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The rumbling that had begun in the courtyard made its way inside. It slowly rolled from room to adjoining room, all the way into the king's bed chamber. Without any superiors to watch them, the guards who had been left to guard the princess’s body fell out of formation and began to whisper among themselves. One even peeked through the curtains.
Claudine had just finished packing away her tools. She had let her falsely gruff tone lapse during the crisis, but now that it was all over, she supposed she ought to cloak herself in her assumed persona again, even though it fit her as poorly as her trousers.
"What is happening?" she asked.
The guards took the question as permission to fling the window open wide. "Cannot say for certain. Fabien Marchal rides out in great haste with at least thirty Musketeers at his side."
Claudine joined them in watching the spectacle. The troop galloped past the autumnal tree line and soon out of sight. At the head of the charge she caught a glimpse of long black hair and the chestnut charger she had long admired. Fabien sat awkwardly in his saddle, slanting forwards and sideways, instead of with his usual aggressive seat. Something was wrong.
Bontemps was not around to inform her of the proper etiquette, so she took a guess and left the palace by a servant entrance. On her way through the courtyard, she saw footmen loading trunks onto carriages. Chevalier de Lorraine managed the proceedings, chiding clumsy servants and deciding which trunks should go where. Claudine spotted Monsieur sitting quietly in the carriage. He looked even paler and more bereft, if possible, than he had earlier. If Claudine had to guess, she would say that he had overtired himself by his wife’s sickbed, and had possibly sprained his ankle while dancing a few nights before.
But it was neither her place nor her business to speak to them uninvited, so she continued on her way. A few minutes later, the carriage passed her, and Monsieur’s wet eyes locked with hers, just for a moment. She nodded, equally dejected.
When they had passed, Claudine redoubled her pace. She had lost a patient today, yes, but she had a feeling she would soon have a new one. She could only hope.
It was not until the next evening when a heavy weight fell against her front door. Claudine would normally have asked who it was before opening it, but she knew that weight. She had been expecting it. She lifted the latch and stepped out of the way to let Fabien fall inside. Without a word of greeting, nor even a grunt, he stumbled towards the bed. He knew where it was; he’d occupied it before.
He collapsed on the mattress, and the wood squeaked under the sudden weight. Too weak to open his clothes and expose the wound that he must have kept hidden all this time, he simply lay on his back, open and vulnerable, like a corpse for an autopsy.
“You should not answer your door so freely,” he mumbled when she began to unbutton his shirt and pull it out of his trousers.
“And you should not ride about the countryside with a knife wound to the abdomen.” Next, she unfastened the leather ties of his trousers, raising his hips to pull them down around endearingly bony knees. There was no modesty here, no embarrassment, at least on his part.
For her part, Claudine was glad of the looming darkness.
“This is for you.” Fabien pulled a ring off his finger and pressed it into her palm. When she pulled back to look at it, he grasped one of her fingers and slipped it on.
Baffled, Claudine said, “You are barely conscious. Likely delusional. And you owe me nothing. So, you’ll forgive me if I reject your proposal.”
He shook his head weakly no. “I have avenged your father. This is the token of my victory.”
“What are you talking about?” Claudine asked as she left his side to fetch tools to treat his wounds.
“It was Rohan,” he called after her, even though he should not have been raising his voice, for any reason.
“The king’s friend?”
“He conspired with the King of Holland. It was he who poisoned your father in an effort to deprive the king of medical aid during his illness.”
“How did you find this out?”
“I interrogated him. Just after rescuing the Dauphin from his clutches.”
“What?!”
“He kidnapped the child while hunting. While everyone was preoccupied with Madame. I believe that was his true aim. A brilliant plan—one life and one kidnapping, thus depriving the king of half his family at once.”
“There has been no talk of this. I have been in town all day, and there was no talk.”
“That was by my design. It would not do let it be known that there are problems beyond the princess’s death.”
Claudine had a feeling that if he could have, Fabien would have kept even that quiet, but she said nothing. He needed to stop talking and rest; continuing to converse with him would not achieve that. However, she had one question first—a diagnostic one, she told herself.
“Was it Rohan who stabbed you?”
“No, that was Moncourt, just before the king killed him.”
