Judith Merkle Riley (21 page)

***

On our return from St.-Germain, Auntie had taken a lease on commodious rooms in a house on the rue de la Cerisée, convenient to the nicer district of the old Hôtel St.-Pol, where so many people of distinction now live. The location had brought out her long-buried passion for a life in society, and she hunted guests with the avidity of a tiger. But in one thing was she adamant: Philippe d’Estouville would receive no invitation.

“Let’s see, on Tuesdays we might bring together a gathering of choice wits—”

“But, Auntie, why not M. d’Estouville?”

“I don’t like him. He smells wrong to me. He will cause you nothing but grief—”

“But the poems, and the serenades—”

“Rank or no, he’s much too conceited to be capable of true love—he’s not good enough for you, Sibille. He’ll just use you and discard you, as I’m sure he’s done before. By God, if I knew that drunk who chased him off last week, I’d send him a bottle of his own choice—”

“But, Auntie—he seems so sincere—”

“Sincere, bah! So was my brother—now, let’s see—for the Abbé, we must be sure to have a naturalist or two—let’s see—yes, a free dinner always flushes out the poets—we need several, as a proper setting for you, as soon as—
oof
—this dreadful gout fades out a bit. Théophile, my dear cousin, I feel a spa trip coming on. Enghien, perhaps not as distinguished as Évian-les-Bains, but so very convenient. And the water—so agreeably sulfurous.”

***

All the plans had been made for the spa, and the horses had already been harnessed when an unkind wind blew in the first gray clouds. “Rain,” said Auntie, surveying the sky as she put one hand out the window. “I felt a drop. I absolutely refuse to travel in the wet. It will make my gout so much worse that even the spa won’t touch it.”

“Surely, my dear cousin, you are premature,” said the Abbé, but Auntie sent down word to put her litter back in the stable, and before we had even half unpacked, the gray wisps had turned to rolling black, with a hint of distant thunder. By the time we had taken out the
jeu
de
dames
, a waterfall was thundering down the gutters and battering the shutters.

“You see? I was right. My left knee always tells me when it will rain. Jump there, he’s left a piece with a space behind, don’t you see it?” said Auntie, peering over my shoulder.

“It’s a trap, Auntie—see there? The Abbé is lying in wait for my piece like a wolf—then he can jump here—and here—”

“Cousin Sibille, how inconsiderate of you to spy out my plans—” There was a pounding on the door, and Arnaud showed in a boy and two soldiers of the king’s guard in heavy cloaks, dripping wet, their boots and breeches mud-stained with hard riding. The boy was a page we had seen in the queen’s household.

“The queen commands that the Demoiselle de La Roque be brought into her presence today, and bring with her a certain coffer that she has in her keeping. She said you would know what coffer that is.”

“As indeed we do,” said Auntie. “But you must dry off and have a little something. This is not a fit day to travel without a bite to eat.”

“Madame, we would be pleased to accept your offer, but we must ride more than two leagues before nightfall. Once Saint-Germain is sealed after the king’s
coucher
, the Pope himself wouldn’t be allowed in. It’s been delay enough getting fresh horses from Les Tournelles—we must go—ah, I see the demoiselle is ready—” As I stuffed the silver-gilt box into its traveling case, the Abbé said:

“My dear cousin, what about the game?”

“Save the board as it is—I’m sure I’ll be back in no time. And remember, I have an excellent memory—”

“Sibille, take care,” said Auntie, as she pressed me to her effulgent front. “Promise me—”

“Madame, the Queen’s own
dame
d’honneur
, Madame Gondi, will have charge of her at the palace. And the Queen has commanded that we ourselves escort her back by tomorrow evening,” said the page. But as I descended the steps, I could hear Gargantua, confined upstairs against his will, howling.

We took the empty streets at a fast trot, muddy water splashing everywhere, rain slashing at our faces, the only respite the brief pause beneath the city gates. Once past the walls and moat, we pushed the horses to a canter wherever the road looked reliable, cross-country away from the dark waters of the swirling river. Heavy mud clods flew from the horses’ hooves, and as the rain let up, we were no drier, for we passed into forested lands where the trees spilled water from their leaves as we passed.

