THE MONTHS CREPT BY with unbearable slowness as I waited for my mother. In my impatience I exasperated the duchess and my governess and everyone else within hearing with my constant questions. When will the queen my mother leave Scotland? How long will the journey take? When do you think she will arrive? Will she come here immediately after she leaves the ship?
Near the end of August Madame de Poitiers announced brightly, “You have not much longer to wait, Madame Marie. The king has dispatched six French galleys to Scotland to fetch the queen mother.”
Have the king’s galleys arrived in Scotland? How long will they stay? When will they return?
My brother François, duke of Longueville, would be sent to meet her, but I would not. I received this news with tears of bitter disappointment. “Why may I not go too?” I asked Madame de Poitiers, who replied in a soothing manner, “The king believes it is better this way. Your mother will likely be very tired after her sea voyage. When she has rested and recovered, she will be all the more ready to greet you.”
I had no more success persuading Queen Catherine, though she did seem sympathetic. “Dear child, if it were up to me, you would be the very first to throw your arms around your beloved mother and receive her grateful kisses. But the king believes it is the son’s duty and privilege to greet his mother first. Then it is the daughter’s turn.”
“But I am a queen, and my brother is only a duke!” I protested. “I should take precedence.”
Queen Catherine gave me a long, searching look. “Sometimes,” she said, “precedence is everything, and sometimes it means nothing at all. Be patient, Marie. You will soon see your mother, and you will forget this little delay.”
I agreed, though reluctantly, for I saw no reason why a son should be more important than a daughter, especially when the daughter was a queen.
During the long days of waiting, Monsieur Amyot hovered over me as I prepared, memorized, and rehearsed a formal address welcoming my mother. After two years in France, this would be my first public speech. In flowery language, I was to inquire about the state of the church in Scotland. Next, I was to turn to the Scottish nobles in her retinue and exhort them to be loyal to our country and grateful to the king of France for the protection he offered me and my realm. When I had finished, I was to step aside and allow the queen mother to reply.
We learned that the French fleet carrying my mother and her entourage had encountered foul weather. Then, after a harrowing journey of twelve days, the French galleys sailed into the harbor of Havre de Grace on the north coast. It was the nineteenth of September. Six days later my mother and her court, accompanied by my brother François, rode into Rouen.
At my first sight of my mother, every word of my fine speech flew out of my head. I heard my tutor nervously prompting me, but I remained dumb. My mother smiled encouragingly At last I found my voice and had managed to stammer only the first two or three phrases when my mother uttered a loud cry, reached out, and pulled me to her bosom. Half suffocating in the brocades and velvets of her gown, I heard the shuffling of the startled dignitaries nearby. After a time, we regained our composure and I finished my ridiculous speech. I cared about none of this! I simply wanted it to be over! When the ceremonies finally did come to an end, we rushed into each other’s arms and wiped away our happy tears.
Everyone said I had played my role to perfection. Only two years ago the child did not speak a word of French that anyone could understand. My mother’s pride in me was evident. She could not let me out of her sight.
The king had taken care to arrange every kind of fête and pageant to honor my mother. We watched from a gilded pavilion built on the banks of the Seine and decorated in brilliant blue silk. Dozens of colorful banners fluttered from gilded poles. Horses pranced by, wearing headdresses that transformed them into unicorns. Men in slave dress pushed wheeled platforms carrying tableaux portraying King Henri as a Roman emperor surrounded by his children. Costumed actors fought make-believe battles. Giant papier-mâché elephants thrilled the children, who believed they were real.
The crowds seemed immensely entertained by the pageantry. Out on the River Seine a mock sea battle was set to take place when disaster struck. Without warning, a barrel of gunpowder exploded on the deck of a ship. The ship sank, drowning members of the crew. I was painfully reminded of the collapse of the drawbridge when I first arrived in France. I had wept then at the loss of life, and I wept now.
Many of those who witnessed the spectacle did not realize it was a terrible accident, and they cheered and applauded wildly and cried out for more. The organizers arranged another sea battle for the next day, and the same awful accident occurred—another keg of gunpowder, another explosion, another ship down, more lives lost. King Henri ordered a stop to the sea battles, and Maman hurried me away from a scene that upset me dreadfully. I could not rid myself of the feeling that I was in some way responsible for the terrible things that happened, though Maman tried to assure me I was not.
