The months passed with terrible monotony for Rénèe le Meung and perhaps for all at the Court of Brussels; the long and bitter struggle between the grandees and the Cardinal filled the air with intrigue and dissension; the Regent began to hesitate in her allegiance to Granvelle, and hung miserably undecided between the two parties; Montigny had been sent to Madrid to remonstrate with Philip, but without avail; a second letter of protest was sent, equally fruitless; the Cardinal, serene as always, triumphed quietly over his enemies and continued to be the predominant influence in the Councils of Margaret; heretics continued to be seized and slaughtered wherever the civil authorities could be induced to support the Inquisitors, and the raging discontent of the people was repressed with a heavy hand.
In the sumptuous household of William of Orange life went with the old magnificence but not with the old joyousness; politically it was the rallying-point of the grandees, who had now refused to sit in the councils with the Cardinal, and met in William's gorgeous saloons to discuss their plans; it was also the headquarters of the Prince's brothers, sisters, and brothers-in-law. During the year after his marriage, too, his German relatives visited him there, causing great offence to the Cardinalists; but all these comings and goings, all these intrigues, meetings, entertainments, were clouded by two things: the growing embarrassment of the Prince's finances, and the element of bitter discord provided by Anne of Saxony.
Whatever the festivities or excitements might be, Rénèe saw none of them; she was for ever closeted with her mistress, who, now the Prince's quarrel with Granvelle made her appearance at Court impossible, sulked week after week in her rooms. She had taken a capricious liking to have Rénèe, and Rénèe only, with her; and the waiting-woman submitted to the slavery of her position with a curious dumb patience.
There was no distraction, no change, no interest in Anne's life. Her first child she had lost at birth, and this had further embittered her; her one time extravagant love for her husband, her pleasure in fine clothes and jewels, were completely dead; she never appeared but she created a disturbance with her temper; she refused to admit any of the court ladies into her intimacy, and so she remained closed within her rooms, a slattern, a shrew, a scold, and daily becoming worse; entirely indifferent to the great events taking place at her very gates, but keenly alive to any detail in which she might find excuse for complaint or fury.
Rénèe wondered why she stayed; the life was almost intolerable, and she had had two chances of escape since she came to Brussels: one of the Regent's secretaries had asked her in marriage, and the Countess of Egmont was willing to take her into her service.
But Rénèe had declined both, and remained in the great Nassau palace, tending her mistress with tireless devotion and eagerly watching what news she could of the movement of the events in which she perceived the Prince of Orange was the leader; she was like one waiting—but for what she did not know. It was in the winter after the grandees had dispatched their second letter to Philip, and when affairs seemed to be reaching a crisis in the Netherlands, that matters in the Nassau household reached a climax of discord.
Anne had taken a whim to have the Prince's children by his first marriage under her care, and had been fiercely angered by William's decision to place his little girl in the household of the Regent, and to keep the boy in Louvain. As a result of this Anne kept her room for nearly a week; but the day came when the Prince, entertaining his friends at one of his lavish dinners, demanded her presence as necessary.
It was, as usual, Rénèe's task, first to persuade her mistress to appear, and secondly to make her fit to take the head of the Prince's table, and, as the short afternoon began to fail, Rénèe went in search of her; she found Anne in her bedchamber hunched up against the white porcelain stove; she was eating sweets.
Rénèe, whose natural instincts were towards the beautiful, the refined, even the voluptuous, never came into her mistress's presence without a sense of absolute repulsion.
Anne, though still under twenty, was now as careless in her dress and person as any hag of ninety; increased ill-health had deadened her always dull complexion, her eyes were swollen beneath, her mouth loose and ragged; her colourless hair was gathered untidily in her neck, her twisted figure further bent.