Chapter 5: The King's Comfort
The frost on the unadorned window in the corner had thickened into a crystalline forest, each morning revealing new, fragile landscapes. Sabine, propped against a mountain of linen pillows in the royal bed, felt a kinship with that glass: under immense pressure, holding a separate, intricate world within.
Eight months.
The child was no longer a secret, a subtle curve, or even a mere presence. It was an occupation. Her body had been requisitioned, her bones leveraged apart, her organs rearranged by a tiny, imperious landlord who kicked the walls at all hours. The sheer physicality of it was a force that flattened every other concern. Queenly duties—the petitions, the interminable standing at ceremonies, the judging of silks for the spring wardrobe—had been gently but firmly taken from her by Louis’s decree. “Your only duty,” he had said, his hand resting on the monumental swell of her, “is to be the fortress. Let me handle the sieges.”
Now, in the deep silence of a pre-dawn chamber, the fortress was under assault from within. A dull, grinding ache had taken residence in the small of her back, a constant companion for three days. She shifted, trying to find a configuration of limbs and pillows that didn’t send a bolt of fire through her hip. The baby, awake and apparently practicing somersaults, rolled vigorously. Sabine let out a sharp, defeated gasp.
Instantly, the sleeping form beside her stirred. Louis was a light sleeper, a habit of kingship. “Again?” His voice was gravelly with sleep, but his movement was alert. He didn’t ask for permission. He turned onto his side, his warm hands already seeking the aching arch of her spine through her thin shift.
His thumbs found the knotted muscles along her lumbar, pressing in with a firm, knowing pressure. He had learned this. He, the Sun King, had quietly asked the royal physician for instruction on relieving the pains of pregnancy. The memory of him practicing on a bolster, his brow furrowed in concentration, could still make her eyes sting.
“It’s like carrying a sack of millstones,” she muttered, her face pressed into the pillow. “A sack of millstones that elbows.”
He chuckled, the sound vibrating through his hands into her back. “My son has his father’s assertiveness.”
“Or your daughter has your impeccable timing, insisting on gymnastics at four in the morning.” She groaned as his thumb hit a particularly stubborn knot. “There. For the love of God, don’t stop.”
He worked in silence for a long while, his touch both clinical and reverent. The only sounds were the pop of the dying fire, their breathing, and the occasional rustle of bedding. He pushed the shift up to her shoulders, his palms smoothing over the stretched, tight skin of her lower back. He poured a little lavender oil into his hands, warming it before applying it. The scent bloomed in the dark room, a note of calm.
“Turn onto your back,” he murmured.
“I can’t. If I lie flat, I feel like an overturned turtle.”
“Just for a moment. Trust me.”
With considerable effort and his assistance, she pivoted. The ceiling swam above her, the painted gods and muses blurred in the candlelight. He didn’t try to make her lie flat. Instead, he sat up, crossed his legs, and gently guided her to rest her upper back and head in his lap. Then, his hands moved to her feet, swollen and foreign-looking at the end of her legs.
“Your poor feet,” he said softly, cradling one in his lap. He began at the arch, his fingers strong and meticulous.
“They’re monstrous,” she said, closing her eyes. “Like loaves of undercooked bread.”
“They are the foundation of my kingdom,” he countered, his thumb pressing into her instep in a way that made her whimper with relief. “And they are magnificent.” He worked each toe, each metatarsal, his touch erasing the throbbing, heavy feeling. “Do you remember the picnic?”
“The frozen, public spectacle? Vaguely.”
“When he kicked. And I laughed.” Louis’s voice was soft, remembering. “I have not laughed like that in a council chamber, or at a ballet, or during a state dinner. Not ever, I think. It was a laugh that came from here.” He took her hand and placed it low on his own abdomen. “A place I did not know could make such a sound.”
Sabine opened her eyes, looking up at the inverted view of him—his strong jaw, the shadow of stubble, the tender focus in his down-turned eyes. He was looking at her foot as if it were the most fascinating piece of statecraft.
“I am proud of you,” he said, the words simple and direct, not like a king to a subject, but like a man to a woman performing a miracle. “Every day. The way you carry this. The way you carry yourself. You are…” He searched, rejecting the florid phrases of court. “You are the strongest person I know.”
