The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(23)

“We were not expecting you,” she said. She bade him take a chair near the open casement, and when she called for capon and new bread, she made him eat it.

La Trémoille picked at his capon, sipped at his wine, then said abruptly, “I have seen a unicorn.” His gaze was fixed on his own fist, clenched round the cup.

Marguerite had taken up her embroidery—a baby-gown for Suzanne, her firstborn. “Have you?” she said, after a first, startled pause. “You said in your letter that you were merely going hunting.” She made herself concentrate on her needle, on the fawns and flowers of the pattern.

La Trémoille answered cautiously, “Not at first. I went to Nantes. The little duchess is an agreeable fool. Much given to finery and feasting. It was then that a report came to the castle of a unicorn sighted in Brocéliande—the first in twenty years. The whole court wished to hunt this unicorn. So did I wish to go. I thought there was a chance to bring it to bay and carry the horn to His Majesty. The hunt was assembled. The duchess spent the night before in prayerful contemplation.”

Marguerite had stopped even trying to pretend to embroider. She thrust the needle into her work and put it aside. “Did you kill a unicorn?”

Bitterly he answered, “No. The duchess laid hands upon the creature. She cut a lock from its mane. But she would not keep the beast for our spears.”

“The lady laid her hands upon a unicorn? And there were witnesses?” Father in Heaven. People would be extolling the duchess’s holy virtue for sure; someone was sure to have written to the pope.

“There is the lock of mane. One could not mistake it. It is like nothing else.” La Trémoille looked like a man in some distant dream. “I think—I feel the duchess’s betrothal ought to be delayed. So that she remains pure. Until the unicorn can be hunted a second time. The beast would come to her again, I know it, if she were brought back into the wood. Never mind that the soft-hearted child insists she will not have it killed. An ambush can be arranged.” On his face was a look Marguerite had never seen from him. An implacable longing. This was why La Trémoille had come back to Amboise in person. To persuade her.

He added, “Or perhaps you—or His Majesty—could make her see sense. The unicorn—the light in the horn—it would be the greatest blessing for France.”

Marguerite was turning cold. If La Trémoille persuaded the king and court to his way of thinking, it would mean the Breton marriage delayed for months. The king himself would wish to hunt this unicorn. And perhaps new objections would be raised. Perhaps the pope would want to examine the duchess. People would say she was a saint and should not be wedded at all. Marguerite had never heard of anyone cutting a lock from a unicorn’s mane.

“What you hope cannot be,” she said coldly. “The duchess must marry my brother with no more delay, and Brittany be attached by law to the crown of France. Once that is accomplished, you may have the sister if you like—the child—to bait your unicorn. No—it must be so. I shall go to Nantes to arrange it as soon as may be. You will go to Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier, stir up the French garrison there, and wait with them in readiness. The time of our lenience is over, and I think our soldiers have been idle for long enough.”



* * *





Marguerite of France was on the road three days later, having left the king under the eye of his brother-in-law, her husband, Pierre. She’d given the latter strict instructions to keep the king occupied so that no word reached him of the duchess’s accomplishment and above all so that he formed no intention himself of going unicorn-hunting.

La Trémoille had left for Saint-Aubin, but he was discontented. “I do not think you understand the benefit for France if the unicorn is killed.” He had rested and supped and joined the court for a day of hawking. His face was calmer, his words fluent again, but in his eye lurked the disturbing gleam of obsession.

“No beast, however fair, is equal to the worth of the duchy of Brittany,” she told him, and would not hear further arguments. Finally, blessedly, La Trémoille took up the azure eagles of his standard and went. But Marguerite had an errand to accomplish before she could turn herself and her train in the direction of Nantes.

Bourges was an unpleasant ch?teau and also lay in the exact wrong direction. She had no desire to go. But Bourges was where they had imprisoned the duke of Orléans. Orléans was beautiful and clever and treacherous as a snake. Charles, inconveniently, still adored him; she kept having to fob the young king off with excuses about why his beloved Orléans could not come back to court. Louis of Orléans was also—and Marguerite considered this his worst crime of all—the eldest scion of a cadet branch of the Valois. Her father had tried to extirpate that branch by forcing Louis to marry Marguerite’s sister Jeanne, who could not bear children. But in the meantime, Louis was heir to the throne of France, in law, until Charles got an heir of his own.

Orléans had also fought on the side of the Bretons during the last war. He knew the Breton court. Its rivalries, its alliances, its traitors. He knew the young duchess and her sister. He knew things that Marguerite needed to know.

It was gray and cold when she rode into the courtyard of the castle at Bourges, as though her own ill-will could hold summer in abeyance. One of her equerries dismounted to hand her out of the saddle, and she crossed the courtyard, passed the hall, came to the stair, noted the very proper number of guards and not a single servant who was loyal to the duke. She changed them every few months in order to be sure.