The Mark of the King Read online

  © 2017 by Jocelyn Green

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-3107-9

  Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

  Epigraph Scripture quotation and quotations labeled NASB are from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)

  This is a work of historical reconstruction; the appearances of certain historical figures are therefore inevitable. All other characters, however, are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Cover design by Jennifer Parker

  Cover photograph by Miguel Sobreira/Trevillion Images

  Author is represented by Credo Communications, LLC

  To all who feel marked by judgment.

  May your life be marked by the grace of Jesus instead.

  “From now on let no one cause trouble for me,

  for I bear on my body the brand-marks of Jesus.”

  —Galatians 6:17

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: The Deep

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Part Two: Currents

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Part Three: Fissures

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Part Four: Flood

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Author’s Note

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  Prologue

  PARIS, FRANCE

  MAY 1719

  “You shouldn’t be here.” With gentle authority, Julianne Chevalier ushered a man twice her age to the doorway of his young wife’s lying-in chamber.

  “You have what you need?” Toulouse Mercier looked over Julianne’s head toward Marguerite. “My first wife died in childbirth. I cannot lose Marguerite too. Or the baby.” He gripped Julianne’s arm, pulling her close enough to smell the pomade on his wig and to see the powder dusting the shoulders of his black robe. “Marguerite lost the last baby. The last midwife did not bleed her, and so we lost the baby before it was fully formed. Please.”

  Gritting her teeth, Julianne peeled Toulouse’s fingers from her arm and gave them a reassuring squeeze before releasing them. “Oui, monsieur, we have bled her monthly as required, and today of all days will be no different. Now, am I to attend any further questions, or shall I attend your wife instead?”

  His watery blue eyes snapped. “If you require the surgeon, I’ll fetch him posthaste.”

  “I’ll notify you at once should such a measure become necessary.” With a firm nod, she watched Toulouse bow out of the room and closed the door. As she unpinned her lace cap from the curls that crowned her head, she swept to Marguerite’s bed, where Adelaide Le Brun already stood watch. Julianne had completed her three-year apprenticeship under Adelaide months ago, but Toulouse insisted on having the seasoned midwife present for the birth.

  “You will help me?” Marguerite’s voice quaked as she reached for Julianne’s hand.

  “With all that I am.” She smiled as she unpacked her supplies and tied her birthing apron over her skirt, pinning the bib to her bodice.

  “I’m so afraid.” Marguerite’s lips trembled. At sixteen years, she was nine years Julianne’s junior and dangerously slight of frame.

  “We have taken every precaution.” Her fingernails trimmed short, round, and smooth, Julianne gently probed Marguerite’s belly through the thin sheet covering her. “Today will be no different.” Throughout the pregnancy, she had gathered this sparrow of a girl under her wing, providing linseed oils to help her skin’s elasticity, wraps to support the weight of the child, and advice on what to expect.

  Adelaide stood by Marguerite’s head, speaking encouragement to her in low, practiced tones. With greased fingers, Julianne reached under the linen, and with her eyes still on Marguerite’s face, skirted the neck of the womb. It was still small and unwilling.

  “We have some time yet.” Julianne wiped her hand on a rag. “Rest between the pains. Save your strength for the grand finale, oui?” She caught Adelaide’s eye and cocked her head to ask if she wanted to examine Marguerite as well.

  “It’s you she wants, not me.” Adelaide’s eyebrows arched innocently, but bitterness soured her tone. The mistress midwife had been practicing for three decades. But when clients began asking for Julianne, the apprentice, rather than Adelaide, something shifted between them. Julianne never intended to usurp her teacher, but her young practice had outpaced the older woman’s.

  Stifling a sigh, Julianne crossed to the window, opening it wide enough for healthful ventilation, and fragrances of orange and jasmine wafted in on the breeze from the parfumerie down the street. A hundred church bells chimed across the city. Rainwater gushed from the roof, cutting muddy channels into the road three stories below.

  Marguerite stirred, and Julianne turned in time to see her belly harden into a compact ball. A grimace slashed the young woman’s face. With her palms upturned in a helpless gesture, Adelaide retreated petulantly to a chair in the corner of the room.

  “Breathe through it.” Julianne seated herself on a stool and greased her fingers once more before reaching under the linen. During the next contraction, she pierced the membranes around Marguerite’s waters with a large grain of salt. The familiar sour smell pinching her nose, she replaced the soaked rags beneath Marguerite’s hips.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Adelaide crowed.

  Julianne had forgotten nothing. But rather than argue, she allowed Adelaide to bleed Marguerite from the arm to ease her breathing, lessen engorgement, and soften the cervix so it would stretch and open more easily.

  “Forgive me for not asking sooner, Julianne, but do you have children?” Marguerite’s eyelids drooped.

