Four Children

"You favor him," Perrette said once, carefully, watching Catherine de' Medici's attention settle on young Henry yet again while Charles stood a few feet away, plainly noticing the same thing.

"He's an easier child to be pleased with."

"He's not the one who'll be king."

Catherine's look told Perrette exactly how far that particular observation was welcome to travel, which was not very far at all. Perrette had nursed all four Valois children through three decades of close daily service, and she understood, better than almost anyone else in that court, exactly how visible a mother's preference became to the children living inside it, however carefully that preference was dressed up in more diplomatic language for outside observers.

"Why doesn't she like me as much as Henry?" young Marguerite asked once, with the plain, devastating directness only children manage.

Perrette had no honest answer that wouldn't wound the child further, so she gave the only true thing she could offer instead. "She likes you a great deal. Mothers don't always show it the same way to every child, and that's not a fair arrangement, but it isn't the same thing as not caring."

"Henry gets shown it more."

"He does." Perrette pulled the girl close. "I can't fix that for you. What I can do is make sure you're never short of someone showing you plainly, every single day, exactly how much you're worth."

She watched the same pattern work its way through Charles, more dangerously: a boy destined for the throne, visibly outshone in his own mother's evident affection by a younger brother with none of Charles's future responsibility and all of his mother's easier warmth. Perrette recognized the danger in that arrangement long before anyone with actual power over it seemed inclined to address it. "Madame," she ventured once, in the most careful language three decades of court service had taught her, "the way things stand between the boys now — it may matter more, later, than it seems to matter today."

"I'm sure you mean well, Perrette. Leave the political calculations to those better positioned to make them."

She received exactly the polite, unproductive dismissal she'd half expected, and she returned to her nursery duties with no further illusions about her own actual influence over the larger currents shaping four children who would, one day, bear direct responsibility for an entire kingdom's stability. What she could not change, she resolved to at least soften: remaining, for as long as her diminishing formal role still allowed it, the one steady presence in that nursery whose warmth never depended on which child happened to be easier to love that particular week.