Chapter Text
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[In an elaborate, curling, formal calligraphy, a short note in a dark brown ink.] To: Madame d’Artagnan Dear Madame, Her Majesty requests the honour of your presence in her rooms at midday. Please indicate by prompt return of message your acquiescence to this invitation. Yours in all faith, A Anne, Queen of France by the hand of Françoise Bertaut de Motteville |
Constance stands, hand on one hip, mouth tucked to one side. She looks up at the servant. He gazes back at her, the picture of well-trained blankness. She sighs, quirks an eyebrow. “You know what I could do with?” she says.
“No, Madame?”
“A book of words – what they mean.”
“French words, Madame?”
“Yes. But, since nothing like that exists, as far as I know, I’ll make do with you.” She flicks her eyes down to the letter, returns to him. “What does ‘acquiescence’ mean? I know its general thrust, but what’s the proper meaning?”
The servant, who has had a modest pamphlet of verse published rather recently, screws up his face in thought. “‘Reluctant acceptance’,” he says in the end.
“As if to a duty?”
“Er, yes.”
“Right.” Her face sharpens to something like determination, and something like humour, and he realises, all of a rush, that he’s going to miss her, this strange woman who’s quite unlike any servant or courtier in this place. Every thought or feeling she has dashes across her face except when she’s decided to school someone. The blanker her face, in his experience, the harder they’re going to be schooled.
“Well, monsieur, I appear to have packed most of my writing materials, so needs must, wouldn’t you say?”
“Madame,” he inclines his head, and is very glad not to be Madame de Motteville.
She flips the missive over, fishes what turns out to be a pencil from her pocket and leans on the nearest blank surface, face shifting in concentration as she composes.
He receives in return:
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To Anne, Queen of France Your Majesty, No duty can compel the pleasure with which I return my wholehearted acceptance of your invitation to wait upon you at the stroke of noon. Yours in all fealty, C [there is a tiny ‘x’ appended to the tail of the capital letter] Constance d’Artagnan, by her own hand. |
“Well?”
“I think,” he says, as neutrally as he dares and rolling the paper into a neat scroll, “that will do very well.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” she says, with the tiniest of smirks and what looks to be the ghost of a wink. She presents a red ribbon: “Here,” and he holds the scroll steady while she ties it, wrapped around three times and pressed into a neat bow.
She pats it gently, he retreats on a small courtesy, and leaves.
Constance stands, hands on her hips. The rooms she’d struggled to lay claim to for all that first, lonely time now seem too large again, and echo uncomfortably. In truth, she’s not lived here for weeks, maybe months – they’ve merely been a place to hold changes of clothes and somewhere to sleep. The very quiet that had seemed balm and comfort now seems incomplete, constrained, an itch across her skin.
Still, these walls hold memories, the very furniture bearing the weight of secrets shared and love affirmed, sometimes in the strangest and most unexpected of ways.
She has written her last letter at this desk; anything further addressed to her here will have to be forwarded. She trails her fingertips over its surface and turns to survey other parts of the room.
Reconciled, and, later, shriven by confession, she and d’Artagnan had stood there, fierce and heated, words and emotions flying and falling, seeing each other more truly, loving each other more deeply, more courageously.
There, at that table, two unfinished games of chess with Athos, each one a means to connect calmly, each giving way to tactics and strategies mapped across their bodies, learning new ways to be.
That broad chair, holding so much straining, heated, desperate emotion in its forgiving lap.
Then, cheeks heating and not minding in the least, she sways into the bedroom, to take her leave of there, stripped slowly and sumptuously by the pair of them; there, d’Artagnan taking his mouth to her, both of them exhausted and exalted by a long day of peril and farewell and reconciliation; there, her taking him inside her for the first time; there, Athos showing her, casually, how words can bind their young lover, the thrill of power arcing through her in a way she had barely articulated to herself at the time. And there d’Artagnan summoning stuttered narration from Athos, and there they join inside her, and oh, there… sharing their most intimate act with her.
She lets the heat of remembrance crest in her, holding it for a deliberately indulgent moment, then releases it, blowing her fringe off her warm face. Rolling her eyes and smirking fondly at her own wilful foolishness, she begins a far more pragmatic sweep for any tiny thing that may have escaped her attention.
The cupboards are swept clear, as is the space under the bed, and every drawer is accounted for. And still she circles, opening, closing, bidding it all farewell, consigning it to history, to the hands of whoever comes next into this place, to it merely being part of The Palace.
