Médicis Daughter (55 page)

“You are mistaken. I do not dwell on the wrongs you have done me in the past. But nor can I forget them. Only a fool allows herself to be burned by the same candle twice. Surely you did not raise a fool.”

She smiles. Not one of her false or mocking expressions, but a genuine smile. “No, Margot, you are
not
a fool. Bravo. In this you achieve a great deal more than many. It is because you know how to weigh your own interests that we have something to speak of. I said I am sorry, and I am. Sorry that I forced you into a marriage with Navarre.”

She pauses to allow me to respond, but I cannot divine what is best to say, and even were I sure, my tongue cleaves to my mouth. Reaching out, she places her hand on top of mine where it rests. I cannot bear her touch. Drawing my hand away, I stand, walk to my fireplace, and turn to face her again.

“The King and I believed your marriage would bolster the
Paix de Saint-Germain-en-Laye,
so we urged you to overlook your qualms of conscience and your inclination. As you have ever been
une fille de France
and a dutiful daughter, you did so.”

I would laugh at this description of myself if the memories of how I implored Charles on my knees to give me a different husband did not pain me so.

“And now it seems your sacrifice was wasted.”

“Do you not mean my
hand
was wasted?” I snap. “The King and Your Majesty meant to benefit from my marriage. You needed to keep the King of Navarre close and to make it less likely he would lead troops against the crown. My marriage was intended to do that and might well have succeeded had you given the matter time. My hand could have soothed your enemies. But you were impatient and found other hands willing to slaughter them.” I stop, expecting Mother to lash out. Instead she shrugs. How very different her shrug is from the one I have become accustomed to seeing my cousin give—a shrug I used to hate but now understand. It seems to me that her gesture is uncaring and dismissive, while my cousin’s seeks to avoid disagreement or to show a brave indifference where he is anything but.

“Phrase it as you like. Yes, your hand was wasted. The question is: Will you allow it to remain so? This last week you have perceived your fortunes to be coupled to your cousin’s and acted accordingly.” She nods understandingly. Most alarming. “But look again. Now that your cousin is under the King’s thumb, held here as securely as if he were a boy once more, might you not prefer the freedom to make better, more beneficial allies?”

“You would have my marriage annulled.” Strangely, the image of my husband as a boy comes to me as I speak: he is in the Great Gallery at Fontainebleau, his hose are twisted, and he is speaking fiercely of his return to Béarn. I did not like him then. I like him now, but I do not love him.

“Yes. You can be free of Henri de Bourbon. But you must assist in your own case for the annulment.”

“Meaning?” My mother cannot need me to tell the Pope that I was married without dispensation. The Holy Father certainly knows this, even if a vast majority of the Court remains unaware of it. Therein, I suspect, lies the problem. Charles and Mother cannot be eager to trumpet the fact that they flouted papal authority just as they are being embraced as champions of the faith.

Raising her eyebrows, Mother leans forward, breaking her pose of studied nonchalance. “I spoke with Guise today. He tells me that perhaps you are not really the King of Navarre’s wife after all.”

So that is the game. The words I sent to Henri to soothe him—words I asked him to hold in confidence—were betrayed to Mother within hours, giving her grounds for an annulment without needing to admit there was no dispensation. Oh, Henri, where is the faith in this? Where is the honor? While I am lost in a swirl of thoughts and emotions, Mother speaks again.

“I have explained to His Majesty that such an admission might be mortifying to you and persuaded him that, if you were willing to attest that your marriage is a matter of paper and no more, he ought, as recompense, to grant you the right to choose your next husband without limits.” She smiles magnanimously.

“The man I would have chosen is no longer free.”

“For the right price, anyone can be made free.”

My eyes sting. The union that Henri and I planned so many years ago and were denied might still be within our grasp. I might yet be happy. I might be loved. And if my life has taught me any lesson, it is that to be truly loved by no one is to be lonely beyond measure. I swallow the lump that rises in my throat.

I may be loved, but at what price?

