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The doors swung open. “Uncle Philippe?”
Lorraine looked up from his book gratefully—it really was very dull; he was getting down to the dregs of his collection—and grinned. In the entryway stood little Philippe, with his hands behind his back. He tossed his head like a colt to get one of his curls out of his face, but it fell back a moment later, unbothered.
“My dear boy! Do come in.”
With a grunt, Lorraine pushed himself up against the headboard, and hated that he had to close his eyes for a moment to give his head time to stop spinning.
When he opened them, Philippe was peering at him nervously, chewing his bottom lip, like he was worried that if he looked away Lorraine might turn to ash. It was bright in the room, with afternoon sunlight spilling across the floor, but Philippe stood shifting like someone had laid a pall over Lorraine. He stared at his jaundiced hand, and wondered if someone hadn’t.
Lorraine was rarely given to melancholia, but recently it had been dogging him. It was an excellent day for hunting—the sun was warm, and he could imagine the bite of the autumn wind through the golden trees—but here he was, stuck indoors, with the mild, constant sort of fever that was just bad enough that it made his head swim and his joints ache. Antoine would be out right now, he considered, as he watched the swaying of the forest beyond the gardens; his chest constricted with a crushing sort of loneliness, pressing in on either side of his lungs, and he blinked against the chagrin of having been bedridden for so long. In spite of the autumn sun pouring through the windows, Lorraine’s bedchamber had come to feel positively sepulchral.
Philippe still watched him, gravely. He had lost more than enough governors and preceptors in his short life; Lorraine wondered if he expected him to retreat to his chambers and simply expire some day soon, as poor Monsieur Saint-Laurent had. Lorraine shuddered. He was not so very old, yet—.
Desperate to dispel the solemnity that had settled across them, he said, as cheerfully as he could muster, “What’s that behind your back?”
“Oh,” said Philippe, revealing a box which he studied before presenting. “They’re sweets. Monsieur Dubois allowed me to finish my lessons early if I spoke to you about the Laws.”
“How thoughtful,” Lorraine smiled, opening the lid to find glistening bonbons and biscuits and preserved fruits. He really shouldn’t be eating them, but he’d been on a diet of pottage for so long that he yearned to eat anything else. “Come; we’ll share them.” He patted the space beside him on the bed and reached for a biscuit.
Obediently, Philippe climbed up. He was getting into those gangly, awkward years of youth, when one forgets where one’s feet are; as if self-conscious of his own lack of grace, he had tucked his legs beneath him. Lorraine sympathetically offered him a sweetmeat.
Philippe hesitated. “Papa does not like me to eat on the bed.”
Lorraine threw his head back and burst out laughing. “He’s a damned hypocrite! You should have seen him when we were young; we’d take every meal in bed for days!”
For a moment, Philippe looked stunned, and then he began to chuckle.
“You should have seen him: crumbs in his—!” guffawed Lorraine. “Well, I suppose that isn’t for you to know. Suffice it to say they were everywhere.”
“So, you don’t mind?”
“My dear, I have to take my meals in bed anyway; why should I mind?”
Philippe, upon hearing this, took an eager bite of his sweetmeat.
“You are so alike your father,” said Lorraine, wistfully. “Now, what was it that you wanted to talk about?”
“Plato,” Philippe replied, whilst still chewing.
This had become something of a routine a few months ago—Lorraine would accompany Philippe semi-regularly on his daily promenades through the grounds and they would discuss his lessons—but when Lorraine fell ill, this came to a halt. The physicians had only just allowed the young prince to see him again. Perhaps they had attempted to bar anyone at all from seeing him, but Monsieur had clearly overruled them, and he came to visit most evenings; if Lorraine attempted to protest, having his love touch his skin, and pull that fever-ache from his spine, quickly melted his resolve.
He was exceedingly glad that Philippe had been permitted to see him once more. Lorraine had a son, who lived with his brother and his sister-in-law; but he and Alexandre had only met a few times, and his son felt very remote from him. He existed, for the most part, as a name on a list of yearly expenses that Lorraine was required to pay.