She comes, finally, back to the reception room, and opens the door to summon someone to bring a porter for the last of the boxes. She realises, slightly to her surprise, that she has already decided that she won’t be returning here after speaking to the Queen.
It seems fitting, somehow; a circle turned full. A little theatrical, but no matter of that.
Constance has never sat well with time on her hands, so, after seeing to the stowing of the boxes on their transport, makes her way towards the Queen’s quarters. She climbs up via the kitchens, nodding and smiling and pressing the occasional hand or arm or kiss to those who are bidding her farewell. Nanette and Simone rush over to thank her for the dresses and shawls. Tiny Simone will have to have hers taken in somewhat, but she’s still thrilled. Constance feels a stab of something, something about how much she’s taken her resources while here, and clothes in general for a long time, for granted, but now isn’t the time for that, it’s the time for hugs and smiles and nods to demands to visit sometime soon, and to taste a little of what will be going up for lunch shortly and to offer praise and sincere tokens of how much she will miss everyone here.
And, in this moment, that’s both true and not. What she is heading to will be difficult and different, but truly, her foot has been on this path for a long time now, and she will likely be far too busy for much in the way of nostalgia.
She ascends, shifts her expression to something a little more neutral, but can’t quite get her gait back to matching that which patters in muted echoes off the walls, pale and constrained. The whisper of well-trained footsteps in the corridors around her seems painfully narrow and frankly unnatural.
Constance no longer seems quite able to hobble her stride. She is walking, she thinks, more like a countrywoman than a courtier. But she still nods and bobs as appropriate to those she passes
At the door to the Queen’s quarters she pauses for a moment, smoothes down her gown, pats and tucks her hair, breathes deep, and knocks.
The door is opened by a trim, brunette woman whose sloe-dark eyes always seem hooded in judgement of the subject on which they lay their gaze. Constance has known her long enough to know that this expression is partly an affected courtly disdain, but also partly just the slightly unfortunate shape of her eyes. She allows herself a demure smile and courtesy, which is returned on a murmured Madame. She casts a look up the corridor on reflex as the lady-in-waiting pulls the door wider open, spotting the Breton guard, Erwan, strolling towards them on his round. She has a soft spot for him, so offers up a twinkle, which is circumspectly returned. As she enters the antechamber, she receives an correcting kind of look from the dark-eyed woman.
“You are early, Madame,” says the lady-in-waiting, admonishment at the display of something so indecorous as a twinkle still ringing through her.
“It’s a vice of mine,” she returns, unabashed, looking up and around the curlicued cornices and rich hangings of this room with a melancholy kind of pleasure as the other takes herself away to stand in the middle of the dim space, facing Constance, hands and mouth folded modestly in front of her, feet neatly together.
As she returns her gaze to her, it comes as a small but welcome shock to realise that Madame de Motteville no longer intimidates her, and that she hasn’t for quite some time. She smiles at little sharply at the other woman, begins to understand something of the way that Treville moves around the Palace, his absolute calm when facing down the machinations and insinuations of the court-bred around him. It’s hard to be intimidated by these delicate creatures.
She feels her smile broaden, irrepressible, while her eyes stay a little narrow, watches a mote of understanding penetrate the until-now unshakeable glacier of Madame’s regard. No doubt it is a little unwise for her to push the reality of this switch of attitudes at her with another, rather sharper twinkle and a swaying half-step towards the statuesque… wait, that’s not right, either. She is sizing her up in the way she has been learning to for a while – not just for her social influence now, but her physical presence. Which is significantly less impressive than it used to appear to her. Maybe Constance is holding herself taller these days. Or maybe she’s woken up a little further.
And it’s heady, this feeling. She squares off her shoulders a little, stands with her feet hip-width apart, weight forward a little on the balls of her feet, her hands clasped behind her back, gazing a little over Madame de Motteville’s shoulder, eyebrow quirked, and the woman gives her a look mingled of distaste and disquiet. Then Constance hears, clear as anything, in the back of her head, almost, as it were, in her ear, Athos murmuring that she’s showing off like the rawest recruit, swaggering and sneering, revealing the very vulnerability she thinks she’s beyond. Porthos mutters that she’s as good as swinging her dick around, and d’Artagnan just smiles, telling her with one look that she’s enough in herself. With his hand at her waist, and Athos’s on her shoulder, she unwinds herself and smiles directly at Madame de Motteville: a soft, disarming, brilliant thing worthy of Aramis himself, and the other woman, charmed against her own volition, startles herself with a returning smile of her own. Constance thinks it may be the first real one she’s seen on her, in truth. She also sees, finally, that Mme de Motteville is nowhere near as rigid as she has always thought her, not a minor monument in the model of Madame de Beauvilliers at all.
