Mother’s smile fades first. The color in her cheeks follows. “The father has no more interest in you than the son did.”
I feel as if I have been slapped. “I do not understand.”
“Philip’s happy marriage to your sister may cause him to mourn her, but not to look favorably upon her family. It seems there is nothing but ill will for France at the court of Spain.”
Her eyes return to the page but do not move, so she is thinking, not reading. I am not thinking, only feeling. The embarrassment of another marital rejection is horrible enough, but there is something especially brutal about being spurned by a man who adored my sister.
“God’s blood!” Mother’s words interrupt my pitiful reflections. “Spain has urged us again and again to dissolve the peace and bring the Protestants into submission. But when His Majesty goes to war, rather than aiding us, the Spaniards are but another obstruction.”
The color begins to return to her face in angry red splotches.
“Philip is less interested in the preservation of faith than he pretends,” she continues, her anger making her more candid than I am accustomed to. “His real interest is power, and he doubtless reckons that the impoverishment of France by war strengthens Spain. I prefer the German princes. They may be heretics, but they are plainspoken in their positions and their hostilities.”
Mother’s face is nearly purple. I can see the blood pulsing at her temples. Rising to her feet, she opens her mouth and then, quite suddenly, sways as if she were aboard a ship. She reaches out to clutch the chair she just left.
“Madame!”
The Queen falls back into her seat. For an instant her eyes reflect the same panic that imbued my voice. Then she says, “Get hold of yourself, Marguerite. Is it not bad enough that I must deal with treachery abroad and a depleted treasury at home? Must I be saddled with a hysterical daughter who appears destined to remain unmarried?”
She puts her head in her hands. “Go.”
I run to my rooms. Fran?ois is there. He often is lately. Without a word I rush past him, snatch up the Spanish I have been working on—books and all—and cast it onto the fire with such force that sparks fly out. One lands upon my skirts. Before I can reach down, my brother is beside me beating at the spot with his hand, then stamping the small glowing fragments that litter the hearth.
“Margot, you might have been burned.” Looking up from extinguishing the last of the embers, his eyes widen. “Who has made you weep?”
“The King of Spain and our mother. Neither loves me, nor do they find me useful.”
“The more fool them.” Fran?ois takes my hands in his.
I am surprised by this response. I expected protestations that Mother cares for me. I stop crying, catch my breath, and look more closely at Fran?ois. “You think Mother does not love me, then?”
“Not as I do. Not as she ought. Not as she loves Anjou.” There is bitterness in this pronouncement, but even more noticeable is the certitude.
Is this what being left so long alone at Amboise did to my brother: made him sure he is unloved? If so, is that horrible or fortunate? I waver between believing Her Majesty indifferent to me, and grasping at gestures which suggest she might care. My striving to secure her approval and her love is constant, and can be crushing. Would believing—truly believing—I was unloved free me? No. It would destroy me. I know that by the nausea that wells at the thought of being nothing to Mother, and by the need I feel to prove to Fran?ois he is in error.
“Mother loves all her children.”
“Convince yourself of that if you wish,” he replies. “But I refuse to be duped. She does not love me and I do not care.” He does not care, but his voice shakes. “The day will come when she will be sorry for thinking so little of me. When she will not be able to look over me or past me. When she will need me and wish that I needed her.”
I think of my brother as a boy. After all, he is just on the cusp of fourteen. But in this declaration—in his clear, angry eyes and fervent expression of ambition—I glimpse the man in him. Like Charles, there is something frightening in that man. This is knowledge worth having. It also makes me vaguely sad. It seems that, among my brothers, Anjou alone has been spared a dark side. I can see that prince in my mind’s eye as he was at Saumur, striding about, all muscle, grace, and authority, showing His Majesty the troops. Is it any wonder Mother loves Henri best? He has earned that place by never disappointing. Can I say the same? Not if I am being honest. Anjou once called me his equal. I must try harder to make it so.
*
Fran?ois is stretched out, head resting in my lap, eyes closed when it happens. Pausing to turn a page in the book I am reading aloud, I glance in the direction of the window just as a bird flies into it with a sickening thud—a black bird. My body starts involuntarily.
“What is it?” my brother asks, eyes still closed.
“A bird struck the glass and fell away. I fear it is dead.”