The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine De Medici (8 page)

Clarice shouted in my ear. “Stand up in the saddle, Caterina! Stand up, I won’t let you fall.”

Miraculously, I struggled to my feet, swaying. I was now almost the height of the wall next to me.

“Crawl up, child!”

I pulled myself up while Clarice pushed. In an instant, I was kneeling on the wide ledge.

“What do you see?” my aunt demanded. “Is there a carriage?”

I looked out onto the narrow Via de’ Ginori—deserted save for a peasant woman dragging two small children with her, and a motionless one-horse carriage sitting next to the curb.

“Yes,” I called to her, then shouted and waved a hand at the carriage. Slowly, the horse lifted its hooves, and the wheels began to turn. When it finally arrived, the driver pulled so close to the wall that the wheels screeched against the stone.

I looked over the roof of the stables as the gate squealed; it swung wide open as a small crowd swarmed onto the estate. A man pointed up at me and let go a shout; the crowd headed directly toward us.

The driver, dressed in rumpled, oil-stained linen, stood up in his seat and stretched out his dirty hands to me. “Jump! I’ll catch you.”

Behind me, Clarice lurched as she grabbed the wall’s edge; her panicked mount had taken a step away from the wall. I tried to pull her up but lacked the strength.

I sucked in a great deep breath and leaped. The driver caught me easily and set me down beside him, then called to Clarice. I could see only her fingers and the backs of her hands—the right one purpled and swollen—where the fine bones stood out like ivory cords.

“Hold on, Madonna, I’ll pull you over!”

Our rescuer walked to the far edge of the driver’s box until his chest was pressed against the wall. He strained but could only brush Clarice’s fingertips.

“God
help
me,” Clarice screamed, at the same time that her horse shrieked. Men shouted on the other side of the wall.

“Get her! Hold her horse!”

“Don’t let her escape!”

In desperation, the driver climbed onto the roof of the carriage and, flexing his knees, bent from his waist to reach over the ledge and catch her arms. Clarice’s good hand caught hold of him; when he straightened, her face appeared over the top of the wall.

She screamed again, in fury rather than fright; her shoulders dipped beneath the wall as the men on the other side pulled at her. “Bastards! Bastards! Let me go!”

The driver staggered and almost fell, but pulled on her with such brute force that he fell back onto the carriage roof. Aunt Clarice came tumbling with him. The driver leaned down to examine her, but she sat up and struck him with her left hand.

“Go!” she snarled. She clambered down the side of the carriage and pulled me inside to sit beside her. She was gasping and trembling with exhaustion; her hair was wild on her shoulders, and the back of her gown had been torn off, exposing her petticoat.

She leaned out the door and shouted, “Out of the city, quickly! I’ll tell you then where we’re going!”

She fell back against the seat and stared down at her injured wrist as if astonished that it had not betrayed her. Then she stared up at the dirty wooden interior; unlike me, she made no attempt to look back at the home she was leaving.

“We’ll go to Naples,” she said, “to my mother’s family. But not today. They’ll expect us to go there.” Shivering but unshaken, defeated but indomitable, she
turned her fierce gaze on me. “The Orsini will help us. This is not the end, you know. The Medici will retake Florence. We always do.”

I looked away. In the beginning, I had not wanted to take the knife, but it had drawn me like the darkness in Cosimo Ruggieri’s eyes. Now I stared down at the palm that had wielded the blade and saw that same darkness in me. I had told myself that I did it for the House of Medici; in truth, I had done it because I was curious, because I had wanted to see what it was like to kill a man.

Like Lorenzo, I learned early that I was capable of murder. And I was terrified to think where that capability might lead.

Poggio
means hill, and the villa my great-grandfather built at Poggio a Caiano rests atop a sprawling grassy prominence in the Tuscan countryside, three hours from the city. The home Lorenzo obtained in 1479 had been a plain, three-storied square with a red tile roof, but in
il Magnifico
’s hands, it became much more. He encased the ground floor by a portico with several graceful arches that opened onto the front courtyard. A staircase originated on either side of the central arch and the two curved upward to meet at the grand middle-floor entrance, where a triangular pediment rested atop six great columns in the style of a Greek temple. The structure stood majestic and alone, surrounded by gentle hills and streams and the nearby Albano mountains.

No one would think to look for us there, Aunt Clarice explained, as it lay northwest of the city, and the rebels would be searching all the roads leading south. We would spend the night there, during which she would formulate a plan that would eventually take us safely to Naples.

We rolled through the open gates, coughing from the dust, and tumbled barefoot and disheveled from the carriage to be met by a dumbstruck gardener. Exhausted though we were, our nerves would not let us rest or
eat. Her gaze distant, her mind working, my aunt paced through the formal, painstakingly groomed gardens while I dashed ahead of her in an effort to tire myself. Dove-colored clouds gathered overhead; the breeze grew cool and smelled of rain. I thought of the astonishment and reproach in the stableboy’s eyes. I had learned a fundamental truth about killing: The victim’s anguish is brief and fleeting, but the murderer’s endures forever.

I ran and ran that afternoon, but never succeeded in leaving the stableboy behind. Clarice never spoke to me of him; I honestly believe that she, lost in her efforts to transform a bleak future, had already forgotten him.

