The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine De Medici (22 page)

I closed my eyes and thought of Clarice’s mouth blooming upon Leda’s, of Ippolito’s skillful tongue and fingers. I cupped Henri’s face in my hands as Clarice had Leda’s and pushed my lips against his, then delicately parted them with my tongue. He tensed and would have recoiled had my touch faltered, but I persevered until he responded with kisses of his own. As his confidence and mine increased, I rolled him onto me, slipped a hand between his legs, and felt the flesh there stir.

I sensed nearby movement and opened my eyes to see King François looming; he drew the bedsheet down until his son’s buttocks were exposed.

When Henri and I both looked up at this intrusion, the King dropped the sheet and stepped back, mildly chagrined.

“Don’t stop! I’m only making sure it’s properly accomplished. I will disturb you no more.” He moved away toward the hearth.

Henri’s cheeks went mottled scarlet. Because I was obliged, I reached between his thighs and stroked him until he grew again; and he was obliged, when he was ready, to part my legs and settle himself between them, as Ippolito had done so long ago, but there was no sweetness, no heat, no yearning.

At the moment of penetration, my resolve wavered and my body tightened; I cried out at the pain. Henri must have feared losing his confidence, for he began to pump wildly. I held on, gritting my teeth. Within a minute, his passion crested and he reared his torso backward, his eyes rolling up against his fluttering lids. Simultaneously, something warm trickled between my legs.

Henri pulled away and lay on his back, gasping.

“Well done!” King François clapped his hands. “Both riders have shown valor in the joust!”

I pulled the sheets up and turned my face toward the distant wall. After
an all-too-audible whisper to his son that virgins were prone to weep after such events, the King left.

In the silence that followed, I knew that I should falsely compliment Henri on his lovemaking, yet exhaustion so overwhelmed me I felt I could not move; it was accompanied by a painful constriction of the muscles in my throat, the certain precursor of the tears the King had mentioned.

I lay silent, hoping that Henri would leave me to my self-pity, but he said, very softly, his gaze directed at the ceiling, “I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t hurt me, Your Highness,” I lied, without turning to look at him. “I cried out only because I was startled.”

“I wasn’t speaking of that,” he said, “although I’m sorry for that, too.” He paused. “I’m sorry that I haven’t been more pleasant. You’ve been so kind. My brothers and sisters like you very much, and so does my father.”

I stared at the tapestry bed hanging in front of me, at the play of the firelight on the threads of shining gold woven in among those of burgundy and forest green. “And you?” I asked.

“You’re charming,” he answered shyly. “Dignified, yet cordial. Everyone at Court is very impressed. But . . . I know I’m not as cheerful as my brothers, a fact that annoys my father. I’ll try to do better.”

“You need not apologize,” I said. “I know you didn’t want this match. I’m a foreigner, a commoner, and ugly . . .”

“Don’t speak of yourself in such a manner!” he exclaimed indignantly. “I forbid it. Your looks are pleasing enough; one doesn’t need to be pretty to be handsome.” His words were so honest and guileless that I was moved to roll over and face him.

“Oh, Henri,” I said, reaching for him, but I had moved too quickly. He flinched and recoiled in such involuntary disgust that I withdrew at once. His gaze met mine, but he didn’t see me: instead, he stared at something beyond me, something hideous. I saw the poorly veiled loathing in his eye and shrank from it.

How,
I thought,
shall I ever be able to tell you of my bloody dream, if you will not love me?

He dropped his gaze. “Please, I . . . I’m sorry, Catherine, truly I am. I’m just so very tired.”

“I’m tired, too,” I said tightly. “I think I would like to sleep.” I turned my back to him.

He hesitated—trying, perhaps, to think of the words to ease my hurt—then finally turned away. He lay awake for some time, but in the end, sleep took him.

Had there been a place within my new home to find solitude, I would have gone there; but the room where I had spent my last virginal days in the temporary palace was full of servants, the corridors full of revelers. Women stood watch in our antechamber; if I had risen, or stirred, they would have known. I remained all night where I least wanted to be—in Henri’s bed.