“What of the King of Navarre? Would you allow him to go south?” It is a trick question, for I know that Mother will never willingly permit my cousin to go where he might effectively lead what remains of the Protestants.

“That could be discussed.” She says this without a flicker of guilt for the lie. “His Majesty will consult with his friends and advisors, your new husband among them.”

A fearful price.

In that one sentence it is clear to me: once I am freed from the King of Navarre, he will perish. Mother wishes it so. Henri does as well. My cousin will not, like his friends who lost their lives in the massacre, be killed openly in the halls of the Louvre. He will be assassinated cleverly: by poison, in a street brawl, or as he travels home, if he is ostensibly permitted to go. My mother and my brothers may be willing—nay, delighted—to be credited with the deaths of thousands, but my family is too chary to take my cousin’s blood upon their hands.

It will be on mine.

No, no, no! I fight the thought. Surely the choice here is not so stark!

Mother comes to stand beside me and slips her arm around me. “My dear Margot, tell me: Is your husband a man?”

“What else should he be, Madame?” I sidestep the intent of her question, postponing the moment that must decide my cousin’s fate. “You have seen him enough times at table and at the chase to know that he has the appetites of one. And you have doubtless had more intimate reports from the Baronne de Sauve, whom you set upon him.”

“The King of Navarre’s foolish preference for a woman not your equal in wit or beauty is another reason to be done with him,” Mother says. “He has a peasant’s tastes which his crown cannot mask.” Mother releases me. “I have come here to be satisfied, daughter. Tell me plainly: Has your marriage been consummated?”

Thoughts swirl about me like the swarms of small insects that descend on Paris in the summer, pricking me from every side. All I need do is tell the truth and I will be unmarried. Free, if my mother is to be believed, to follow my heart.
But when has my mother ever been true to her word, at least where that word was given to me?
More than this, can I purchase my freedom with another’s life? The murder of an honorable man—and my cousin is honorable—by dishonorable means—this is sin. Not even the
Te Deums
that have resounded through Paris this last week, celebrating the slaughter of my husband’s coreligionists, can convince me otherwise. I am
not
my mother, willing to do anything to achieve my personal ends.

“Madame, it has.”

Mother starts. Putting her hand on my shoulder, she stares commandingly into my eyes. Her dark eyes remind me of the crow on the windowsill. She is waiting for me to twitch, to look away, to concede defeat and say what she wants to hear. “Will you swear to it? Remembering that a false oath is a serious thing?”

I have a nearly overwhelming desire to laugh, a reaction which would be most unwise. An oath is a serious thing? Is murder not more serious? Is betraying your children in favor of your own power and political aims not more loathsome? I am about to swear falsely but my heart is light.

“I give you my word as a devout
femme catholique
and a daughter of France that I consider myself truly joined to my husband.”

For one unguarded moment, Mother’s face falls. Then she is herself again, utterly composed. But that moment was a triumph for me and it is enough. I am free! Not of my husband, nor of the walls of this palace. It seems to me Henri and I will be held prisoner here some while longer. Rather, my mother’s hold over me is broken. My years of struggling to please, of seeking to garner her attention and gain her love through obedience—of being disappointed when her affection proved to be nothing but affectation—are at an end. I am a woman grown, a queen and worthy of that title in this moment for the first time. I do not know if the crows have left the Louvre’s courtyard, but the black birds in my soul have flown and I do not fear their return.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

If only Marguerite de Valois had been born in England.

That is what I found myself thinking as I researched and wrote about this much-maligned princess. Setting aside the myths about her (and I will get to those in a minute), and looking at the historical record, it is clear that Marguerite was highly intelligent, politically astute, and, in her later years, a serious force in the literary life of France. Arguably her political acumen exceeded that of her brothers, making her more similar to her strong-willed, politically expert mother, Catherine de Médicis. Yet, as the Valois princes died one by one and left Marguerite the last legitimate royal of her line, Salic Law kept her from ruling in France as her contemporary, Elizabeth I, was doing so ably in England. She might have made another great sovereign queen, but fate was not kind to Marguerite de Valois.

