from his most stubborn uncle, who’d ended up dying at sea, food for sharks, all because he refused to make peace with his father over a woman whom he hadn’t even married. Henri was in even less of a position to argue with the duchess. He might be good enough to service her, but she seemed unlikely to take advice from a grubby stableboy.
He lowered his eyes and quickly bowed before hurrying to the door. He would do better to forget about this, as soon as he possibly could manage it.
The Duchess Camille sat on the edge of her bed, the blue silk velvet coverlet caressing the bare backs of her thighs and the drawn-back curtains of the canopy brushing her bare shoulders. Under threat from Sylvie’s eagle eyes and sharp tongue, a flurry of bathmaids gathered up discarded towels, bottles of bath oil and skin cream, razors and strops, polishing grit and all manner of perfumed oils and balms, which Laure had applied to her skin while Tatienne and Solange shaved her legs and pubic area. It was all very tedious. She had never been sure why it mattered, since no one ever saw her bare skin except the maids and her husband. She sometimes wondered if the rituals of adornment were meant solely to devour time for women more idle than she.
Camille was now grateful she’d let the boy take her in a sitting room and not her bedroom. Sylvie had set a rose-scented candle burning in the sitting room, which overwhelmed everything. If the bathmaids had noticed anything amiss, they had not spoken of it.
She closed her eyes for a few moments, welcoming the spring chill as the perfumed bathwater dried on her body; she needed to return to reality before darkness fell and her husband called for her. If he called for her.
Now she was tired, and her body ached. Sylvie chased away the last of the bathmaids, summoned two footmen to haul away the tub, then returned to hover over Camille. “Madame,” she said, in a much gentler tone than she’d used with her fellow servants. “You must eat. I brought you food while you were in the bath. See? All things you like. I prepared it myself.”
There was a silver tray on her side table, filled with cubes of fresh bread, thin slices of sharp cheese, a ramekin of soft goat’s cheese, a cluster of meringues and a juicy pear, laid out in a fan of slices. “Thank you, Sylvie. You may go.”
“Madame, are you well?”
Sylvie had served Camille for too many years. Camille knew she was truly asking about the boy, and what she had done with him. Camille resisted asking Sylvie’s opinion of him. She said, “I am perfectly well. I do not require your help to eat.”
“Yes, madame.” Sylvie bowed and departed. Listlessly, Camille picked up a slice of pear and forced herself to chew it. She would need all the strength she could muster. She did not want to face the duke. Not just now. But she must face him. Doing things she did not care to do were part of her duty.
Heaps of documents obscured the surface of her marquetry desk, tucked into a corner near shelves of weighty tomes inherited from her father and his father before him. In her anxiety over the duke’s increasing impatience with her, she’d neglected her normal perusal of the financial and judicial reports, brought in daily by Lord Stagiaire’s secretary. More than five years had passed since the duke had removed her from sitting in judgment, or even from reviewing cases, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself from at least following the duchy’s business in private. Lord Stagiaire had been her tutor once, and still maintained a confidential position with the king. Even if the duke found what information he’d provided and continued to provide to Camille, his status as an elder of politics would protect him.
Once, Camille had been able to throw herself into the work of researching precedents and alternative judgments. It wasn’t how she might have chosen to spend her time, but it was worthy work, and she’d been well-trained for it. However, once she’d been denied directing or even witnessing the outcome of the issues she’d so carefully studied, her research had begun to seem more and more worthless, equivalent to decorative embroidery that would never be seen. Once she’d been forbidden her horses as well, she’d retreated into herself. The sight of her abandoned desk gave her a guilty stab. By giving up her studies, she’d done what the duke wanted. And here she was, trying to get herself with child!
She remembered hearing the door click shut behind Sylvie and the boy. No, not merely a boy, she corrected herself, but Henri, whom she’d taken into her body. If they’d been successful, he might be the father of a child she carried, and her child would not be fathered by some boy of no name. Camille tried to imagine having a child, seeing it grow and learn. Would it be a boy or a girl? A boy might be all that would keep her from death. She would never be able to tell it of its true heritage. That would be too dangerous. It would likely to be too dangerous even to allow Henri to see the child. Perhaps he would not care. She had been told the lower orders did not care so much for their children, as they lost them so often. She had no way to find out if it was true. No peasant would give a truthful answer to his duchess. Perhaps Sylvie would know. She was very resourceful. Perhaps the midwife would tell her.
After her first year of marriage, Camille had summoned a midwife from the town for a careful examination, as she hadn’t trusted the palace’s male physician. Nothing had been wrong with her physically, nothing that the midwife could see, and she’d been told to expect a child in good time. Two years ago, in desperation, she’d summoned a second midwife, whom Sylvie found for her; that was Annette. That first time, Sylvie smuggled Annette in as a pageboy, and she’d examined Camille thoroughly, both inside and out. Cold as her manner had been, Mistress Annette reassured Camille that she’d suffered no disease, and scoffed at the notion that riding astride could prevent pregnancy.
“Your husband’s jism is more likely to blame, he wastes it so freely.” Her scorn for the duke had been clear, and Camille was grateful for once that he had his own amusements and never visited the town’s brothel; if he heard Annette’s words, he would have her executed without a second thought. Camille had believed everything Annette had told her, but had not yet been desperate enough to try to find another possible father for her child.
Now she wished she had been. She had wasted far too much time in hope. How ironic that her own mother had given birth a mere ten months after marriage, though she had not had much to do with Camille afterward, leaving her to a wet nurse and having her brought down, suitably wrapped in velvet and a lace cap, for ceremonial occasions only.
Camille had no idea if she herself would be able to love her child. If she could not…how cruel, once it knew. To know you lived only to save your mother’s life. If she lived past its birth, though, she might have emotion to spare for her child. She would at least try. She would not leave the babe to nurses and tutors while she shut herself away among her own amusements. Perhaps none of it would matter. She did not feel pregnant. How long would it take before she would know? She felt sure she would know, somehow, in her body, before she missed her courses or had any other physical sign. She tried to imagine how her child would look, and could only picture a smaller, rounder Henri, thick brown hair matted to his forehead, endearing snub nose, wide blue eyes surrounded by lashes dense and long as summer grass, an enticingly plump lower lip. If she was not pregnant—she could not think of that now. It was out of her control for the time being. To think of her own doom was just as dangerous as thinking the opposite. She had survived so far by living moment to moment to moment. She should think on the present.
She sat cross-legged on the bed and ate another slice of pear, then a fragment of cheese. She could feel the stretch in her leg muscles from her afternoon exertions. Her quim throbbed pleasantly, deep within. It had been a long time since she’d had sex. The duke did not seem to care if she became pregnant or not. A younger woman, and a more compliant one, would be infinitely more to his taste, and had been from the beginning of their marriage, over twenty years