It was there, in the hours before dawn, that an ominous thought jerked me from a light doze.

Perhaps what Henri had seen, when he recoiled from me in disgust, was not his hated father or an unwanted marriage. Perhaps, with his innocence and sensitivity, he had looked beyond those things at the dark blot on my soul.

In the weeks that followed, Henri never came to my quarters or summoned me to his. He spent his time hunting, jousting, or playing tennis with his older brother. Many times I sat with the gentlemen of the chamber in the great indoor gallery and watched Henri and François. One brother would lift the ball high in his left hand and bellow: “
Tenez!
I have it!”—a warning to his opponent that he was about to smash the ball against the high stone walls. That either ever managed to avoid being struck by the madly ricocheting projectile—or braining one of the spectators—was a testament to his skill.

Young François, pale and golden in contrast to his dark brother, won the crowd’s affection and sympathies, grinning at his errors and bowing to the audience immediately after their commission. In his presence, Henri came alive. He was athletically gifted, while François was shorter, heavier, and not as lithe. Henri could easily have taken every game but often made intentional errors so that his brother could win.

When Henri was not engaged in sport, he spent a great deal of time with the blond widow from Queen Eléonore’s entourage. Young François, by contrast, liked to dine with his sisters and many days shared lunch with us.

On one such occasion, I asked him about the widow. She was Diane de
Poitiers, wife of the late Louis de Brézé, a very powerful old man who had been the Grand Seneschal of Normandy. Her grandmother had been a de La Tour d’Auvergne, which made us second cousins. At the age of fourteen, Madame de Poitiers had come to Court to attend the King’s first wife, Claude. In the twenty years since, she had earned a reputation for dignity and temperance, dressing modestly and eschewing the white face paint and rouge used by the other women. A pious Catholic, she was scandalized by the infiltration of Protestants into Court.

“In which subject does she instruct my husband?” I asked François.

I speared a piece of venison—I had brought my own fork from Italy and still suffered the bemused glances of the French for using such an exotic implement—and paused before taking a bite.

Young François held his meat in his fingers and bit off a large chunk before answering. “In protocol, comport, and politics,” he said, chewing, his words muffled. “She’s quite good at all three.” He swallowed and shot me a curious glance. “You needn’t be jealous. The lady is famous for her virtue. And she’s a good twenty years older than Henri.”

“Of course I’m not jealous,” I said, with a little laugh.

François dismissed the thought with an easy smile. “You must understand, Henri was only five when our mother died. He had always been very attached to her, so the loss was particularly hard on him. Madame de Poitiers looked after Henri and tried to be like a mother to him. That’s why he looks to her for approval now.”

François was not the only dear friend I discovered in my new family. The King’s sister Marguerite, Queen of Navarre—that tiny country south of France and north of Spain, bordering the Pyrenees—lived at Court with her five-year-old daughter, Jeanne. Marguerite and I adored each other at first glance; our affection was strengthened when we discovered our shared passion for books. Marguerite was tall, warm, and sparkling, with such prominent cheeks that, when she smiled, they partially eclipsed her eyes.

Like her brother, she had been born in Cognac, not far from the central eastern coast, where Italian art and letters were properly appreciated, and she had insisted that King François bring the aging Florentine master Leonardo da Vinci to France and pay him handsomely—“even though,” she said, with gentle, rueful humor, “he was too old and blind to do much painting.” He
had brought with him some of his best works—including a small, lovely portrait of a smiling, dark-haired woman, one of my favorites, which still hangs at the Château of Amboise.

“However,” Marguerite warned, “don’t believe the King when he tells you that Leonardo died in his arms. My brother likes to forget that he was not in Amboise at the master’s final hour.”

She also spoke with pride of her brother’s work to create the grandest, most complete library in Europe—housed at the country Château at Blois. I promised that at my first opportunity I would visit it.

