympathetic guard, a timid young man from Marseille on the Mediterranean. You wonder if he misses the roar of the ocean, the salt spray as waves crack against rock. You too have left a sea behind, cliffsides you climbed as a child becoming memories and then strangers.
Perhaps we’ll be lucky, you had written and sent to a cell down the corridor, and the army will return from their victory at Toulon and put down the mob, and we will be released.
The Tower of Temple in Paris is a body of stones: trickles of cold rainwater for blood, screams and prayers in place of air in its lungs. Each day, each hour, more people are wrenched from their drafty cells and taken down to the square to be dismantled like logs split for firewood. There are children here too—the offspring of traitors—who no one has decided what to do with yet. Some of the guards take pity on them and bring them books or toys; others think it’s amusing to get the little boys and girls drunk and watch them stumble around, knock into walls, get ill and whimper for their parents. When you press yourself against the bars of your cell so forcefully your ribs ache, you can sometimes catch a glimpse of Marcel. He reaches as far as he can into the corridor and waves his hand so you’ll know he and Noella are alright.
You read the note the guard has just delivered. Marie Antoinette, once an Austrian princess and then the queen of this country and now a commoner widow soon to be executed, has replied: The lucky ones are dead and already gone from this hell.
And then she drew an X at the bottom of the scrap of paper, meaning a kiss goodbye.
~~~~~~~~~~
But here, twenty-six months earlier, is a paradise. It is August of 1791, candles flickering on the table, platters of duck and lamb and herring picked over until the bones show, laughter enveloping you like warm bathwater. You are on Aemond’s lap, which is where he wants you; you are a jewel like the sapphire in his left eye socket. He is feeding you butter-slick green beans one at a time, letting his fingers linger so you can lick them clean. Around your throat is tied a lace-trimmed pink ribbon. It is embroidered with the name everyone calls you, derived from the islands you grew up on after King Louis XV—Louis the Beloved—sent your father there to govern them: La Sainte.
Across the table, the young military officer keeps glancing at you from under his dark curls. He is revolted; he is too pure for the company in which he finds himself. You are the antithesis of what he believes women should be. You smirk at him, sucking rich salted butter from Aemond’s ring finger. Lieutenant Velaryon winces and looks away. In the corner of the room, a harper plucks at her strings.
“You let the king escape,” Aemond teases Lafayette, firelight on his face, taking a swig of Mourvèdre from Provence, deep sickly purple-red like a bruise in crystal. He means Louis XVI, who is very much not beloved. “That’s what the revolutionaries are saying. And then the loyalists hate you for seizing him before he could reach sanctuary at the Austrian border. You are an enemy to all.”
The Marquis de Lafayette sighs and smiles wearily at his wife Adrienne. She pats his thigh reassuringly. They are the only married couple at the table; they have been in love since childhood. Lieutenant Velaryon is not horrified by them, of course. “And things had been going so well,” Lafayette says.
Here is a brief history of recent events. In the midst of financial ruin and discontent that swelled like a gangrenous limb, the king was persuaded to agree to modest reforms. This was not enough for the commoners—who had watched their children starve for too long, who had paid for France’s imperialist wars while the priests and nobility dined at full tables like this one—and a crowd of them stormed a royal fortress known as the Bastille, killed its governor, and paraded his head on a pike through the streets of Paris. Mobs and militias rose up, murdering aristocrats and burning their property. Nobles with estates in other nations fled there. The direction of the wind was clear. The national assembly outlawed feudalism, confiscated lands owned by the Catholic Church, and drafted a new constitution that severely restricted the power of the king. Consequently, the realm was more or less at peace for several years until Louis XVI (the Unbeloved) and his family tired of their house arrest at Tuileries Palace and attempted to abscond to Austria. Now the people threaten the king with deposition and execution, and the monarchies of Europe threaten to invade France if he is harmed. And so what can be done?
“A constitutional monarchy would never have been enough,” General Jean-Yves Haxo grunts as he mops up duck grease with a hunk of baguette. His mistress, Suzette Jourdain, is stabbing drunkenly at her carrots. “The Americans have opened Pandora’s box and now all the world knows of its forbidden wonders, who could be content with half a liberation?”
“Will they kill him?” asks the Comte de Ramadier. His mistress Maeva Casoli is presently under the table, probably unbuttoning his trousers. “Louis, I mean?”