When evening came, my aunt and I shared a supper of greasy soup, then went upstairs. Clarice undressed me herself. When she undid the laces on my bodice, the smooth black stone hidden there dropped to the marble floor with a click, and the battered bit of herb followed mutely. I bent to pick them up, bracing for angry words.

“Did Ser Cosimo give you those?” my aunt asked softly.

I nodded, flushing.

Clarice nodded, too, slowly. “Keep them safe, then,” she said.

She sent me to bed while she sat just outside, in the antechamber, and laboriously penned letters by lamplight. I put the herb and gem beneath my pillow and fell asleep to the halting scratch of her quill against the paper.

Some time later, I was awakened by a wooden bang; an early summer storm had ridden in on a cold wind. A servant girl hurried into the room and closed the offending shutters to keep out the rain. I stared at the antechamber wall, where Aunt Clarice’s shadow loomed and receded as the flame danced, and listened to the shutters’ muted complaint.

My sleep, when it finally came, was troubled by dreams—not of images but of sounds: of Clarice screaming for men to let go of her skirts, of horses neighing, of rebels chanting for our downfall. I dreamt of hoofbeats and the pounding of rain, of men’s voices and the faraway roll of thunder.

Consciousness returned like a lightning strike; with a start, I realized that the drum of hoofbeats, the strident cadence of Clarice’s voice, and the lower one of men’s were not part of any dream.

I pushed myself from bed and hurried to the shuttered window. It was
low enough that I could look out easily—but the shutters were latched, and I too short to reach them. I looked about for a chair, and in that instant the door opened and a servant entered. She was not much older than I, but she was tall enough to unfasten the shutters at my impatient command and open them, then step back, her eyes enormous with fright.

I stared out. On the vast, downward-sloping lawn, two dozen men sat on horseback in four militarily precise rows, sheathed swords at their hips.

In that instant, my faith in Ruggieri’s magic crumbled. The Wing of Corvus was at best a harmless piece of jet. I would never grow up to rule; I would never grow up at all. I backed away from the window.

“Where is she?” I whispered to the girl.

“Madonna Clarice? At the front door, talking to two men. They told me to fetch you.

“She is so angry with them,” the girl continued. “She did not want them to wake you. She is swearing at them so, she will surely provoke them—” She pressed her hand to her mouth as if she was going to be sick, then forced herself to calm. “Last night, she summoned me and said that, if anything happened to her, I was to see you safely to her mother’s people.” She glanced nervously at the door. “They will come looking for you, if we don’t appear soon. But . . .”

I lifted my brows questioningly.

“But we could leave by the servants’ stairs,” she continued. “They wouldn’t see us. There are places to hide here. I think Madonna Clarice would want that.”

I expected Clarice
did
want that, and that she knew if I did not appear, the rebels would torture her in the hope of learning my whereabouts; they might well kill her. Escape seemed possible but unlikely—but my disappearance would undeniably put Clarice in terrible danger. Weighing this, I moved slowly to the bed, reached beneath the pillow, and found the hidden stone. I stared at its glassy surface, a black mirror in my palm, and saw my aunt reflected there:

Aunt Clarice, lifting me up to touch Lorenzo’s childish face. Clarice, lifting me out of the rebels’ reach, even as they tried to tear her apart. Clarice, who could well have departed with her husband and children, leaving us
heirs in rebel hands. But like her grandfather, she did not abandon those of her blood, no matter how fatally afflicted.

I placed the worthless gem upon the pillow, then pulled off the silver talisman, on its leather cord, and coiled it beside the stone. Then I looked up at the servant.

“Get my gown, please,” I said. “I will be going down to meet them.”

Images from that day are etched clearly in my memory: the long walk down the stairs, the sight of Clarice in the vestibule, a shawl tossed over her shoulders to hide the fact that a swath had been torn from the back of her gold gown. Her wrist—resting now in a sling—had left her pale with agony. Although the man she spoke to was more than a head taller and flanked by two aides of similar height, she seemed larger than them all. Gesturing sharply with her free hand, she railed as fearlessly at him as she had at Passerini the morning he came to tell her Pope Clement had been routed.

As I moved down the stairs, the man listening to her glanced up. He was intense and very quiet, and made me remember something Piero had once said, that a dog who did not bark was far more likely to bite. His hair and beard and eyes matched his new brown cloak. He was Bernardo Rinuccini, head of the rebel militia.

I remember how his eyes grew rounded at the sight of me, how Aunt Clarice’s mouth fell open as she glanced over her shoulder, stricken and profoundly speechless.

“Promise me you won’t hurt her,” I told the general, “and I will go with you.”

Rinuccini stared down at me. “I have no reason to hurt her.”

“Promise me,” I repeated, gazing steadily at him.

“I promise,” he said.

I walked past Clarice to Rinuccini’s side; there was horror in her eyes as she watched me slip irrevocably from her care. But the greater horror was mine, to glimpse the proud spirit behind those eyes and to mark the instant it broke.

They led me away. When I appeared in the doorway, the troops waiting on the lawn cheered. I moved quickly so that they had no cause to touch me, not until I was lifted up onto a horse and into the lap of a well-born soldier. He wore not a sword but a weapon I had never seen before: an arquebus, a contraption of wood and metal designed to blast balls of lead into distant victims, like a miniature cannon one might hold in one’s hand. He regarded me with victory and loathing; never was a trophy more scorned or prized.