Meanwhile, I settled into an ostensibly magnificent life. We quit Marseille’s sunny coastline for the country’s wintry interior as King François grew restless after a month or two in any one location.

Before I arrived in France, I had thought I lived in luxury, with my needs attended to by many servants, but my error was one of scope. In Italy, power was scattered and a ruler’s subjects few. The Sforzas ruled Milan; the Medici, Florence; the d’Estes, Ferrara; a hundred different barons ruled a hundred different towns. Rome lay under the authority of the Pope; Venice, under that of a Republic. But France was a nation with a single monarch, and the greatness of that fact struck me when I first traveled with François I’s Court—not so much a court as a city of thousands.

Most of the royal employees served in one of three domains: the chamber, the chapel, or the hostel. Under the first, the Grand Chamberlain supervised the provision and maintenance of clothing, the ritual of dressing the King, and all activities related to the King’s personal toilette. Its staff included valets, gentlemen of the chamber, cupbearers and bread carriers, barbers, tailors, seamstresses, laundresses, chambermaids, and fools.

The domain of the chapel, managed by the Grand Almoner, included the King’s confessor, dozens of chaplains, almoners, choirs, and the King’s reader.

The domain of the hostel, run by the Grand Master, fed the King and his enormous entourage. There were other lesser domains, including those of the stables, which encompassed the royal messengers; the hunt, which cared for the dogs and birds; and the fourriers, who faced the harrowing task of moving the Court and its belongings from location to location. In addition, there were councillors, secretaries, notaries, bookkeepers, pages, apothecaries, doctors,
surgeons, musicians, poets, artists, jewelers, architects, bodyguards, archers, quartermasters, sumpters, and squires.

And these were only those who were in the King’s employ. There were also those who attended his family—his sister, children, and cousins—as well as the foreign dignitaries and ambassadors, and all of the King’s friends whose boon companionship pleased him.

I left Marseille in a sumptuously appointed carriage and turned to look at the winding caravan of wagons, horses, and heavy-laden mules behind me. Twenty thousand mounts, five hundred dogs, and as many hawks and falcons, as well as a lynx and a lion, traveled with our circus. We stayed at various lodgings—mostly the châteaus of nobles happy to entertain the Crown—until we made our way into the Loire Valley.

The royal Château at Blois was magnificent and contradictory. To one side stood a red-brick castle built by François I’s pre de ces sor, Louis XII, and inherited by his daughter, Claude. It was here that Jeanne d’Arc received a blessing from the Archbishop of Reims before leading her troops into battle. Claude had been fond of the property, and when she married François—thus securing his claim to the French throne—he added a modern four-story palace.

The palace was unlike Italian palazzi. The interior apartments were connected to all other areas not by corridors but by spiraling staircases. My first few days at Blois, I was constantly short of breath, but within a week, I was running up and down the steps without a thought. The King was so fond of spiral staircases that he had a massive, dramatic one—adorned with statues, in Gothic fashion—placed outside at the building’s center.

The King’s and Queen’s apartments were on the second floor—as was, in flagrant violation of tradition, that of François’s mistress, Madame d’Etampes. The children’s apartments were all on the third floor. Persons of lesser importance lived on the ground floor, where the refectories, kitchen, and guardroom were also located. Numerous outbuildings housed cardinals, clerks, courtiers, bookkeepers, doctors, tutors, and a host of others.

Night had fallen by the time I ate and saw my trunks unpacked. I was shown my spacious apartment, next to that of Henri’s sisters, by lamplight;
the King was expected on the morrow and would take up residence in his. I was used to a bedchamber and antechamber, but now I had a bedchamber, an antechamber, a garderobe large enough to hold all my clothes as well as a sleeping servant, and a cabinet, a small, private office. On the brick over my bedroom fireplace was the golden image of a salamander—King François’s personal symbol—and beneath it, the motto
Notrisco al buono, stingo el reo, “
I feed off the good fire and extinguish the bad.”