Chimène Alais de la Courcel was born two years after her fortunate brother and four years before her next sister, during which span of time House Courcel’s eagerness to improve its arrangements for importing and exporting goods in the capacious holds of Rousse ships, to prevent its rivals from availing themselves of the Rousse fleet at all, and to balance the burgeoning power of House Mereliot by forging a modest royal link with the other Eisandine duchy, saw her pledged in eventual matrimony to the next heir of that famously seafaring line.
The royal house in both its branches has long looked upon Mont Nuit as a nursery and finishing school for its most beautiful and most favoured children. Thus this reserved and dignified little girl, mature beyond her years, seemingly conscious already (hadn't she heard it said often enough over her head?) that despite her simple title of ‘Lady’ she was the next best thing to a princess, was promised also to House Dahlia until she was of an age to be married.
These two decisions, taken by her parents when she was still wearing her hair in pigtails tied up with big blue satin bows, combined to mould her life almost entirely.
Her only deviation was unintentional, born of a childish grace beyond the norm and a delight in movement that saw her master with unerring speed the steps of the court dances in which all Dahlia children are drilled from the morning after they enter that house. The Dahlia Dowayne, disinclined to squander so becoming a talent, arranged for Chimène and another fosterling of her house with a similar bent to take dancing lessons with the Eglantines, providing in return tuition in court etiquette for certain young Eglantines much in need of it. Chimène’s physical gifts, the lines of her body and its natural agility, and the dedication with which she shaped and polished herself into an instrument for embodying beautiful music, so endeared her to her tutors that when she was thirteen the Eglantine Dowayne bought her marque and she dedicated herself to Naamah as a novice of that house. The next three years consisted of brutal preparation for a remarkable debut, at which this Courcel daughter danced in a gown of soft white swan’s-down and white silk and a head-dress of white feathers, with her sculpted midriff and her preposterously long arms bare to the gaze of her would-be patrons.
She had no difficulty in earning her marque. Meanwhile she danced: for colleagues; for patrons; in court masques; twice at the fête of the Longest Night at Cereus House, as an Eglantine star just coming out in the night sky; once only in public, at a festival at the Temple of Naamah, without prior announcement and suitably masked with feathers so that few could have known her. She was happy in the collegial atmosphere of Eglantine House, where one inhales with every perfumed breath of air the unspoken assumption that art is life, as life must in turn be made into art. But she was dancing on borrowed time. In the spring of the year 1300, shortly after she completed her marque and shortly before her eighteenth natality, she was summoned home to Namarre to prepare for her summertime wedding to Athanasius Rousse.
Chimène was an indifferent bride. She put on the dress, walked to the altar, said the words without needing to be prompted, and lay that night with her new husband: every other task, every other detail, she left to her mother the duchesse de la Courcel, who was overjoyed to be at last marrying a daughter (and so creditably too). It was the social event of the season. The KIng and Queen were there, and all the princes and princesses; the wedding tourney lasted a full fortnight and brought praise and glory to the Courcels of Namarre.
Then the journey south to Nice, capital of the duchy of Roussillion, shut up in a carriage with the man to whom she was now legally at least shackled for life. The young couple had met a handful of times over the years, occasions awkward on his side and determinedly cool on hers. They weren’t by any means strangers. They were however incompatible in almost every respect, Athanasius being a naval man possessed of many practical skills but few words, and Chimène being a confirmed landlubber who delighted in social pleasures, idle chatter, and artistic pursuits in which her husband simply couldn’t meet her. He had two left feet, too.
The sex was all right at first. One advantage of being a courtesan: one learns how to get what one wants or, failing that, how to make do. Their first child, a daughter, was born on schedule eleven months after the wedding, in the early summer of 1301. Two sons followed, in 1303 and 1306, Chimène’s own timetable of every second year having been thwarted by Athanasius’s lack of shore leave during the appropriate months: only one of the many domestic inconveniences to which she was subjected as the wife of a sailor before she gave up trying to factor him into her life at all. They live separately and have done for some years. They meet to conceive children or to plan their futures, or to discuss the business of House Rousse and how best to advance its interests in Marsilikos and at the court of Chimène’s Courcel cousins. For, despite the idle and dissipated life she generally leads between two great cities, and to the astonishment of most of her friends did they but realise it, Chimène is a capable future duchesse. She could do the job… if only she had the job to do.
The Rousses knew what they were getting when they bought a Courcel bride: impeccable d’Angeline bloodlines, royal connections, stringent Night Court training, social and political sense, beauty, grace, and a fertile womb. Of course, they didn’t know they were also getting a frustrated artiste; a compulsive gambler; a mother who considers that her immediate involvement in her children’s lives ends at the nine-month mark and who was known, when the boys were small, to pick up her nephew by mistake for her son; a sharp-tongued, expensive, indolent woman who only grows even more imperious when she’s drinking. C’est la guerre.