Thank you so much to WolfOfTheBeyond, demedicigirl, CallmeCordelia1, sylvia629, FaerieBreath and Katie for their reviews! Keep 'em coming because (as ever in fandom) your enthusiasm kindles mine and result in more fic.
October, 1551
'I'll seek,' Mary announced.
She usually did—she or Bash divided that honour between them. Francis and Elisabeth followed Mary's lead and the Queen of Scots' recently-arrived ladies-in-waiting were hardly likely to argue.
'It's always you,' Claude complained. 'Why can't I have a go?'
'You're too little,' Francis said in the superior manner he'd picked up from his fiancée. Claude stuck her tongue out at him.
'This isn't just a game,' the Princess Elisabeth reminded them. 'It's to help Mary's Marys find their way around.'
Bash jumped down from his perch on the window ledge. 'We should do something about that. So many Marys, it's mad. And confusing.'
Mary Beaton and Mary Seton exchanged glances.
'Marie de Guise always used our surnames,' Mary Seton said. 'I thought we'd do that here.'
'That'd be horrid,' Claude said, plucking at the embroidered rosettes on her gown. She cocked her red head to study them. 'Haven't you any other names?'
A pause.
'Mine's Lola,' said Mary Seton after a moment's thought. 'And Beaton's always liked the name Greer—you have, don't lie!' as Mary Beaton's fair complexion turned rosy. 'That's what you called yourself when we played at home.'
'What about you two?' Queen Mary asked, turning to look at Mary Fleming and Mary Livingstone. 'I'm sick of jumping every time someone shouts "Mary"—especially when it's usually for her!' She pointed at Mary Fleming, by the far the most mischievous member of the quartette, and that young lady grinned.
'I'll be Kenna,' she announced after a moment's thought. 'Livingstone?'
Mary Livingstone quailed. She was easily quietest and shyest child in the nursery—even more so than gentle Elisabeth.
'You—you decide.'
'That's silly,' Claude said, coming to sit beside the older girl. 'It's your name.'
'Isn't there one you've always liked? One you've read, perhaps?' Elisabeth suggested.
'What about "Aylee"?' That was Mary Beaton—Greer.
Mary Livingstone looked like rabbit caught in a snare; the horrified focus of the collective nursery's attention. She nodded jerkily. 'That–that'll do.'
Queen Mary beamed. 'Now we all have our own names.'
'Can we get back to the game now?' Claude demanded, jumping up with a toss of her unruly curls. 'Can I seek, can I?'
'You can help me hide,' Elisabeth said, exchanging a glance with Francis and Mary. 'You know all the best places.'
'Francis is staying with me,' Mary told the rest, her finger hooking in the trim of Francis's velvet tunic. They grinned at each other in perfect understanding. 'We'll seek together.'
As Dauphin, it fell to Francis to get the game going.
'So what are you waiting for? A hundred, ninety-nine... You'd better move, Aylee, 'cos we'll be coming whether you're ready or not—'
The other children took the hint and left in a flurry of squeals and scraped floors and swishing fabric, leaving the Dauphin and the young Queen of Scots alone.
Francis took Mary's hands. 'Let's count.'
'We'd better close our eyes,' she whispered. 'Just in case.'
They began their countdown, blissfully unaware that the seekers were themselves the sought.
Queen Catherine entered the nursery to find it deserted apart from a a dozing wet-nurse and her youngest, the new baby Charles.
'Madeleine, where are the children?'
The demand was sharper than she'd intended and the wet-nurse jerked to awareness, her ruddy cheeks paling at sight of the Queen.
'Madame, I—I—'
Catherine silenced her with a wave, momentarily weary of the furtive suspicion and fear that seemed to follow her wherever she went; pressing Madeleine further would be a waste of time.
'Never mind,' she said quietly. 'It's a lovely day; they must have gone out. I shall wait for them here.'
Madeleine gulped and swallowed until the Queen began to wonder if the other woman was going to pass out. She wasn't that frightening, was she? She dismissed the petrified wet-nurse with a swift gesture and sank into the vacant chair beside the cradle, admiring its beauty and workmanship as she always did. The vaulted roof, echoing France's finest cathedrals ... the gold ... the intricate carving and painted decoration that proclaimed that this cradle was made for an enfant de France and none other.
Little Charles started to grizzle and Catherine leaned over, a finger going to stroke her baby's cheek. The grizzling morphed into a wail and she bit her lip, leaning over to lift him. He was probably hungry and she couldn't feed him; after weeks of painful binding her own milk had finally dried up, leaving her unfit to mother her own child in this most fundamental of ways.