Tears, hot and sudden, welled in her eyes. They were not tears of pain, but of a vulnerability so complete it was terrifying. “I’m scared, Louie,” she whispered, the admission fleeing in the dark intimacy of the room. “What if I’m no good at it? What if I forget what to do? I had a child before, and I remember nothing useful. I only remember the silence that came after.”
His hands stilled on her foot. He looked down at her, his face solemn. He leaned over, his frame blocking out the painted ceiling, and kissed her forehead. “You will remember. Your body will remember. And I will be here. Not as a king. As a… a porter. A footman. A fetcher of things. You will tell me what to do, and I will do it.”
The image was so absurd—Louis XIV, fetching cloths and boiling water on his own command—that a wet laugh escaped her. “You’ll be terrible at it. You’ll try to delegate the actual birth to a committee.”
“I will not,” he said, offended, but a smile tugged at his mouth. “I have commanded armies. I can command a midwife. Or,” he added, seeing her expression, “I can heed her commands. Whichever you prefer.”
He helped her shift again, this time onto her side facing him. He moved close, his chest to her back, and slid one arm beneath her neck. The other he slipped underneath the colossal curve of her belly, his hand splaying wide to take the weight. He lifted, gently, taking the crushing pressure off her hips and spine.
A sigh of profound, almost ecstatic relief shuddered through her. “Oh. Oh, that’s…”
“I know,” he said, his lips against her hair. “The physician said it helps. Why did you not tell me it was this bad?”
“You have a country to run.”
“I have a queen to hold up,” he corrected. “The country can wait an hour.” He held her like that, a human cradle, his strength supporting the weight of their future. The baby, perhaps soothed by the new position, settled into a gentle, rocking motion.
“What shall we call this cavalry officer?” he asked, his voice a low rumble in her ear.
“If it’s a boy, not Louis,” she mumbled, already feeling sleep pull at her as the pain receded. “One of you is quite enough.”
He snorted. “Philippe, then. After my brother. He will hate it, which is half the appeal.”
“And if it’s a girl?”
He was silent for a long moment. “Marie,” he said finally. The name hung in the air. It was a name borne by queens and regents. It was also the name of his mother. “But she will have your eyes. The color of wet earth after a storm.”
Sabine smiled in the dark. “And your stubbornness.”
“Naturally.”
They lay there, fused together in the quiet bedchamber. The candle in the sconce nearest the frost-etched window guttered and went out, plunging the corner into deeper shadow. But where they lay, the embers from the fire cast a warm, pulsing glow over the bed, over his arm locked around her, over the immense, living curve he upheld.
“I love you,” he said into the nape of her neck, the words not a grand declaration, but a statement of fact, as solid as the floor beneath them.
Her hand found the one he had splayed over her belly. She laced her fingers with his, the emerald ring cool against his skin. She didn’t say it back. She didn’t need to. Instead, she pressed his palm more firmly against the place where a tiny heel was sliding, a final, gentle goodnight.
Outside, Versailles began to stir. Scullery maids whispered in the corridors. Guards changed posts with a click of heels. The first grey light of dawn began to bleed into the sky, threatening the frost on the window.
But inside, for now, there was only this: the weight held, the pain shared, the fortress bolstered, and the quiet, terrifying, glorious certainty that the siege would soon begin in earnest.
But inside, for now, there was only this: the weight held, the pain shared, the fortress bolstered, and the quiet, terrifying, glorious certainty that the siege would soon begin in earnest. The siege, however, proved to be a creeping, mundane attrition. Days bled together in a haze of physical discomfort. Louis was relentlessly attentive, a fixed point in her shifting universe. He continued to lift the weight of her belly with his own hands each night, memorized the map of her backaches, and brought her sketches of the Bosquet’s progress to her bedside. “Le Nôtre is installing the piping for your laughing fountain,” he said one afternoon, waving a plan. “He’s drawn six different water trajectories. He wants your opinion on which is the ‘most surprising.’ The man is a fanatic.”
“He’s an artist,” Sabine corrected, shifting painfully on her chaise lounge. “Tell him the fourth one. It’s irregular.”
Yet his very devotion became its own cage. She could not voice the depth of her misery without feeling it was an indictment of his care, of this gift they had made. So she smiled, she nodded, she accepted his foot rubs and his proud, worried glances. The misery banked inside her like cold ashes, waiting for a wind.
