Tale of the Necromancer by Kathryn Ann Kingsley
1
July 1551
Palace of Fontainebleau, France
“Father!”
Marguerite ran to him as fast as she could, although the tears stung her eyes. She flew into his arms, burying her head in the rich fabric of the king’s robes.
“Oh, my dear heart. Whatever is wrong?” Henri hugged her tight, stroking a hand over her hair.
Throwing her arms around his neck, she sniffled. “Why are they so mean to me?”
“They are but children, Marguerite. They know not what they do. Come, come.” He brought her over to a bench by the wall and sat, patting the spot next to him.
She nearly collapsed next to him, wiping her eyes with her handkerchief. “Francis said I did not matter. Said that nobody loves me. Called me a bastard.”
“That is not true, and you are well aware of that fact.” Henri placed an arm around her and hugged her close to his side, kissing the top of her head. “I love you more than the stars. You are my gift from God.”
“But…I…I am not really your daughter.”
“Oh? How strange. I had thought you were. What a terrible misunderstanding.” He chuckled, and then let out a sigh. “No, my beloved, you are my daughter. But you are not the daughter of my wife, and therein lies the rub, I am afraid.”
Marguerite nodded weakly. She knew she was not Catherine de Medici’s daughter. That fact was made painfully clear to her from the first day she was old enough to comprehend the thought. It was a fact the queen herself enjoyed reminding her of at every opportunity.
She was not really a princess. She was not really the daughter of Henri II, King of France. She sniffled and wiped her eyes again. “I know.”
“They are just jealous of you.”
“Father, now you jest.”
“No, I am quite serious. You are older, smarter, more talented—and indeed, I think if you were allowed to train in the art, you would be a better fencer. I have seen you in the yard playing with young de Lorges. What is his name again?”
“Leopold.” She paused. “You are not mad at me?”
“Hm, no. I think it will be a long time before I allow you to enter the knighthood, however. But I see no harm in picking up a wooden sword and playing at children’s games.” He hummed as a thought clearly came to him. “Ah, see? There is the benefit to your condition.”
“How so?”
“If you were heir to the throne or a titled princess, you would not be able to sneak off so.” He tapped her on the end of her nose and smiled wryly. “With your little pad of paper and pilfered charcoal to sketch the fountains in the gardens. Or to fence with your companion by the woods.”
Marguerite pouted. “I thought I was hiding that.”
“You were, but there is much that a father sees that others do not. Even I, as king, as busy as I may be.” He kissed the top of her head again. “The children are simply jealous of you, and for more than just the freedom your heritage allows. No, they are jealous because you were born of true love, my dear heart.”
“What do you mean?”
He smiled sadly as he gazed out the window into the gardens and yards outside the palace. “You are too young to understand, I fear. There is a simple rule in the world around us, one that is as inescapable for kings as it is peasants, if not more so. A marriage of love is mournfully often the exception, not the rule.”
“You do not love the queen?” She frowned. How sad for both of them if that were true.
“Our relationship is…not meant to be about such matters. We were wed by arrangement. I had barely even met her before we were bound. I do love her, but it is not the kind of love that one aspires to own.”
“I still do not understand.”
“I hope you never will. If I have my say, my dear heart, yours will be a life of love. I will give you that which I never had the opportunity to achieve.” He pulled his arm from around her shoulders. “Now, dry your tears and off you go, dear heart. Ignore the callousness of the children. They play at cruelty to test the limits of their bonds.”
“Thank you, Father.” Standing, she turned back to lean down and kiss his cheek. She curtsied before she left his side, feeling much better than she had moments before.
If entirely confused.
* * *
July 1556
Palace of Fontainebleau, France
Marguerite glancedup at the statue on the pedestal before her, and then back down to the sketchbook in her lap as she worked on sketching out the details of the form with the bit of charcoal she had borrowed from her tutor. Well, borrowed was not the right word. She had stolen it. While drawing was a perfectly ladylike pursuit to the stuffy gentleman, he wished her to adhere more strictly to her other studies. She personally felt his other subjects were utterly useless, and instead wished to spend her time drawing.
Honestly, from a practical standpoint, what was the difference between embroidery and drawing? They were both art. But what dismayed her was not that her tutor allowed her to draw, or that he wished her not to. It was that it did not matter.
Perhaps that was it? One was a harmless triviality, something to pass the time, and the other was a talent of honor that could grant rights and money to those who possessed it. There were no famous female painters. She knew it was not because her gender was incapable of such things. It was because the other gender wished them not to be. She could draw just as well as any man, paint as well as any man, but she would never make a living at it.
She still did not understand why, but it did not matter in the end. It was a simple fact of life, and it would not be her place to stop it. Even as the half-daughter to the king, she was powerless in such matters.
But she could choose to ignore it.
