The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine De Medici (63 page)

Coligny, damn him, knew that we had no choice. I turned to Charles, floundering about for the right words to make him refuse the Admiral without revealing my guilt. There were none.

Charles waved dismissively at Edouard, at me. “I’ll call for you when we are done.”

I could do nothing save take Tavannes’s proffered arm and, with Edouard flanking me on the other side, turn my back to Coligny.

We took three steps away from the bed and were obliged to stop. A giant with an arquebus slung by a strap over his shoulder stepped into my path and stared down at me, his tiny eyes full of loathing.

“Make way for Her Majesty,” Tavannes snapped.

When the giant did not yield, the old Marshal shoved him. Edouard immediately filled the gap, and we managed to push our way forward a few more steps—men in wrinkled black linen encircled us and began to close in. They did not genuflect to us royals; their glares revealed hatred, and their hands rested upon the hilts of their swords.

One of them—a haggard man of thirty—approached us. He, too, had his hand upon the hilt of his long sword, and as he neared, Edouard tensed beside me. I touched the Dauphin’s arm in warning, lest he draw out a hidden dagger: We were outmanned and would quickly lose any fight.

The Huguenot’s face was thin and sharp as a hatchet; when he spoke, his red chin beard wagged.

“There will be Hell to pay for what you have done,” he hissed. His breath was so fetid, I turned from it.

Someone behind him added, “God punishes murders.”

A different man, with a goiter the size of a tennis ball on his neck, stepped
forward to stand beside the red-bearded soldier. “We don’t need God.” His eyes were blue, like Coligny’s, and just as mad. “
We
will strike them down.”

He swung an arquebus from his shoulder and nestled the stock against his chest. He took a step closer and touched the elbow of my sleeve with the barrel.

Now they will kill us
, I thought. I was furious with myself for not realizing how dangerous the situation had become.

“Mannerless bastard!” Edouard shouted. “Touch the Queen’s person again, and I will kill you!”

“Do you want war?” the red-bearded soldier hissed. “We will give you war!”

The owner of the arquebus cried out, “You lure us to your Catholic city, so you can slaughter us like swine! But we will kill you first!”

“I married my daughter to one of your own,” I countered haughtily. “How dare you suggest that we would harm the Admiral! The King loves him as a father!”

My voice must have carried. I heard Navarre’s shout; the men dropped their hostile gazes to the floor and withdrew as he hurried to my side.

“Madame la Reine,”
he asked, with disturbing formality, “did they harm you?”

Edouard pointed. “
He
touched her with the barrel of his arquebus!”

Navarre turned to the implicated man and drew his arm back to slap him; I caught his upraised arm.

“Don’t punish him,” I said. “Feelings are running high enough.” I looked back in Coligny’s direction. “Please,” I said to Navarre, “will you escort me back to the Admiral?”

When I arrived, Charles was sitting on the edge of the bed, his jaw set, his brows knit in a formidable frown. He looked up at me, his eyes narrowed with mistrust.

“Your Majesty,” I said softly, “Admiral Coligny is surely exhausted. We must let him rest.”

Charles was ready to contradict me, but Doctor Paré, who had been standing at the head of the bed, spoke up suddenly.

“Yes,” he said. He caught my gaze and immediately looked away, as if afraid his own might be too revealing. “It is difficult enough for him, with all
his men here. It would be best, Your Majesty, if he were able to be quiet for a time.”

“Very well,” Charles said, with sullen reluctance, then turned to Coligny. “But I shall return soon,
mon père
. God keep you in the interim. You have all my prayers and my love.”

“As you have mine,” I said to the Admiral.

Coligny gazed up at me. He was trembling, his brow beaded with sweat, but I saw triumph in his eyes.

Given the hostility in the streets, Edouard sent one of our guards to fetch a carriage. Navarre and Condé remained at the Hôtel de Béthizy, while the King, Anjou, Tavannes, and I rode back to the Louvre at a slow pace, our carriage surrounded by the guards who had accompanied us on our walk to Coligny’s lodgings.

Charles remained darkly silent, refusing to look at his brother or me, though we tried several times to draw him into our conversation.

Exasperated, I finally demanded, “What, precisely, did Admiral Coligny say to you that has upset you so?”

He lowered his face, taut with rage. “Only that I cannot trust either of you. Only that you wish to subvert my will, to use me as it suits your purposes.”

Edouard flared. “Have you considered, my brother, that he says such things because
he
cannot be trusted? Because
he
means to subvert your will, by using you to further his insane war? He speaks ill of us because he knows we want to protect you from his cold-blooded manipulation.”

“Enough!” Charles shouted. “Enough lies, lies, lies!” He clapped his hands over his ears.

By then we were slowing on our approach to the palace. Suddenly, one of the horses shrieked; I heard the drivers’ curses, followed by a furious, deafening clatter of hail on the carriage walls and roof.

Outside the window, a hundred black-clad protesters stood at the northern gate, some pelting rocks at us, others waving swords and screaming at the Swiss soldiers who now stood, two men deep and armed with arquebuses, around the Louvre’s walls. A fresh contingent of Swiss had marched into the
street to form a human barricade. Just beyond them, a few dozen peasants—ragged, starving men with pitchforks, shovels, stones—had gathered.

Death to heretics!
the distant peasants screamed, while the Huguenots at the gate cried out:

Murderers! Assassins!

We are striking back, and will kill!

Another volley of rocks struck the carriage; one sailed in through the window like a shot and buried itself in the padded seat beside Charles, abruptly checking his anger.

“Jesus,” he whispered.

“So it begins,” I said, staring out at the raging crowds, remembering Ruggieri’s final words to me.

It may already be too late
.