The light was almost gone when we at last spied, among the shifting dark clouds, the towers of the old castle glowering from above us on the bluff. Trees and outbuildings had become black shadows, and already the first trembling candlelight could be seen in the windows of King Henri’s new chateau, built in the modern style beneath the black bulk of the old fortress.

“Thank God the gates are still open—the Queen would accept no excuses.” The boy shuddered, but I did not know if it was just because we were all soaked to the skin.

The Swiss guards were already in the courtyard when we entered, preparing to seal the gates, and lighting the four torches that were to burn all night in the corners of the court. The rain had stopped, but there was the distant rumble of thunder in the half-dark. The boy took my arm, so I wouldn’t stumble on the slippery wet, uneven paving, for we were on foot. Only members of the royal family were allowed to enter the court on horseback or litter. Inside, the archers were already deploying on the staircases, and valets were lighting the torches to illuminate the narrow stone passages, the long public halls, and the stair landings for the night. Palaces at night are like cities, with crimes and blood and secret whisperings in the dark corridors. Worse, perhaps, for in a palace one expects less evil than in a city alley. A palace must have its Swiss guards and its archers no less than a city its night watch.

The boy led me to an ornate, sealed door, where a lady-in-waiting answered his knock, dismissed him, and led me inside.

“Good,” she said, “you arrived in time. Just hand me the coffer, and I’ll send for a maid to dry you off.”

“I can’t give it to you, I’m afraid. The queen herself commanded that I never put it in anyone’s hands but her own.”

“I am pleased,” came a voice from the depths of the room, and I saw there a short, plump figure in a white robe, standing beside a little table laid out like an altar, with black candles in silver candlesticks burning at each end of it. “I see you are loyal, discreet, and true to your word. I could wish for no more. Now give me the coffer.” I took the coffer from its traveling case. The candlelight shown and flickered luridly across its surface. I hate this thing, I thought, as I gave it to the queen. I wish I were rid of it. You
could
wish for it, came the hidden voice of Menander in the depths of my mind. And the way you work, you’d give me my wish by killing me, I answered, just as silently, as I handed it to the queen. Of course, came the secret voice of the thing—that’s how the others got rid of me.

But the queen had put the box on the altar between the two black candles, and though her back was turned to us, I could hear her chanting in some unknown language just like a necromancer in some drama. After that, she threw open the lid of the box. The lady beside me caught her breath and shuddered at her first sight of Menander. Somehow he looked more revolting than usual this night, his skin more like a viper’s dead sheddings, the brown teeth of his ghastly, mummified mouth more like fangs, and his gangrenous eyes exuding pure evil. He knew that he had a victim, and that victim was a queen made reckless with desire and capable of anything, even selling her soul. I felt sick to my stomach, and the clammy cold of my wet clothes made me shiver.

But the queen spoke in a forthright voice, without a quaver. “At last,” she said. “At last your magic is mine, O deathless one. And tonight I will do a great deed, one that I have long craved.”

The lady-in-waiting beside me turned away, closing her eyes and covering her ears as the revolting object in the box moved as if to speak. At last the dead thing spoke in a rusty, thin voice, as if from another world:

“Great Queen, command me,” said the undying head of Menander the Magus.

Carefully, firmly, Catherine de Medici repeated the words engraved over the catch of the open box:

“By Agaba, Ornthnet, Baal Agares, Marbas, I adjure thee. Almoazin, Membrots, Sulphae, Salamandrae, open the dark door and heed me,” said the queen.

“Speak your desire,” said the head, and the aroma of things long rotten rose from it.

“I, Catherine de Medici, wife of the great Henri the Second, son of the mighty King Francis the First, command and desire that the influence of the Duchess of Valentinois over my husband shall be taken from her and cease forever.”

“It is done,” said the Master of All Desires. “Time will show you the truth.”

“At last,” said the queen, taking a deep breath. “I will have my heart’s desire, and the means to secure my son’s throne. From the Spanish—and from the Guises. All with one simple wish.” As she closed the box, she turned to me. “Seal this thing up again and take it away—oh, you are wet. Maddalena, take the demoiselle away and have her dry by the fire; get her nightclothes and a bed—it will not do to have her catch a mortal fever. I am pleased to find the demoiselle a loyal servant.” As I was bundling up the box, she asked suddenly, “Demoiselle, why have you not confided any of your desires to this magical box?”

