The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine De Medici (47 page)

The room was vast, high-ceilinged, and empty, all of which conspired to give the sense of infinite, uncharted darkness. At its center, Ruggieri waited in the heart of a large circle. Candles flickered faintly at each of the four cardinal directions—one of them just behind a low, silk-draped altar, which held a small wooden birdcage and a human skull, its crown sawed away to admit a censer. Smoke streamed from its eye sockets, perfuming the air with the resinous, sacred smell of frankincense.

He moved to the edge of the pentagram but no further; a double-edged dagger glinted in his left hand.

“The circle has already been cast. Come.” He pointed at a spot just outside the black perimeter. “Stand there and do as I tell you.”

I went to it and watched as the magician wielded the dagger, touching the tip to floor at the circle’s edge and lifting it up to carve an invisible archway just wide enough to permit me passage.

“Enter now,” he whispered. “Quickly!”

I hurried through, and he performed the reverse motion swiftly, sealing the gap.

Inside the circle, the darkness was dancing, alive. Ruggieri sheathed his dagger and returned its center. The pale blur of his hand moved swiftly, and I found myself suddenly staring at an apparition: a tiny woman, dressed and veiled in black, her white face haggard with grief.

I reached toward her; my fingers brushed cold metal and recoiled. It was a large oval mirror upon a stand, draped in black until that instant. Ruggieri set aside the cloth and pulled a stool in front of the steel mirror.

“Sit,” he commanded, and I obeyed.

He moved to the altar and took a white pigeon from the cage. It sat trustingly in his hand until he reached out to wrest its neck suddenly, savagely. The dagger flashed; the pigeon’s head fell to the floor as blood gushed onto white feathers. Ruggieri lifted a quill from the altar and, dipping it into the bloody stump, painstakingly formed strange, barbarous letters upon the steel. Red sigils soon covered my reflection, until the mirror was almost filled; he set down his gruesome inkwell and quill to stand behind me.

“Catherine,” he said. “Catherine . . .” It was a chant, musical and strangely sensual. “You wish to know your sons’ fates,” he sang. “Let the mirror now reveal the future kings of France.”

Bitterly weary from grief, I closed my eyes and leaned back against him, passive and on the verge of slumber. My breathing grew deep and languorous; I wanted never to stir.

“Catherine,” he hissed.

I opened my eyes with a start. I was sitting unsupported on the stool, and Ruggieri had vanished. I called his name, but no answer came—only the gentle trill of the surviving bird. The slab of polished steel revealed two shining candles at the circle’s edge, nothing more.

The mirror suddenly filmed as if censed with smoke. As I stared into it, a countenance formed in the mists. I thought at first that the magician had come to stand behind me again, but the face was not his. The features were blurred and translucent, the specter of a dark-haired boy with dark eyes.

“François?” I whispered. The features, the cant of the head and shoulders, could well have been those of my eldest son.

The face gave no answer but grew slowly incandescent. It pulsed once, dazzling as fireworks, then quickly dimmed.

The mirror darkened and began to swirl. As the mists cleared a second time, a face appeared, this one in profile but again blurred and indistinct. It, too, was of a boy, round-cheeked and sullen, with an ugly red mark on his upper lip: my second son, Charles.

Let the mirror now reveal the future kings of France.

François, my poor frail boy, was doomed. I pressed my hands to my eyes in an effort to hold back tears. Ruggieri had been right; I had not wanted to know.

When I parted my fingers, Charles’s countenance was pulsating with
light. Bright and dark, bright and dark alternated until I began to count the fluctuations: four, five, six . . . Were these increments of time? Years? If so, how many had I missed?

A black tear trickled down Charles’s ghostly cheek; I pressed my fingertips to the mirror’s cold surface. Dark liquid rushed from the top of the mirror downward, spilling like a black curtain to blot out the sight of my son. I pulled my hand away and spread my fingers—sticky, red, smelling of iron.

At once, the bloody curtain vanished. I let go a sob at the realization that Charles’s face had also disappeared; within the mirror, clouds roiled. A third face formed, one bearded and handsome, very like my husband’s.

“My precious eyes,” I gasped. Of all my children, Edouard was most suited to be King. I began to count the oscillations but did not get far: The bloody veil soon fell again.

The steel flashed as if reflecting the sun. Dazzled, I cried out and covered my eyes.

When I looked again, the mirror was clear, unclouded—a mirror, nothing more. I peered into it and saw my own reflection clearly.

Above my right shoulder hung the sun-browned face of a little boy, perhaps six years old. It was solid, not ghostly, with close-cropped chestnut curls and large eyes—green, like those of his grandmother Marguerite of Navarre, like those of his mother, Jeanne.

I whirled about, the stool skittering beneath me as I struggled to my feet. The boy stood near the door—a real boy, flesh and blood, mouth gaping at the sight of me.

“You there!” I shouted and started as a strong hand gripped my arm above the elbow. The boy dashed out the door and disappeared.

“Don’t go after him,” Ruggieri warned. “Don’t break the circle.”

“But I know him!” I said. “Henri of Navarre, Jeanne’s son. What is he doing here? He should be in Paris!”

“It’s only a groom,” Ruggieri countered, “from the stables. A curious boy who needs a beating, nothing more. Let him go. We must close the circle properly.”

“No,”
I said. “Not yet. I must ask the King what this means. My husband—I know that you can summon him.”

Ruggieri sighed wearily and stared at the candle flame behind the altar and the smoke that streamed up from the skull.

“All right then,” he said at last. He took the second pigeon from the cage and wrung its neck, then wiped the mirror clean with his sleeve.

“Give me your hand,” he said. I balked until he added, “He knows you, Catherine. Your blood will draw him the fastest.”