At least today she was dressed for comfort rather than show, she thought as she held the baby close. Her gown was beautifully made with delicate embroidery picked out in metallic threads at chest, sleeves and hem, but it was simply laced over a chemise of the finest linen and—thank heaven—no corset. It left her feeling soft and free and the fierce love she felt for all her children coursed through her anew when Charles's tiny body moulded into her own, his little fingers entwining in hers. The whimpering was quietening, she noticed with satisfaction.
'You're not scared of me, are you, sweet boy?' Charles gurgled and Catherine laughed softly. 'Not scared at all! Well, Monsieur Charles, here's lesson number one on being a royal—especially a French royal. Fear is better than love. Love fades; it is a delusion and a snare, and leaves you weak when you most need to be strong, to survive—I've learned that if nothing else. But worry not; a mother's love isn't like that, mon chou. I shall love you until I die. You and your brother and sisters are the whole meaning of life to me—'
'Poor Henry,' a familiar and hated voice said behind her and she turned, her shoulders squaring and the softness she kept for her children dropping from her like a discarded cloak.
'Diane.' A pause. 'Bash isn't here.'
The older woman gave a condescendingly sweet smile. 'I know. He's out with the other children.' A beat. 'Where's Madeleine?'
Catherine shifted. 'I dismissed her to get some rest; the poor girl was asleep when I arrived.'
'How kind you are!' Diane exclaimed and Catherine's eyes narrowed as she studied her enemy. 'I did not know you to be so concerned with servants!'
'Madeleine is my servant, Madame la Duchesse. Just as this is my nursery and these are my children, no matter what Henry allows you to believe.'
Diane came closer, bringing with her a cloud of overly-sweet scent. Catherine's nostrils twitched but she stayed where she was, despite every instinct crying at her to move away.
'Why, Catherine. Can it be that Henry's meek little wife has a backbone after all?'
The Queen smiled slowly and responded in a tone as mocking as Diane's: 'And can it be that perhaps you have been mistaken in me all these years?'
Carefully, she went to lay her baby down. He was somewhat flushed but she stamped down on the flare of alarm. Diane would love to see her worry about her sons' frailty ... would love to take to opportunity—again—to emphasise young Bash's robust strength by contrast. Even Francis's improved health seemed nothing more than a mirage next to that of Bash or the Queen of Scots.
She turned, her eyebrows going up. 'Are you still here?'
Diane gave a smile that would be considered a smirk from anyone else. 'Of course. I am, after all, in charge of the nurseries. By the King's command, Your Majesty.' The honorific was an insult—an insult that Catherine chose to ignore as she'd ignored so many.
Her time would come. Nostradamus had foreseen it. And when it did ... All these petty slights would be nothing and less than nothing. She could bide her time and survive as she'd always survived, by seeing and saying nothing. Video et taceo ...
But Diane was talking, her soft voice dripping a poison as potent as those Catherine learned to mix in Nostradamus's lab.
'How would Henry feel, do you think, if he learned that you love your children above him? That you perhaps look to the day when he is no longer with us?' Catherine fought to remain impassive; sometimes it seemed to her that Diane could read her mind. 'That is treason, my dear, as I'm sure you know. You have done your duty; we have the heir and spare and two girls for the marriage market.' Once again, she moved closer, close enough that Catherine could see the fine lines on the older woman's implausibly smooth skin. 'You are ... dispensable, my dear little Catherine. I advise you not to forget it!'
She swept of in a flurry of fragrance and satin and the Queen dropped into the hard chair by the cradle. With only sleeping Charles near there was no need to wear a mask and she brought trembling hands to her lips. Diane was right, damn her, she'd (finally) done the duty she'd been brought to France to do. The name of the Medici might mean something in Rome or her native Florence but here in France ... she knew too well that there were many to see her as little more than a merchant's daughter. She was no Katharine of Aragon, she had no powerful relatives at her beck and call. If Henry decided to discard her there was none to stop him and she'd be left with nothing but her own wits.
And a very large sum of money.
Some of the tension through her body started to dissipate. It wasn't as if this was a new threat, after all. It had hung over her head for the first ten years of her marriage. She'd been a fool to think that motherhood would save her; perhaps it would, some day, but not for a long time to come.
