The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(66)
“Well, lady?” said Moreau when he had gone. He came softly near.
She said, “You failed me. All this nonsense of traps. And now the duchess has fled, Orléans has betrayed me, and we must do everything the hard way.” She threw the handful of roses on the floor.
He came nearer still, gathered up the roses, and laid them tenderly on a coffer. Remorsefully he murmured, “It is true. I fear I am not your equal at strategy, Madame. Will we— Perhaps we could learn together how our talents can serve our cause?”
“Perhaps,” said Marguerite, not mollified.
“Shall I go to Rennes with you? Or will you fling me away onto the wide world? Shall I be beheaded?” He looked earnest.
She gave him a long look. A smile, irrepressible, curled his mouth.
* * *
Anne and Isabeau reached Rennes the evening after they left Ch?teaubriant, just as the pearly afternoon became damp evening. The city garrison saw her standard from the wall-top, and the drawbridge of the western gate was raised as her party came nearer. Interested faces peered down.
Isabeau sat straight in her saddle, ferocious as a corsair, though her eyes were red. Under the clamor of the citizenry, she said, “Orléans likes you.”
“He liked Father,” Anne said testily. The strong evening sun had revived her headache. She lifted a hand to the crowd on the wall-top, and they cheered.
Isabeau was not to be put off. “Orléans saved us for you.”
They were crossing the lowered drawbridge now, with burghers and city fathers ranged to greet them. “Because he thought he owed it to Father,” Anne said. She was trying not to blush.
“I don’t think so,” said Isabeau. “Why would Orléans do a senseless thing for Father now that he’s dead? He did it for you.”
Anne could not possibly have answered. Sacrifice was always something she was bound to do; that the duke had done it instead filled her with bewildered warmth. She was glad that the whirl of their entry drowned further speech. The Guardhouse, the ducal residence, had been kept against her return; its linens were aired, and the leaded glass windows glittered like passementerie in the torchlight. Anne was instantly plunged into the realm’s business, and she was glad of that too. It stopped her from remembering.
She had spent her childhood rambling from Nantes to Rennes and palaces in between; most courts were peripatetic. But Rennes was where the justiciars worked, where the chamber of accounts wrote out its reports, and where the sovereign might convene the Breton estates—a body that met only at her will—to discuss the realm’s business. This body comprised lords and prelates and burghers, chosen by their fellows and charged to advise her. Anne had hardly passed her own door before she unearthed a secretary, who wrote out a summons of the estates to the great hall of the Guardhouse.
Everyone within range of her summons came the next day, prompt to his hour, collecting in ones and twos, passing along God knew what rumors that had attended Anne’s flight from Nantes. Anne received her guests herself, and they packed the great hall of the Guardhouse to hear her.
With Henri beside her, Anne poured wine with her own hands and greeted many of them by name, and when the pleasantries were over, she told them in plain speech why she had come.
In the end she said, “I will not subject the city to this violence of a siege without your consent, but the alternative is to yield at once to Charles of France and be made vassals.”
She fell silent. Henri gave her a quick, reassuring look, and Madeleine, acting as maid-of-honor, poured her out a fresh cup.
The estates muttered among themselves. Anne saw their eyes returning, over and over, to the white-embroidered fillet, which had come with her from Nantes and now held back her veiled hair. Finally the eldest of the burghers addressed her unexpectedly. “We have heard a strange tale that followed you from Nantes, Highness, but we know not if we can credit it.”
“What is this tale?” said Anne. She felt her heart begin to sink. What garbled version would have come to them of the chaos of her last days in Nantes? What would they think of her in consequence?
“That—we do not understand how it happened—but that a sea-dragon appeared in the garden of the castle in Nantes, and you tamed it.” His face wanted to be skeptical, but his gaze kept straying back to her hair.
Anne, startled, managed to say, “I grew from childhood on tales of the sea-drakes of Keris that heeded the word of men. So I spoke to this—creature—in our own tongue, and it heeded me.”
“It heeded the trueborn sovereign,” said a low voice. Mutters of agreement went round the room.
The Rennais had been plying the roads and rivers of their cold green country for years uncounted before the Romans ever marched west. They had long memories. They knew what the duchess was asking of them and what it might cost. Rennes had been besieged during the last war of succession, had almost been taken by sappers digging under the city walls. Only by fortunate chance had their great-grandfathers heard the tunneling, had countermined and killed the intruders. They understood what it would mean for war to come under the walls of Rennes.
Anne waited.
At length, one said, “Highness, if your marriage stands, will we not be vassals of the Holy Roman Empire?”
Anne said, “Maximilien of Austria has resigned all claim to Brittany after his death and promised also that whoever inherits his title will not also be duke of Brittany. As he has a son from his first marriage, I hope very much that my firstborn son will be raised here and inherit the duchy in his own right.”