The wind came on a brittle morning in March. She had insisted on walking to the Orangery, desperate for the scent of citrus and damp earth. The journey was slow, a humiliating waddle past courtiers who dipped into shallow, perfunctory curtsies. Their eyes skated over her, this vast, biological event, to the more interesting political landscape beyond. In the Orangery, she found the small, concealed corner where she’d persuaded a gardener to let her try propagating some forget-me-nots in a long terra cotta tray. It was her one clandestine act, a tiny scrap of her old self.
The tray was a massacre. A flock of sparrows, trapped inside the glass building, had discovered the soft soil. They had scratched and bathed, uprooting every delicate, grey-green seedling. The tiny plants lay wilted and upturned, roots exposed to the dry air, a total loss.
It was so stupid. Such a small thing.
She stood there, her back screaming, her feet throbbing, looking at the ruined tray. A great, suffocating wave of frustration rose in her throat. It was about the seeds, yes, but it was also about her body, this unwieldy vessel. It was about the court’s whispers, the terrifying approach of labor, the ghost of her first child that seemed to hover in the shredded leaves. A raw, wounded sound escaped her. Then another. The tears were hot and sudden, pouring down her face in a silent, relentless stream. She didn’t sob; she just stood there, crumbling inside, watching her little, meaningless garden die.
Across the parterre, the Comtesse de Mailly saw. She saw the Queen, solitary and immense, her shoulders shaking. She turned and walked, not with haste but with purpose, to find the King.
Louis was in a ministerial meeting about tariffs on Flemish lace. The Comtesse did not wait for an usher. She entered, curtseyed low, and said directly to his annoyed face, “Your Majesty, forgive me. The Queen is in the Orangery. She is… she is weeping.”
He was moving before she finished her sentence. He did not run, but his stride was so swift his ministers were left staring at the empty space where he had stood, papers fluttering in his wake. He took the stairs two at a time, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. Visions of blood, of pain, of some hidden crisis cascaded through his mind.
He burst into the humid, green-scented air of the Orangery. He saw her back, the familiar curve of her neck beneath its simple twist of hair. She was just standing there, utterly still except for the slight tremor in her shoulders.
“Sabine.” His voice was a punch of air. He was at her side in three long strides, his hands gripping her arms, turning her to face him. Her face was blotched and wet, her eyes swimming with a despair that knocked the breath from him. “What is it? What’s happened? Is it the child?”
He was scanning her body, looking for a sign, his own fear a metallic taste in his mouth.
She shook her head, more tears spilling. She tried to speak, but it came out a hiccupping gasp. She gestured weakly, helplessly, at the terra cotta tray.
He followed her gesture, his mind not comprehending. He saw dirt. Some scattered, dead-looking sprouts. He looked back at her face, the profound anguish there. “The… the plants?” he asked, his voice low and confused.
“They’re all dead,” she choked out, the words thick and miserable. “The birds got in and they… they scratched them all up. I tried to grow them and they’re all just… dead.” A fresh sob wracked her, her hands coming up to cover her face. “It’s so stupid. I’m so stupid.”
The relief that it was not a physical catastrophe was instantaneous. What followed was a deeper, more complex understanding that settled in his chest like a stone. He looked from the trivial wreckage of the tray to the monumental, weeping woman before him. This was not about the plants.
“Oh, my love,” he whispered, all the king gone from his voice. He pulled her gently into his arms. She came, her body heavy and slack against him, her face buried in his coat. He held her, really held her, as she cried. He didn’t shush her. He didn’t tell her it was alright. He just anchored her, one hand cradling the back of her head, the other splayed wide over their child.
Her tears soaked through the silk of his waistcoat. The frustrated, exhausted, pent-up misery of weeks poured out in great, shaking waves. “I can’t sleep,” she wept into his chest. “I can’t get comfortable for five minutes. Everything hurts all the time. I’m so tired. And I’m terrified. And I just wanted one thing, one little thing, to grow right.”
“I know,” he murmured into her hair. “I know, Sabine. I see it. I’m right here.”
“You have a war to manage and a treasury and I’m crying over dirt.”
