Judith Merkle Riley (40 page)

Tight-lipped, white knuckled, the troll-faced little Queen of France heard the heralds’ trumpets announce the arrival of the king in the lists. The note she had sent him; had he received it? I have had a dream, it said. Do not joust today. Remember the words of Luc Guaric, and of Nostradamus. This is the forty-first year.

The king, a black-and-white surcoat of the ancient style over his glittering black, gold-engraved tournament armor, paused at the end of the list, leaning down from the high jousting saddle on Le Malheureux’s back to take up the note.

“Superstition,” he said, crumpling up the note and throwing it away. “What does she take me for, a fool? A king does not withdraw once he has announced his intention.” Then he said firmly to the little page, “Tell the queen my wife that I will joust today, and that I shall have the victory.” His squire handed up his lance, and he couched it. He was a beautiful horseman, handsomely mounted, and as he rode out to show himself, his plumes flying and armor glittering, it gratified him to hear the crowd’s awed sound. I am not old yet, he thought. I have not put on that much weight. I can still show men in their twenties a thing or two. He lowered his gold-barred visor, then at the signal, spurred the black stallion forward. The two horsemen met with a crash; the king’s lance shattered, his opponent was unhorsed. Cheers and applause. The King of France was still king of chivalry. Could Philip of Spain, that bleary-eyed old man, do as well? In the stands, he saw Diane fluttering her white handkerchief at him. His wife, pallid and stout, did not even smile at his triumph. How many years more would he be saddled with this stolid, superstitious little Italian merchant’s daughter?

Again, the sound of trumpets, and again, the triumph. Let the Duke of Alva return to his master, that old man who hides in his palaces, and tell him that King Henry of France is a master of chivalry, still powerful on the field of honor. Le Malheureux was stained with sweat now, and the long black-and-white embroidered saddlecloth clung damply to his flanks. The third and last encounter; his own captain of the Scottish guard. Only twenty-eight years old; this was a conquest worthy of him!

When Montgomery was announced, and rode forward in the lists, the queen’s lips turned white. The younger man, mounted on a handsome bay from the royal stables, was carrying on his left arm a shield painted with his coat of arms: most prominent, to her eyes, as if painted in fire, was a red lion. The young lion, the thought hummed through her brain. Here is death. One last encounter, then the three courses required by the rules of the tournament were fulfilled. Mary, Queen of Heaven, she prayed silently as the two heavily armed knights clattered down the lists toward each other. They met with a thunderous crash; Montgomery sat firm, the king reeled, then recovered. He had lost—a stirrup. There was a gasp, then shouts from the women about her, from the windows, from the crowd on the ground. But she sat, iron faced, and could feel her heart begin to pump blood once again. Her prayers had been answered. The king had survived. Now tonight he would dance, he would dine, he would bid farewell to his daughter. All was well. The time of danger was past; sixty-nine years, Nostradamus had said. The kingdom would recover from this backbreaking, fruitless lost war. It would knit up the religious division that was splitting it apart and become the greatest kingdom in all of Catholic Christendom. France would take England, conquer heresy, serve God, and become mighty. Then, to her horror, she saw her husband had not dismounted at the far end of the lists.

As several attendants rubbed the sweat from his horse, King Henry accepted a drink of water, then handed down the empty cup.

“I lost a stirrup,” he said. “Montgomery made me lose a stirrup; I want to match myself against him again.”

The Sire de Vieilleville, fully armed and mounted for the next joust with Montgomery responded. “Sire, you have acquitted yourself with honor, and mine is the next match. Don’t ride again.”

But the king, grumbling and enraged, thought of the disgrace of losing a stirrup before the Duke of Alva. “Move aside,” he said, “I want to ride again against Montgomery; this time I will defeat him.”

From a distance, the queen saw the two armored figures conferring on horseback. She turned to her daughter. “The king, your father, wishes to ride a fourth course.” The slight, fourteen-year-old girl looked at her, not understanding. Three pages stood behind the queens, to be at their hand for any little service. The queen sent the fastest of them to run to the end of the lists with a message.