I did not know you to be so concerned with servants, indeed. Charles made a little sound and Catherine hummed in soothing response, pleased when he settled anew. Diane was a clever woman but she lacked cunning ... a trait that Catherine knew herself to possess by the bucketload. That was a threat, no mistaking it, and she had to be prepared. She had to make the people—or some of them, at least—love her so well that they would provide refuge should those threats ever become reality. She might lack Diane's charm or beauty or grace but her nearly endless revenues were more than enough to buy loyalty and that was all she needed.
Her eyes fell on the sleeping babe.
That, and the love of her children. She'd resigned herself to being nothing more than Henry's brood mare, the years seemed to do nothing more than deepen the rift between them. Today he was indifferent, perhaps tomorrow—or next month or next year—he'd come to hate her.
She sighed.
Her short respite from childbearing would soon be over and she dreaded it. The tender couplings of her first years with Henry were long gone; now they were little more than a duty, and frequently a physically gruelling one at that. Henry was a big man and she was comparative small, he had, as he was fond of boasting, the stamina of a lion. All too often she was left bruised and sore by their encounters and only the grim necessity to conceive more children, more sons, kept the nightmare of her past at bay.
And just now she longed for peace; she was still wounded by little Louis's death, and there'd been such a small gap between his birth and Charles's conception that her body cried out for rest. Rest that she would not in all probability receive. Her doctors had already begun making noises to herself and Henry to the effect that her childbearing years could come to an end sooner rather than later and there must be more sons for France.
Her hands fell back into her lap as she accepted her fate.
If she failed to bear more sons nothing else mattered; when Henry died the Bourbons would rule and she would be thrown out, she knew that too well. The Bourbons had looked down their aristocratic noses at her from the day of her very arrival, and the years in between had done nothing to blunt their contempt. For her own sake and that of her girls there must be more boys, there must be ...
'Mama! Mama!'
Catherine jolted out of her unhappy as her daughters stumbled into the nursery—and such a sight they were! Her careful Elisabeth looked as if she'd fallen face first into a mud-pool and small Claude appeared to have had a battle with a bramble bush and lost—badly, if the twigs still entwined in the copper curls and the tear streaks on her dirty face were any indication.
The Queen was beside them in a flash.
'Girls! What's happened?' She put a hand on Elisabeth's cheek while reaching for a twig in Claude's hair. The little girl yelled and Catherine drew a steadying breath as Elisabeth catapulted into her, sobbing. That was disturbing in itself; for all her quietness, Elisabeth rarely cried.
'Shh. Come now, it's all right,' she soothed, standing and drawing both girls towards her chair. 'Princesses don't cry, do they? Even when they fall into bushes!' She brushed Claude's nose with a fingertip and her younger daughter's howls quietened. When Catherine lifted her she snuggled close, chubby fingers latching onto the front laces of the Queen's gown.
But Elisabeth remained unconsoled, refusing to settle at the Queen's feet.
'You don't understand,' she insisted, pulling a resisting Claude away from their mother. 'Mama, come, please. To Papa, we have to tell him—'
Catherine shook her head in exasperation.
'Tell him what? Elisabeth, he's in a meeting with the Scottish ambassador—'
Elisabeth wrung her hands. 'That's worse! What're we going to do?' Her dark eyes looked even darker in her small white face. 'Mama, they'll go to war with us. They'll make us prisoners like the wicked King of Spain did to Papa—'
'Elisabeth. Elisabeth!' Catherine gave her older daughter a slight shake. 'Listen to me. Calm down and tell me what has happened. No-one is going to lock you up, you have my word.'
'It's Francis'n'Mary,' Claude piped up. 'Someone's took them.'
'What?' Catherine managed a short laugh. 'Don't be absurd.'
'They did,' Elisabeth echoed, returning to her usual serene self now that the Queen knew the worst. 'We were playing hide'n'seek up in the tower. It was Mary's idea 'cos it's out of everyone's way and we didn't want to get shouted at—'
'An' Mary doesn't like the ambassador,' Claude supplemented.
Elisabeth nodded. 'That too. It was Claude's idea to hide in the passages—'
'Cos there's holes in the wall,' Claude explained with a flash of her bewitching grin. ''Lisabeth said it was cheating but I wanted to win.' She lifted her pointed chin.
'And what did you see?' Catherine asked calmly, leaving the question of cheating aside.
'Two men. They—they ... one of them grabbed Francis. He tried to yell but the other ... the other had a knife to Mary's throat!' Elisabeth's voice wobbled. 'He said—he said something we didn't understand, but Mary did. She told Francis to be quiet and she was crying, Mother! And they took them away ...'
