Médicis Daughter (20 page)

“We cannot openly propose a match while the Spanish king is in mourning,” Jean de Morvilliers says, letting his fingers tap idly on the table. “But we may make more subtle moves.”

Mother nods approvingly at the chancellor. “I wish Philip to know of our proffer within the month. And”—she looks around the table meaningfully—“I wish to hear no mention of this beyond those assembled here.” Moving back down the table, she takes my arm. “I will interrupt your business no further.”

As she draws me out of the room, I expect some discussion of the match. Instead, Mother moves off, leaving me standing outside the chamber door. I was a prop in the scene that just played out, nothing more.

“Madame, have you no instructions for me?” I call after her.

Without turning, she says, “Work on your Spanish.”

*   *   *

The service for Elisabeth draws to a close. Charles’ violet-clad shoulders shake as he cries. His attendance is a testament to how deeply he feels Elisabeth’s passing. As king, tradition dictated he absent himself, but as brother he could not bear to do so. Reaching out, I offer a hand, which he closes tightly in his. A lump rises in my throat, not for Elisabeth, for Charles. He has a tender heart.

Another brother reaches for my remaining hand. After living largely apart from the rest of the family since I left him at Amboise, François arrived yesterday. I had not seen him since Charles’ “Assembly of Notables” in the winter of 1566, when he was invested as Duc d’Alençon. François seemed a stranger as he climbed from his horse rather awkwardly. Then his eyes met mine and he gave a little smile. Whatever else had changed about him over the intervening years, that smile had not. He was the little boy who played with me in the nursery, and I sensed we would be friends as we were then.

Filing from the chapel, we proceed to our waiting horses. Mother, in her grief, needs to see the son absent from this morning’s ceremony, so we are setting out for the army’s winter quarters at Saumur. Watching Her Majesty climb into her saddle, I wonder how it is that Anjou alone should have the power to console where the rest of us do not. I love my brother, but the unevenness of our mother’s affection rankles. He is first among her children. And I … I fear I am last. And now I have been given an opportunity to raise myself in her estimation by a prestigious marriage. Yet I find myself balking.

In the days since Mother laid her matrimonial hopes for me before the council, her plan has seldom been from my mind. Time and again I have told myself Philip is the most powerful king in Christendom and therefore the most desirable husband. But such bright thoughts are haunted by the shadows of every mocking story I have ever heard from Her Majesty’s ladies about the elderly gentlemen they have been obliged to seduce. And I have been having nightmares about King Philip—or, rather, the same nightmare over and over. In the dream I am in the
Salle des Caryatides
. Henriette stands guard as she did on the night the Duc and I first kissed. A gentleman holds me in his arms, but I know by the way he does so that he is not my Duc. Pushing back, I look up and I am horrified to see Don Carlos of Spain—or rather a gray-haired man with Don Carlos’ jutting chin and haughty eyes. He must be Philip. As he stoops to kiss me, I struggle. But he only laughs and says, “Be still, girl, your sister never made such a fuss.” I always wake shaking and utterly repulsed. But when I related the dream to Henriette and Charlotte, neither showed any sympathy.

“You cannot blame the real King of Spain for the behavior of the incarnation of him that your imagination creates,” Charlotte said.

“I know,” I replied, “but I fear my mind creates him as it does because it seems wrong to take my sister’s place.”

“Do not be silly,” Henriette admonished. “I would lie with my sister’s husband even as he molders in his grave if I thought by doing so I could wear the crown of Spain. This nightmare is not the result of anything substantial. In all likelihood it comes from your silly fancy that you are in love with Guise.”

Silly fancy!
I think as my horse moves along beside François’ in the late autumn sun. What I feel for Henri is more than fancy. But I will concede this much: it does not follow it is wise to allow my
amour
with Guise to keep me from doing my duty to the King and my mother.

“You are very pensive,” François says. “Are you thinking about the Queen of Spain?”

“Yes.” I lower my voice. “I am thinking about whether I would like to be the next queen of Spain.”

“Why wouldn’t you?” my brother asks. “A crown—what is better in all the world?” There is absolutely no doubt in his voice. “If I were a king, no one would shy away when they saw me. No one would talk behind their hands about my scars or the fact I do not seem to be getting any taller. Or if they did”—his face is suddenly vicious—“I could order them killed.”

