The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine De Medici (40 page)

“Maman!”
six-year-old Charles bellowed rudely, so excited that he had forgotten his manners. “
Maman,
Margot was almost bitten by a snake!”

My shock was genuine. “A snake? Where is it now?”

“Gone,” Edouard said, as I deflated with relief. “Margot climbed onto that pile of rocks”—he pointed—“and while she was standing there, Henri told her to get down, because the snake was near her foot, ready to bite her!”

“Henri!” I exclaimed. “How good of you to save Margot!”

Little Navarre blushed and turned back to his mother’s arms. Jeanne gave him a squeeze and beamed proudly. “He’s a brave, good boy,” she said.

I turned to give Margot a hug and listen to her excited rendition of the story; when she was done, Edouard whispered in my ear.

“The snake was under the rocks,
Maman.
Little Henri couldn’t have seen it. None of us could see it until Henri took a stick and pushed the rock away. But he knew exactly where it was. He told Margot to get away from it.”

I smiled indulgently, certain that I was listening to a child’s embellished tale. “How amazing.”

“Henri sees things,” Edouard hissed. “Things that aren’t there.”

“Very good,” I said, my tone dismissive. I signaled for the governess to collect the children and distract them so that I might speak to Jeanne privately.

Jeanne looked after her son with a faint smile. “The snake was more frightened than the children, I think; it escaped at the first opportunity. My Henri must have glimpsed it coiled beneath the rock.”

“Monsieur de Nostredame,” I said. “What did he say?”

“What?” She blinked. “Oh, is that his name?” Her tone grew amused.
“He fancies himself a soothsayer. I was offended at first by his forwardness, but he was pleasant enough.”

“Yes,” I said, impatient, “but what did he tell you?”

She gave a little laugh. “He made the somber pronouncement that I had given birth to a king. And I said, ‘But Monsieur, I am Queen of Navarre—so of course my son shall one day be King.’ It was all rather funny. What a silly little man.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. What a silly little man.”

Monsieur de Nostredame spent one night at Blois. His carriage left at dawn, and when I rose from my bed later that morning, I found that he had left me a quatrain, scrawled in a looping hand:

One skein still runs true
Restore it, and avert the rising tide of evil
Break it, and France herself will perish
Drowned in the blood of her own sons

I was sorely tempted to cast it into the fire; my heart had already been shattered by the deaths of the twins, and Nostredame had dared to pierce it again.

Instead, I refolded it and put it in a compartment hidden in the wainscoting on my cabinet wall.

Those who have never lost a child at or before birth think that the grief would be less than for an older child or an adult, but they fail to account for the peculiar ache of loving someone one has never known. I cloistered myself in the months after the twins’ deaths, refusing to hold audiences or ride on the hunt or even to eat with my family. When my husband asked whether he might resume his evening visits to my chamber, I produced excuses until he stopped asking. I endured the regular company of no one but my necessary ladies, and my friend, Jeanne.

I conferred once with Ruggieri, who could not entirely hide his jealousy that I had summoned the famous Nostredame. Even if Monsieur de Nostredame had foreseen my husband’s death, Ruggieri said, the future was malleable. The seer was wrong: God indeed heard prayers. I did not have the heart to ask him whether the Devil heard them, too.

My husband’s longtime nemesis, the old and ailing Emperor Charles, unofficially abdicated in January 1556, leaving his brother Ferdinand to rule the German countries and his son, Philip, to rule Spain, Naples, and the Low Countries. I was happy to hear the news, thinking it would bring peace.

But war came in my husband’s thirty-ninth year. One of Philip’s viceroys, the Duke of Alba, launched an attack on the entire southern region of Campania in Italy. Alba’s army secured the area with startling speed and began marching toward Rome.

The new Pope, Paul IV, remembered the horrors wrought on the Holy City by invading Imperial troops more than two decades earlier. Terrified, he begged my husband for military aid.

Henri acquiesced, and sent François of Guise to Campania in his stead, at the head of a large army. Guise was a brilliant strategist and swore not only to protect Rome but to take Naples for France. We had great hopes that the campaign would go swiftly, but our Italian allies failed to produce either the funds or the men they had guaranteed.

We soon discovered that Alba’s attack had been part of a trap: Once we sent Guise and his army to Italy, Philip’s Imperial ally, the Duke of Savoy, invaded the region of Picardy, on France’s northeastern border with the Empire.

Henri sent his old friend Montmorency to lead the fight against Savoy’s invaders. Montmorency took with him his nephew, the brilliant but arrogant Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. Before leaving for Picardy, they conferred with the King and decided upon a strategy that Coligny swore could not fail.

In the final, brutal days of August, Montmorency and his men met the Imperial invaders at the French stronghold of Saint-Quentin, near the banks of the river Somme. My husband was a day’s ride away; in spite of my protests, he had insisted on being close enough to the battlefield to stay in constant touch with Montmorency. I served as the King’s regent in Paris, only two days’ ride from the front, a fact that made the citizens apprehensive.

I was at supper with Jeanne and the children when a messenger appeared at the door. Haggard and gasping from his long ride, the young officer wore an expression of total despair; before he could utter a word, I excused myself and stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind us.

“What news?” I demanded, rigid with dread.

“I come from His Majesty,” the young man gasped, and I went limp with relief.

“The King is well?” I asked.

“The King is well,” he confirmed. “But our army has suffered a terrible loss at Saint-Quentin. A third of our men were killed . . . and Constable Montmorency and his top officers have been captured and are on their way to a Spanish prison.”

I closed my eyes at the news. I grieved for the dead, but at least their suffering was over: I mourned more for Montmorency and the humiliation and torture he would now endure.