'We got Bash an' the Marys an' we tried to go after them,' Claude said. 'We ran an' ran ever so fast through the woods until 'Lisabeth fell over and I fell in that nasty old thornbush—'
'She yelled so much Bash sent us back,' Elisabeth added. 'He was scared we'd be heard. He's taken the Marys and they're still looking. For clues. Bash thinks the bad men took went through the woods to get to the road without the guards seeing—'
The little catch as she finished jerked Catherine out of her horrified state and into action. After calling for Madeleine to attend Charles she took the girls' hands in hers and hustled them through the corridors as fast as she could, snapping an order to her page to fetch the King to her rooms. He'd be in a temper but Elisabeth was right, there was no point in antagonising the Scottish ambassador by informing him that they'd managed to lose his Queen.
And Francis, an inner voice reminded her and she forced it aside, telling herself that surely Mary was the target here and not her son.
'I hope there's a damned good reason for this,' Henry said when he stalked in, slamming the doors behind him with small regard for the little girls that clung to their mother's skirts. 'We were right in the middle—'
'Francis and Mary are gone,' she interrupted. 'The ... the English, I assume. Elisabeth and Claude saw.'
Henry stared at her. 'Don't be ridiculous.'
'I'm not being ridiculous.' Catherine's voice was icy but she loathed it when he spoke to her like that, his tone dripping contempt. She disengaged herself from her daughters and moved towards him, ignoring the flicker in his eyes. 'Henry, please. Look at our girls. Look at them. They're distraught and in rags, do you think they'd be like that for some game?' Despite herself, her eyes filled and her husband's stony expression softened.
He beckoned the girls towards him with a finger and demanded they tell him what they knew while Catherine allowed herself to drop onto her chaise, her knees like jelly. They'd always known there was a risk in taking Mary, but they'd believed that she was safe with them. After Spain, France was the dominant power in Europe. Even England would not dare—
Only it seemed she would.
The Queen bit her lip hard to suppress the tide of hysterical laughter that wanted to come ... laughter borne of sheer terror ... as Elisabeth and Claude recounted their story once more. Then Henry was rising to his feet and shouting for the guards, his jaw hard and his eyes glittering. He shoved the girls towards the door.
'Nursery, now,' he ordered in a tone that not even Claude dared dispute. 'Get yourselves tidied up, you look like ragamuffins.' They did not need to be told twice and he went to follow.
Catherine found herself on her feet. 'I'm coming too.'
He wheeled to face her. 'I need you here.'
'My son needs me,' she hissed, moving towards him so that only a few centimetres separated them. 'Mary needs me. You have councillors for France—'
'Catherine—' He gripped her upper arms so tightly that later she would find bruises. Furious, she freed herself by the simple expedient of stamping down hard on his feet, wielding her sharp heels as a weapon. He swore and released her at once.
'Never, ever ask me to put France above the safety of my children again,' she spat. 'Because France will lose.' With that, she turned to grab a cloak and swept past him, ignoring him as he babbled about danger and the need to ride fast and hard.
She was capable of outriding him any day and he knew it, she thought scornfully as her groom tossed into her saddle and she hooked a leg over the pommel and settled the other foot into its stirrup.
Her mare shifted beneath her, already responding to her touch on the reins, and Catherine turned her head to look at her husband. He too was mounted—on his favourite white stallion—and bawling orders. Guardsmen were running hither and yon like chickens trying to escape the pot and Catherine's hands tightened, causing her mare to toss her head with an impatient whinny.
'Henry!'
Her tone was peremptory and he paused mid-order to scowl.
'I'm going ahead, into the woods. Bash and the girls are there still. They might know more—' She kicked her mare on without waiting to hear what he thought of that, the need to find her missing son and future daughter-in-law overwhelming all else.
Please be safe, she prayed as the mare's pace lengthened into a canter. Please be well and whole ... and all the time a conviction was forming within her that her original instinct of nearly three years ago was right. Mary was dangerous because she was in danger and thus she posed a threat to Catherine's beloved son.
When the children were found—Catherine refused to even countenance an 'if'—alternative arrangements would have to be made. For Francis's sake, Mary had to go ... she had to go soon.
I've really enjoyed writing this bit and filling in a few gaps, particularly the renaming of the Queen's Maries—an especially insulting piece of history-changing, even for Reign. I hope you've enjoyed it too!
