Judith Merkle Riley by The Master of All Desires Page A

Protestant faction. But to the Catholic faction she was a bastard who had no claim, since Henry VIII’s divorce and remarriage to Mistress Boleyn had no standing in the Catholic Church. To the French then, the Guises’ Mary was the legitimate heiress, born to bring England back to the Catholic fold. Her uncles, the Guise brothers, dazzled the king with her claims, and the possibility that his oldest son, the Dauphin, through marriage to their niece, could be king of three realms.
    But the actual moment of the Queen of Scots’s marriage to the Dauphin would seal the Guises’ supreme power permanently. For this reason, the shrewd Old Constable, Montmorency, was doing his best to delay or undermine the wedding, for the sake of his own family.
    The Guises were patient and brilliant; they did not play for short-term gains. They had smuggled little Mary out of Scotland at six, and seen to it that for all these years she was raised with the Dauphin, and trained by Diane de Poitiers in the graces that would charm the king and control his sickly, simpleminded son. The girl herself was encouraged in uselessness, vanity, and feminine frivolity, and to turn for any serious advice to her dear uncles, the Duc and the Cardinal. Their puppets were almost in place. Someday, through Mary, they would rule. She would be queen of beauty, and they, in all but the crown, kings of France, of Scotland, and of England.
    Behind these scheming rivals and supports of the throne came a throng of courtiers, the highest lords and military commanders and landholders in the realm, dressed in satin and gold-embroidered velvet, tight silk hose with shining garters, codpieces as puffed and embroidered as their padded doublets. The Dauphin, ill-grown and bad tempered, also accompanied his father. Shorter, with goggle eyes, bulbous nose, and a receding chin that resembled his mother’s, his face was marred with great patches of angry red, and his mouth hung slightly open with adenoids. He had none of dignity of the king, whose somber, long-nosed profile gave him an air of great seriousness and gravity of purpose. Still, parents must work with what they have, and the king, now at the height of his powers, intended for his son, someday, to be an even greater king than he had been.
    “Ah, the garden of delights,” breathed the King of Navarre, first of the princes of the blood, as the courtiers entered the queen’s tapestried reception chamber. Musicians were playing in a gallery, games and food were laid out here and there on little tables. The queen herself sat on a low, cushioned chair, with a slightly grander and higher one empty at her side. The colored tile floor was covered with rare carpets and soft, embroidered silk cushions, on which the gloriously dressed ladies of the court sat around her on the floor, their bright skirts spread about them. After making their formal greetings to the queen, the gentlemen joined the little groups of women to play cards, tell stories, and hear the latest gossip and songs. The evenings with the queen were something no gentleman would willingly miss: there one could carry on flirtations, make assignations, and trade an old mistress for a new. Harmless diversion, they thought, as they looked over the ladies of honor assigned to the duchess’s and the queen’s households. Women, so light-headed, so delicious, so easy.
    But these women were pledged in loyalty either to the queen or the royal mistress, who clothed them, financed them, and ruled their lives like a pair of generals. They assigned them their lovers, controlled their affairs, and required the reporting of their pillow talk. Yet so subtle and perfumed was this rule that the gentlemen of the court never understood that they were in the hands of two rival espionage services, deployed with all the brilliance of two military commanders in the field.
    The king, with a half dozen of his lords standing behind him, joined the queen, making polite conversation with