I am sure he jests, and I am about to reply that a queen does not have such power, but Mother does; Elizabeth of England too. This realization gives me pause. Could I have influence as Queen of Spain? I cannot say for certain, but Mother more than once remarked that Elisabeth held sway with her sovereign husband. At very least, as a married woman I would be my own mistress. That would be something—something marvelous. A wife must be obedient to her husband. But Philip would be only one master. Presently I am under the thumb and the eyes of so many more.

I smile at François. He may be younger than I, but he speaks wisdom. I have made up my mind. I will be the Queen of Spain. If I must kiss King Philip, so be it. After all, I may surely kiss others as well. Both Henriette and Charlotte indulge in romances with men who please them more than their husbands. Perhaps a Spanish lover is in my future.

*   *   *

The Queen’s secretary bustles into Her Majesty’s apartment at Metz. “A letter from Madrid.” He holds out the sealed packet. Like the Queen’s other ladies, I rise, but Mother puts out a hand to stop me.

“You may stay,” she says with a slight smile. “I hope for good news in a matter that concerns you.”

My stomach feels odd. For more than four months, whatever Mother may have heard about my prospective marriage, I have heard precious little. Left in ignorance of the negotiations, I have done what I can to prepare myself to be a Spanish queen—working diligently on learning the history of the House of Habsburg and the language. Now perhaps the moment has come for me to know my future. As I watch Mother open the ambassador’s dispatch, I try to remember the Spanish word for seal.

Mother’s smile fades first. The color in her cheeks follows. “The father has no more interest in you than the son did.”

I feel as if I have been slapped. “I do not understand.”

“Philip’s happy marriage to your sister may cause him to mourn her, but not to look favorably upon her family. It seems there is nothing but ill will for France at the court of Spain.”

Her eyes return to the page but do not move, so she is thinking, not reading. I am not thinking, only feeling. The embarrassment of another marital rejection is horrible enough, but there is something especially brutal about being spurned by a man who adored my sister.

“God’s blood!” Mother’s words interrupt my pitiful reflections. “Spain has urged us again and again to dissolve the peace and bring the Protestants into submission. But when His Majesty goes to war, rather than aiding us, the Spaniards are but another obstruction.”

The color begins to return to her face in angry red splotches.

“Philip is less interested in the preservation of faith than he pretends,” she continues, her anger making her more candid than I am accustomed to. “His real interest is power, and he doubtless reckons that the impoverishment of France by war strengthens Spain. I prefer the German princes. They may be heretics, but they are plainspoken in their positions and their hostilities.”

Mother’s face is nearly purple. I can see the blood pulsing at her temples. Rising to her feet, she opens her mouth and then, quite suddenly, sways as if she were aboard a ship. She reaches out to clutch the chair she just left.

“Madame!”

The Queen falls back into her seat. For an instant her eyes reflect the same panic that imbued my voice. Then she says, “Get hold of yourself, Marguerite. Is it not bad enough that I must deal with treachery abroad and a depleted treasury at home? Must I be saddled with a hysterical daughter who appears destined to remain unmarried?”

She puts her head in her hands. “Go.”

I run to my rooms. François is there. He often is lately. Without a word I rush past him, snatch up the Spanish I have been working on—books and all—and cast it onto the fire with such force that sparks fly out. One lands upon my skirts. Before I can reach down, my brother is beside me beating at the spot with his hand, then stamping the small glowing fragments that litter the hearth.

“Margot, you might have been burned.” Looking up from extinguishing the last of the embers, his eyes widen. “Who has made you weep?”

“The King of Spain and our mother. Neither loves me, nor do they find me useful.”

“The more fool them.” François takes my hands in his.

I am surprised by this response. I expected protestations that Mother cares for me. I stop crying, catch my breath, and look more closely at François. “You think Mother does not love me, then?”

“Not as I do. Not as she ought. Not as she loves Anjou.” There is bitterness in this pronouncement, but even more noticeable is the certitude.

