The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine de Medici

  The Dauphin’s eyelids fluttered and his head lolled upon his shoulders; Montmorency and I caught him as he fell. The Grand Master laid him gently in his father’s arms and told Henri that his son had come. At the sound of his old friend’s voice, Henri opened his good eye, then reached out blindly to embrace François. When the boy stirred, Henri whispered: “God bless you, my son, and give you strength. You shall need it, to be King.”

  At that, François let go another low wail and fainted again; Montmorency and a valet carried him from the room. Henri’s eyelid closed as he returned to his unhappy rest. I remained on my feet at the King’s side—but, overwhelmed, pressed my hands against the mattress in an effort to hold myself up.

  “Catherine,” my husband whispered, his eye still closed. He fumbled for my hand, his touch hot.

  I gripped his hand and kissed it. “I am here,” I said. “I will not leave you.”

  He let go a groan that was also a sigh. “Promise me,” he said.

  “Anything.” My voice sounded deceptively strong.

  “Promise me you will protect and guide my sons. Promise me an heir of Valois will always sit upon the throne.”

  “I swear it.” Ignoring the reek of pustulance, I kissed his grey lips—lightly, gently, to avoid causing him further pain.

  Afterward, he sank into a deep slumber, from which he could not be roused. I kept my promise: I did not leave him but stayed at his side, still dressed in the purple gown I had worn to the tournament. For seven days, he lay blind and speechless, unable to give voice to his agony.

  In the early afternoon of the tenth of July, His Most Christian Majesty King Henri II died in Paris at the Château des Tournelles. Once the doctor had pronounced him gone, a gentleman of the chamber ran to part the heavy brocade drapes and push open the window, releasing the stench of rotting flesh. Outside, the air smelled of rain.

  The living move swiftly to dispose of the dying: As I lay grieving, my cheek pressed to Henri’s silent chest, Doctor Paré pulled all the bed curtains open with blunt finality. Those who had sat vigil with me that day—François of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Dukes of Savoy and Nemours—left at once to spread the grim news. The corridor filled with murmurs and footfall. I heard the gentle sloshing of water and looked up: Two serving women had arrived, basins in hand, to wash the King’s body.

  “Go away,” I snarled and turned from them, only to start at a gentle touch upon my shoulder.

  Madame Gondi stood over me, her lovely face swollen from too many tears. “Madame la Reine,” she said softly. “You must come. Please. You will make yourself ill.”

  “A few more minutes,” I told her. “Do not take me from him so very soon.”

  Her lips trembled. “Madame,” she said, “you have lain here for six hours.”

  I planted a kiss upon Henri’s cooling cheek and ran my fingers tenderly over his wiry beard; only then did I let myself be led away toward my apartments. On the staircase, I balked, panicked.

  “The children,” I said. “They must be told. The Dauphin must know at once.”

  “They already know,” Madame Gondi said gently. “Some hours ago, the Duke of Guise and his brother went to inform them.”

  “It’s not right,” I said. “They should have heard it from my lips, not another’s.”

  “Come up to your room now, and lie down,” she soothed. “I will have you brought something to eat.”

  I had refused food for days and drunk little; when I began to climb the staircase again, the walls started slowly to spin. I gasped and turned to Madame Gondi, but there was only darkness.

  I woke to find myself undressed to my chemise, lying in my own bed. The window was open to the midsummer heat and encroaching dusk. Nearby, Madame Gondi stood next to the silver-bearded, portly Doctor Chapelain. On the bedside table was a platter of mutton and boiled eggs, and a flask of wine.

  “You must eat and drink, Madame la Reine,” he said, wagging a plump fore-finger in my direction. “And then you will sleep until morning.”

  I said nothing. The doctor left, and I took the plate Madame Gondi proffered. I chewed and swallowed the mutton and drank the wine, but tasted nothing: Food was an offense, a bitter reminder that Henri was dead and I was alive, that I should have to eat and drink from that moment forth without him.