Lafayette shrugs, frowning, troubled. “When my men and I escorted the royal carriage back to Paris, there was a mob waiting for us. They shouted for the heads of the king and queen...and mine too, unfortunately. For the moment, they have none of them.”
“Do you think they’ll send the queen back to her family in Austria?” Maeva asks from under the table. Suzette moans and squeezes her eyes shut; the room must be spinning. Aemond leans in to lap up the butter that glistens on your lips. Lieutenant Velaryon looks nauseous.
“I hope so,” Lafayette says. “She’s been accused of being their spy for two decades, she should see some benefit from it at last. She is not deserving of the vitriol she has endured. She’s not a cruel woman.”
“No, she isn’t,” you agree softly. You’ve met her. Marie Antoinette is naïve and frivolous, but she was bred to be. How could she have been anything else? Who would have taught her about taxes and harvests? She loves her husband, and she is generous to her friends, and she gave France four children, two that lived. What more could any country ask for?
Her life, apparently, you think.
Haxo chortles. His voice is deep; he is a very large man, in every direction. “So the queen who is no longer a queen, and the prince and princess, will go to her brother the Holy Roman Emperor. The king who is no longer a king will lose his head, but Lafayette will keep his.” Lafayette raises his goblet of wine in approval; Adrienne giggles and kisses the back of his other hand. “And France will have a republic. And we shall choose a president from among the landowners, just like the Americans did.”
“And you imagine it might be you,” Ramadier says, noting the zeal in Haxo’s voice.
“Washington was once a general too.”
Lafayette laughs. “You are no Washington, my friend.”
“Washington is more of a king than Louis ever was,” Aemond says, grinning crookedly, cunningly. He admires greatness when he sees it; he studies it like a language he hopes to become fluent in. “He is competent. He commands respect, even from his enemies. His people would forgive any sin if he was the one who committed it.”
“Whoever comes next will have massive shoes to fill,” you note as Aemond’s palm skates down the bodice of your gown, settles in your lap, begins to knead you through the taffeta, pale pink like a peony or a pig. You gasp and murmur feigned protests into the shell of his ear, then nibble him there when he ignores you. Lieutenant Velaryon stares down at the bloody slice of lamb on his plate. The others are smiling, amused. Suzette cups her flushed cheeks with both hands, gazing dizzily at you. Maeva crawls up from under the table and back into her seat, licking her lips. Then she washes away the taste of him with a handful of red grapes.
Aemond says: “Washington will never give it up. No man could resist the temptation.”
“He will,” Lafayette insists. “He is committed to democracy. And his health is bad, he wants to go back to Mount Vernon. He might not even run for a second term.”
“And who will replace him?” Aemond says, incredulous. “That goblin Adams?”
“I just hope the Americans embrace emancipation sooner rather than later, as they led me to believe they would.” Lafayette shudders. “I never would have helped them win independence if I knew I was participating in the founding of a slave state.”
Suzette groans and pushes her plate away. Delicate herring bones quiver and pieces of carrots roll off onto the table. “Where is the cake?” she slurs, and Haxo snickers at her. Ramadier and Maeva exchange a smile, thinking she is an idiot.
Lieutenant Velaryon leaps up from his seat. “I’ll see to it,” he says, and then bolts to the kitchen like he’s being chased by wolves. As soon as he’s gone, everyone else bursts out laughing.
“Oh, Targaryen.” Ramadier wipes tears from his eyes. “He is so green.”
“I enjoy him,” Aemond says. He takes a gulp of wine and then tilts his goblet against your lips so you can swallow some too, a maroon that burns and blurs. “It’s like having a pet.”
“I prefer my pugs,” Maeva replies.
“Well, because they resemble Ramadier,” you say. The comte scrunches up his nose and snorts at you.
“You must educate Velaryon,” Haxo tells Aemond, smiling devilishly. “You must teach him how to relish life. It is your Christian duty to ensure he never sees the pearly gates.”
“Where on earth is he from?” Ramadier asks. “A nunnery?”
Aemond waves a hand, disinterested. “Somewhere. Nowhere. But he shows promise on the battlefield.”
“Is he very brave?” Suzette says doubtfully. She blinks, slow and dazed; she is trying hard to follow the conversation.
Aemond considers this. “More brave than talented, I think. But the talent part is catching up.”
“How old is he?” Haxo says.
“Twenty-two.”