  “Not yet,” she replied.

  “’Twould be a scandal if she did, given that she’s not married,” volunteered Adelaide. An unvarnished attempt to undermine Julianne’s credibility, as married midwives with children wer
e preferred for their life experience.

  Julianne could inform them both that her own mother had died giving birth to her little brother, Benjamin, and that ever since she had wanted to be a midwife, to help spare other families such sorrow. She could say that she had raised Benjamin while her father drowned his grief in wine until he joined his wife in heaven. Then Benjamin had enlisted in the army and sailed for Louisiana, and Julianne had felt his loss with a mother’s heart.

  But today was about Marguerite, so Julianne said none of this.

  Shadows lengthened on the floor. The hands of the clock pointed accusingly at the hour, and still the baby’s head did not crown. Malpresentation.

  Breathing deeply, Julianne spoke. “Marguerite, I need to put my hand inside you. I need to know where the baby’s head is. Do you understand? Just keep looking at my eyes.”

  Mercifully, Adelaide came and held both of Marguerite’s hands. Julianne’s gaze locked on the young mother’s eyes as she slipped her hand into the womb and probed the baby’s head for the V where the suture lines of the scalp met in ridges at the back. There it was. Slowly, she wrapped her fingers around the baby’s skull.

  “Your baby is face up. That’s why we haven’t been able to make the progress we were hoping for yet. I have to turn the baby.” She stood up, gaining leverage, and decided not to explain that if she didn’t turn him, his jaw would hook on Marguerite’s pelvic bone. “It’s going to hurt, but I’ll be as quick as I can. Then things will be much easier for you, and for him.”

  Her right hand inside Marguerite, she felt through the abdominal wall for the baby’s limbs with her left. A contraction hit, and when it relaxed, Julianne shoved with her left hand at the same time she turned the baby with her right until he rolled facedown.

  Marguerite arched her back off the bed in silent agony, then fell back upon it, and still Julianne did not release the baby’s skull. Through two more contractions, she held him to be sure he did not slip out of place.

  At last convinced the baby was locked into the correct position, Julianne withdrew her hand and wiped it with a rag. The rest of the delivery proceeded normally, and the baby boy was born. He was nine pounds, she judged as she swiped her finger through his mouth and nose. Little wonder Marguerite had torn despite Julianne’s best efforts at greasing and gently stretching the neck of the womb. She wiped him off and handed the mewling newborn wrapped in clean cloths to his mother.

  Marguerite’s arms shook as she accepted him. “My son,” she whispered. “My son.”

  “You did well, ma chère,” Julianne told the young woman. “He’s perfect.”

  Briskly, she readied the room for Toulouse’s arrival. She tied off and cut the navel string once the afterbirth slipped out. Because Marguerite was still bleeding, Julianne soaked cloths in a mix of water and vinegar, wrapped them around Marguerite’s thighs, and placed one under her back.

  Adelaide raised her painted eyebrow. “Shall we send for the surgeon?”

  “Why? Is something wrong?” Marguerite’s voice trembled.

  Irritation swelled within Julianne. Marguerite was in no danger. “Nonsense. The bleeding will stop soon on its own.” After all, she’d seen worse—and so had Adelaide, for that matter. “You’ll be sore, but your body will heal.”

  Shrugging, Adelaide wiped the mother’s face with a sponge and smoothed her hair back into place.

  Julianne smiled at Marguerite as she washed her hands. “Ready for your husband?”

  No sooner did Adelaide unlatch the door than Toulouse burst into the room and crossed to his wife in four long strides. Kneeling, he tentatively touched the baby’s velvety crown with one finger before kissing Marguerite on the cheek.

  With calm efficiency, Julianne dissolved a hazelnut’s worth of Spanish wax into six spoonfuls of water and gave it to Marguerite to drink while Toulouse held the baby. “To help stop the bleeding,” she whispered discreetly.

  Peeking under the sheet, she noticed that the cloths were already dark crimson far too quickly. Alarm triggered somewhere deep inside her.

  While Marguerite slowly sipped the concoction, Julianne pulled from her bag portions of wild chicory, orange blossoms, and a vial of syrup of diacode and capillaire. “Adelaide, could you brew this into a tea for Marguerite, please?” Her voice was steady. Her hands were not.

  “I remember a time when it was you who brewed the tea for my patients. My, how times have changed.” But Adelaide prepared the tea just the same. She gave the cup to Marguerite and coaxed her to drink every drop, though the girl drifted to sleep between shallow sips and needed to be gently wakened to finish. Clearly, she would need more time than most to convalesce.

  A sickening thud. Julianne spun around to see that Marguerite’s empty cup had slipped from her grip and tumbled to the floor at Toulouse’s feet. Dread seized Julianne. Marguerite’s pallor was not that of one asleep.

