The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine De Medici (20 page)

For my fourteenth birthday in April, a reception was held at the Palazzo Medici and attended by His Holiness, who had made the long trip from Rome. Weighed down by jewels, I held Pope Clement’s hand as he presented me to each distinguished guest as “my darling Caterina, my greatest treasure.”

Surely there was no greater treasure than that which was heaped on me now; I suspected His Holiness had leveraged half of Rome and his papal tiara to cover the expense. Later I learned that Sandro—that is, Duke Alessandro—had forwarded the taxes paid by the citizens of Florence to help with the costs.

Swaths of brocade, damask, lace, and silk arrived, hand-picked by the
stylish Isabella d’Este. Heaps of jewels—rubies, diamonds, emeralds, necklaces and belts of gem-studded gold, and a pair of earrings made from pear-shaped pearls so huge I wondered how I should wear them and still hold my head up—were spread out for my inspection. When I was not sorting through precious stones or metals or fine cloth, I met with a tutor to sharpen my proficiency in French and the protocol of the French Court. I learned French dances and practiced them until my legs ached. I learned King François was overly fond of the hunt, and so I mounted a stallion and practiced jumping—and, as a necessary corollary, falling. The tutor remonstrated when I used my sidesaddle; it was indecent, he charged, as it permitted glimpses of my calves. He recommended a ridiculous contraption—a little chair, so unsteady that the rider would be thrown if she urged her mount to more than a slow walk. I would have none of it.

There were countless public appearances. If my presence had lent legitimacy to Alessandro’s rule before, it lent the aura of royalty to it now. I hung on his arm, a shiny political bauble, and stood by his side to welcome his betrothed, Margaret of Austria, to Florence; I sweetly kissed her cheek.

Those frantic days left me too exhausted to think. Summer came all too quickly, though I earned a respite when the wedding location was changed from Nice to Marseille, and the date from June to October.

Inevitably, however, the first of September arrived, and I departed Florence in a sumptuous coach, accompanied by a gay caravan of nobles, servants, and grooms, and a dozen wagons loaded down with my belongings and gifts for my new family. In my excitement, I had never considered that I might not return to the land of my birth; it was not until we reached the city’s eastern gate that my throat constricted and I turned, panicked, to stare behind me at the slowly retreating orange dome of the great cathedral and the winding, grey-green Arno.

Aunt Clarice was gone, Ippolito fickle, and Sandro cunning; I would miss none of them. But as Florence shrank from view, I wept as I thought of Piero—and of the wise-eyed boy Lorenzo, high upon the chapel wall of the Palazzo Medici.

I traveled by land to the coast, and from there, by sea to Villefranche to await His Holiness, who intended to perform the religious ceremony himself.

Clement had decided that my marriage to Henri, Duke of Orléans, would be a gilded spectacle such as had never been seen. When the papal flotilla arrived, I boarded His Holiness’s ship to find it entirely upholstered in gold brocade. We sailed for two days to Marseille, and when we dropped anchor, three hundred cannon boomed over the joyous clamor of cathedral bells and blaring trumpets.

Marseille was sunny and scented with brine, with clear blue seas and sky. We made our way through streets lined with cheering Frenchmen, to the plaza known as the Place-Neuve. On one side of the avenue stood the King’s magnificent Palace of the Comtes de Provence, on the other, a temporary papal mansion of timber. The two were united by a vast wooden chamber that spanned the entire square. It was here that the banquets and receptions would take place.

I made my entrance into Marseille on a roan charger caparisoned in gold brocade. The awkward throne the Frenchwomen used was proffered me, but I refused it in favor of my own sidesaddle; if the cheering crowds were scandalized to see a woman riding a horse in that fashion, they hid it well.

My destination was the papal palace of wood on the Place-Neuve. When I dismounted, I was led quickly to the reception hall. Three hundred souls, the eminent men and glittering women of the French Court, had gathered there. They had come to weigh me as though I, too, were a gem to be set within His Majesty’s crown.

I swept past six hundred eyes, past the cat-eyed, haughty women with their insolent smiles. Their tight-fitting bodices ended in widows’ peaks at their breathlessly cinched waists; they were all thin, and strangely proud of it. Their tight sleeves were not separate from the gown but sewn onto it, with small puff s at the upper arm. Their collars were high, ruff ed at the neck like the men’s, but open at the throat and plunging in narrow vees to the décolleté. Stiff , curving bands of fabric smoothed back their hair to midcrown and covered the remainder in velvet or gossamer veils. They were beautiful, sleek, and blatantly confident, and I a clumsy, unfashionable foreigner in my large sleeves and loose-waisted gown.

I shook off their stares and fixed my gaze on His Holiness, who sat in a golden throne upon a high dais. Beside him, at a respectful remove, stood King François I and his three sons: Henri; eleven-year-old Charles; and
the fifteen-year-old Dauphin, heir to the throne, named François after his father.

Clement’s face was luminous. In six years’ time he had gone from prisoner in a ravaged city to puppetmaster of a king.

As my name—
Caterina Maria Romula de’ Medici, Duchessina of Urbino
—was announced, I kept my face downcast, my gaze demure.

“Caterina!” Clement exclaimed, drunk with achievement and joy. “My darling niece, how beautiful you are!”

I ascended three of the five steps leading up to the dais, then knelt. Prostrating my upper torso upon the stairs, I took Clement’s slippered foot into my hands and pressed the velvet-clad toe to my lips.

“Rise,
Duchessina,
” Clement said, “and greet your new family.”