“So young,” you muse, twisting the heavy rings on your fingers; you are six years older, and you feel every one of them like lead filling up the gaps in your bones where lush red marrow should be. Of course, you cannot show this. Not for a moment, not to anyone.
“Will he get lost?” Adrienne says, only half-joking, peering at the doorway Lieutenant Velaryon disappeared through. “It is a big house, you know.”
Lafayette chuckles. “Targaryen, you have corrupted him. Now he wonders what he’s been missing all this time. He is probably outside soliciting prostitutes.”
You stand, your pink topaz earrings jangling, the crystal chandelier sparkling high above your head; Aemond threads one of your long curled tresses through his fist fondly as you leave. You have thickened your hair with pieces shorn from peasant girls and ornamented it with bows and strings of pink pearls. “Shall I be a good hostess and go search the kitchen for the lost lieutenant?”
“Take his virginity while you’re in there,” Haxo quips, and everyone cackles, including Aemond; he loves when other men imagine you naked. He loves knowing they can’t have you.
“Alas, I don’t do charity,” you say, simpering, and listen to their howls fade as you depart with a theatrical twirl, your gown swishing and the cascade of ruffles dragging on the parquet floor.
The Hôtel de Targaryen is an urban mansion built by Aemond’s grandfather, or his great-grandfather, or maybe the one before that, you can’t remember. Portraits of his surly, white-haired ancestors adorn the walls. There are vases from China and swords from India with gemstones gleaming on the hilts. There is a landscape painting of the Îles des Saintes that Aemond gifted you for Christmas last year. The estate includes a front courtyard and a back garden, an ornate entrance gallery, a formal dining room, a salon for entertaining, a library, a kitchen, a music room, quarters for the servants, a grand staircase that leads upstairs to the private apartments, and a stable for the carriages and horses. You sweep through vast, candlelit rooms until you reach the kitchen and the open the door.
Inside, the lieutenant is trying to collect himself, leaning against a wooden table littered with half-empty bowls and knolls of flour and the stems and skins of vegetables. The cooks do not speak to him as they work stirring pots and sliding loaves of bread in and out of the oven, just as they don’t speak to you. They respect your privacy by pretending not to exist, as if the labor of the household is done by faeries or ghosts. You have never attempted to become too familiar with the staff because Aemond doesn’t, and you follow his orbits in all things, charting his eccentricities, adjusting to his fluctuating gravity.
By the time you’ve spotted the cake—a towering dacquoise layered with almond meringue, Chantilly cream, and dark cherries stewed down into a gelatinous, saccharine syrup—a servant is lifting the plate to whisk it away to the dining room. She casts her eyes down to the floor as she skirts around you as if you aren’t present, and then only you and the lieutenant and the there-but-not-there chefs remain in the kitchen.
Jacaerys Velaryon—you recall his given name even though no one has used it since introductions were made hours ago, you have trained yourself to have an excellent memory—stares at you, one palm still propped on the wooden table as if he needs it for support. His eyes are dark, hard, hostile. His face doesn’t match his chasteness; he has soft full lips, a stern brow that says he likes to be in control, hair that is meant to be unruly.
“The marquise feared you lost your way,” you tell the lieutenant, slinking closer, drawing lines in the snowfalls of flour on the table. The hungry would lick it up, raw and flavorless; here, it goes to waste.
Lieutenant Velaryon’s spine straightens and his shoulders shift back. He says, as if he has been working up the courage since he arrived: “Do your children know how you spend your nights?”
This is a tremendously stupid thing to do, particularly since Aemond is his benefactor. Fortunately, you are not easily offended. “They know they have beds with feather mattresses and meals so rich they would kill a starving man.” You smile and dip two fingers into a bowl of Chantilly cream. “Your life has been nothing but sweetness. Here, have some more.” So swiftly that he is too startled to stop you, you paint his lips with a thick layer of whipped heavy cream, sugar, pulverized specks of vanilla bean seeds.
The lieutenant swats your hand away and, as you chuckle, cleans the Chantilly cream from his mouth with a furious swipe of his sleeve. He wears a dark blue coat and a sword at his hip; no one could forget he is a military man. “You have no conception of my circumstances.”
“And you don’t know mine,” you say, abruptly severe.
“No force on earth could compel me to so debase myself.”
“And yet you are a soldier.” You plunge in close, your pink gown billowing around you and your jewels rattling, your voice fierce and hissing. “I fuck men for money, you kill men for money. You’re not better than me.”