Claudine’s hand stilled on his bleeding abdomen. “It has been a more eventful few days than I realized.”
“Do not breathe a word of any of this. I should not have told you. I don’t know why I did.”
“Likely because, as I said, you are delusional.”
“No, it is not because of that.”
“That is what you would say if you were delusional.”
She leaned over him, even though it was not strictly required, and massaged his temple, trying to give him a pressure point to focus on aside from the stinging liquid she was pouring on his wound. From so close, she could smell the autumn leaves that had fallen into his hair while riding.
She soaked a bit of rag in a drug that would make him sleep, and passed it under her nose. Within moments, he had nodded off, allowing her to finish her work in peace.
By morning he was gone.
Being the royal physician, Claudine was discovering, sounded strenuous, but in actuality, left her with quite a lot of spare time. The King and Queen enjoyed a healthy constitution. The carefully sheltered dauphin suffered even fewer scrapes and sprains than other little boys his age. Monsieur and the Chevalier had not returned to Versailles after Madame’s death, so, even if he had been unwell, Claudine did not see him.
Most of the time, she was left to herself, her errands, and her studies. The little house in town that she and her father had begun renting it by the week, thinking only to stay for the queen’s delivery, had somehow slipped into becoming her home. Upon making this realization one grey day, she looked around and saw the emptiness for the first time.
She had come from the country, and knew almost no one in Versailles; the few she did know lived in the palace, too lofty to serve as a friend. Claudine could hardly stop by to take wine with the king.
However, she did begin to wonder if she was allowed to take on some other responsibilities to alleviate the boredom. She would ask Bontemps, she decided.
The next day, as if the universe had listened to her mood, a diversion arrived.
It took two men to drag the corpse to her door and inside. They deposited it on the table she had bought specifically for autopsies, and then left with nothing but a bow.
Claudine circled it for a few minutes, scalpel out, wondering what she was meant to do. There was no note, no immediate signs of poison, no cause of death at all. It was a puzzle, one that flexed her brain as nothing else had for weeks.
Only after she had investigated all the normal hypotheses did she notice the tiny hole that had been drilled into the man’s skull.
“I assume I have you to thank for my recent delivery,” Claudine said when she encountered Fabien in the cour d’honneur later that day. The queen had come down with something that looked only like a trifling cold, and so, Claudine was on her way again, after only a twenty minute visit.
“I was with the king all day, discussing matters of state,” he said, and it would have sounded grand had the tone been less weary. “I could not possibly have delivered anything to your house.”
“No, but your men did. And they do nothing without your orders.”
Claudine repressed a smile at the thought of the obviously fresh recruit who had knocked at her door, stammeringly called her “sir”, and said, "With compliments," before fairly running out of the house. Whose compliments, he had not said, but he also had not needed to. Claudine passed a hand across her brow, remembering only when she felt a tacky residue on her skin that she had recently been wrist deep in a lung.
Fabien’s eyes backtracked along the blood streak. He looked approving, intrigued, a flash of something warmer. Claudine could not decide whether to feel flattered or disturbed.
“How is your stab wound?” she asked. “You never returned for the follow-up I ordered.”
“It has healed very well. There was no need to return.”
“There was still a need,” she said quietly, and realized only after she’d said it that she wasn’t certain how professionally she’d meant it.
Fabien turned to look at her with more focus than he had before; normally, his eyes roamed the entire surroundings, searching for clues and crimes that had not yet happened. He stared at her balefully, and then bowed.
“Good day, monsieur,” he said before walking away.
She shouldn’t have said anything.
The bodies began to come regularly, once or twice a week, all perfectly healthy aside from a hard to find, yet violent cause of death.
“This has to stop,” Claudine said when she next saw Fabien in town, weeks later. It was quite dark, and the streets were mostly empty, but she recognized the faces of some of the men with him as those who regularly stopped by her house. However, they were dressed as civilians, which she could not understand.
“What does?” he asked, not even looking at her. Instead, his attention was focused on a house down the road, a non-descript one.
Normally, Claudine might have been curious enough to ask about it, but she had had enough.
“You, leaving corpses on my doorstep, as a cat might leave a dead mouse on the porch of its mistress.”
