At the door to his new chamber, he pauses. In his mind are his young wife’s cheeks, round and pink; the strong column of her throat, where her heartbeat showed staccato at the tender pulse points. Fear and fear and fear; that is what she felt as she wed him today.
Her Majesty has spared them, at least, the indignity of a rowdy bedding. He is alone outside her door. When at last he gathers the courage to tap upon the wood, there is no response; but he enters anyway, feeling foolish standing in the corridor in his nightclothes.
But he balks upon entering. He’d had some idea that his wife would be tucked up into bed; but she is standing before the hearth, clothed in nothing but her chemise, Agnes kneeling on the floor at her feet, her fingers at the chemise’s hem. His wife’s hair, unbound, the yellow-brown of autumn leaves, falling to her elbows, all the ribbons gone. The firelight behind her shows the outline of her body through the fine linen she wears and makes sparks of the fine pale hairs on her legs. A sort of magic, from which Petrus forces himself to wrest his eyes.
“I am sorry,” he says, and both women look at him, his wife’s eyes big, Agnes’s laughing.
“Eager, are you, Sauvage?” Agnes says. “Well, you must wait a little longer.”
His wife’s entire face is red as if the blood moves not under the skin, but over it, and Petrus turns away.
This chamber is larger than his old one, the carved bed wider. It looms opposite the fire, a waiting, monstrous thing. Many of his things were brought here, as he expected—the mirror is his own; so is the wooden cross, and the small hideous painting of the Holy Mother and Child, which he has always hated, and which has followed him to each of his chambers in each of the royal palaces for as long as he can remember. But the rug on the floor, woven in faded reds and blues, is unfamiliar. The sewn-together skins are nowhere in sight.
He smiles a little at his flexing bare toes upon the swirls of red and blue.
Two narrow chairs are drawn up before the hearth, an elbow table between them; another table and two stools butt up against the far wall, where the only window shows the black of the sky and Petrus’s reflection, a blur of brown and white. Just faintly, behind his own, are the smudges of his wife and Agnes. He watches the window as Agnes, still kneeling, lifts the hem of his wife’s chemise and drops his eyes to the heavy dark wood of the sill when he realizes that she is cleaning between his wife’s thighs.
Then Agnes rises, gathers up petticoats, partlet, and the sweet soft green of gown bodice and skirt. She puts them all neatly into an unfamiliar clothes chest, thick with carved scrollwork and blossoms. Petrus turns, watching; pretending he is not. His wife does not look at him, but she must sense his gaze for she shakes her hair forward so that it hangs like a cape over her breasts.
“Ah, God love you,” Agnes says.
Inside Petrus’s head, waves crash. The girl—his wife—looks at him as everyone does who is not accustomed to the sight. She looks as if she would run, half-naked and barefooted as she is, run through the gilded halls and past startled guards, into the grounds and then farther still—past the town, through fields growing brown at the tips as autumn approaches, crashing through forests where the underbrush would catch and tear at her shift like witches’ fingernails and nettles would sting her ankles. Splashing through streams where her toes would sink into the silt. All to escape this moment, this life.
He turns away again, and now he does not even watch the images in the window glass. There is a little more bustle, the creak of the clothes chest once more. Footsteps, and the snick of the door opening. And then Agnes says, “The queen will want to see the linen,” and closes the door softly behind her.
The waves crash, higher and higher, louder and louder, inside his ears. Dimly, he hears a pop from the fire, and he turns with ponderous slowness to face his wife, his limbs heavy as tree trunks. With one hand, he makes a gesture, half-aborted, toward the bed.
“Should we not pray?” she says, and then does not wait for his response, only kneels beside the bed and sketches the sign of the cross, then bows her head, hands clasped; a fire-lit ode to piety. Petrus stares openly before falling to his knees beside her. Of course she is a Catholic—Her Majesty would not have wanted a Huguenot, a heretic, as part of her son’s court. Her lips move silently, fervently, and he watches from the corners of his slitted eyes, his own prayers dead dull things best suited to church and desperation; nothing he feels the need to air each night.
When at last she is finished, she rises clumsily to her feet. Looks at him, and then away.