  It would have been easy, then, to lie down and let sorrow blot out all else. Yet one small ray pierced the growing gloom: the thought of my children. For their sake, I rose from my bed, suddenly desperate to tell them gently of their father’s last hours and to offer what comfort I could. I demanded fresh clothing, so emphatically that my ladies quickly obliged me.

  They produced a new dress of white silk damask studded with pearls, with a high ruffed collar of starched white lace. It was a pristine creation, an exquisite mourning gown for a French queen, with a matching hood and a veil of white gossamer. The seamstresses had no doubt worked long, feverish days since Henri’s mishap to complete it.

  I spat on it and ordered them to take it away. I called for my gown of plain black silk, the one I had worn when the twins died. But before I could put on my slippers or lower the dark veil, I heard a high-pitched, anxious call in the antechamber.

  “Maman . . . ? Maman, hurry, you must come at once!”

  Barefoot, I moved as quickly as shock allowed into the next room, where my darling eight-year-old Edouard stood in the doorway leading to the corridor. He was slender, with the Valoises’ long torso and limbs, and his father’s shining black eyes. His expression was one of pure panic.

  “My precious eyes,” I said. “My sweet child, what is it?”

  “The Duke of Guise and the Cardinal,” he said, his cheeks stained with tears. “They have told François to meet them downstairs. He is to bring Mary, Charles, Margot, and me. They are going to take us all away. They said not to tell you, that they must speak to François alone now that he is King.” His eyes narrowed; he was capable even then of understanding intrigue. “I don’t trust them, Maman. They are friends with that wicked Madame de Poitiers.”

  My fingers dug into the sides of his shoulders. “When? When are you to meet them?”

  “Now,” he replied. “At the entrance leading to the western gate.”

  I gripped his hand. Together, we dashed from my apartments, down the spiraling staircase leading to the ground floor. On the landing, I almost collided with Montmorency. The old man was so stricken by his master’s death that he did not react at all to the fact that I had been running at full tilt down the stairs.

  In a voice as dull as his bloodshot eyes, he said, “I came to inform you, Madame, that the vigil in the King’s chamber will commence tomorrow, at nine o’clock. You must rest well tonight, for the coming days will be long ones for you.”

  He referred to the mourning vigil kept by all French queens: Tradition bound me to spend the next forty days at the Château des Tournelles, secluded in a darkened room beside my husband’s embalmed body.

  But I had vowed to protect Henri’s sons. “I cannot stay,” I answered quickly. “The Guises are taking François away. I must go to him.”

  He drew back, for love of Henri offended, but I had no time to explain. I squeezed Edouard’s hand, and my son and I ran down the stairs, through the vast, echoing reception halls to the chateau’s western entrance.

  Outside, a carriage waited at the edge of the driveway. The sinister-eyed Cardinal of Lorraine, Charles of Guise, was holding the Dauphin’s elbow as my son ventured the high step into the carriage. The Duke of Guise, Mary, and my two younger children were waiting to follow them in.

  Thunder rolled in the distance. François, skittish at storms, jerked and almost hit his head upon the carriage ceiling as he climbed inside. A cold drop of rain stung my cheek, then another.

  “François!” I cried—sharply, but as the others turned to face me, I forced the muscles in my face to ease. “Here is the missing Edouard,” I called calmly, as if the Guises themselves had sent me to l
ook for him. “And I shall come, too.”

  The Guise brothers’ eyes widened with shock, but they dared say nothing. For an instant, Mary looked at me as though I were an asp that had just stung her, then composed herself and nodded a somber greeting. She was lovely and fresh despite the heat, a glittering vision in her white wedding gown.

  “Madame la Reine,” she said. “Should you not remain with the King?”

  She referred, of course, to my dead husband, but I pretended not to understand.

  “That is precisely what I intend,” I answered, with a nod at François. “As I promised his father I would do.”

  She said nothing more but stood silently as the Duke of Guise moved to one side of the carriage door and his brother the Cardinal moved to the other. They held out their hands to me.

  “Please, Madame la Reine,” the Duke said and bowed.