Under a hail of projectiles—stones, bricks, rotting garbage—our carriage dashed inside the palace gates, thanks to the guards who held back the onrush of angry Huguenots. We were met immediately by one of Edouard’s commanders, who reported that “disturbances” had erupted in several neighborhoods, provoked not only by outraged Huguenots but by fearful Catholics convinced that they must rid themselves of a growing threat. Edouard responded by deploying more troops to key locations throughout the city, ostensibly to keep peace.

I was shaking when I returned to my apartments but insisted on going down that evening for a public supper an hour after the sun had set. The Duke of Anjou was preoccupied with his commanders, and Charles so distraught he took to his bed; Margot had joined her husband at Coligny’s bedside. I went to dine alone.

It was a tense affair. In light of the Admiral’s misfortune, no entertainment was offered that evening; the dozen nobles who had gathered were intense, brooding, silent. In the absence of conversation, the clatter of the spoon and knife, the clink of the glass, echoed in the still chamber. I forced myself to chew, to swallow, to appear as though I enjoyed a meal grown bitter.

As I stared down hopelessly at a pair of freshly delivered roasted doves, a shout shattered the silence.

“Madame la Reine!”

A noble I had often seen at Court but whose name I could not recall—he was a baron, I believe, and a Huguenot—stood three arms’ lengths away from my table. My solitary guard had caught his elbow, but the baron—a giant, tall and broad as an oak, with a great long face framed by a streaming cloud of white hair—would not be moved. He did not genuflect; he did not bow. His large yellow teeth were bared, but not in a smile. He shouted my name as though it were an accusation.

“We will not rest, do you understand?” His face was very red against his white hair. “We will not rest until the murderers are brought to justice. We will not rest until they hang!”

My guard tried vainly to push him back. “Show the Queen respect, you cur!”

“I do not bow,” the baron announced, “to a bloodstained Crown! Enjoy your supper while you can, Madame!”

He shook off the guard’s grip at last and, turning his back rudely to me, stalked out of the dining chamber. No one followed him; no one rushed to my defense or offered apologies. The few nobles standing in attendance murmured among themselves, then turned their eyes to me.

I stared down at the little corpses on my plate and pushed them away. I rose and left the chamber slowly, regally, on unsteady legs.

Instinctively I went in search of Edouard. He was just leaving the war room, on the ground floor beneath the King’s apartments, after a meeting with Marshals Tavannes and Cossé, and the city’s Provost of Marchands. As my son crossed the threshold, our gazes met; his expression was as mine must have been—stricken—and I knew at that instant that we had finally arrived at the same conclusion.

He stopped in the doorway and, when I approached, took my hand and guided me inside the chamber, then closed the door softly behind us. The lamp had been snuffed; he gestured in the darkness for me to take a chair at
the long conference table. I sat and watched as he struck the match and held it to the wick, which caught with a flare.

“It is worse than I thought,” I said huskily. “I have been called a murderess to my face, here, in the palace. We aren’t safe, Edouard.”

“Maman,”
he said. He was trying to gather himself, to voice difficult words. “
Maman . . .”

In the end, he could not utter them but set a piece of paper in my hands—a missive penned in an unfamiliar masculine script.

Strike at dawn Monday
, it began,
when Notre-Dame first marks the hour. We will strike inside the palace at the same instant, sparing Charles—as a public abdication would serve us—but not his mother and brother, as they are a danger to—

I let go a soft cry and pressed my fingertips to my lips. The letter fluttered to the table and stayed there. I turned my face from it; I wanted suddenly to retch.

Edouard brought his face close to mine. “Written by Navarre,
Maman
, to his commander in the field. The provost intercepted it at the city gate. Our scouts say that five thousand Huguenots are on the march toward Paris and will encamp outside her city walls on Sunday night.”

“No,”
I said and closed my eyes.

He said nothing more, only hovered next me; like the lamp, his unseen face emanated warmth. In the room’s heat, the smell of orange blossoms grew suffocating. Reason abandoned me. I had loved Navarre since his birth, and trusted him as I would a son; now, he had betrayed me. Whose blood had he seen in his visions? Had it been my children’s, and my own?

I opened my eyes to stare down at my hands, at the ring infused with the power of the Gorgon’s Head.
The star Algol, which the Arabs call
ra’s al-Ghul,
the Demon’s Head, and the Chinese call the Piled-Up Corpses
.

Two hours before dawn on the twenty-fourth of August, the star Algol will rise in the sign of Taurus . . . and precisely oppose warlike Mars. . . . France has never been in greater danger; nor have you
.

This was Friday night, the twenty-second.

I thought of the huge entourage Navarre had brought with him to the wedding—most of them housed here, at the Louvre. Military commanders, captains, generals, all of his former comrades-in-arms—three hundred men.

“I welcomed him into my home,” I whispered, “and he brought his army
with him, in open daylight. Coligny may truly want his war in the Spanish Netherlands, but Navarre sent him here only to distract us. They are lying in wait for us. They mean to kill us in our beds.”

“We must stop them,” my son said softly.

I looked up at him. Edouard’s eyes, infinitely black, glittered in the lamplight. I had worked so hard for peace, not knowing that we were already at war.

“We must strike first,” I said.

I spent the next few hours with Edouard in the Council chamber, planning the attack. I recruited him to send a discreet messenger to the young Duke of Guise, directing him to gather men for an attack on Coligny’s lodgings at the Hôtel de Béthizy. Coligny must be assassinated, and every one of his commanders killed. With my guidance, Edouard wrote the secret orders for the Swiss troops who protected the palace and the Scots who guarded the King: At the same instant that Guise moved against Coligny, our soldiers would attack the Huguenots sleeping at the Louvre.