The lieutenant is stunned, and he is seething, but perhaps he is a little fascinated too. His dark eyes widen, softly, slowly; his brow lifts inquisitively. You gaze back, thinking that he is handsome when he’s not glowering. He is not fussy enough to mist himself with perfume, but he bathes often; there is no grit under his tidy fingernails, and he smells like soap made from neroli oil, citrusy, floral, honeyed. He is only a little taller than you are. He doesn’t understand the world yet. He is so fresh; he is so unruined.
You whirl on him and glide to the kitchen doorway. Then you pause there, peering back at the thunderstruck young man, and your face turns gentle to disarm him as your fingertips tap on the frame of the door.
“Come have some cake, lieutenant,” you say. Then you cross through the threshold, trusting he will follow.
~~~~~~~~~~
Tumbling back through the past, another nine years. Now it is April 12th, 1782, and you are nineteen, and your life is over. You watch from the cliffside as French ships burn on the waves and are sucked under, beams and bones and iron, and one of the men dying down there is your husband Capitaine Ulysse Arceneaux, the third son of a third son and heir to no fortune but what he could make for himself, which in the end was not much.
You do not mourn him; he married you hoping to inherit your father’s estate, as you have no brothers and your sisters died as children, forever enshrined as vague cherubic memories, and then your mother died too of some infernal New World fever. But as it turned out, your father remarried and left everything to his pretty new wife’s sons when he died, not that they will keep the property either as now the British have won the Îles des Saintes and will take possession of the small archipelago in the West Indies: no indigenous population, no potential for agriculture, no fresh water, useful only for fishing and as beautiful, rocky tokens dropped into the pockets of the imperial powers. They were Spanish, and then French, and then British, and then French again in accordance with the terms of the treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, and now they are British once more, and King George III can reign over the iguanas and fruit bats and sea turtles to his heart’s content.
What you mourn—rather than your husband who is presently either burning alive on his ship or drowning in the waves bright with moonshine—is your future, which is indescribably bleak. You are holding two-year-old Marcel in your arms as you watch the ships burn with weeping, horror-struck eyes; you are less than a month away from delivering Noella. Your stepmother does not care about you. Your father is dead, not that he cared so much himself. Your husband is now dead too, and he has more drinking and gambling debts than coins hidden in your house, smaller than the dining room you will one day find in the Hôtel de Targaryen. And the British will confiscate that miniscule property with the rest of the islands, and you will be cast out from the only home you’ve ever known, and you will have to cross the Atlantic and beg on doorsteps for a place to sleep.
Marcel, his dark hair whipping in the wind, reaches out towards the glowing dots of French ships that have turned to infernos on the sea. He says, mesmerized, not understanding what has happened: “Lumineux.”
“That’s right,” you reply, kissing his tiny pawlike hand as tears flood down your cheeks. “Lumineux.” Bright.
You give birth on the journey to France, and as if the ceaseless rocking and pitching of the ship on the waves is not bad enough, the baby gets stuck and the other women have to use a lantern to see who has the smallest hands so they can reach up inside and try to yank her out before you both die. Fortunately, the Lord shows some rare mercy and Noella is born healthy and perfect, and the very first time Marcel is introduced to her—swaddled in rags and still bloody—he picks up a whalebone hairbrush and tries to whack anybody else who touches you or her, and this is a habit he maintains forever.
You have an aunt who lives in Pont-Audemer in Normandy, an older sister of your mother, so you drag yourself and your children there and are relieved to discover that she lives in a fine country estate with servants and gardens and sheep and plenty of space for guests. But inconveniently, your shriveled aunt and her brute of a husband prefer the rooms unoccupied, and she says you can stay only until you find someplace else. Your aunt calls you fat and lazy, and her husband (you cannot bring yourself to refer to him as ‘Uncle’) kicks the children if they wander too close, and so you spend the vast majority of your time trying to keep them out of sight as they grow. You manage to stall for a few years—until Marcel is four and Noella two—and then you wake up one morning to see the servants have packed your meager possessions and a small sum of cash, and it is time to venture onto the road again.
You use the money your aunt gave you to get to Paris, because you’ve heard it is rich and sophisticated and gorgeous beyond imagination. There you rent a room from a baker and try to find work, but you have no skills; people learn trades from their parents, and you were never taught to do anything. You can’t even read. When you were a child you couldn’t seem to learn how, and you frustrated the tutors until they let you escape from your books and play with the iguanas or paint your watercolors, and your father didn’t seem to notice and your mother was dead, so who was there to ensure you were taught?