Nor was history.

As long as a royal line endures, those who go before will be memorialized by people with a vested interest in maintaining their reputations. When a dynasty expires, its last years are recounted by people who often have agendas that make it tempting to denigrate their predecessors. Such was the fate of Valois in the late sixteenth century. No member of the royal family was exempt from the attacks of anonymous political pamphlets during their lifetimes or after. Anti-Valois propagandists seeking to degrade Marguerite—like the pamphleteers who, in a later era, skewered Marie Antoinette—chose that easiest and most ancient path for destroying a woman: allegations of rabid sexual desire and wanton conduct. Marguerite owes most of the defamation of her character to a single such work,
Le divorce Satyrique
. This pernicious tract mocked and insulted her as it stated, purportedly in the first-person voice of her husband, grounds for the annulment of her marriage—an annulment essential to the production of a Bourbon heir for the man who was no longer merely King of the Navarre but King of France. That such propaganda should have been taken for fact seems astounding today. But early chroniclers of history were often not particularly concerned with objectivity. As Robert J. Sealy argues in
The Myth of the Reine Margot: Toward the Elimination of a Legend,
“The documentary sources for our knowledge … were written during the wars of religion and, all too frequently, are colored by political expediency…” Even some later histories written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make no pretense at objectivity. The authors unabashedly announce in their prefaces which side they are on. I hope in
Médicis Daughter
that I have done Marguerite justice. Better justice than she received from Valois disparagers, and from those later historians who saw no reason to look more closely at a figure considered insignificant.

What about Catherine de Médicis, then? If I am discarding what can be clearly identified as propaganda and rehabilitating Marguerite, can’t Catherine be more the sainted “mother of a nation” and less
La Serpente
? Catherine is a trickier figure. While the Queen Mother was by no means the cartoon villainess or “black queen” as she was dubbed by her most ardent contemporary detractors, historians disagree strongly on both the content and efficacy of her policies with respect to the Wars of Religion—and just about everything else. Unquestionably, Catherine was a woman of influence who preserved her sons and wielded power for and through them. As such, she can be given credit for that which went well in the post–Henri II Valois era. But she must also take her share of the blame for what went disastrously. To insist that she was effective as a political operative when the resulting events are viewed as laudable, yet argue she was utterly unable to influence events that turned out to be less than savory (and the most blatant Catherine apologists do this), is too logically inconsistent for my taste. Also, such assertions strip Catherine of her agency, doing her no justice as one of the sixteenth century’s impressively powerful women. As historian R. J. Knecht asserted, “Whitewashing Catherine can be taken too far. She may have been given more than her fair share of blame, but she was no saint and had dabbled in assassination…”

Happily, unlike academic historians, I was not obliged to parse out Catherine’s motivations or moral culpability. My story is told from the point of view of her daughter, and even the best mother is seldom seen objectively through a daughter’s eyes. Marguerite de Valois had valid personal reasons to feel hurt and angered by Catherine. Those feelings act as a filter for how Catherine is portrayed in
Médicis Daughter
.

No author’s note would be complete without a disclaimer of sorts. In bringing you a Valois Court in the throes of the Wars of Religion, I strove to be true to history. But I also had another mission: to tell a compelling story. Driven by considerations of plot and theme, I occasionally engaged in the gentle tweaking of history. Sometimes this meant moving events slightly in either time or space to avoid confusion or streamline the narrative. On other occasions it involved giving Marguerite eyewitness status to events that actually took place outside her presence. Certain aspects of the book required not so much an adjustment of history as an informed decision between conflicting historical opinions. For example, one of the critical events in Marguerite’s life is her appointment by her brother Anjou as his partisan, and her corresponding promotion to a position as confidante to their mother. Historical accounts cite competing dates for the start of this new intimacy. I’ve accepted the assertion, made by Leonie Frieda among others, that Margot’s elevation in fortune dates to a Court visit paid by the Duc d’Anjou to report his victory at Jarnac.