From the courtyard, blanketed to some extent by the walls, came the shouts of Bersumée, who was busy having his lodging emptied by the soldiers.
‘Louis still hates me, doesn’t he?’ she said.
‘Oh, as for that, I won’t conceal from you that he hates you very well! You must admit that he has reason to,’ replied Artois. ‘To have decorated him with a cuckold’s horns is an embarrassment when they must be worn above the crown of France! Had you done as much to me, Cousin, I should not have made such a clamour throughout the kingdom. I should have given you such a beating that you would never have desired to do the like again, or else …’
He looked so steadily at Marguerite that she was frightened.
‘… or else I should have acted in such a way that I could feign the preservation of my honour. However, the late King, your father-in-law, clearly judged otherwise and things are as they are.’
He certainly possessed a fine assurance in deploring a scandal he had done everything in his power to set alight. He went on, ‘Louis’s first thought, after witnessing his father’s death, indeed the only thought he has in mind at present, since I believe him incapable of entertaining more than one at a time, is to extricate himself from the embarrassment in which you have placed him and to live down the shame you have caused him.’
‘What does Louis want?’ asked Marguerite.
For a moment Artois swung his monumental leg backwards and forwards as if he were about to kick a stone.
‘He intends asking for the annulment of your marriage,’ he answered, ‘and you can see, from the fact that he has sent me to you at once, that he wants to put it through as quickly as possible.’
‘So I shall never be Queen of France,’ thought Marguerite. The foolish dreams of the day before were already proved vain. A single day of dreaming to set against seven months of imprisonment, against the whole of time!
At this moment two men came in carrying wood and kindling. They lit the fire. Marguerite waited till they had gone again.
‘Very well,’ she said wearily, ‘let him ask for an annulment. What can I do?’
She went over to the fireplace and held her hands out to the flames which were beginning to catch.
‘Well, Cousin, there is much you can do, and indeed you can be the recipient of a certain gratitude if you will take a course that will cost you nothing. It happens that adultery is no ground for annulment; it’s absurd, but so it is. You could have had a hundred lovers instead of one, pleasured every man in the kingdom, and you would be no less indissolubly married to the man to whom you were joined before God. Ask the chaplain or anyone else you like; so it is. I have taken the best advice upon it, because I know very little of church matters: a marriage cannot be broken, and if one wishes to break it, it must be proved that there was some impediment to its taking place, or that it has not been consummated, so that it might never have been. You’re listening to me?’
‘Yes, yes, I see what you mean,’ said Marguerite.
It was no longer a question of the affairs of the kingdom, but of her own fate; and she was registering each word in her mind that she might not forget it.
‘Well,’ went on her visitor, ‘this is what Monseigneur Valois has devised to get his nephew out of his difficulty.’
He paused and cleared his throat.
‘You will admit that your daughter, the Princess Jeanne, is not Louis’s child; you will admit that you have never slept with your husband and that there has therefore never been a true marriage. You will declare this voluntarily in the presence of myself and your chaplain as supporting witnesses. Among your previous servants and household there will be no difficulty in finding witnesses to testify that this is the truth. Thus the marriage will have no defence and the annulment will be automatic.’
‘And what am I offered in exchange for this lie?’ asked Marguerite.
‘In exchange for your cooperation,’ replied Artois, ‘you are offered safe passage to the Duchy of Burgundy, where you will be placed in a convent until the annulment has been pronounced, and thereafter to live as you please or as your family may desire.’
On first hearing, Marguerite very nearly answered, ‘Yes, I accept; I declare all that is desired of me; I will sign no matter what, on condition that I may leave this place.’ But she saw Artois watching her from under lowered lids, a gaze ill-matched with his good-natured air; and intuitively she knew that he was tricking her. ‘I shall sign,’ she thought, ‘and then they will continue to keep me here.’
Duplicity in the heart is catching. But in fact Artois was for once telling the truth; he was the bearer of an honest proposal; he even had the order with him for Marguerite’s removal, should she consent to the declaration required of her.
‘It is asking me to commit a grave sin,’ she said.
Artois burst out laughing.
‘Good God, Marguerite,’ he cried, ‘it seems to me you have committed others with less scruple!’
‘Perhaps I have altered and repented. I must think the matter over before deciding.’
The giant made a wry face, twisting his lips from side to side.
‘Very well, Cousin, but think quickly,’ he said, ‘because I must be back in Paris tomorrow for the funeral mass at Notre-Dame. With fifty-eight miles in the saddle, even by the shortest way, and roads a couple of inches deep in mud, and daylight fading early and dawning late, and the delay for a relay of horses at Nantes, I have no time to dawdle and would much prefer not to have come all this way for nothing. Goodbye; I shall go and sleep an hour and come back to eat with you. It must not be said that I left you alone, Cousin, the first day upon which you fare well. I am sure you will have reached the right decision.’
He left like a whirlwind, as he had arrived, for he paid as much attention to his exits as his entrances, and nearly upset Private Gros-Guillaume in the staircase, as he came up bending and sweating under a huge coffer.
Then he disappeared into the Captain’s denuded lodging and threw himself upon the one couch that still remained.
‘Bersumée, my friend, see that dinner is ready in an hour’s time,’ he said. ‘And call my valet Lormet, who must be with the horsemen. Tell him to come and watch over me while I sleep.’
For this Hercules feared nothing but to be found defenceless by his numerous enemies while he slept. And he preferred to any squire or equerry the guardianship of this short, squat, greying servant who followed him everywhere for the apparent purpose of handing him his coat or cloak.
Unusually vigorous for his fifty years, all the more dangerous for his mild appearance, capable of anything in the service of ‘Monseigneur Robert’, and above all of obliterating noiselessly in a few seconds people who were an embarrassment to his master, Lormet, purveyor of girls on occasion and a great recruiter of roughs, was a rogue less by nature than from devotion; a killer, he had the affection of a wet-nurse for his master.
Shy, and a clever deceiver of fools, he was an able spy. Not the least of his exploits was to have led the brothers Aunay into a trap, so that they might be taken by Robert of Artois almost in flagrante delicto at the foot of the Tower of Nesle.
When Lormet was asked why he was so attached to the Count of Artois, he shrugged his shoulders and replied grumblingly, ‘Because from each of his old coats I can make two for myself.’
As soon as Lormet entered the Captain’s lodging, Robert closed his eyes and fell asleep upon the instant, his arms and legs stretched wide, his chest rising and falling with the deep breathing of an ogre.
An hour later he awoke of his own accord, stretched himself like a huge tiger, stood upright, his muscles and his mind