“Majesty,” I spoke, shivering, “it is because I am afraid.”

“Ah,” she answered. “That is because you are not a queen.”

***

That night I lay awake in my borrowed nightgown and cap, listening to the breathing of the other two ladies-in-waiting in the bed, unable to sleep for the terrifying dark that lay clustered inside the bed hangings. I thought I could hear Menander’s soft and sinister breathing from his box beneath the bed, and then his voice, a whisper like dead reeds rattling in the winter wind.

“You should kill yourself. It would be easy. Just rise and jump out of the window.” My heart began to pound. What was this new trick of Menander’s? Wasn’t hounding me to make wishes enough to satisfy him anymore?

“It would be far better for me if I were to belong to a great queen, instead of to a nobody like you. How much grander my scope, how much greater my conquest of souls. Who are you, an ugly old maid, to possess such a treasure as myself? You make no wishes, you acquire no grandeur, and what is more, your poetry is despicable, a joke. No one likes it. Rise and go to the window. You would be better off dead.” In the dark, tears squeezed out of my eyes. He was right. Why didn’t I? But something solid in me stood apart, watching, and said to me: Menander can’t get you to wish yourself out of the way, so he wants to drive you to suicide. He sees how much more evil he could do if he belonged to the queen instead of you. I won’t listen to you, you dried up piece of bacon in a box, I said to him in my mind.

Oh, but you have to, said the secret voice of the Magus. You won’t let me go, so I won’t let you go.

Menander, you’re nothing but a cheap social climber.

If I can’t have your soul one way, I’ll have it another. Rise and go to the window.

I won’t, I answered, grubbing the tears from my eyes with my fist. Then I pulled the covers up tight around me and began to make a noise in my head to drown out Menander’s voice, the hideous temptation. In my mind, I sang the psalms of Marot, noisier and noisier. At the sacred words, I could hear the diabolical little thing shriek, then go silent. Outside, in the real world, the breathing of my two bedmates was as steady as ever. How long was it we wrestled there, in the mind’s dark, until I fell asleep, exhausted? Perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, but it seemed like eternity. And I knew that now my nights would be full of struggle and horror, until such a time as either I or Menander the Undying had perished. Each night, every night. Nostradamus, said the observer in me. You must see Nostradamus again. He has the answer.

***

The next morning, at her levée, the queen dismissed her flute player, and while Madame de Saint-André handed her her chemise, she had Madame Gondi read her an unusual dialogue on virtue from a slender volume, professionally hand-copied on vellum, and bound in very handsomely tooled morocco leather.

“Clever, that remark the Demoiselle de La Roque has put in the mouth of Athena,” said the queen, as her hairdresser fussed over her elaborate curls. “This work seems ever so much more brilliant than the poems, which are rather ordinary. It’s quite original, too. Read again that section on the sacredness of marriage, where Hera speaks. I like the sentiment.” The queen was unusually calm and peaceful this morning, but she noticed that Madame Gondi’s hand shook as she turned the pages back. She is not fit to be a queen either, thought Catherine de Medici. Her nerves are too weak. Kingdoms are lost by the weak-nerved, and then the winning prince slaughters the heirs. That is what I learned in Florence, when the enemies of my family tried to hang me from the city walls for cannon practice. Machiavelli, who wrote for my father, what does he know of these truths? He scratches with his quill, and understands only with his mind, but I, I know these things in my heart and my stomach as well.

“‘—and for that reason marriage is ordained as a holy sacrament—’” The queen looked about her at the richly tapestried room, the ingratiating servitors with hidden hearts and veiled eyes. Any one of them could strike from behind. To be a queen is to be different from other people: the stakes of the game are higher.

“‘—and as children born of affection are more beautiful, even so those of married affection are superior even to them—’” read Madame Gondi, her voice somewhat quavering. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her skin was ghost white. Her sleep had been filled with nightmares of the mummified head that spoke.

“Stop reading awhile, is that where Hera rebukes Aphrodite?”

“N-no, it is the part after, where the Archangel explains true Christian marriage—”