She regretted her choice of words no sooner than they had fallen from her lips. But, apart from a momentary squint of his left eye, Fabien showed no reaction.
“I had thought to help you in your studies,” he said, eyes still focused on that house. “You require subjects for your studies, do you not?”
“There is little new to be learned from a body that had been perfectly healthy before someone—presumably you—stabbed him in the eye with a fire poker.”
“One of them had the gout,” Fabien said offhandedly. “My spies informed me of his condition.”
“I already knew the symptoms of and remedy for gout.”
“I see. I will instruct my men to only send cases they consider exceptionally interesting from a medical perspective. If you would like to write a list of what is considered ‘interesting’, I will keep it in mind.”
Claudine felt that she had somehow lost the argument. “I would prefer fewer violent deaths in Versailles in general, but yes, fine.”
“Is that all, Mademoiselle?” Fabien asked, making the word sound dirty somehow. At the same time, he gave a signal for two musketeers—the ones in plainclothes—to enter the little house. A flock of maids ran out. The scuffle took only a minute. Fabien loaded his musket and lined up a shot aimed at the attic window.
Even from this distance, Claudine could hear the cry as the bullet found its aim.
“A simple shot to the head. I take it that he would not considered ‘interesting’?” Fabien asked.
Claudine shook her head and walked away.
The rate of deliveries slowed down—to, Claudine had to admit, only very interesting cases—but the daily stops and knocks and ‘just checking, mademoiselle, I mean, er, monsieur’ did not.
She meant to say something about it, but then the books began to arrive. Beautiful tomes, not only about medicine, but also theoretical texts, too, even novels. Blank notebooks for her to write down her learnings and also loose sheets for correspondence. Inkwells and pens of the finest calibre.
“From the king’s own stationer in Paris, sir,” one of the soldiers informed her.
Highly as the king respected her, Claudine doubted that he was the purchaser of such gifts. For all his lecherous behavior, he had never once looked at her like that. She was too far down the hierarchy, but not quite far down enough—a maid, a whore—for the circle to come round and attract his attention. As far as he was interested, she might as well have the man he had decreed her.
She didn’t mind.
Even if he had looked at her in that way, she doubted the king appreciated the smell of the fine paper as much as he whom she suspected of being the source.
She meant to say something about it, but could not find Fabien in town, and, pretty as the paper was, she thought such gifts demanded an in-person thanks, not a letter. She was loath to dress as a man when she didn’t have to; since she was only to visit the palace in her guise as physician, she ended up rarely going there outside of her few duties. So, she rarely saw him.
Eventually, he came to her. Another day, another staggering weight against her door.
"For how long have you been walking around like this?" she asked as he slumped, yet again, into her bed, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
"Only since this morning."
"Who was it this time?" she asked as she stripped his clothes, yet again.
This dance of theirs was becoming a strangely unerotic habit.
"I was stabbed through the thigh by a drunkard."
"Really?"
"You sound surprised," he said hoarsely.
"You are one of the most renowned swordsmen in the kingdom. You regularly face master assassins and proven warriors. I would have thought that a drunkard proved little danger."
"On the contrary. He who has studied with the best masters has predictable movements and similar technique to all the other master assassins and proven warriors. But a drunkard has wild unpredictability on his side. He swings left when anyone with sense would swing forward."
"You don't need a reason, you know," she teased, hoping to distract him from the burn of the cauterizing. "If you would like to stop by, you are always welcome. You don’t need a wound to visit.”
"You think I purposefully fail in my duty? You think I hurt my body for pleasure?”
“It was a joke,” Claudine said, but at the same time, she remembered the welts she’d seen on his back, the wounds he had voluntarily allowed Madame de Clermont to inflict upon him in the name of love… or lovemaking, rather.
“No, it wasn’t a joke,” he said softly, sadly, as though reading her mind.
"Yes it was, but it was one I should not have made. I am sorry. You take your duty very seriously, too seriously for me to joke about.” She sat on the bed beside him. There wasn’t as much to do today, as the wound was clean and she’d already dressed it. “Why, may I ask? What do you owe the king so especially?"
