Gertrude's Warning

"He looks at you the way a man looks at something he's already decided is his," Gertrude said, watching Monsoreau's carriage disappear down the drive after another visit.

"He's courting me properly, Gertrude. That's what courtship looks like."

"Is it? I've watched a fair number of suitors call on this household over the years. None of them looked at you quite the way that one does."

Diane waved the observation off, the way a young woman does when a friend's concern collides with a father's evident enthusiasm for the match. "You're imagining things."

Gertrude didn't press it further that day. She'd weighed the matter carefully enough to know that a companion's warnings carried little practical weight against a father already delighted by a suitor's standing and connections, and that pushing too hard, too early, might simply cost her whatever credibility she'd need later, once the warning became harder to dismiss.

She was right to wait, though the waiting gave her no satisfaction once its reason finally arrived. The marriage concluded, and within its first months Gertrude watched exactly the possessive intensity she'd once tried gently to name reveal itself as something considerably worse: a controlling jealousy that narrowed Diane's movements, her friendships, her whole visible life, in ways Gertrude found increasingly difficult to simply witness from the sidelines.

"You were right," Diane admitted, months into the marriage, in a voice considerably smaller than the one that had waved Gertrude's concern away that first afternoon.

"I wish I hadn't been."

"So do I." Diane looked at her properly for the first time in weeks. "I don't know what to do about any of it."

"Neither do I, yet. But we'll work it out together, rather than you carrying it alone the way you've been trying to."

It was, from that conversation forward, a real partnership rather than the more formal mistress-and-companion arrangement their earlier years together had settled into: two women navigating a difficult marriage's actual daily texture together, since neither of them, Gertrude had come to understand with real bitterness, possessed any actual authority to have prevented the marriage in the first place.

"I saw it coming," Gertrude told her, once, in a rare unguarded moment years later. "I saw it and I said what I could, and it still wasn't enough to stop any of it."

"You couldn't have stopped it. My father had already decided."

"I know that. It doesn't make the seeing feel like it counted for much, watching it happen anyway." Gertrude said this without bitterness toward Diane herself, only toward the plain, structural fact of it: that a companion could see a danger with total clarity and still possess no actual power to keep it from arriving, however loudly or however early she chose to name it.