You can’t cook or clean or sew or bake or make candles or shoe horses. You rub your hands raw trying to be a laundress, but you’re too slow to make decent money and you can’t work and watch the children at the same time, so you have to leave Marcel and Noella with other women who seem nice enough, but they are overwhelmed with their own broods and you can hear Noella crying as someone shuts her in a closet and leaves her alone for hours, and neither you nor Marcel can bear it. At night you are kept awake by the drunken laughter spilling out of carriages that travel to and from the extravagant parties where far more than what you need is wasted, but you have received no invitation into that world and never will.
So what am I going to do? What the fuck can I do?
You sit on the floor in your rented room, nearly catatonic with terror, sobbing for days as your coins run low, and then the baker says he’s very sorry but you haven’t properly made rent since he let you have the room three months ago so you have to leave. You have no things to gather up; you’ve already sold them. You soothe an overtired Noella—blessedly, she is too young to comprehend any of this—and bundle her into your arms, and then Marcel tugs at the skirt of your plain cotton gown, threadbare in spots and marred with stains.
“Maman, where will we sleep tonight?” he asks, his eyes dark and vast and worried, and it’s like he’s struck you, like he’s bled you, and it hurts so much you wish you could just drop dead but of course you can’t. Death hurts, but life hurts first, and for much longer, and every serrated second of it demands to be felt.
So you force a smile and tuck Marcel’s long dark hair behind his ears, and you say: “I’m going to find us somewhere to sleep. I promise.”
You get an idea and ask the baker, who pities you as any good man would, for one last favor. He has dyes that he uses to make cakes and fillings and creams—saffron for yellow, parsley for green, beet juice for pink, tea or cocoa or cinnamon for brown, smashed blueberries for purple—and because you are so pathetic he lets you use some of them for free. You go back to the room that is soon to be receiving a new occupant, and you strip down to your chemise and spread your plain cotton gown across the floor. You show Marcel how to use a spoon to paint petals and leaves so he can help as you take turns holding Noella while she dozes, as she has never been able to sleep alone.
You cover the inelegant dress, front and back, with orchids, hibiscus, heliconias, sea grapes, cacti, and a pink trumpet tree. Then you hang it outside on the clothesline to dry and throw on a flannel bedgown to cover yourself. You walk with the children—Noella lolling against your chest as you carry her—to the Tuileries Garden, where Marcel helps you pick enough flowers and sprigs of leaves to fill a breadbasket.
When night falls, you put on the painted gown and fluff your hair to make it as voluminous as you can, then braid your stolen foliage into it. You cannot afford the Venetian ceruse that rich women paint their faces with, so you mix flour with water and lard and use that instead, then redden your cheeks and lips with beet powder instead of rouge. You tear up pink rose petals and stuff them into your bodice in place of perfume. Your shoes are hopeless, but the gown mostly covers them. Noella is making handprints in a bit of flour you left on the floor for her to play with, but Marcel is gazing rapturously up at you.
“You look like a queen,” he says with awe.
“Like Marie Antoinette?” you reply, doing one awkward spin in a tiny drab room to make him giggle. “What a compliment. I’ll never hear one better.”
You tell the bewildered baker that you need his wife to keep an eye on the children for a few hours, and then you’ll be back for them one way or the other. He reluctantly agrees. Then, under the fiery glow of the street lanterns, you step out onto the cobblestones and follow the drunken laughter that spills from lavish carriages until you reach a maison de ville—not a hôtel particulier, but still a far grander place than you deserve to be—where wig-wearing gentlemen and their ornamental ladies are hurrying inside. You take a trembling breath and walk in as if you belong there, camouflaged by a flock of especially inebriated women, already staggering and howling with laughter and needing the servants to help them ascend the front steps in their clicking high-heeled shoes.
In golden air full of candlelight, amber-scented perfume, and the music of strings, you take a coupe of champagne from a servant and stand against the wall, surveying the possibilities, stoking your nerve. Men are dancing with their mistresses, women are complimenting each other’s gowns and hair and jewels. You search for a man who is presently unoccupied. Handsome would be nice, but you don’t expect it. Kind would be advantageous, but might be too much to ask for. What you need, the beginning and the end of it, is a roof over your children’s heads. And all that requires is money.