We see each other clearly at last, she thinks, in a loop, head cocked slightly to one side, smile fading slowly as Madame de Motteville’s does, and now Constance is remembering that she wears black as the widow of a man near four times her age, her union a political expediency written on a greater tableau than Constance’s own, but enough alike that they should know each other better than this, they truly should.
And Constance sees how hard she’s been battling, the whole time here, and how much she’s missed out on in the way of potential friendship if she’d only thought to look deeper.
Damn.
Constance does not forget, as such, but decides to put aside the fact that Madame de Motteville was among the foremost in the sly campaign of pausing before her old name: Madame… Bonacieux, a reminder that she was not “de” anything. How slender an advantage they must have felt after all, she thinks, wondering, if that’s what they went with.
She feels a momentary irritation, because this means that Athos was right. Damn it.
The other woman is looking confused, no doubt at the long silence combined with the flashes of emotion crossing her as she thinks her way through all this. She takes a deep breath. “Madame de Motteville.” The other nods, cautiously. She smiles warmly at her, decides to reject all the clever twists of phrase she’d started to prepare. “It’s wonderful to know that Her Majesty will be in such safe hands as yours,” she remembers something else, of her mother, Madame Bertaut, former lady-in-waiting to the Queen, “once again.” Another nod, somewhat warmer. “It’s a shame that I wasn’t able… that I didn’t take more time to properly hand everything over to you.” She catches and holds her gaze firmly, earnestly. “I think I would have enjoyed that. Enjoyed getting to know you better.”
And Madame de Motteville looks… shaken. Gently, ever so gently, but shaken. And Constance has not only got to enjoy shedding the restrictions of… what was that word? circumlocutious diction at last, as she bids farewell to court life once and for all, but also to see her frankness thaw a chunk off the unassailable Mme de M., who is – yes – actually smiling back at Constance.
Better late than never.
Hah.
“Madame d’Artagnan,” and Madame de Motteville takes an involuntary, abortive little step-and-reach-out towards her and she closes the distance for her, both hands out, palms up.
“Constance, please.”
“Constance.” She lays her hands on hers, a little hesitantly. “Thank you. It is… It is an honour to serve Her Majesty, of course, but…” she looks down, and Constance still isn’t quite sure how much of this coyness is manufactured, but it doesn’t matter so very much after all, does it? She looks up again. “I have large shoes to fill… You are. She–”
Constance ducks into her eyeline, smirking. “You’ll do very well, I think.”
“She speaks of you a great deal,” says Madame de Motteville.
“And no doubt you’ll be heartily sick of my name soon enough.” She grins, to show it’s a joke. They’re still on too shaky ground for her to try the kind of deadpan that she and Athos enjoy.
Madame de Motteville colours, and Constance sees, again more clearly than before, quite how young, tucked behind all those airs, she truly is, but she smiles back through her mild mortification.
“I just hope you enjoy hard work, is all,” she adds.
“Oh, indeed,” she replies. “It is the only thing, sometimes, when your spirits are low.”
Married to a man in his dotage and far from your family. No wonder. And she, well, not so much curses, but scowls at the Cardinal’s unlamented memory. Oh well. Young Françoise Bertaut, lettered to the point of studious, no real beauty, of a minor family, might never have made much of a name for herself. But, exiled with her mother to excise the Queen’s Spanish connections from her, enduringly loyal, safely widowed, and returned at the Queen’s behest, now to her right hand, might well be a power to reckon with, truly.
So many fires to temper us, she thinks, and who knows which blow will shatter us and which give us strength?
She shakes off her thoughts as the far doors open and the Queen sails towards her, hands outstretched. She releases the other woman with a quick flick of her eyebrows and a brief moue of amusement, turning with her to dip a low courtesy.
“No need for this,” tinkles the Queen, glowing under a more elaborate confection of hair than Constance has yet seen on her, and she rises to meet her perfumed embrace.
“Françoise.”
“Your Majesty?” Madame de Motteville remains low.
“I would have a moment or two alone with Constance, before she leaves us entirely for her new duties.”
“Of course,” she murmurs, turns smoothly out of her courtesy, and sweeps away to the outer corridor.