“You have a universe to build inside your own ribs,” he said, his voice fierce. “That is the only war that matters today. The treasury can go hang.”
She gave a wet, shuddering laugh that dissolved back into tears. He held her through it, until the storm began to subside into hiccups and exhausted silence. He kissed her temple, her tear-salty cheek.
“We will get more seeds,” he said softly. “We will get a hundred trays. We will build a wire cage so thick not even a moth could get in. I will station a guard of my tallest Swiss mercenaries around them, if you like.”
She pulled back, wiping her face with her hands, looking embarrassed and raw. “I must look a state.”
“You look like a woman carrying my child,” he said, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “You look real. It is the most beautiful thing I have seen in this entire place.” He took her hand, his thumb rubbing over the emerald. “Why did you not tell me it had become this… this weight?”
“You were being so kind,” she whispered. “How could I complain about your gift?”
“It is our gift,” he corrected. “And gifts are allowed to be heavy. They are allowed to ache.” He looked around the Orangery, at the perfect, potted trees in their orderly lines. “Come. Let’s go back. We’ll send for some chocolate. And I will rub your feet until you fall asleep. And tomorrow, we will deal with the birds.”
He kept his arm firmly around her as they walked, taking her weight not just physically but entirely. The ashes of her misery had been scattered, leaving a strange, clean emptiness. The fear was still there, the pain was still there. But it was no longer a silent, solitary country.
As they reached their chambers, a sharp, clamping sensation gripped her lower abdomen, so different from the usual ache that she gasped and stopped, her hand flying to her belly.
Louis froze. “What? What is it?”
The sensation released, a wave receding. It left behind not pain, but a profound, unsettling awareness. She met his eyes, wide with a new kind of knowledge.
“I think,” she said slowly, “the siege just sounded its first trumpet.”
The clamp in her abdomen released, leaving a hollow, tingling alertness in its wake. Louis’s hand tightened on her arm, his face instantly pale beneath its usual authority. “A pain?” he asked, the words clipped.
“A different one,” Sabine breathed, feeling a slow, warm trickle down her inner thigh. “A… definitive one.”
He didn’t hesitate. He swept her into his arms, her immense weight no obstacle to the adrenalized strength flooding his limbs. He carried her from the Orangery, his strides long and swift down the patterned hallway. Courtiers scattered before him like leaves before a gale, their curtsies half-formed, their eyes wide at the sight of the King bearing his weeping, dripping Queen through the palace.
“Fetch the midwives!” he barked at a passing page, not breaking stride. “To our chambers. Now!”
The world narrowed to the rhythm of his footsteps and the low, gathering pressure in her pelvis. Each jostle sent a fresh, bright spark of sensation through her. She buried her face in his neck, breathing in the familiar scent of his skin, orange blossom and crisp linen, an anchor in the sudden, churning sea of her body’s rebellion.
He shouldered open the door to their bedchamber and laid her gently on the coverlet just as the first real contraction seized her. It was not a trumpet this time, but a vice, a band of iron cinching around her spine and pelvis, squeezing the air from her lungs. She cried out, a sharp, guttural sound she didn’t recognize as her own.
The door flew open. Two midwives, Margot and Therese, bustling figures with capable hands and faces like seasoned oak, hurried in, followed by a maid with a steaming basin. They took in the scene: the King on his knees beside the bed, holding Sabine’s hand, her face contorted. Their eyes flicked to the damp stain spreading on her skirt and the coverlet beneath her.
“Your Majesty,” Margot said, her voice low and calm, “the waters have broken. The child comes.” Her tone held a subtle question, an unspoken expectation for him to leave.
Louis heard it. He looked from the midwife’s face to Sabine’s, her fingers crushing his, her eyes wide with a primal fear that mirrored his own. He had commanded armies. He had faced down rebellions and plots. This was a different battlefield, raw and shrieking and intimate. “I am staying,” he said, the words leaving no room for debate.
The midwives exchanged a glance, a silent conversation of raised eyebrows. Tradition dictated a room of women, the blood and mystery hidden from the eyes of men, especially kings. But this was Louis. They bowed their heads and got to work.
The next hours dissolved into a landscape of pain. It was not a linear climb but a series of crashing waves, each one higher, harder, more consuming than the last. There was no reprieve, no clean space between them, only the ebb of agony before the next wall of it slammed into her.