You start by approaching a strapping naval officer, a man you later learn is the Vice-Admiral of the Indian Seas, who ignores you. You move on to a vicomte, and then a colonel, and then an esteemed wine merchant, and then an owner of a sugar plantation in Saint-Domingue, and then a horse breeder, and then a young red-haired esquire who is so bashful he can’t reply to your stilted pleasantries with more than two words at a time and soon flees to the gardens. You are at a loss. You are running out of options.
You spot an old man watching a game of faro, a bit downcast, with arthritic hands and a long grey beard. You don’t know what to say to him; no one has ever accused you of being charming, not your father or your stepmother and certainly not your husband. Nonetheless, you have to try. You sashay over, attempting to be graceful and unafraid, reminding yourself of the way Marcel gazed up at you with amazement.
Tonight, I am Marie Antoinette. Tonight, I am a queen.
You stand beside the old man and pretend to take an interest in the game, cards drawn and betting chips placed. He appears to be a nobleman, although you aren’t sure of his title. He inhales deeply and turns to you, smiling.
“You smell like a garden,” he says. Then his placid grey eyes drop to your gown. “And you look like one too! What a fascinating dress you are wearing.”
You beam, and you are so thankful for a man’s attention you don’t even have to fake it. “Thank you, monsieur! I had it made just for the occasion. It is inspired by the plants that grow on the Îles des Saintes.”
His brow furrows. “In the Caribbean?”
“Indeed. I was raised there, my father was the governor.”
“Oh, how exotic!” other party guests are now murmuring excitedly to each other, and you have discovered the key that will forever unlock doors for you. You must be something rare and remote, a souvenir from an outlying (and now lost) territory of the French colonial empire.
“Are you accompanied by your husband this evening?” the old man inquires, as if that’s not really what he’s asking.
“Alas, monsieur, I am not so fortunate. I am a widow,” you continue, acting wounded by it, and the other guests sigh in sympathy. “My husband was Capitaine Ulysse Arceneaux. His ship went down in the Battle of the Saintes.”
“You poor dear,” the old man says, taking your ringless hands and squeezing them. It is not an entirely unpleasant feeling, you are grateful to discover. And his crinkled grey eyes are alight in a way they haven’t been in years. “You must tell me all about what life was like on the island where you came from.” He offers you one frail arm. “Will you dance with me, Madame Arceneaux?”
You don’t want your husband’s name; he didn’t feel like your family, not after the first few months at least. And so you grin as you take the old man’s arm and reply: “Only if you call me La Sainte.”
As it happens, this man is a baron, and his children are grown and gone, and his wife is an invalid at a far-off country estate. His immediate fondness for you is apparent as he touches your arms and your cheeks, admires the flowers in your hair, allows his gaze to wander to your bust and your waist. But he does not seem frightening or lecherous; there is something almost grandfatherly about him, as if he’s concerned about your health or wondering if you’re warm enough. Could you let him crawl on top of you and batter his way inside? Of course; you’ve slept with a man you didn’t love before. There’s not much to it. You lie back and stare at the wall or the ceiling and hope it’s over soon, and usually it is. You’d pay that price to keep your children fed and clothed. You’d pay with pounds of flesh carved off your own sides if that’s what it took.
When the baron asks if you would like to come home with him to see his collection of books from the Abbey of Saint Martin of Ligugé, the oldest monastery in Western Europe—a polite euphemism for his true intentions—you take your biggest risk of the evening. “I want that so very much. But I’ve never spent a night away from my children.”
And you are relieved when he smiles tenderly and says: “You may bring them. I have plenty of rooms.”
The baron leads you to his carriage, and you give the driver directions to the bakery. Luckily it is now very dark out, and the baron has poor eyesight, so he is not quite aware of the extent of your destitution. You hurry inside, collect an alert and wary Marcel and a drowsy Noella, and bring them into the carriage, into their new lives.
The baron is good to you, a bit dull and often tired but kind to the children and very generous—gowns and jewels and shoes and makeup and perfume that smells like roses—and you are his escort to parties where you begin to learn how to be an artful mistress. Then he gets so sick he’s bedridden and his children swoop in to scrap over the heirlooms he loved so much, and you are given three days to find new accommodations.
