The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(22)
La Trémoille had not dismounted; he circled on his sweat-streaked horse. “Where did it go? Which direction?”
He was not answered, and then he too saw the stranger, hatless, with his disheveled silk, kneeling in the moss, his face wet. “Who is this man?”
“I mean no harm,” said the stranger in stiff, strangely accented French, and staggered to his feet.
Anne said, “I do not know him; he came through the wood—I think he is ill.”
“Was it an assignation?” demanded La Trémoille with a startling want of logic. “Have you schemed to thwart—?” He broke off. His face was whitening under the flush of exertion.
De Rieux said to Anne, “This man might have been a brigand, better not to have got off your horse, Highness. And your gown—what has happened?” Thankfully, most of the ruin was under Henri’s cloak. Anne disliked appearing before her court with a wet skirt and loose hair, hardly able to keep her feet. Her maids-of-honor came galloping up; tried to help dry her. Madeleine, flushed with riding and anxiety, exchanged worried glances with Henri.
“Where is the unicorn?” demanded La Trémoille again. “The hounds lost the scent.”
“It fled,” said Anne.
Tell them the rest? Yes. For no one in Christendom will ever wonder why I tarried in Brocéliande if I emerge with a lock of a unicorn’s mane.
In her open hand it lay like raw silk, loosely knotted, luminous with a moonstone light. Murmurs became exclamations. Henri whistled low between his teeth. She said, “The unicorn is a holy creature. It gave me a lock of its mane and I have put my hands upon it. I do not think it right that we should kill it.”
La Trémoille said, “God has given us all the beasts of the field to kill.”
Almost she said, Just as he gave you my lands to pillage?
But then the stranger spoke, swaying on his feet. “Forgive me. Am I among men?”
After a startled pause, Henri said, “You are, sir. In the duchy of Brittany.”
The stranger closed his eyes. “And you say it is the year fourteen ninety?”
Henri again answered courteously. “Yes.”
A burly knight caught the stranger’s elbow, else he must have fallen again. The stranger said, “Know then that I am a man like other men. But I strayed into the Lost Lands two hundred years ago, and I am lost now to all I loved.”
Then he fell on his face in the moss, heedless of their startled exclamations, his arms over his head, and spoke no more. When many hands lifted him up and the physician pried up his eyelids, they found that he had swooned quite away.
Part
II
Chapter
8
The castle at Amboise lay on a bluff above the Loire, white as a swan and packed tight with the acid-tongued and expensive flower of a rising France. Normally the court spent its year going from castle to castle, bearing all their hawks and horses and clothes and furniture with them, so that a methodical lady could make her fortune merely by recalling which coffers held what. But the king did not seem inclined to move that year. He was fond of Amboise, and as spring drifted into summer, he amused himself hawking for rabbits in the greenwood and buying Spanish horses.
Also at Amboise was his brilliant sister, Marguerite of France, the beating heart of her own dazzling circle. Though her regency was over, her younger brother, the king, had not yet fully taken the reins of government from her masterful, manicured hands.
Marguerite of France was not a beauty in the ordinary sense; there was no languishing in her eyes, no hint of the rose-petal in her lips. But she stood straight as a spear, and at thirty-five, the magnificence of her clothes and the authority of her bearing stood her in better stead than a fair face.
Charles was hawking in the field, and Marguerite was pacing the high wall of Amboise, one ear on the clangor of claimants and acquaintances and hangers-on, her mind elsewhere, on the day that Guillaume de La Trémoille returned.
He had sent word by diviner only once from Nantes, to say that the Bretons would present no difficulty about the duchess’s marriage and also that he was going hunting. Marguerite was still wondering what he had not said, even as she squinted against the sunlight on the river and breathed the scent of the thousand lime-trees in the royal garden below.
Before her lay a dizzying drop from the lofty walls of the castle and, farther still, down a sheer bluff, to the town of Amboise and the river beyond. As she squinted in the strong sun, she saw to her surprise a standard on the road up to the citadel, rippling in the wind off the Loire: a chevron and three blue eagles on a field of gold. La Trémoille.
The chatter rose a note behind her.
Marguerite caught her chamberlain’s eye. “Send him to me as soon as may be.”
She had barely regained her rooms and dismissed the greater part of her followers when La Trémoille arrived. He’d paused only to beat the dust from his travel-stained clothes and splash water on his hot face.
They were nearly of an age, had been allies during the decade of her regency. He thought women were fools, as a rule, but he had worshipped Marguerite’s father. The conquest of Brittany had been her father’s dearest wish and, since then, hers.
Once many independent seigneuries had surrounded the crown-lands of France, but Marguerite’s father had brought nearly all to heel, with wars and weddings and indefatigable scheming. Now only one remained, the greatest of them all: the green peninsula cradled in the sea. The duchy of Brittany.