Philippe was an entirely different matter. Lorraine had watched Monsieur pace backwards and forwards across the rug, ranting incessantly about Henriette’s inability to bear a healthy boy, and how much of a chore it was to go to her; he had seen the boy, finally born, wither away and die, and he had seen, years later, Monsieur’s first child with Elizabeth Charlotte follow him. A little coffin, and Monsieur weeping into Lorraine’s shirt night after night.
Lorraine was certain, somewhere deep inside of himself, that he would give up his life for little Philippe in an instant. He could not imagine Philippe doing anything that could change that. And he was certain that that was the sort of love that one has for one’s own child.
They had passed some time together when Monsieur peered around the edge of the door. Cast in the glow of the afternoon, with dust floating in sunbeams, was his son sitting cross-legged atop his lover’s coverlet, playing chess. In Philippe’s hand, pinched like a teacup, was a bonbon, which had dyed his fingertips cochineal red; he licked it intermittently. Philippe was telling a story, and Lorraine laughed so hard that he jerked and toppled half the pieces on the board, and then laughed some more.
Monsieur smiled. Lorraine had been awfully gloomy these past months; it was a singularly wonderful thing to see him enjoying himself.
“I think this game is a lost cause,” Lorraine sighed, out of breath. “You’ve won the biscuit.”
This Philippe removed from the box, and promptly devoured.
Monsieur’s heart was queasy, swollen. There was a part of him that had worried that he would always have to keep Lorraine separate from his children, for Henriette had hated them to be together; Marie-Louise once screeched at Lorraine that he’d murdered her mother, and Anne-Marie was indifferent towards him at best.
Monsieur liked his current wife better than his first one, and there were others with whom he shared his bed, but if he had been able to choose his life for himself, and there had been a priest willing to overlook their disqualifications, he would have wedded Lorraine. He had given Lorraine what he could—appointments, control of his household—and demanded that visitors treat him as a spouse; but he could not give him the title, and he could not give him the family. Monsieur wanted nothing more than to raise his children with the man whom he considered a husband in all but name; it sometimes brought him nearly to tears to see Lorraine acting as a father would with Monsieur’s children, the intense gratitude that the man he loved had been accepted into his family. This scene before him, of Lorraine and Philippe, was of the sort that Monsieur had rarely dared to hope for. It warmed him.
A touch misty-eyed, Monsieur pushed into the room; Lorraine looked no better than he had yesterday, or the day before—he was sallow, and his hair hung flat against his skull—but his eyes twinkled. Beside him, Philippe was glancing this way and that, before he decided to try to sneak his bonbon into his mouth and pretend that he had not been eating.
“My love! I didn’t expect you to visit; I was just instructing dear Philippe on how to play chess—or rather,” he grimaced, “how not to play it.”
Monsieur approached, his heels clacking against the floor, and Lorraine’s valet detached from the wall to bring a chair to the bedside, which Monsieur ignored.
“Philippe, what have I said about eating in bed?” he admonished, and his son flushed.
Crumbs littered his breeches, and there was a great bulge in his cheek from stuffing the bonbon away to say, “I—”
But Lorraine waved a hand. “I told him to, darling. Boys must enjoy themselves. Won’t you join us?”
He flashed his handsome smile; it still retained that crooked, puckish quality that Monsieur had fallen in love with two decades ago, and unheeding of his wig, or the silk ribbons in it that would wrinkle against the pillow, he laid his body along the length of Lorraine’s, with his head resting on his shoulder and his palm over Lorraine’s heart. There was fondness in the way Lorraine looked at him from under his lashes, in the way he reached up and brushed the spray of curls from his neck and arranged them back into the wig.
“As I was saying, Philippe,” Lorraine continued loftily to Monsieur’s son, as he draped his arm around Monsieur’s shoulders and began massaging the muscles of his neck, “one must never gamble what one cannot afford to lose.”