And so, she sat on the bench in the hallway of the palace, her skirts pooling around her, and she sketched the figure of a man onto the scrap of paper she had also borrowed from her tutor. Claude d’Urfé would oft roll his eyes at the discovery of her drawings, but as a patron of the arts himself, did not punish her for the simple dalliance that he viewed as merely a misplaced interest in the topic, not an affinity for the creation of it. His mindset on the topic suited her just fine.
Despite that, it was immensely frustrating to her that she was not allowed to take formal lessons in art and yet her male half-siblings were allowed to do whatever they liked. Especially Henri the younger, who preferred art to more scholarly subjects as well. As Catherine’s favorite son, young Henri was…well, Marguerite worked at all opportunities not to cross the impossibly dramatic five-year-old prince.
That was not to say she did not get along with the flamboyant young thing. All the opposite. She would sit beside him in the gardens, and he would allow her to draw as well, often using the same supplies. He would regale her with what he had learned, and she would listen eagerly.
Sometimes it angered him that she was ostensibly better than he was at drawing, but she would calmly point out that she was ten years his elder, and therefore had no extra talent than he, simply ten more years of practice. And that once he reached her age, he would have easily surpassed her, as she would not have access to the tutelage he could have on account of her gender.
That always calmed the boy, who insisted that he was to become whatever he liked to be, no matter the rules.
Honestly, Marguerite hoped he had the chance to do just that. Even at such a young age, the young Henri was an almost overwhelming presence in any room he found himself in, and she often found herself smiling at the boy’s antics.
But better anyone than the eldest prince, Francis. One year Henri’s elder, and in all ways seemingly the younger. Where the young Henri was full of passion and vigor, even if it was sometimes used maliciously, Francis was the opposite. Frail and fragile, she could not abide that child’s incessant whining. But he was the heir apparent, and she was simply a fixture of the court. And so, she attended his wishes and did her best to mind them when their nurse was not around to do so. Ever since Diane had left, the duty fell to Marguerite instead.
She smiled faintly. She missed her half-sister. Diane was the eldest child of the king and a fellow illegitimate daughter. They had bonded over that, and Marguerite had found shelter in her kindness. Often, Diane would point out how very kind Henri was to his children, regardless of their heritage.
It was one of the many reasons Marguerite loved her father. She could complain all she wanted about learning Italian and Latin or being taught to play the lute—which she was abysmal at—but she knew what the alternatives could be. She was not an ungrateful daughter.
She was just a little bit of a lonely one, sometimes. At the age of fourteen, Diane had been wed and was now a duchess. Without a fellow half-daughter around to keep her company, Marguerite found herself spending more and more time with her favorite companion.
“There you are!”
Smiling, she looked up from her scrap of paper. “Hello, Leopold.” She blinked at the young man, just a few years her elder. “Oh! Am I late?”
“Yes, indeed.” He smirked and crossed his arms over the front of his tunic. “How do you expect me to train you to fence if you do not attend your lessons?”
“I lost track of the hour, that is all.” Tucking her drawing into a stack of other papers she had been meant to be reading on some treatise or another, she sprang to her feet. “Shall we, though?”
“Only if you say you are sorry for leaving me standing out there by the woods.” His smirk widened to a grin.
“Yes, yes, I am sorry.” She stood on her tiptoes to give him a harmless kiss on the cheek. “Let us go, then. I am eager to learn more parry techniques.”
“Better you master the first one than learn the rest. And you are quite terrible.”
“I am not!” She frowned. “It is this lousy dress. You are allowed to fight in—in trousers, and I must do so like this.” She picked up the fabric of her skirt and dropped it again. “It is not my fault.”
“So you keep saying.” He laughed. “I do not think I believe you.”
“I do not care if you believe me.” Pouting, she kept her head held high. “I am a princess. You are merely my knight. It is not your place to question me.”
“Oh, is that so?” He shoved her arm playfully. “You are no more a princess than that plant over there.”
“And you are no more a knight than a candlestick. What is your point?” She smiled at him, confident in her argument. “We are children of our fathers and not our mothers. Perhaps we should start our own court. There seem to be enough of us in the world.”
That got Leopold to laugh hard, his face lighting up at the thought of it. “How wonderful would that be?”
“I say it is already done. You are my knight, and I am the princess.” She nodded resolutely. “And therefore, I do not care if you believe me or not.”
“A court cannot have only two members.”
“We have to start somewhere, don’t we?”
Leopold chuckled and shook his head. “If you say so.”
“I do say so. That is very much the point.” She took his hand as they left the palace and headed for the private area by the woods that they often snuck away to. Being as she was had disadvantages, but it also had many advantages. No one cared when she went missing for long hours, as long as she made her appointments. And since her father knew and approved of her friendship—and sparring matches—with Leopold, everyone else was encouraged to look the other way.
The scandal of her playing with wooden swords hardly outweighed the one that which she was born into. No one expected her to act like a true princess, so she could skirt the edges of propriety. It was harmless.
In more ways than one.
Because despite her arguments to the contrary?
The dress had nothing to do with it. She really was terrible.