The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(9)
Skilled hands untied her sleeves, helped her take off her overdress. When they had borne all her finery away, Anne sank at last into her chair, the one already warm from its nearness to the fire. Mostly she contrived to ignore her bad hip, but she’d been on her feet since sunup and the muscle along the ill-formed joint was hard as stone.
Hawiz’s capable hands unclasped the gold and pearls from around her brow and began unraveling the tight plaits. Masses of brown hair slithered down her back, and Anne made a small sound of relief. “When I am an empress, I shall wear diadems every day just for the joy of taking them off.” Maximilien of Austria was heir to the Holy Roman Empire.
Hawiz didn’t answer. Instead she said, “Isabeau, did I not tell you that you’d see her in the morning?” Anne opened her eyes. Isabeau had got filthy in puddles that afternoon and then stuffed herself at the feast; now she stood at the threshold of the bedchamber, the open doors of the paneled bed gaping beyond. Her hair, lighter than Anne’s, massed over her robe and shoulders.
Isabeau’s eyes were rimmed with red. Anne came to her feet in instinctive alarm, staggering a bit as her hip took her weight. Hawiz steadied her. Anne said, “Isabeau, what is wrong? Are you ill, love?”
Isabeau shook her head, seemed to hesitate, and then darted across the room, clinging to Anne like a child much younger. She didn’t say anything.
Anne stroked back the tangles of hair. “Isabeau?”
Isabeau still didn’t look up. “At the feasting tonight—some ladies said—that you will never come back after you have married the king of France. And I told them that you would but they said your husband would not allow you. That I should never see you again, for I must stay in Brittany. I said it was not true. But—is it?”
Anne was silent a breath too long. Very softly she said, “I am not going to marry France. I cannot, for I promised Father.” A mad, impossible promise for a dying man to extract from his half-grown daughter, but Anne had never regretted her oath. “Because if I am married to the French king, then we are conquered. I must marry someone else, someone who can protect us. But that is a great secret. Can you keep the secret?”
Isabeau drew herself up proudly. Her face had lightened. “I can keep a secret. You will live here then? When France is gone and you have married this other king?”
“Isabeau, I must go and live with my husband when we are married.”
Isabeau pulled away a little. In a small voice, she said, “And I?”
Anne realized she was biting blood from the inside of her cheek. “The ladies are right that you must stay in Brittany. But it will not be forever. Only until I have given my lord his heir. Two heirs. Then I am sure he will let me return.” She did not say that it would be years…or never, if she died in childbed.
Isabeau scrambled back, woe turned to wrath. “Let you return? But you belong here!”
Anne did not want to leave Brittany. Her whole heart lay in its earth and gray sea, belonged to its people in their wool and lace, in the language she had learned from Hawiz. If years on her wobbling throne had taught her one thing, it was that the power of good governance was beyond most men’s gifts, however high their birth.
It was not beyond hers.
But she could not govern Brittany and also keep it free.
If she did not marry Charles of France and accept annexation, then she must marry a man who could defy him. Maximilien of Austria was perhaps the only man in Christendom who could. Maximilien would not annex her realm; his own lands were too far away. But Anne would still pay dearly for her husband’s protection: with her presence, her body, her womb, the taxes of her territories, the title of Duke of Brittany.
With the Austrian marriage, she would keep her promise to her father. But the necessity was a cruel one.
Anne whispered, “I am not leaving by choice, Isabeau.” The words came wrenching from her, outside all composure. Then she swallowed and added, quieter, trying for reason, “Father told me once that it is the price we pay.”
“What does that mean?”
Anne tried haltingly to explain. “We shall never go hungry, you and I; we have our secret box of sweetmeats and we wear silk and velvet and have horses and hawks and a palace to live in.”
Isabeau said nothing. She had knelt slowly on the wolfskin hearthrug, head bowed, and Anne sank back into her chair. She made herself go on. “But do you think we are owed that for nothing? No. We pay for it with our lives and our fates and our flesh, which must serve the realm. I cannot serve the realm and stay. Believe me, dearest, if there was another way, I would take it.”
Isabeau was still now, her face pressed against Anne’s knee. She whispered, “I will think of another way.”
Anne had no answer for that. There was no other way. Hadn’t she lain awake every night of her reign, trying to think of another way? “Dearest, it is time for bed. We neither of us will do anyone any good if we fall ill.”
* * *
Anne and Isabeau had shared a bed since they were small. Naturally, each could have had her own suite, separate retainers. But when Anne had taken her place at court, Isabeau simply left her bed in the nursery and came to Anne’s every night, until Anne told her governess to stop trying to fetch her back.
They had shared ever since, and Anne was glad of it. A duchess lived at the center of everything but also at strange remove, every friendship freighted with the knowledge that she could order the friend killed or make their fortune forever.