***
Once the fêtes were over, my mother, my brother, and I traveled to Joinville to visit my grandmother. It was the first time Grand-Mère had seen her daughter since Maman left France, eleven years earlier, to marry my father. It would have been a brilliant homecoming and reunion if Grand-Père had been alive, but as he was not, there was far more sorrow than joy.
Grand-Mère appeared thin and pale, almost ghostly, in her mourning clothes. She received us solemnly, embracing my mother and greeting my brother and me with dry kisses. She seemed an entirely different person from the lively woman who had so loved to entertain friends and family at the Château du Grand Jardin. During our visit we never went to the banqueting house my grandfather had built, or even strolled in the once beautiful gardens that now lay neglected. Instead, we sat quietly in Grand-Mère’s gloomy apartments, where black cloth on the windows blotted out every glimmer of sunlight. The little dogs that had once greeted me with joyful barks had been banished. The cages of exotic birds were gone.
“I have considered withdrawing to pass my last days in a convent, away from this cruel world and its wicked ways,” Grand-Mère told us.
“What have you decided, dearest Maman?” my mother asked. She was distressed to find her mother in such dark despair.
“That I am needed here, to oversee the welfare of my family,” my grandmother said. I wondered whose welfare she meant.
We accompanied Grand-Mère through a dimly lit gallery to offer prayers in her private chapel. The only sound was the whisper of skirts and our hushed footsteps on the stone floor. We passed an empty coffin with an ornately carved lid and a lighted candle at each end. The sight startled me. “Whose coffin is that, Grand-Mère?” my brother asked, his voice echoing in the gallery.
“Mine,” she said. “I pass it every morning on my way to hear Mass, and several times each day when I come to pray, and I am reminded of the transitory nature of our lives here on earth.”
I loved my grandmother, but I was relieved when this doleful visit ended. Promising one another to meet again soon, my brother left for Amiens and my mother and I rejoined the French court at Blois, the château with the wonderful staircase. We would spend the winter in the Loire Valley My mother’s brothers, my Guise uncles—François, who had inherited the title duke of Guise when my grandfather died, and Charles, the cardinal of Lorraine—soon joined us.
My mother and my uncles often retired to the privacy of a small library in the suite of rooms my mother had been given for her stay Surrounded by leather-bound books, they discussed certain matters that were not of interest to me. But once, as I came to beg my mother to settle an argument with one of my friends, I heard her declare firmly, “I will not rest until Arran is out of the picture and I am the sole regent for our little queen!”
She was talking about me, la petite reine. Naturally, I stopped to listen. A Scottish nobleman, the earl of Arran, had been named regent by the Scottish Parliament to rule Scotland until I came of age, with my mother serving as co-regent. My mother did not wish to share this duty with him or anyone else, that much I understood. She and my uncles decided that I should be declared fully of age at eleven plus one day, four years earlier than the usual age of fifteen. “Then I will serve as queen regent,” my mother said, “and Arran will be out!”
Such matters were far beyond my comprehension, but I liked the idea of being declared of age when I was eleven—even if I did not know just what that involved. I turned and left quietly.
On another occasion, when the discussion seemed more interesting, I did not leave. My mother and her brothers were discussing what should be done about Lady Fleming. I hid myself behind a heavy drapery and listened.
“Lady Fleming is creating a scandal,” said my uncle Charles. “She is having an affair with the king, and she is not even discreet about it! Madame de Poitiers is furious.”
“Queen Catherine is angry as well, but not nearly so angry as the duchess,” Uncle François remarked. “I think she rather enjoys Diane’s humiliation. The queen has had to sit by quietly all these years while the king openly acknowledged Madame de Poitiers as his mistress. Now they have a common enemy—Lady Fleming.”
“There is more to the story,” my mother told her brothers. “I have learned from Sinclair, who has an unerring ear for court gossip as it is being discussed among the servants, that Lady Fleming is expecting a child.”
Expecting a child? I strained to hear better, nearly falling out of my hiding place. Does La Flamin know?
“How very interesting!” my uncle François exclaimed, and I could imagine him stroking his silky beard as he spoke. “King Henri himself confided to me just days ago that the queen his wife is also with child.”
A chair scraped across the floor. Someone might leave the reading room at any moment and find me there. Not wanting to be caught eavesdropping, I scurried away—and nearly collided with La Flamin, who had come looking for me.
“Let us ask the cooks to make us some sweets!” she proposed.
I was happy to agree. Poor girl, I thought as we ran off together, hand in hand, to the kitchens. She probably has no notion of the trouble her mother is in.