Ring of Fire II(54)

Everyone around the table knew it, and his remark raised a round of chuckles. "I could take it very amiss, you know, that Monsieur Gaston thinks me stupid enough to keep playing when I'm losing."



"Now, now, Jules," Richelieu said, wagging a finger, "Cardinals aren't allowed affairs of honor. And if you think you are embarrassed to learn that Gaston's crowd thinks little of you, imagine how embarrassed I should be to have you imprisoned for duelling and for killing the king's brother."



"Shame," Abel said, into the thoughtful silence that followed that. "He's given me cause a couple of times."



"Perhaps some other kind of contest," Leon added, suddenly with a 'butter wouldn't melt' expression on his face.



Servien erupted. "Arm-wrestling!" he choked out between guffaws, "Bowling! Duels will be transformed! A new fashion!"



Leon grinned. "I was thinking of, perhaps, something a little more in keeping with the spirit of the slander. Jules, Gaston has taken to playing primero rather a lot."



"Really? I had thought him a basset man, and baccarat when he feels like an intellectual challenge." Mazarin had been at Monsieur Gaston's table a couple of times, but had never found the company truly congenial. The man was perennially unhappy at not being his elder brother, and tended to attract the like-minded to his circle. They were not marked so much by a lack of talent as an inability to use it because they flatly refused to believe the world was as it was, insisting that it was as they would like it to be.



"Until recently, yes," Leon said, "but the new fashion for poker affronts him, and thus his entire circle. Apparently it is a foreign game that no true Frenchman would be seen playing."



"What patriotism." Richelieu's drawl was dry and deadpan. The regularity with which Gaston took foreign support for his schemes was notorious. Had he not been the king's brother he would have gone to the headsman along with his conspirators. "Perhaps you can show him how a foreigner plays the game, Jules? If that is what Leon is driving at?"



"How could a naturalized Frenchman teach so senior a Frenchman as Monsieur Gaston how to play a game that was invented in Italy?" It was too good to resist, Mazarin thought. Gaston, a serial traitor who frequently colluded with foreign powers was flouting his Frenchness by playing an Italian game? If that was the defining standard, Jules could prove himself easily. He'd been beating his relatives at it when he was twelve.



"The idea has merit," Richelieu said. "He will think himself presented with an opportunity to ruin you financially—what little I know tells me that over time the player with deepest pockets can win. And—forgive me Jules, but it was necessary to know—I understand that you rarely lose over the long term. The worst that will happen is that you will rise from the table with some trifling loss, and we might well see Monsieur Gaston subsidizing your new estate."



"I cannot simply walk in to his circle," Mazarin observed, "unless you want the gesture to be theatrical in the extreme."



"No, no," Richelieu said, "an outright challenge would be counterproductive for the moment. If Leon would procure you an entree, you should work your way toward playing cards with the fellow for high stakes, somewhere very public. And then, Jules, forget the rules of protocol. You rank before him as a prince of the church. You are entirely permitted, encouraged even, to take him for everything you can."





The opportunity came shortly after Christmas, at the kind of levee that Mazarin had come to look forward to immensely. Her Majesty, whatever the king thought of her, was a thoroughly charming lady and one whose company he could not get enough of. She, too, liked him. He could see Richelieu's purpose in bringing them together as much as was possible—Anne of Austria, despite the name, was quite thoroughly Spanish, despite the best efforts of her court ladies. She also corresponded frequently with her brother, Philip of Spain, and while the correspondence could not be practically intercepted, Richelieu had deep suspicions that it went beyond simple matters of family gossip. Although, for the Habsburgs, politics, statecraft and warfare were simple matters of family gossip. And Philip of Spain, faced with separations between his own throne and those of Austria and the Netherlands—the United States of Europe had not just messed things up in the Germanies—would be scrabbling for any connection he could get his hands on. And it was only a matter of time before she got drawn into the machinations of another de Chalais—Richelieu had had that one executed but there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of traitors.