The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine De Medici (38 page)

“Catherine . . .” Henri’s tone held both disbelief and dawning amazement.

“I have tried . . .” I faltered as a wave of emotion broke over me. “All my life, I have tried to understand what I must do to protect you. It’s what God means me to do. So don’t scoff, and don’t push me away.”

“Catherine,” he said, this time gently. He could see that I was distraught and took my hand.

Tears slid down my cheeks, though my voice remained calm. “That’s why I wanted Ruggieri to come to France—to save you from evil, not to bring it—and that’s why I’m so curious to know what Luca Guorico told you. I would die for you, Henri.”

I did not say,
I have already killed.

We were silent a long time—I, struggling to gather myself, he, clasping my hand.

“Then we will not send Monsieur Ruggieri away, since his presence comforts you,” he said at last, “though I do not believe in his methods.” He took the folded letter from his belt and handed it to me. “Because you are so desperate to help, I will not hide this from you.”

I unfolded it with an unpleasant thrill.

Your most greatly esteemed Majesty,

My name is Luca Guorico. Her Majesty Donna Caterina may have told you that I am a horoscopist who focuses my art on determining the fate of illustrious persons.

After studying your stars, I must warn you urgently to avoid all combat in an enclosed space. Duels and single combat present the greatest peril, and could lead to a mortal blow to the head.

This danger remains constant but will be magnified greatly a few years hence, in your fortieth year, as the result of an evil aspect made by Mercury to Mars as the latter
moves through your ascendant, Leo the royal lion. I warn you in hopes that foreknowledge and caution will allow you to survive this treacherous period. This is quite possible, for my investigation has revealed that you survived an earlier period of comparable risk without incident.

May God bless and guide you and see you safely through all hazards.

For a few moments, I sat with the letter open on my lap before turning to Henri, who now sat beside me.

“Promise me that you will never go to war again,” I begged.

His brows lifted. “Of course I’m going. I
must
lead the troops. Didn’t you read the letter carefully? War doesn’t occur in enclosed areas, and I’m not challenging anyone to a duel.”

The same anguished helplessness I felt in the dream tugged at me. Henri was so close, yet there was nothing I could do to keep him there beside me; he would—like my mother, my father, Aunt Clarice, and King François—slip too easily from life into shadowy memory.

“War is unpredictable. What happens if you find yourself in a building, faced by a single assailant?” I demanded. “If I lose you . . .”

“Catherine,” he soothed. “We’ve only just found each other, after all this time. I promise that you won’t lose me. Not now.”

“Then take a talisman with you.”

“I need no such thing,” he answered gently. “If God sent you to protect me, then He will hear you. Pray for me, and that will be enough to bring me home safely.”

He would not listen when I tried to explain that God did not hear my prayers.

Before he left for the war in the northeast, Henri appointed me his regent. With the country mine to run, I discovered that I had both the taste and the aptitude for it. My memory was keen, and I enjoyed the exercise of recalling each word uttered by Henri’s advisers. Coupled with my gentler, more diplomatic method of governing, this talent won me support and admiration. I pored over each letter Henri or his generals sent from the front and made sure that funds and supplies were constantly available for them; I even grew bold enough to offer military advice.

Victory came quickly; within months, the towns of Toul, Verdun, and Metz were ours. My husband distinguished himself in battle, as did François of Guise, and the campaign further solidified the friendship between them.

Henri left for war in late January and returned to my arms in late June, brimming with optimism. By August I was pregnant again. This time I did not remain sequestered in my chambers or the nursery but sat in on cabinet meetings with Henri and his ministers. Montmorency and Diane soon learned that I was no longer the silent, invisible Queen.

Henri began to spend more time with the First Prince of the Blood, Antoine de Bourbon. I approved heartily of this, for Bourbon despised the Guises. He was also a Protestant again by that time, as was his wife, Jeanne.
I hoped that Henri’s relationship with the man would soften his prejudice against non-Catholics.

While Henri spent more time with Bourbon, I spent a good deal of time with Jeanne. She assisted the midwife at the birth of my daughter, whom I named Marguerite, in honor of Jeanne’s mother, though we all called her Margot. In the difficult hours before Margot’s birth, Jeanne confessed that she had just learned of her own pregnancy.

My dark-eyed, dark-haired Margot, as precocious and stubborn as her own mother, was born on the thirteenth of May, 1553. Jeanne’s son, Henri of Navarre—named to honor both his grandfather and my husband—was born seven months later, on the thirteenth of December. I remained beside Jeanne throughout her labor, just as she had stayed with me throughout mine. And when I first held her squalling newborn son, love pierced me as keenly as if he were my own.

Even then, I believed the two children were linked by fate. When Jeanne’s father died a year later, leaving her Queen of Navarre, she chose to remain in France for her son’s education. Little Henri, or Navarre, as I sometimes called him, grew up at the Court and spent his days playing with my children in the royal nursery and sharing their tutors. He and Margot became especially attached to each other.

For many years, I would not understand just how intricately their fates were intertwined, or how deeply both were bound to the coming bloody tide.

This is how a dozen years of my marriage passed. As I lived them, I perceived them to be difficult and tumultuous, but perspective has revealed them to be sweet and halcyon compared with the evil that followed. I was deeply relieved that Henri did not return to war, though he and Emperor Charles remained enemies. Shortly after Margot’s birth, a new queen ascended the throne of England: Mary Tudor, champion of Catholicism, determined to purge her country of the Protestant blight. Perhaps we should have been glad of the fact, but when Mary wed King Philip, uniting the thrones of England with Spain to create an invincible military giant, I grew uneasy.