The long pause had unnerved the crowd. The king’s three courses were over. What was happening? A nervous muttering started up, and when the king heard it, it set him more firmly in his resolve. “Send a message to Montgomery that the king will have the next encounter,” he said. “I insist on having satisfaction.” Vieilleville looked long and hard at his sovereign.

“Your Majesty, for the three nights past I have been troubled with evil dreams. Do not, I beg you, run this next encounter. Here am I; honor has been served. Let me encounter Montgomery for your sake.” Two little pages ran up, one of them in Montgomery’s livery, one in the queen’s.

“What says Montgomery?” said the king.

“Your Majesty, he says honor is served, and begs not to be asked to ride against you again,” said the boy.

“Tell him to make ready,” said the king. “It is my command.” He looked at the second page, and raised his dark eyebrows. His long face looked disdainful. “What says my wife the queen this time?”

“Your Majesty, the queen begs you for love of her not to engage Montgomery again.”

All decked out in his mistress’s colors, he looked down, and said with unconscious irony, “Tell her that it is precisely because of love of her that I will run this next course,” and lowered the gilded bars of his visor. His squire, shaken by strange demand, checked the buckles on his armor, the fastening on the visor. They seemed still sound. At the king’s command, the trumpets sounded, and the king, refreshed, rode toward the lists again. As he passed, a little boy ran from the crowd:

“Sire, do not joust,” he called after him, but the king did not hear.

With the thunder of heavy hooves, the two armed horses and their armed riders rushed down the lists at full gallop. The king’s lance missed its target, and Montgomery’s hit the king’s canted jousting shield slightly above the center. It shattered with a crash and the long, sharp tip broke away. But in the very moment that the lance shattered, it slid upward, and Montgomery, in a moment of stunned paralysis, did not fling the stump away swiftly enough. Too late. The splintered stump of the lance glanced upward off the angled jousting shield hitting the king’s visor, which flew open.

The crowd saw the king reel in the saddle, then slide slowly toward the ground. There was a collective gasp, and cries. “The King has fallen!” Before the king’s attendants surrounded him to remove his armor, Catherine saw, from the stands, the vision of her nightmare: the king’s face, covered with blood that flowed, flowed unquenchably, from his right eye, from which the huge splinters of the broken lance protruded hideously.

***

High up in a window in a rented room on the rue St.-Antoine, a tall, angular young lady held her hand to her mouth and gasped in shock. Another young lady turned suddenly, rolled up her eyes and fainted into the lap of her mother. Aunt Pauline and Montvert the banker looked at each other with shrewd eyes.

“This changes everything,” said Auntie.

“I’ll send for Nicolas at once. The new regime won’t be interested in the pursuit of bathhouse duelists.”

“But if anyone suspects this is Menander’s doing, Sibille is in great danger.”

“Exactly. But it’s not only anyone—it’s the queen.”

“While the king lives, all hope will be on him.”

“And if he dies, there will be a required period of forty-days’ mourning when she will be sequestered. Both give us time. They can marry in secret, and Nicolas can take her out of the kingdom. I hope that Sibille is not as averse to sunshine as you are, Madame.”

“They say Italy is very healthful in this season,” said Auntie. And even though the others were right in the room with them, they were so shocked by what they had seen that they did not hear a word.

It was the Old Constable himself, mended and freed with the peace, and the great Guise, victor of Calais, who carried the king into Les Tournelles. “I want to walk,” he whispered at the foot of the great staircase, but several more lords of the court had to support him. Behind him came a group of notables carrying the weakling heir, who had fainted. An evil sign, said those who witnessed the eerie procession into the palace. That night they sealed Les Tournelles, and Montgomery, the young lion, packed his belongings in haste and fled the country.

Lying in the great, draped bed, the king passed between fainting and waking, night and day mingled into a blur of surgeries, of dignitaries whispering in corridors, of papers presented for a feeble signature. “Perhaps he will recover; the surgeons say the wound is not mortal,” said the queen to Madame d’Alamanni, as she left the sickbed for an hour or two of sleep. But her froggy little eyes, wide with horror and guilt, told another story.

“I myself heard Maître Paré’s assistant say that if it has not penetrated the brain, he will only lose the eye,” replied her companion.