  “Marguerite?” Toulouse rasped.

  Julianne rushed to her patient’s side. Lifted her hand, felt her wrist for a pulse, for a flutter, for some sign of life.

  Felt nothing.

  Toulouse yelled at Marguerite to wake up and the baby cried, but it sounded as far away as the muffled tumult of theatergoers spilling back into the street a few blocks away. Sweat prickling her scalp, Julianne grabbed her jar of smelling salts and waved it beneath the young mother’s nose, her heart suddenly a rock in the pit of her stomach. But of course no scent or sound, not even that of a husband’s heart breaking or of a baby wailing for his mother, could bring Marguerite back from the dead. Her soul had already taken flight.

  The baby dipped in Toulouse’s arms as he dropped to his knees beside the bed. He clutched his son tighter and skewered Julianne with his gaze. “What have you done? He needs his mother. I need his mother.”

  Words webbed in Julianne’s chest. She could scarcely take in that Marguerite was gone at all, let alone form a defense of her actions.

  “You did this!” he cried. “You put your hand inside her; I heard you say so! How dare you invade the body of my wife when you knew her to be so narrow!”

  “No, that’s a common practice. I needed to change the baby’s position. . . .” She looked to Adelaide for help.

  “You killed her!” Toulouse’s voice trembled with grief-glutted rage.

  Julianne reeled. “We took every precaution. The baby was so large . . . Madame Le Brun was here the entire time. If I had been close to making a misstep, she would have caught it.”

  Toulouse rounded on Adelaide. “What say you?”

  One word from the mistress midwife could absolve Julianne from any suspicions. Just one word. The truth.

  With a scathing glance at Julianne, Adelaide looked under the sheet to examine Marguerite’s condition. “Ma foi! The girl has torn dreadfully! No tea could have repaired this damage.”

  Her breath suspended, Julianne sank to her knees beside the bed, watching Marguerite’s complexion grow waxy while Adelaide conferred with Toulouse in low tones. “A preventable tragedy. If only a surgeon had been called right away. Fatal negligence.”

  “What am I to do?” Toulouse moaned. “Oh, what am I to do?”

  “I’ll take care of assigning a nurse. As for Mademoiselle Chevalier, you know what to do. As a magistrate, you know this—an abuse of midwifery is a public crime.”

  The room swayed. Julianne clutched at the ache in her chest as her gaze dropped to the bowl of blood Adelaide had let from Marguerite’s arm. Her reflection stared darkly back at her. How could I have let this happen?

  Part One

  The Deep

  “We believe that We can do nothing better for the good of our State than to condemn [convicts] . . . to the punishment of being transported to our colonies . . . to serve as laborers.”

  —Royal Policy of France, January 8, 1719

  Chapter One

  PARIS, FRANCE

  SEPTEMBER 1719

  There it was again.

  Suddenly wide awake, Julianne covere
d her ears. Straw crunched beneath her, needling her skin through the ticking as she inched away from the dank stone wall and closer to the warm body beside her. The bedding, like the damp air forever clinging to her skin, reeked of the waste dumped into the creek beside the prison. On the nights when it was not her turn to sleep by the wall, elbows and knees of bedfellows on either side jabbed her ribs and spine. But it was the screaming that bothered Julianne most.

  “What is that? Julianne, what is that?” Whispering too loudly, Emilie propped herself up on her elbow, her hair a spiky halo around her head. Behind her, three more criminals shared the wooden platform that served as their bed.

  “It is nothing, only the screaming.” Julianne would have been lying if she told the newest inmate at Salpêtrière that she would get used to it in time.

  “But why are they screaming like that?”

  “They are mad,” Julianne murmured. A tickle crawled across her scalp, and she raked her fingernails through her shorn hair until she pinched the vermin off her head. Passing her fingertips over her linen, she searched in the dark for any other offenders, but all she felt were the sharp ridges of her ribs and the narrow valleys between them.

  “They sound angry.” The whites of Emilie’s eyes gleamed in the moonlight.

  “They are insane. And likely they are angry too, chained to the walls as they are. Maybe they know they will never get out.”

  Another shriek ricocheted against the walls tucking Salpêtrière away from the rest of Paris, and Julianne felt their despair reverberate in her soul. Shackled by a life sentence, she too would never leave Salpêtrière. The maison de force was her permanent home now.

  In the northernmost section of her building, le commun, hundreds of prostitutes cycled through. In the adjacent maison de correction, libertine women and debauched teenagers were held in isolated cells by lettres de cachet at the requests of their husbands or fathers. And in thirty other dormitories in this massive complex, paupers lived in groups, four to a bed: the invalids, the orphans, nursing mothers, the diseased, the venereal, epileptics, the sick and convalescent, the deformed, able-bodied women and girls, destitute older married couples.