A great hand upon my shoulder guided me to my feet. Before me stood a very tall man with a short dark beard along his jawline, so wiry it puff ed out like uncombed cotton. His thick neck made his head seem small by comparison; his nose was very long, his eyes and lips small. The grandeur of his costume—a tunic of bronze satin with insets of black velvet embroidered with scrolling leaves—made me draw in a breath of admiration. His posture and movements reflected self-aware dignity and supreme confidence as he smiled at me.

“Daughter,” King François said, his voice welling with affection, “how sweet your demeanor, how humble! Surely I could have found no better bride for my son in all of Christendom!”

He embraced me impetuously, then kissed my mouth and cheeks with wet lips.

“Your Majesty.” I executed a low curtsy. “How grateful I am to you for rescuing me from my dire prison; I am happy to be able to thank you in the flesh.”

The King turned to his son, his tone critical. “Here, Henri, is true humility; you could learn much from your bride. Embrace her gently, with affection.”

Henri lifted his miserable gaze from the floor. He wore his fourteen years awkwardly—his nose and ears were too large for his eyes and chin, though time would likely see them better matched. He was bony, gangly, with a boy’s narrow chest and back, a fact that the full sleeves and padded shoulders of
his satin doublet sought to disguise. His brown hair was clipped short in the Roman style.

He was a poor substitute for my charming, handsome Ippolito, but I smiled at him. He tried to do the same, but his lips trembled. He hesitated for so long that a murmur passed through the crowd; I lowered my gaze, embarrassed.

The King’s eldest son, the Dauphin François, stepped between us.

“
I
must kiss her first,” François announced loudly, in a voice as polished as any courtier’s, yet good-natured. He had full cheeks, ruddied by fresh air and good health, and flax-colored hair.

“We want her to feel welcome,” François added, winking at me, “but I fear the bridegroom’s nerves are so unsteady, he shall put a fright into her instead.”

The King looked annoyed at this breach of propriety, but François kissed me quickly, then handed me to his youngest brother, Charles, an imp with pale ringlets.

Grinning wickedly, Charles kissed me on both cheeks with such an exaggerated smacking sound that some in the crowd tittered.

“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “I’ll soon prove that he can laugh.”

He drew back and presented my hands to Henri. The King beamed; apparently, he approved of Charles’s every action.

Panicked, Henri looked to his older brother; the Dauphin gave him a nod of gentle encouragement. Henri’s expression hardened with determination as he turned back to me, but terror flickered in his eyes as he leaned down to kiss me; his breath smelled agreeably of fennel seed.

“Duchess,” he began, reciting a speech from memory. “With all my heart, and with the good wishes of all my people, I welcome you to my father’s kingdom, and to . . .” He faltered.

“To our family, the Valois!” the King snapped. “Have you no brains? You’ve only practiced it a hundred times!”

Henri glared up at his father with sullen hatred. The unpleasant moment was broken suddenly by a loud, stuttering fart. I thought that someone in the royal party had just embarrassed themselves until I saw young Charles’s smug grin. His tactic worked: Henri broke into a charming smile and giggled; King François relaxed and gave Charles a reproving but affectionate nudge. The Dauphin smiled, relieved for his father and brother.

Henri gathered himself and, in better humor, said, “Catherine, welcome to our family, the Valois.”

Catherine,
he said, and like that, Caterina was no more.

His voice was too deep to be a boy’s, too wavering in pitch to be a man’s. Though I had never heard it before, I knew it. His voice and face were young now, but given time and maturity, they would change. Somewhere, between my bridegroom’s voice and his father’s, somewhere between his features and the King’s, were those of the man who had cried out to me in my dreams.

Catherine

Venez a moi

Aidez-moi

That evening, in my gilded, timber-scented chamber on the Place-Neuve, I wrote another letter to the magician Ruggieri. There was little point to the exercise, save to vent my desperate foreboding: Ruggieri was at worst dead, at best mad and missing. He could not help me, trapped in a foreign land and a blood-soaked dream that threatened to become waking.

I paused in midstroke of the quill, set it down, and crumpled the page before feeding it to the hearth. I took a fresh sheet and addressed it to my cousin Maria. I asked that she send me
De Vita Coelitus Comparanda,
by Marsilio Ficino, and the letters from Ser Cosimo Ruggieri on the art of astrology.

When the time came to sign the letter, I paused, then scrawled in bold letters:

Catherine

Duchesse d’Orléans

Three days of celebration followed—banquets, jousts, and balls. My betrothed participated reluctantly in them all. I, too, participated with only half a heart. The thought that Henri was the man in my nightmare had terrified me, and I had no one to confide in, no one who might say, with a laugh, that I was tired and anxious and so had let my imagination run unfettered.

Queen Eléonore, my soon to be mother-in-law, served as my chaperone. Three years earlier, she had married François, as reluctant a bridegroom then as his son was now. Ravenous to plant the French flag in Italian soil, François had unwisely taken on the Emperor’s forces and suffered a catastrophic defeat at Pavia, where he was captured. He had purchased his freedom with hundreds of thousands of gold ecus and a promise to marry Emperor Charles’s widowed sister, Eléonore.

Like her brother, Eléonore was Flemish, fluent in French, and well-versed in Parisian culture and customs but altogether unlike the sparkling, sly-eyed women of her husband’s court. Her chestnut hair was worn in an unforgivably old-fashioned Spanish style: parted down the middle, plaited, and wound in two thick coils covering her ears. She was solid, thick-limbed, and graceless, her movements lumbering, her eyes bovine.