“Plague-monger! Poisoner! Aaaaaaaaaargh!” The spurred hunting boot flew through the air and found its mark, painfully: the bowed head of Louis’s terrified chief valet, Alaunce Levaux. “I trusted you and this is how you serve me!” “Plague-monger! Poisoner! Aaaaaaaaaargh!” The spurred hunting boot flew through the air and found its mark, painfully: the bowed head of Louis’s terrified chief valet, Alaunce Levaux. “I trusted you and this is how you serve me!”
Poor Alaunce: damned if he tried to explain, and condemned, assuredly, if he did not. “Your Majesty is always most just, however—” That was as far as he got.
“Don’t you dare ‘however’ me!” The other boot followed its partner. This time the spur sliced Levaux’s ear and blood dripped onto the neckband of his shirt.
“They’ve been poisoned! Look! See here, there must be noxious matter on the leather.”
Some orders a man obeyed; some he did not. Alaunce knew that if he raised his head even a little, something else would be thrown at him. Unfortunately the king, so unhandy at most physical things, had a very strong throwing arm. An accurate, strong throwing arm.
Alaunce contrived to wriggle toward the chair in which the king sat, agitatedly waving his lower legs for his valet’s inspection. Louis’s face was slick with sweat and there was such a hot and violent look in his eyes that, when Levaux allowed himself to glance upward, he was profoundly disturbed. The man inched closer, close enough to peer forward without raising his head and once there, saw why the king was so agitated.
The calves and shins of Louis de Valois, monarch of all the French, were a mass of weeping sores, the surface of the skin marked by huge purpled bruises and the toes of each foot swollen into fat, violet sausages. Whatever it was, the affliction looked most painful. Alaunce was so surprised he forgot to be afraid. He sat up and inspected the nether limbs of the king with keen attention. “Fleas, Your Majesty? Suppurating flea bites?” He knew it sounded weak, but it was all he could think of.
“Fleas? Fleas! These are not flea bites—unless fleas have turned to pigeons and grown teeth. Look, man! These are holes in my legs. Holes! It’s happened today; this morning. What could cause this so quickly but poisoned boots? AND YOU ARE THE KEEPER OF MY BOOTS!” For a man of indifferent height and narrow chest, the king could roar like a bull when he chose to and, for a moment, the sheer volume of sound, delivered so close to the valet’s ear, destroyed all chance of rational thought.
Louis was correct: Levaux was the keeper of the king’s boots, among other things, and he slept across the doorway of the king’s sleeping-room. No one entered or left without his knowledge. And during the day, the room was locked with a key—the only key—that he personally carried.
This was all so perplexing. The day had begun in normal fashion.
After mass, and the late-morning dinner, Louis had gone hunting in his favorite boots, boots that had been placed on his legs, as was usual, by Levaux. The valet could swear to the irreproachable sanctity of those boots, yet, if the king was right, who could have sabotaged them, if sabotaged they had been? When could they have been sabotaged?
“Winter is a difficult season, Your Majesty. Could it be distemper of the legs, or an ague which has infected the humors so causing the swellings?”
“How would I know? Am I a doctor?”
A doctor. Yes! That was the way through this mess. Someone else to blame. So thought Alaunce, cowering on the stone flags before the malodorous, swollen feet of the king. “Shall I summon your personal physician, Lord King?”
Terror struck Louis de Valois. A doctor? “No! Or I will assuredly die! I’ll not have them near me with their cupping and potions and poisons! I’ve seen them. Perfectly well people sicken and die. But not me! Oh ho, not me. I want a herbalist. A good man who is not of my court. Find me such a one, but tell no one. I will not have it whispered about that the king has been poisoned. That would be a disaster for France. Go. NOW!”
“At once, Your Majesty. Immediately.”
On his belly, like a lizard or a snake, Alaunce Levaux crept backward from the king’s presence, almost dribbling with relief.
“Stop!” The valet froze. It had been too easy. His heart suddenly filled the entire cavity of his chest, swelling to pump blood to his legs so that he could run, when that was needed.
“Bar this door when you leave here. No one, no one at all, is to enter until you return. Hurry! I am racked and burning!”
The king groaned as he said the words and Levaux dared not reply; he did not trust himself to speak in case he pissed his breeches from fear. But outside the doors of the king’s chambers, he scrambled to his feet and brushed the dust and filth off the front of his black jerkin. Hurriedly, after exhorting the guards to prevent all access, he barred the door himself—all the rooms in Louis’s private domain could be barred or locked from the inside and the outside—and left the suite of royal rooms at a hobbling run.
He knew of just such a man for the king’s needs: a Dominican monk who worked with the very poorest in the city of Paris, prescribing only simples and herbs to remedy their afflictions. It was said he was a holy man. A man to whom money meant nothing. He was English, and had a strange Greek name. Brother Agonistes, was that it? Yes. Perhaps the monk would know if the boots had been poisoned or if something else was troubling the king’s humors. Please God, let the monk know what should be done, for what would happen if the king died of this new ailment? What would happen to France? Louis was not loved as a king, but he was powerful—and feared. If he died, it would convulse the kingdom; convulse all Europe. Levaux shivered. He didn’t pay much attention to politics in the broadest sense, however he did attend to gossip in the palace. And gossip said that Louis was close to overstretching the resources of France in his support of the English earl of Warwick. Gossip also said that the duke of Burgundy was pitiless, and poised to invade France if he did not get his way in the Low Countries.
The skin on Alaunce Levaux’s back tingled and stung as he hobbled on through the busy palace, which was convulsed by preparations for the Christ-mass revels. Please God, let it not be a premonition of the whip. He did not like his master, naturally—how could one like a king?—but he understood him. Louis’s father had treated him badly as a boy, and constantly undermined his authority as dauphin when he was older. The nobles, too, had all laughed at Louis, since he had been ill-favored and weak as a child and had grown into an ugly young man. No one had expected the wizened runt to live, much less to rule. But he had, and he did, and that was the way of it.
Born to trouble, both of them: this king and his kingdom. But the English and the Burgundians? They would be worse, far, far worse. It was his duty: he, Alaunce Levaux, must save the king for France, or there would be anarchy and destruction.