  “I am no longer Queen,” I told him. “That lot falls to Mary now.”

  I stood my ground, holding Edouard’s hand, and waited until the Guises helped their niece—Mary, Queen of France and Scotland—into the coach, to sit beside her husband the King. At last the Guises turned to me.

  By then the rain had begun to fall in earnest, slicking the pavement and bringing an abrupt chill to the summer air. I thought of Aunt Clarice—ragged and trembling, yet utterly determined on that frantic ride from the Palazzo Medici—as I set my bare foot down on the wet cobblestone and took the short walk away from the Château des Tournelles, away from Henri and my heart, away from everything past.

  PART VII

  Queen Mother

  July 1559–August 1572

  Thirty-two

  The Guises’ carriage took my children and me to the Palace of the Louvre. François, Duke of Guise, and his brother Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, wanted desperately to separate me from my son—now François II, King of France—so that he would refuse my advice and listen only to them and to Mary, whom he adored. But I would not leave François, and when he asked sweetly whether he might speak privately with the Cardinal and the Duke, I surrendered myself to such earnest—if calculated—paroxysms of weeping that he was too frightened to desert me.

  I feared for him on more than one account. The strain of his father’s suffering and death had left François physically debilitated: even in the carriage, he laid his head upon Mary’s shoulder and moaned feebly at every lurch. He was dizzy, he said, and his ear had begun to pain him.

  Nevertheless, François tried his best to understand my words about the necessity of a smooth transfer of power. By nightfall, I had convinced my son to establish a regency council whose decisions bore a weight equal to those of His Majesty. I was to share power with the Guises, who had moved into Diane’s and Montmorency’s apartments after throwing the former occupants’ belongings out onto the Louvre’s paved courtyard.

  Old Montmorency—too late realizing that it honored Henri more to save his kingdom than to sit with his dead body—came to the Louvre the following day, and offered his services to François. My son thanked him stiffly, then haltingly recited a cruel speech written by the Guises: Montmorency was too old to be of use, and his position of Grand Master now belonged to François, Duke of Guise. The new King suggested Montmorency retire to his country estate.

  In the days after my husband’s death, many faces changed at Court: old Montmorency, a reliable fixture, was gone; the young Scotsman, Captain de Montgomery, could not be found. Diane de Poitiers retreated to her home at Anet. At my request, she promptly returned the Crown Jewels my husband had given her in his smitten youth, along with a letter asking my forgiveness for any pain she had ever caused me.

  When the jewels arrived, in a beautifully sculpted crystal casket—a wedding gift to me from Pope Clement—I took Mary to see them. I treated her politely in public, but I had not forgotten her conspiratorial conversation with the man who had killed my husband, nor François of Guise’s stray comment, at her wedding, that she was already Queen of France.

  “These are yours now,” I told her. And when she brightened at the sight of them, I sidled next to her and whispered, “Regicide is the worst crime before God. Those who commit it are doomed to the worst circle of Hell.”

  She glanced sharply at me, her eyes wide and perhaps frightened as her hand went to the diamond-studded crucifix at her breast.

  Easily, I looked away from her, down at the glistening casket filled with rubies and emeralds and pearls. “You are a very lucky girl,” I murmured. “Fortunate that my son loves you so dearly. Fortunate that Captain de Montgomery cannot be found.”

  She stared at me, her eyes owlish, her lips so tightly pursed as to be in danger of disappearing. I left her thus, pale and pinched and silent.

  I don’t understand how, in those early days, I managed to do what was necessary to protect my son. They say that after a soldier loses an arm or a leg, the body insists the limb is still there, moving, touching, feeling. Perhaps that is how I survived the horror of losing my husband; I breathed and spoke and moved, thanks to a phantom heart.

  In the moments I was not needed, I succumbed. I swathed my cramped apartments at the Louvre in black crepe and sat alone on the floor, clutching my skull. There are no words to describe grief: the howling madness, the bitter ache in the chest and throat, the terror caused by loss of meaning. It came in waves less predictable than those of labor but infinitely fiercer. One instant I would be issuing orders to Madame Gondi; the next, clutching her skirts as I collapsed, sobbing.