“Breathe, Your Majesty, breathe through it,” Therese coached, wiping Sabine’s brow with a cool cloth.
Sabine tried. She panted, she groaned, she bit down on the leather strap they gave her until her jaw ached. But as the pain mounted, shredding her composure, her civility, her very self, words began to spill from her, raw and sharp as flint.
“Oh, God, it’s splitting me,” she wept during one contraction, her body bowing off the bed.
Louis stayed rooted beside her, his face ashen, his hand a constant in her grip. “You are doing so well, my love. So strong.”
Another wave, bigger, deeper, tore through her. She arched, a soundless scream on her lips, and when she could gasp air, she turned her wild eyes on him. “You,” she snarled, her voice a ragged thing. “You did this. You and your… your fucking…”
He nodded, accepting the accusation, his thumb stroking her knuckles. “I did. I did it. And I am here.”
The pain escalated, mutating into something monstrous. She lost all sense of time, of place, of who she was. She was a vessel for this torment, a bell being struck over and over. She cursed him. She cursed God. She cursed her own body. She called him a selfish bastard, a vain fuck, a man who planted his seed and left her to be ripped apart by the harvest.
“I hate you!” she screamed as a contraction peaked, her nails drawing blood from his palm. “I hate this! Make it stop, you coward, make it stop!”
He took it. Every scream, every curse, every accusation. He murmured nonsense, endearments, apologies. He let her crush his hand. He mopped her brow when the midwives were busy. He was her pincushion, her anchor, her whipping boy. His eyes never left her face, even when hers was twisted into a mask of inhuman suffering.
“The head is crowning, Madame,” Margot announced, her voice cutting through Sabine’s sobs. “The next pain, you must push. You must push with everything you have left.”
Sabine shook her head weakly, drenched in sweat and tears, hollowed out. “I can’t. There’s nothing left.”
Louis leaned close, his lips against her ear. His voice was low, fierce, stripped of all royalty. “Yes, you can. You are Sabine De Barra. You grow gardens from chaos. You terrified Montespan in a gallery. Now push our child into this world. Push.”
The command, the use of her real name, cut through the fog. A new contraction gathered, a force of nature rising from her depths. She bore down, a guttural, animal sound tearing from her throat.
“Good! Again!” Therese urged.
She pushed. And pushed. Time lost meaning. It was a marathon in a single moment, an eternity of straining muscle and burning tissue. Louis counted each effort, his voice steady. “Six. Seven. Breathe. Again. Eight.”
On the twentieth push, with a final, shredded scream that tore the very air, a slithering, sudden release. A gush of warmth. A thin, indignant wail piercing the thick, blood-smelling air.
Silence, for a heartbeat. Then the sound of a newborn’s furious, vibrant cry.
Sabine collapsed back onto the sodden pillows, utterly spent, her body a landscape of wreckage. She was dimly aware of movement, of the midwives speaking in low, urgent tones, of the snip of scissors, the tying of a cord.
Then, a warm, squirming, bloody weight was laid upon her bare chest.
She looked down. A tiny, red-faced being, smeared with vernix and her own life’s blood, its mouth open in a perfect, howling oval. A thatch of dark, wet hair. Tiny fingers splayed like starfish against her skin. A daughter.
All the sound in the room faded. The pain was still there, a distant, throbbing continent, but it meant nothing. She touched a shaking finger to the damp crown of the baby’s head. The infant stopped crying, turning its head blindly toward the touch, nuzzling into her.
Louis’s hand came into view, trembling slightly, to stroke the baby’s back. A tear fell from his cheek onto Sabine’s shoulder. He did not speak.
Sabine looked up at him, his face blurred through her exhaustion. His eyes were red-rimmed, his doublet stained with her sweat and his own blood where her nails had broken his skin. He looked more human, more undone, than she had ever seen him.
Her voice, when it came, was a cracked whisper, scraped raw from screaming. “I called you… a vain fuck.” A weak, wobbly breath. “And a selfish… bastard.”
He let out a sound that was half a sob, half a laugh. He bent, pressing his forehead gently against hers. His tears mixed with the sweat on her skin. “I know, Cricket,” he murmured, his lips against her temple. “I heard you. It’s okay.”