combination which she had perfected through long practice over the years. Dressed for riding, her rapier thumping against her thigh, Agnès was covered in dust from her riding boots to the top of her breeches, and she was still wearing that infernal red leather corset which, rough and waxed and buckled on tight like armour, was as much a warrior’s talisman to her as an item of clothing. Her face glistened with sweat. As for the heavy braid which fell from the nape of her neck, it only managed to confine half of her hair, allowing the rest to hang free.
“I have left Courage tethered outside,” the young woman said breathlessly.
Marion nodded to show that she was listening.
“I pushed him a little in the lower valley and I really believe he is perfectly recovered from his injury.”
The maidservant had no reply to that either.
“Damnation! I’m dying of thirst.”
Agnès went over to the brass water tank which, set up at an angle, released water through a small tap. She leaned over it, cupping the palms of her hands, and splashing water over the stone floor slabs as she drank. Then she grabbed a crusty heel of bread lying on the sideboard and, ripping it open with her fingers, proceeded to nibble at its soft interior.
“Have you eaten anything today?” asked Marion.
“No.”
“I’ll make you something. What would you like?”
She was about to rise, but the young woman halted her with a gesture.
“Don’t trouble yourself. I’m fine.”
“But—”
“I said I’m fine.”
The servant shrugged and returned to her work.
Standing up, leaning against the door to the salting room, and putting a foot up on a bench, Agnès looked at Marion. She was still attractive, with an ample bosom and small greying locks of hair twisting themselves free between the nape of her neck and her linen bonnet. At one time she had been much courted by men, and she continued to be on occasion. But she had never married, a fact that intrigued other local inhabitants of this area of the Oise valley.
A silence settled over the room, and lingered.
Finally, when she could restrain herself no longer, Marion said: “I heard a coach leave early this morning.”
“Good. Then you’re not deaf.”
“Who was it?”
Agnès threw the piece of bread, reduced to no more than an empty crust, onto the table.
“What does it matter? I remember only that he was well built and knew what he was doing between the sheets.”
“Agnès!” Marion exclaimed.
But there was more sadness than reproach in her voice. With an air of resignation, she gently shook her head and started to say: “If your mother—”
“None of that!” interrupted Agnès de Vaudreuil.
Suddenly frosty, she became absolutely rigid. Her emerald green eyes gleamed with contained anger.
“My mother died giving birth to me and it’s futile for you to tell me that she might say this or that. As for my father, he was a pig who shoved himself between every pair of thighs he could snuffle out. Including your own, as I well know. So do not preach to me about the way in which I occasionally fill my bed. It’s only in such moments that I feel even remotely alive, ever since …”
Trembling, with tears in her eyes, she couldn’t finish the sentence.
Marion was visibly shaken by this outburst, and returned ashen-faced to her scrubbing with more energy than was strictly necessary
Now in her forties, Marion had witnessed Agnès’s birth and the accompanying agony of her mother, who had lain in labour for five days. After fighting at the side of the future King Henri IV during the Wars of Religion in France, the baron de Vaudreuil was always too busy serenading the beautiful ladies at the royal court or stag hunting with the French monarch to interest himself in the fate of his spouse. And upon learning that the child was female, he had not even bothered to attend his wife’s funeral. Entrusted—or rather abandoned—to the care of Marion and a rough soldier by the