I surrendered my hand and did not flinch when the blade stung the tip of my finger. The magician milked it a bit, then pressed it to the mirror’s cold surface.

Ruggieri sat upon the stool and began to breathe rhythmically. Soon his head lolled, and his eyelids trembled.

“Henri,” he whispered hoarsely. It was an invitation, a plea. “Henri de Valois . . .”

His eyes closed, and his body sagged upon the stool; his limbs began to twitch. Abruptly he straightened, though his head lolled forward, as though he were sleeping. The dagger flashed again: The pigeon’s severed head softly struck the floor as the magician’s left hand fumbled for the quill.

I watched, transfixed, as Ruggieri dipped the nib into the pigeon’s bloody stump and wrote across the mirror’s gleaming surface. The script was my husband’s.

Catherine
For love of you I do this for love of you this time I come

Ruggieri’s hand ceased its spasmodic efforts and hovered above the steel—waiting for a question.

“Our sons,” I whispered. “Will they all die without heirs?”

A pause; Ruggieri’s fingers trembled.

My one true heir will rule

“One heir?” I pressed. “François alone will rule?”

The quill steadied and did not move. François was sickly; if he was the only Valois heir, what was to become of his brothers?

“Why the blood?” I demanded. “Why was there blood on Charles’s face, on Edouard’s? Why did Navarre appear? Is it because he will kill them?”

Destroy what is closest to your heart

“Should I kill Navarre first?” I whispered. “Before he takes their throne?”

Destroy what is closest to your heart

“No!” I said. “I cannot . . .” I cradled my face in my hands and did not look up until Ruggieri gripped my shoulders and shook them.

“Catherine!” His voice was harsh. “I have undone the circle. We must go.”

“I can’t do it,” I sobbed. “I cannot kill Navarre, too. A sweet, innocent boy . . .”

“Navarre never appeared.” Ruggieri was adamant. “I saw no one but a stableboy, a black Ethiopian, with straw in his hair.”

“I thought that I was strong enough,” I moaned. “But I am not strong enough for this.”

“The future is not fixed,” the magician said urgently. “It’s fluid, like the ocean, and you, Catherine, control the tide.”

I stared up at him. “A tide of blood. Tell me how to stop it, Cosimo. Tell me how to save my sons.”

My plea disarmed him. For an instant, his composure fled, revealing infinite tenderness, helplessness, pain. Stricken, he reached unsteady fingers toward my cheek, then withdrew them and gathered himself.

“Come,
Madame la Reine,
” he said softly and took my hand.

I returned to Paris in time to see my daughter Elisabeth off on her long journey to the welcoming arms of her new husband, King Philip of Spain. I wept as I kissed her farewell, knowing what awaited her: the loneliness of finding oneself surrounded by strangers, the frustration of wrestling with a foreign tongue. As her carriage rode away, I wrote her the first of many letters, so that she should not have to wait long before receiving a reminder of home.

During my absence, Charles of Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, had been busy trying to put France’s financial affairs in order. The recent wars had left the country near bankruptcy—and the Cardinal, arrogant fool, decided that the best solution was to refuse to pay the French soldiers returning at last from battle. That, combined with his energetic persecution of Protestants, left him and his brother despised by the common folk.

Protestant leaders had gathered near the port of Hugues and birthed a plot to overthrow the Guises and replace them with the flighty Antoine de Bourbon. The Cardinal’s face was livid as he relayed this to me. “Those damnable Huguenots,” he said, “will not stop until they have overthrown the Crown itself.”

Worst of all, François’s health had failed in my absence. The young king’s ear pained him constantly now and exuded an evil smell; his mottled cheeks
were covered with boils. Terrified, I consulted with his doctors and agreed to whisk him from the city’s oppressive heat to the Château at Blois.

By the time we boarded the coach, François was so miserable that he laid his head in my lap and groaned pitifully the entire way—pausing three times, when we signaled the driver to stop, to lean out the window and retch.

When we arrived at Blois, the Guises carried François to his bed while I sent for the doctors. I sat at my stricken son’s bedside next to Mary—she still in a queen’s white mourning, her regal composure stripped away to reveal a frightened young woman. Her affection for her young husband was not entirely feigned; she clung to his limp hand and murmured reassurances. He was fifteen years old—an age at which his father had been a man—yet the body that lay prostrate upon the bed was a child’s, narrow-shouldered and spindly, with cheeks that bore no trace of a beard.

“François!” she begged. “Speak to me, please . . .”

He opened his eyes a slit. “D-don’t m-make me,” he stammered. “It hurts . . .” And he closed them again.

Charles and Edouard entered the room, their eyes wide with uncertainty as they solemnly studied their eldest brother.

Homely and hot-tempered, with a wheezing cough that had plagued him from infancy, Charles turned to me and asked, in a loud, heartless tone: “Will he die, then? And will I be King?”

François’s eyelids flickered. Mary let go her husband’s hand and leaned past me to slap Charles’s childishly plump cheek.

“Horrid boy!” she exclaimed. “What a dreadful, ugly thing to say!”

Charles’s face contorted with rage. “It’s Edouard’s fault!” he bellowed at his younger brother, who was handsome, intelligent, tall, and endearing—everything Charles was not. “He told me what to say!” He whirled on Edouard, who cringed in my arms. “You want François to die. And me, too. You can’t wait until we are both dead, so that you can have your way in everything!”

“It’s a lie,” Edouard whispered. “François, forgive him . . .” He began weeping softly.

I handed the boys over to their governess, with strict instructions that they were not to come back until I sent for them.

Mary and I spent the rest of the day and night with François. Each of us
gripped one of his hands and held it tightly while the doctor poured warm oil of lavender into his ear; François thrashed and howled piteously.