Emile came up while I was mounting. ‘We have to get him to a fire,’ she said with her devastating practicality.
Perhaps I made some feeble protest. I felt terrible; terrible as a man who led men, and terrible in that the cold was like a vice on my feet, my head, my hands. Only the warmth of the horse between my legs steadied me, and when the wind blew I groaned.
‘Thanks,’ I managed to Jean-François.
He smiled, the first time I’d seen him smile. ‘Bah! ce n’est pas rien, monsieur,’ he said. ‘If you are not from these valleys, it is a simple mistake to make.’
An hour later I was all but inside the fireplace in a wealthy farmer’s house at the top of the valley, and warmth began to make it into my hands and feet, but the cold had settled deeply and I was sick.
I do not remember much of that illness, except that I woke to find my head in Emile’s lap. She looked into my eyes.
‘You are a fool,’ she said.
It was the nicest thing she’d said to me in two years.
Or perhaps I dreamed that.
When I returned to consciousness, it was to find that we were snowbound. The snow lasted two more days, and we played cards and sang and I became friends with Jean-François and his men, close enough to exchange a few blows with them in the stable yard. They were very good for country trained men, and Jean-François had a cut to the hands with a feint that caught me again and again.
Thanks to Fiore, though, I had things to show them, as well.
And Marc-Antonio got better every day. He was still fleshy, but no longer plump by any means, and his angelic face now had a harder line to it. He’d been in the saddle for three months.
Where the Alps were in winter, Lombardy might almost have been in late summer. There was plague around Padua, or so we were told by frightened refugees, and I avoided Verona as if it had the plague. We had heard south of Turin that there were avalanches due to the sudden thaw, and I had a notion that if we were pursued, we had a respite. But I was cautious.
Despite my tomfoolery with the stream, by the time we left our snug farmhouse south of Turin, Jean-François and his silent companion Bernard were no longer sullen companions, and when I suggested a plan of march, they were perfectly willing to accede to my wishes, with due courtesy to their mistress. We made our way south of Verona, and it was almost painful to watch Emile bloom: sun, good food and wine and freedom conspired to make her almost luminous.
By Saint George, gentlemen. I loved her full well. And every moment brought me more to love. She was a mature woman now, grown strong, I think, in motherhood and ruling good estate. And yet sometimes she was still the young woman I had known in France – playful, determined, audacious.
And there was the matter of her children. She had three: a boy, Edouard, and two girls, one just a babe in arms, Isabelle, and one a little older, named Magdalene. At first, she was scrupulous about keeping them clear of me. Or rather, the nun seemed to have them whenever I approached the countess, and when she had care of her children, I was clearly not welcome. But then, one afternoon in the countryside south of Verona, I came upon her on the lawn behind an inn, sitting on the sheep-cropped grass in a kirtle like the embodiment of beauty. She had the older girl in her arms and the boy sat watching Bernard on the close-cropped turf and Bernard was whittling – he was a preux cavalier, but he was always making something – toys, dolls, wooden knights for the boy. I could already see the shape of the cavalier’s great helm coming out of the billet of wood.
I could hear Sister Catherine calling her in her Savoyard French from a window of the inn. She shouted something about the child she had – Isabelle, as I remember – and something about blood. Emile leaped to her feet. Her eyes met mine – it’s difficult to describe her look. Questioning? And yet – they held some promise …