Monsieur hit Lorraine amiably in the centre of his chest. “You constantly gamble what you cannot afford to lose.”
Lorraine shrugged. “And you eat in bed.”
“I dislike gambling,” put in Philippe, who had not yet removed the bonbon from his cheek, so his words emerged garbled. He was gathering up the chess pieces that had gotten lost in the folds of the coverlet. “I hate to lose money.”
His hair shone like the shell of a chestnut in the sun; his stockinged feet he crossed before him; and having the plumpness of a babe still in his arms and his round, rosy cheeks, Monsieur thought that he had caught his son on this day in the very twilight of his childhood.
“Good,” said Lorraine, seriously. He had taken to stroking Monsieur’s fingertips with his thumb. “One of the few things that the Church was correct to do was condemn excessive gambling.”
Monsieur rolled his eyes.
Philippe sat back on his knees, glancing between them. “Why were they only correct to do a few things?” He was at an age where he’d discovered the joys of provocation, and he knew that this would provoke his father; there was a smirk twitching at the corner of his mouth that he was trying unsuccessfully to contain.
He had been spending too much time around some of those at court who considered piety to be an inconvenient suggestion at best, and now Philippe would grouse each day before Mass, and ask not-quite-heretical questions that Monsieur found himself unequipped to answer, even after all this time with Lorraine. Monsieur had brought up Philippe’s lack of devotion to Monsieur Dubois, but he had the suspicion that Dubois was himself the sort of priest who did not wear his robe out of any particular religious devotion. If he was not encouraging Philippe, he certainly was not dissuading him; it did not help that Philippe had begun preferring Lorraine’s company over that of more respectable persons. Not that anyone in Monsieur’s circle of intimates was particularly respectable, but at least there were those who did not care to debate religious doctrine over the card-table. Probably.
Monsieur could not be angry, either, for it was one of the things that still most titillated him about Lorraine; there was nothing exactly like committing sins with a blasphemer.
“Don’t get him started, or else we’ll be here until the Grand Couvert,” he sighed, and stuck out his palm. “Pass me a tart.”
“I thought we weren’t allowed to eat in bed, Papa,” goaded Philippe.
“Are you teaching him how to be obstinate?” Monsieur asked Lorraine, both of whose hands went up in surrender. “If His Highness Philippe, Chevalier de Lorraine said it was all right, then who am I to question him?”
Lorraine snorted.
“Now, a tart.” Monsieur wiggled his fingers.
“We don’t have tarts,” said Philippe, peering into the box. “There are bonbons or sweetmeats. Uncle Philippe ate all the biscuits.”
“And you saved none for me?”
Lorraine caught the eye of one of the servants standing rigid against the wall, and shooed him pointedly away; but Monsieur just shook his head.
“Oh, never mind. Do you have any orange peels?”
Philippe placed a few in Monsieur’s outstretched hand, and said, “Uncle Philippe, why is the Church only correct about a few things?”
“Because the Church is an institution built by men, my dear, and men are not infallible.”
“Peter was a saint.”
“Saints are only men. Are you yet to read Saint Augustine’s Confessions?”
“Yes. Monsieur Dubois wants me to improve my German.”
“Well, you can borrow my copies—but what Augustine teaches us is that saints face the same temptations as you and I, and they succumb to them just the same; so, what makes them superior to us? Men make them so.”
Monsieur made a loud snoring noise.
Philippe looked at him, biting the inside of his cheek to force down a smile; it was, Monsieur recalled, a great social faux pas amongst youths of Philippe’s age to find their decrepit parent amusing.
“Don’t tell His Majesty I said that,” added Lorraine.
Cheekily, Philippe said, “I shan’t, or else you shall be banished for a third time!”
The laughter that rose from the bed seemed to cast out waiting Death from the corners, and Lorraine found when he glanced about that his chamber no longer had the quality of a tomb. He ordered the servants to open a window, and finally allow in the tender sunlight.