Is this what being left so long alone at Amboise did to my brother: made him sure he is unloved? If so, is that horrible or fortunate? I waver between believing Her Majesty indifferent to me, and grasping at gestures which suggest she might care. My striving to secure her approval and her love is constant, and can be crushing. Would believing—truly believing—I was unloved free me? No. It would destroy me. I know that by the nausea that wells at the thought of being nothing to Mother, and by the need I feel to prove to François he is in error.

“Mother loves all her children.”

“Convince yourself of that if you wish,” he replies. “But I refuse to be duped. She does not love me and I do not care.” He does not care, but his voice shakes. “The day will come when she will be sorry for thinking so little of me. When she will not be able to look over me or past me. When she will need me and wish that I needed her.”

I think of my brother as a boy. After all, he is just on the cusp of fourteen. But in this declaration—in his clear, angry eyes and fervent expression of ambition—I glimpse the man in him. Like Charles, there is something frightening in that man. This is knowledge worth having. It also makes me vaguely sad. It seems that, among my brothers, Anjou alone has been spared a dark side. I can see that prince in my mind’s eye as he was at Saumur, striding about, all muscle, grace, and authority, showing His Majesty the troops. Is it any wonder Mother loves Henri best? He has earned that place by never disappointing. Can I say the same? Not if I am being honest. Anjou once called me his equal. I must try harder to make it so.

*   *   *

François is stretched out, head resting in my lap, eyes closed when it happens. Pausing to turn a page in the book I am reading aloud, I glance in the direction of the window just as a bird flies into it with a sickening thud—a black bird. My body starts involuntarily.

“What is it?” my brother asks, eyes still closed.

“A bird struck the glass and fell away. I fear it is dead.”

“There are birds enough to fill the March sky without that one.”

François is right. Why should the death of a bird leave me feeling uneasy?

I begin reading again, but my apprehension lingers. More than lingers: it grows. The door swings open. Charlotte stands on the threshold, her face blanched of color.

“The Queen has collapsed!”

François sits up, catching the book with his cheekbone and knocking it from my hands. It lands with a thud very like the black bird made.

Dear God, was that the sound Mother made as well when she collapsed?

Clutching his face, François asks, “What happened?”

“I do not know. I do not know,” Charlotte replies in panic. “She was with the King and his advisors. They carried her to her rooms.” My friend’s hands twist in her skirts. “I saw them. The Queen was insensate and hung in their arms as one…” She stops, covering her mouth with both hands.

As we did as children, François and I go together. Arriving outside Mother’s apartment at a run, we find a crowd. I push my way through until I am at the door. Marie is there, eyes filled with worry. Embracing me, she says, “Charles and Castelan are with her.”

Turning the handle, I push. The door opens slightly, then comes to rest against the sturdy body of a royal guardsman. He turns prepared to upbraid whoever has tried to make entry. But at the sight of François and me, he steps back, allowing us to pass.

Mother’s physician is beside her bed. Charles stands at the foot with several others. The King acknowledges us by look but says nothing. Straightening up, Castelan comes to join him. “It is the strain of the war,” he murmurs. “Her Majesty would not rest after the death of the Queen of Spain, though I more than once urged rest upon her. She would not believe the war could proceed without her. Now nature does for her what she would not do for herself: puts her to bed.”

“I blame the Duke of Florence,” Charles says angrily. “Word came yesterday he was delaying the loan he promised.”

I glance at Mother, her eyes closed, her face white, her stillness a stark contrast to the fury that animated her when I saw her last. And I know I am to blame. Ought I to tell Castelan of this morning? Of how Mother’s anger was disrupted by the sudden swaying? I find I cannot, so instead I say, “I fear, Your Majesty, that the letter from your ambassador in Madrid also upset her.”

The men around me look perplexed. “What letter?” Charles asks.

So Mother kept the news of my rejection to herself.

“Howsoever Her Majesty came to be reduced to such a state”—Charles’ chancellor clearly feels a discussion of diplomatic points can wait—“the question must be asked.” He pauses. We all know what question. It trembles in the air as if it were a living thing. But it seems only he has the courage to speak it aloud, so we wait for him to continue. “Is there reason to fear for Her Majesty’s life?”