“Is there not somewhere we can go?”
How many times have I heard those words? This time I am struck by the fact that, thanks to the slaughter, it has never been easier to be alone without subterfuge. Countless rooms stand empty, with no chance their tenants will return. The closest belong to my husband.
When we arrive, I am shocked by how normal everything looks. Perhaps the guards seeking to arrest the King of Navarre found them empty and simply had no reason to cause destruction. I have never asked my cousin how or where he was taken, assuming the recitation of the event would increase his pain.
I stand facing Henri, waiting for him to begin.
“Marguerite, as I love you and you once said you loved me, I want to know why you treated me as you did this morning.”
I am being called to account? Me?
“Sir, I find it discouraging that you cannot arrive at such a conclusion on your own. Are you not the man who slew the admiral? The man who joked this morning about the dead lying naked in the avenues?”
“I do not understand,” he says. I can see that—in Henri’s eyes, in his defensive posture. “You have always known what I was. And you have always known I was sworn to kill Coligny. When I marched to the last war, you wept and told me to kill as many heretics as I liked, and certainly as many as I needed to come back safely. You wished me luck in avenging my father’s death. Now I have had that luck and done a son’s duty, yet you seem to think I should be ashamed.”
How can I explain? I do not believe I have changed so much—or perhaps I do not wish to believe it. I would like to think that Henri’s manner of killing the admiral would have mattered to me even long ago.
“I knew you would kill Coligny, yes,” I reply. “But I thought it would be in battle, or sword to sword in the combat that befits gentlemen. I could never have imagined you would have an injured gentleman pulled from his bed and thrown from the window of his own h?tel.”
He flinches slightly at my account, and this moves me more than anything he has said or any look he has yet given me. Then his eyes harden.
“One might kill a dog in such a manner,” he says. “Coligny was a dog.”
“No. A heretic, yes, but a gentleman. And even were he not, you are one. It ought to have been beneath you to kill him as you did.”
I wonder what will happen if he hangs his head in shame and admits his fault. If he pleads a sudden madness. Surely many who roamed the Louvre and the streets that night were mad. I think that if he is contrite, I will take him in my arms and soothe him.
“I cannot be sorry the admiral is dead,” he says. “And rethinking the manner of his death is entirely futile.” Lowering his voice, he steps forward, closing the gap between us. “Marguerite, there are things about the long night which make me sorry.”
“Yes?” I keep my voice cold, but my heart leaps.
“Children ought not to have been slaughtered. They were but innocents who might have been brought to see the error of their parents’ ways and reclaimed for the Holy Church. Even some of the adults abjured.”
“God cannot reclaim a heart by force.” I think of my husband facing the pain of his own abjuration, of his guilt and of the loathing he so obviously feels for himself at the prospect of becoming Catholic in name again.
Henri throws up a hand. “And it seems that I cannot reclaim your heart no matter what I say! What would you have me do? Shed tears because we have rid His Majesty’s kingdom of his worst enemies and God’s?”
He paces away, and I think our conversation is over. But, rounding, he returns, this time stopping much closer, intimately close. “Is this truly about dead Protestants, or is this really about my asking you to spy on the King of Navarre, and turning from you when you would not? That spat ought never to have been allowed to continue for so long. I have lain awake more than one night reliving my long climb down the ladder from your room and the moment when, at the bottom, I thought to scramble back again and take you in my arms. I have wished countless times I had acted on that impulse. And I tell you now that though my body may have left you standing alone in darkness, my soul in good part did not leave you and has never left you since.”
So I have not been tout seul in my loneliness. There is comfort in that—comfort and something more. I feel the understanding between us rekindling. The spark is weak but it is there. I do not wish to speak for fear I will speak wrongly and extinguish it. Henri weighs my silence, examines my eyes, and presses onward.
“Do not spy on the King of Navarre if you do not like it. Such a little matter must not be allowed to separate two hearts meant to be conjoined.”