“The King,” I said. “Tell me that he does not plan to rally the troops, to lead them himself in the fight against the Duke of Savoy.”

“His Majesty is returning to Paris to confer with advisers. He has sworn to avenge this defeat.”

My legs threatened to give way; I pressed a hand to the wall and leaned heavily against it. “Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you . . .”

I heard only that Henri was coming home to Paris—to me. Tears of relief stung my eyes; I believed, foolishly, that my husband would never return to the battlefield and would be spared.

I did not know, then, that Montmorency’s imprisonment would bring about the very thing I most feared.

King Philip of Spain was not the brilliant strategist his father had been. He should have ordered his troops to march directly to Paris, which they could easily have captured; instead, he ordered his men to take several small northern towns—a waste of time that worked to our advantage. Winter loomed, forcing Philip’s men to retreat.

In the interim, my Henri returned home. I scarcely saw him: He spent the entire day closeted with his advisers, discussing plans too secret to share with his wife. Henri aged quickly during those bitter months: shocks of white appeared at his temples, lines beneath his eyes. His smile, which had once come so easily, now was infrequent and haggard.

I worried at a distance. The nursery was my only distraction—and even that joy was tempered by disappointment. François was almost fourteen, the age his father and I had been when we had married—but my son was still mentally and physically a child. His sister Elisabeth, almost thirteen, seemed years older, and his fiancée, Mary, was at fifteen a brilliant, capable young woman; I did not doubt that, when François inherited the throne, Mary would rule. My second son, Charles, suffered from abscesses and other infections, but physical weakness did not stop him from exhibiting signs of madness: He had to be restrained from biting the other children viciously enough to draw blood—and, during a momentary lapse of the governess’s attention, had managed to break the neck of the children’s little spaniel with his bare hands. My husband replaced the dog with a puppy, with the caveat that it was to be locked away whenever Charles was present. Only Edouard, then six, grew to be strong and tall and kind, like his constant companion, little Navarre.

On a cold winter’s day in Paris, with iron clouds that in any other northern city might have indicated snow, I sat with Edouard and Mary and the little spaniel in my antechamber, whose tall windows looked beyond the dull, muddy trickle that was the Seine River, to the twin towers of Notre-Dame. Mary had learned to be civil to me—she had resigned herself, I think, to the
fact that I was healthy and disinclined to die soon—and began to come to my chambers to practice the art of embroidery. Edouard accompanied her that day and played nicely with the little dog, whose antics made us laugh.

On that morning, Mary and I were at work on her bridal gown—a sumptuous creation of shining silk satin in her favourite color, white. It was an odd choice for a wedding gown, especially in France, where white was the color of mourning for queens. Yet Mary stubbornly insisted on it, and I must admit that it flattered her. We were busily stitching white fleurs-de-lis on the bodice when Madame Gondi appeared in the doorway, grinning broadly.

“Madame la Reine!”
she called. “Forgive me, but you have a visitor who will not give me leave to announce him! He says that you will be overjoyed to see him.”

I frowned, unable to fathom who might be so rude. “Send him in.”

Madame Gondi stepped aside. A man strode confidently over the threshold, dramatically dressed in a blue velvet doublet cut in the Italian style, with huge sleeves of gold brocade. His head was small for his body, which perhaps explained the large plumed hat covering his riotous curls. He sported a very long black mustache—curling, like his hair—and when he saw me, he beamed broadly.

“Cat!” he cried. “Oh, Cat, how grand you look! How magnificent, Your Majesty!” He doffed his hat and swept it to one side as he bowed low. Then he rose and, spreading his arms wide, approached with the clear intention of embracing me.

I stared at him stupidly for an instant, until something in his eyes, in the curls that recalled childish ringlets, made me drop Mary’s gown and spring to my feet. “Piero! My Piero!”

We embraced, laughing and weeping, while Edouard and Mary watched, astonished. When I pulled back, I pressed my hand to his face. It was no longer plump but manly and weathered from many battles.

“Piero,” I said, in French for the children’s sake. “You were fighting in Italy, with the Duke of Guise. What brings you to Paris?”

“Your husband,” he answered, his arms still about my waist. “He has called me and Monsieur Guise to France. Things were not going so well in Italy, and so he has other plans for us.” He stopped to smile politely at
Edouard and Mary. “Are these your son and daughter? What beautiful children!”

“This is Mary, Queen of Scots,” I said, “soon to be the Dauphine.”

Piero’s hand still clutched his huge hat; he swept it dramatically across his body as he bowed very low, his head almost even with his knees. “Your Majesty,” he said. “Please forgive me for failing to be properly announced. I thought only one queen was present. Truly, you are as beautiful as everyone says you are.”

Mary, who was inclined to be sour toward strangers, giggled and tossed her head.

“And this is my son Edouard,” I said.

Edouard scrambled to his feet and executed a polite bow. The excited little dog began to bark at Piero; Edouard picked it up and shushed it.

“Ah, Your Highness,” Piero told him. “You are quite the young man now; you must make your mother very proud.”

I called for Madame Gondi to return the children to the nursery, then linked arms with my cousin and led him on a tour of the Louvre.

After we had wandered about for a bit, and our excitement abated, I asked Piero, “Has the King spoken to you yet of his military plans?”

“I’ve only just arrived,” my cousin said. “I don’t know the precise strategy, but I do know our aim.”

“And that would be?” I pressed.

Piero looked about to make sure we were alone, then said softly, “Why, to seize Calais, of course.”

“Calais!” I exclaimed, then at his shushing, quickly lowered my voice. “Piero, you’re joking!” The northern city of Calais had long been an English stronghold. It was considered impregnable, so much so that a well-known verse said