Scrambling, you end up with a hotheaded commandant with a weakness for cognac. Before too long he gets himself killed in a duel, which is probably fortunate for you. Then there is the eldest son of the Duc of Vendôme, who is a miraculously cold man, never showing much enthusiasm for anything except the looming prospect of his decrepit father’s death, but at least he abides the children provided they keep out of his way. This goes on for a while, and now you have gained a reputation, and people you’ve never met before recognize you from the descriptions your acquaintances have passed along: an enchanting widow of a war hero, raised in the Caribbean and called La Sainte.
A woman knows when a man is bored with her. You once knew when your husband found you ignorant and clingy and girlish—which you were, at sixteen—and escaped to the arms of his older, married mistress. And now you know when the son of the Duc of Vendôme begins to look elsewhere and takes so long to come he can’t even manage it some nights, leaving you raw and miserable and powerless. So your eyes start roving too, because he is keen to get rid of you and the expenses involved, and if you don’t jump ship soon you might find yourself among sharks.
On a frigid winter night, flurries and fortune in the black air, you accompany the son of the Duc of Vendôme to a dinner at the Hôtel de Targaryen on the bank of the Seine. The host is a terrifyingly compelling man, tall and lean, all muscle and bone and no softness at all, quick hands, penetrating gaze, one eye cut out by the sword of an adversary he killed in return. The Marquis de Targaryen has long white-blonde hair that he is proud of, having no need for powder or wigs, and a scar down the left half of his face that makes you want to trace the rough ridge of it with your fingertips, to raise his eyepatch and see what’s underneath. You’ve heard that he places a sapphire in his voided eye socket, so that is the color of the gown you’re wearing tonight. You notice him watching you, and through the fiery earthbound stars of candlelight you watch him too, and he is the first man you’ve felt a craving for since your infatuation with your husband bled out when you realized how much he despised you.
Once everyone is very, very drunk, the guests begin to play a game. Someone writes words on slips of paper—people, places, animals—and then distributes them around the table so everyone receives a role to play. You are to act out whichever word you are assigned so the others can guess what you are. But you cannot read beyond recognizing a few letters, and to your right the son of the Duc of Vendôme is preoccupied with shoving his hands under another woman’s dress, so he is no help. What your paper says is lapin—rabbit—but you believe it is léopard instead.
When it is your turn to embody your word, instead of simply roaring or painting yourself with spots using a dark sauce of meat stock and browned roux, you climb up onto the table knocking over candles and crystalline wine goblets. Your audience, raucous and boneless with wine, is laughing hysterically, and surely whoever wrote the prompts knows this can’t be right but they’ve either forgotten or are enjoying the performance too much to ruin it. Snarling, leering, you prowl on all fours towards the head of the table as people cheer and pet you as you pass by, stroking your forearms and your spine, pretending to tug on your long feline tail.
But the Marquis de Targaryen doesn’t clap or reach out to touch you. He just sits with one hand to his lips and the other clutching at the arm of his chair, his remaining eye blue and transfixed. He doesn’t seem to notice when plates and silverware clatter to the parquet floor as you displace them. He doesn’t respond when people snicker and ask him if he’s pleased to make your acquaintance. But when you arrive at the head of the table and smirk at him baitingly, Aemond picks up a drumstick from the coq au vin on his plate and offers it to you.
Still on your hands and knees, you rip the skin and meat from the bone with your teeth, thick red sauce slathering your lips and chin. Now the other guests are roaring with delight, and the Marquis de Targaryen is staring at your mouth, bewitched, famished, hard beneath the table, and when the chicken meat is gone you lick the grease from the bone. Then he snaps the drumstick in two and takes one end and sucks out the marrow, and the other half of the bone is for you, and you swallow dark, fatty, butter-smooth tissue even though the taste is mystifying and shards of split bone needle at your tongue.
You climb down from the table and dip into a mischievous curtsy, receiving thunderous applause, and even the generally indifferent son of the Duc of Vendôme is grinning because he knows he won’t be paying your bills any longer. Everyone correctly guesses that you are a leopard. And an hour later as the guests are gathering up their coats and hats with the help of ever-patient servants, Aemond grabs your wrist and pulls you upstairs, no words, no pleasantries. He believes he is stealing you, and you allow him to because this adds to his eagerness; as a future duc, your ex-lover will be ranked higher than a marquis, and so Aemond is claiming the prize of a far greater man.