“And there is no fever,” said the queen. “With no fever, surely he will recover.” Already, she had seen the Guises, tall and arrogant, moving in and out of the chambers where her sickly, simpleton son was being consoled by his redheaded, vain, ambitious little wife. She did not need prophetic dreams to show her the pattern of the future, should her husband not rise from his sickbed. As she walked the corridors during the surgeries, wringing her hands, her heart was frozen with imaginings and phantasms. On the third day, she rallied when the great Vesalius, servant of the King of Spain and the finest anatomist in the known world, arrived, and the king called for musicians, and vowed to make a pilgrimage on his recovery. She remembered she had not eaten, and took a little wine and boiled fowl, then slept upright in a chair by the king’s bed that night, lulled into sleep by his regular breathing.

But on the fourth day the fever began to rise, and no treatment could stop it.

***

Outside the sealed gates of Les Tournelles, Diane de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois, was turned away like a beggar.

“Queen’s orders,” said the guard, as the duchess, her eyes red-rimmed, her face pallid and tense, fled to her ornate, gilded litter. Attendants drew the curtains, and as the guard watched the two white-draped black hackneys bear away their swaying, sealed burden, he thought: how could the king have seen anything in
he
r
? She’s older than my grandmother, and as wrinkled as a prune.

In the reception hall of her luxurious Paris mansion, the Duchess of Valentinois paced up and down on the heavy Turkish carpet, blind to the passage of time. Anyone who had been near Les Tournelles, unworthy persons, pages, gossips, those who in past years would not have been allowed to set foot within her gates, were welcomed and shown in.

“Does the king live? Will the king recover?” she repeated over and over, her face taut and haunted.

On the fourth night, she awoke with a shriek from her opium-induced sleep, and demanded that the woman who attended her go immediately to the city archers and have the fortune-teller Simeoni arrested, but the woman took it for a hallucination, and poured the duchess another dose of sleeping medicine.

That morning, when the duchess held her levée, she noticed many familiar faces from the highest aristocracy were absent. Her courtyard was devoid of petitioners, her open table at noon without guests. Frantic, she sent a message by courier to the head of the family that owed her so many favors, but the Guises sent her a cold little note, letting her know that they were a family accustomed to dealing with legitimate rulers, not with former mistresses.

“But he lives; he still lives,” she said. “By God, I will not be treated like this while he draws breath.” Yet with each passing hour, it seemed that the abandoned duchess grew older and older looking. Lines deepened, and her white face took on a grayish tint. It was as if, as the king drifted toward death, the magic that had withheld her old age was fading. She took up a hand mirror from her dressing table, and above her jeweled bodice and immaculate lace ruff, an ancient face stared back at her. A face—like—oh, God, that horrible mummy in the box. Dried up, decayed—no, it
was
that ghastly, vulgar thing. And as she stared in horror, the thing in the mirror
winked
at her, with one of its peeling, leathery eyelids. With a cry, the duchess threw the mirror from her, and it shattered on the floor, sending glass shards everywhere. But no one heard the crash and came.

As the afternoon shadows grew longer, seated alone in her bedchamber, where an untouched meal lay on a tray by her bedside, she heard a timid knock on the door. A page, sent by the guard at the gate, had brought her a message sealed with the royal arms. Hurriedly, she tore it open. It was a letter addressed to “La Mère Poitiers”—old mother Poitiers, not the duchess, not dearest cousin, not anything. It was from the queen. It demanded the return of the crown jewels, of the funds of state, of the chateaux and gifts of the treasury and royal lands the king had showered on her. The queen desired Chenonceau, the white palace of light breezes and joyful celebrations, that lay like a wedding cake on the bank of the Cher. As cold and precise as a surgeon’s knife was that letter, and it froze the duchess’s vitals.

He must live, he must live, the duchess repeated over and over in her mind, as she knelt in the previously ornamental prie-dieu by her bedside. And yet a whisper like dried leaves came to her ears: you wished that the queen will never have influence over him, and behold, she never will. I have fulfilled your heart’s desire.

***

In the cellars of Les Tournelles, four heavily shackled criminals were brought to a hastily erected headsman’s block.