"He gave me opportunity to practice that for which I am most fit and derive the greatest satisfaction. It is not the lodging in a palace, the finery, the association elevating me from my beginnings, that I value. What I do for him would be called criminal in any other circumstance, but because I do it for him, it is honorable. He gave you the same gift. Without his blessing, you would still be reading books alone in the best case, and tried as a witch in the worst. You would not be tending to patients. We are not so different, you and I.”
“I would call what I do vastly different from what you do.”
“And yet our tools look strangely similar,” he said, eyeing the scalpel on the tray across the room.
“You inflict hurts. I cure them.”
“But that is not why you began, was it? That drive to ‘cure’ took second place to curiosity. You wished to see what people were like underneath, the core of them. So did I.”
She could not deny it, so instead she got up again. It had been a poor idea to sit down in the first place.
“Have you had supper?” she asked.
“Are you asking me to sup with you?” he asked, so heatedly that she almost wished his wound had been more serious, so that he would sleep and spare her this confusion.
“You don’t need to have your men look for me every day,” she said quickly, randomly, covering her discomfort with bluster. "There are plenty of women who live alone, whose parents have died, who have no brothers."
"None of them are the king's physician. And you are not a woman."
Claudine chuckled. "Do you know of one person who believes that?"
"I know of one no one who would dare say otherwise aloud. And in this place, is that not all that matters?”
Claudine felt that she had, as usual, lost the upper hand in this argument, but this time she attempted to take it back. Standing defiantly, and holding the tools to his wellbeing in her hands so he could see, she said, "You are the king's head of security. I am not part of the royal family. Your jurisdiction doesn’t extend to me."
"My jurisdiction covers all threats to the life of the king and the royal family. Your father was killed because through him lay the king's life. If you suffered the same fate, then the king would be at risk."
"Such logic implies that I am powerless."
"And yet also makes you powerful. Who else holds the life of the king in their hands as we do? Who else but us? The king himself gave first me, and then you, that power. Power freely bestowed is greater than power conquered."
“And whose philosophy is this?” she asked.
“I have been reading the Florentine masters.”
Claudine wondered, as she carefully cleaned his latest wounds, if he was just as lonely as she was. If books were to him as corpses were to her. Interests originally cultivated to impress fathers long gone, but which had gone on to become true passions.
Later, as he slept in the flickering candlelight, she changed the bandages. Asleep like this, he looked, not innocent—never that—but almost gentle. As she wiped away the sweat that had collected on his brow, she let her eyes rake to the places she dared not with her fingers, to the fine bones of his hands and the veins of his neck. To the strong muscles of his bare chest and the hard cut of his jaw. To the lines of his hips and the fine hair along his lower belly, to…
She moved to step away, but even though his eyes were still closed, he grasped her hand, pulling her close, so close that she had to sit, lest she lose her balance.
His fingers rubbed against the ring that she wore—had worn since the day he’d given it to her. She had let the drop of blood that had come with it dry onto the gold. It was now a feature, not a blemish, at least in her eyes.
“Fabien,” she whispered when a minute passed and he had still not let go. “Are you feeling unwell?”
“I do need an excuse,” he confessed, responding to a much earlier conversation.
“You don’t,” she repeated.
“I wanted to. I wanted…” He shifted, let go her hand and closed his eyes. “I should stop coming here. There are other doctors. I should go.”
He made a motion as though to stand, but Claudine held him down, pressing both hands against his bare chest.
Claudine asked, leaning in closer, brazenly rubbing her hands up and down where she held. Not quite medically necessitated, but… “But what if I want you to keep coming? Preferably when you aren’t bleeding.”
He grasped her hands and stilled them, but did not remove them from his body. “You shouldn’t. I am not a man who… You have seen first hand the sort of man I am.”
“Well, I am supposed to be one of the king’s most trusted men, just like you. Perhaps I could do with a closer study, so that I can more closely ape your mannerisms.”
He choked on this, stuck halfway between a laugh and a snort. “No amount of study will help you. You will always be the least convincing man I have ever met. And I would not have it otherwise.”
“Fabien…” she said, not knowing how she wanted to continue.
He leaned forwards, grunting in pain when his leg moved a bit. She made it easier on him and closed the distance between their lips.
As he kissed her, his fingers rubbed at the spot of dried blood on the ring she wore.