  Nor are there words to describe the endless feverish workings of my mind as it sought to understand how I had failed Henri, how—despite everything—I had let him die. Why had the sacrifice of the harlot not been enough? Why had I not insisted more vehemently that he avoid the joust?

  Summer turned relentless: Black waves writhed in the air above the pavement and turned to steam in the wake of afternoon showers that gave no respite. Night brought sudden storms: I woke often to the crack of lightning, hearing instead the shattering of the Scotsman’s lance.

  A month to the day after the King died, Ruggieri returned to Paris. Before I hurried to meet him, I peered into my mirror and saw a haggard woman there, with a new shock of white hair at one temple and a pronounced pallor from lack of outdoor exercise. Grief did not flatter me.

  Ruggieri looked better than I had ever seen him. He had grown a black beard to cover his pitted cheeks and put on a bit of weight, which suited him. He had even seen a bit of sun. The instant Madame Gondi closed the door on us, Ser Cosimo went down on one knee.

  “Madame la Reine,” he said, his tone formal but heartfelt. “Words fail to express the sorrow I felt upon hearing of His Majesty’s death.”

  “We meet again, too soon,” I responded.

  “Too soon,” he answered, his voice and eyes sad.

  I walked around my desk to where he knelt. “Rise, Monsieur Ruggieri,” I said and caught his hand.

  He rose. When he stood looking down at me, expectant yet somber, I lifted my arm and, with all my strength, struck him. The gesture loosed a storm of rage: I curled my fists and pounded his chest, his stomach, his arms.

  “Bastard!” I screamed. “Bastard! You made me kill a woman and her children, but it was not enough, and Henri died!”

  He averted his face patiently until I was breathless and spent.

  “You lied,” I gasped. “You said that Henri was safe.”

  “We gave him years,” Ruggieri answered. Misery glimmered in his eyes. “I did not know how many. The stars, you understand, can be cheated only so long.”

  “Why did you not tell me?” I wailed and struck out again. My fingernails caught the tender skin beneath his eye and left three bloody marks; he made no sound as I drew back, aghast.

  “Would you have preferred to live those years already grieving?” he asked. “Counting the days and dreading what must come?”

  “I murdered innocents for naught! How do I know the pearl isn’t useless? How do I know it keeps my children safe???
?

  “We purchased your husband almost two decades,” he countered. “Half a lifetime. Or would you have had Henri perish as the young Dauphin, in his father’s wars? Would you prefer that your children had never been born? The pearl has bought them time—I know not how long—that they would never have had.”

  I fell silent and stared, disconsolate, at the floor. I am not certain what followed: I felt giddy and thought that the lamp upon my desk had suddenly dimmed.

  When I came to myself, I was propped up on many pillows in a chair in my antechamber, my legs resting on an ottoman. Madame Gondi was fanning the air in front of my face.

  “Madame la Reine, thank God!” she said, with a small smile of relief. “You have returned to us at last.” She made me sip from a goblet of wine.

  I put a hand to my brow. “Where is Monsieur Ruggieri?”

  “Out in the corridor. I did not think him capable of being so thoroughly frightened.”

  I handed her the goblet. “Bring him in.”

  She knew me well enough not to argue. She admitted Ruggieri, then stepped just outside the door. Too dizzy to risk standing, I remained seated.

  At the sight of me, the magician brightened; I motioned for silence. I was too weak and ragged to waste energy on a meaningless conversation about my health.

  “You did not tell me everything about my husband,” I said, “but you will tell me everything about my sons. François’s health is poor. I must know whether it will improve, whether . . .” I let the words hang unspoken between us.

  “If you are sure that you can bear to know the truth,” Ruggieri said, “I will present to you the future, more clearly than any nativity can display it. Give me a week, perhaps two. But we will need privacy. It is not something that can be easily accomplished here in the city, where there are too many eyes.” He paused. “And if the truth is not to your liking . . . ?”