He takes you to his bedroom, slams the door shut, shoves you down onto the soft mattress of goose feathers, and with almost no foreplay at all fucks you so roughly that he bruises you somewhere deep inside; and yet the next day as you and Marcel and Noella are eating breakfast in his magnificent dining room, every twinge of soreness feels like a triumph, and the smudges of blood you find between your thighs make you smile at the memory.
~~~~~~~~~~
After the cake has been devoured and all the guests except the austere Lieutenant Velaryon are adequately drunk (Suzette a bit more than that), the servants rush around fetching coats and hats and shoes, and you and Aemond ascend the grand staircase with much fanfare. You cling to each other as you stumble up the steps, laughing and unfastening ties and buttons, as if the second you are alone he will be inside you up to his knuckles or his hips, buried in slick euphoric heat. Lafayette, Adrienne, Ramadier, Maeva, Haxo, and Suzette whistle and cheer you on. Lieutenant Velaryon is busy thanking a servant for his attention as he shrugs on his black overcoat.
But as soon as you have reached the landing and are out of sight, Aemond shoves you away because he’s done with you for the evening. You stagger, catch your balance, watch him recede towards his bedroom. As he passes a vast portrait that hangs on the wall, he reaches out to ghost his fingerprints across the faces painted there, his wife and sons who died in a smallpox epidemic the year before you met him. And now you and your children are his shadow family, never quite right, never real enough. Aemond vanishes into the amber-gold candlelight of his bedroom and you hear the door lock after he closes it.
You wait on the landing until there are no more voices and all your guests are gone, then you go back down to the dining room. “Patrice, help me,” you say to the servant who is physically the largest and most imposing, and he acquiesces because he already knows what you mean. He fetches three breadbaskets and together you fill them with the leftover food from the table, meat and bones and grapes and butter-slippery vegetables and baguettes and even a few slices of cake.
There are no footsteps from Aemond’s room upstairs, so you believe he is asleep. You and Patrice venture out into the humid August night, you lugging one basket and Patrice carrying two. You do not need to walk far, only across the cobblestone street and down to the shore of the Seine. There you find the beggars: old people, mutilated veterans, street children, prostitutes and other indigent women. They drift like phantoms out of the darkness to meet you, and you and Patrice distribute the food to them, Patrice standing very close in case any of them try to rip the rings off your fingers or the pink topazes from your ears. But they don’t; they accept your charity and mutter thanks and prayers, and you tell them you’re very sorry for their misfortune, because you are. They meekly ask you to speak to the marquis on their behalf. You promise to, as if you have not already tried and failed.
“Madame,” Patrice says, startled, and you follow his eyeline to discover something strange. Farther down the shoreline, there is another figure in fine clothes feeding the beggars, emptying his coat pockets of pieces of baguettes and handfuls of grapes. As you stand gaping, Lieutenant Velaryon glances over and spots you. He is astonished, his dark eyes wide; like a mirror image, you are puzzled to see him too. Then the lieutenant finishes his task and disappears, catching one last glimpse of you—a comet of pink in the moonlit indigo gloom—as he marches in his boots back up towards the road.
You have your own private apartment in the Hôtel de Targaryen, of course, but you never sleep there. On nights when Aemond does not want you, after you bathe and change into a flowing white chemise that runs down to your ankles, you pad across the pristine parquet floors to the children’s room. Now Marcel is eleven and Noella is nine, still incapable of sleeping alone and so she has her own pink canopy bed right beside Marcel’s blue one. Whether you are with Aemond or not, you check on them each evening around midnight; if you are delayed, they become frantic and think some horror has befallen you, you are deathly ill, you have been run over by a carriage, you have been abandoned by yet another man.
When you open the door, Marcel jolts upright in bed and reaches for the cutlass he keeps under his mattress. Then he sees it’s you and smiles, lying back down. From her own bed, Noella peeks blearily over at you and then burrows into her rose-colored coverlet. You curl up on the thick Savonnerie rug next to Marcel’s bed and he gives you one of his pillows. He offers you a quilt too, but you don’t need it tonight; it’s too hot.
Marcel tells you, his voice low and drowsy: “I dreamed we were watching the ships burn.”
The Battle of the Saintes? “You couldn’t possibly remember that. You were so little.”
“You were crying,” Marcel insists. His arm falls off the bed and hangs limply, his fingertips brushing your shoulder blade. “And there were lights. Lumineux.”
“Lumineux,” you agree in a murmur, and the echoes of waves crash over you as you sink through strong dark currents into sleep.