Three years after Margot’s birth, I became pregnant again. My stomach
grew so distended that I soon realized I carried more than one child. A strange dread settled over me during my confinement. I had labored hard to forget my crimes, but the memory of them began to overwhelm me. My fear was underscored by an event in the last moments of my last pregnancy.

Henri had continued his father’s tradition of collecting a copy of each book printed in France; my librarians knew to bring works of interest to my attention.

Such was the case with a volume titled
Les Prophéties,
written by Michel de Nostredame—in the Latin, Nostradamus—a physician renowned for saving victims of plague. Monsieur de Nostredame’s work consisted of hundreds of verses—four-lined quatrains—each of which contained a prophecy. The references were oblique, arcane. I understood little of what I read until I reached the thirty-fifth quatrain.

On a warm night in June, I was lying propped up against the pillows in my bed, uncomfortable and sleepless because of the weight in my belly and the relentless kicking of two pairs of little legs. I had chosen to give birth at the Château at Blois, and that night, the dank air rose from the Loire River, bringing with it the stink of decay. I had trouble balancing the heavy book on my swollen stomach and was about to give up the effort when I turned the page, and my gaze fell upon these lines:

The young lion will overcome the old, in
A field of combat in a single fight. He will
Pierce his eyes in a golden cage, two
Wounds in one, he then dies a cruel death.

I sat up with a gasp, recalling the words penned by the great astrologer Luca Guorico:

I must warn you urgently to avoid all combat in an enclosed space. Duels and single combat present the greatest peril, and could lead to a mortal blow to the head.

Fear wrung my midsection like a sponge. I cried out at the sudden physical spasm and let the heavy book slide off my lap.

The labor of childbirth had always gone easily for me, but the agony that
gripped me now was malicious, dire and unknown. I climbed out of the bed, but when my foot touched the floor, pain felled me.

I went down shrieking for Madame Gondi, for Jeanne, and, most of all, for Henri.

I am stout in the face of pain, but this labor was so cruel and protracted that I thought I would die before the first infant was born.

Jeanne sat beside the birthing chair, and Henri visited me at the beginning of the labor, gripping my hands when the pains worsened and encouraging me throughout the long morning and into the heat of the summer afternoon. We pretended that the added agony I experienced augured nothing ominous, that it was only because there were two children instead of one. My longest previous labor had endured ten hours—but when ten hours had passed, then twelve, without progress, our anxiety increased. When the evening lamp was lit, I was no longer able to maintain a cheerful front. Henri paced helplessly until I grew peevish and told him to leave. Once he had gone, I lost myself to the pain, barely aware of Jeanne’s soft, perfumed hands bearing cool compresses, of the midwife’s whispered instructions. I fainted, and woke to find that I had been spirited from the wooden chair to my own bed.

The first infant, Victoire, arrived at dawn, almost thirty-six hours after the initial excruciating spasm. She was weak and grey, with a sickly mewl, but her arrival brought joy to Jeanne and the midwife, who thought that this signaled the end of my travail. But her birth brought only a glimmer of relief before the savage pain returned.

I slid into delirium. I cried out for Aunt Clarice, for Sister Niccoletta, for my dead mother; I cried out for Ruggieri. I must have called out for Jeanne, for when I came to myself, she was clasping my sweaty palm.

The hairline part at the center of the velvet drapes glowed with dying orange light. I felt the midwife’s rapid breath upon my legs, smelled a familiar perfume, heard soft weeping. I wanted to tell Jeanne that I was going to name the second girl for her but found I could not speak.

The lamplight caught the curve of Jeanne’s cheek, turned the crimped curls at her temple into a glowing halo. Her voice was stern, as if she were explaining a hard fact to an unreasonable child.

“Catherine, the midwife must remove the baby now, to save your life. Squeeze my hand, and yell if you must. It will be over quickly.”

I gripped Jeanne’s hand. The midwife’s deft hands added to my anguish; I ground my teeth when her fingers found the unborn child inside me and remained silent when I felt that child turned.

The midwife’s hands came together inside me, clutching little limbs. They moved swiftly, sharply; I heard—no,
felt
—the crack of tiny bones and screamed at the realization that the little girl was still alive, and they were maiming her, killing her, in order to save me. I flailed and shrieked and thrashed against those who wept as they held me down.

I wailed at Jeanne that God was punishing me because I had purchased my children with the darkest magic. I begged her to let me die instead, to put things right; I begged her to go to Ruggieri, to have him undo the spell.

I remember nothing more.

The infant Jeanne died at birth as a result of the wounds inflicted by the midwife. I hovered in feverish limbo for two weeks, then rose from my bed to learn that Victoire, the twin who had survived, was dying.

I went to my tiny, gasping daughter. For three days I sat in the nursery, holding her in my arms, staring into her pinched yellow face, feeling as though my heart were melting and spilling out all my love onto her. I whispered apologies into her perfect little ear; I begged for forgiveness. She breathed her last with her father standing close beside us.

I sat motionless by the infant’s body for hours. No one, not even the King, disturbed me.

In my sorrow, I did not see the pane of light that appeared when the nursery door was cracked open; I did not hear the feather-light tread upon the marble. But I sensed someone beside me and looked down at my elbow to see a little boy plucking my sleeve. It was Henri of Navarre, then two and a half years old, his round head covered with dark curls, his little brow furrowed with worry.

“
Tante
Catherine,” he lisped. “
Chére Tante,
don’t be sad.”