The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine De Medici (31 page)

“Ma mere,”
I whispered. “
M’amie, je t’adore. . . .
Mother, hear my prayer and send me a child. Tell me what I must do.”

The ash fell onto the glowing logs; pieces of it broke off and whirled about before sailing up the flue.

I repeated my plea, staring into the writhing flames. I did not address myself only to my mother, to the dead, to God or the Devil. I spoke to whoever might answer. My heart opened until there was no separation between it and the power that fueled the universe. With my will, my desire, I clutched that power and would not let go.

Heaven—or Hell—opened in that instant. I knew not which. I knew only that I touched
something
; I knew only that my plea had been heard.

The next day, I followed the King’s movements until the afternoon, when I was required to hold audiences. As Dauphine, I had many petitioners, mostly Florentines asking for assistance. Enthroned, I listened to each sad tale.

The first was that of an elderly Tornabuoni widow, related to the Medici
by marriage. She had lived in her deceased husband’s villa until Alessandro’s henchmen seized the property after illegally taxing her into bankruptcy; she had left the city with nothing. I granted her sufficient funds so that she could live comfortably in one of the better convents outside Paris.

There was also a banker with a wife and six children who had long ago worked as an apprentice to Uncle Filippo Strozzi, which had been enough to endanger his life. He had fled Florence with his family, leaving behind all his assets. I promised to find him work in the Treasury.

There were several others, and after a few hours, I grew tired.

Madame Gondi said, “I will tell the others to return tomorrow. But there is one, Madame—a rather strange-looking gentleman—who insists that he be seen today. He says that you know him and will be glad to see him.”

I had opened my mouth to ask the name of the impertinent beggar when revelation suddenly stole my voice. When it returned, I told Madame Gondi to bring him to me.

He entered wearing red and black, the colors of Mars and Saturn; he was fully a man now, but there was no meat on him, and his striped doublet hung upon his bony frame. His face was gaunt and sickly pale against his blue-black brows and hair. At the sight of me, he doffed his cap and bowed very low.

“Madame la Dauphine,”
he said. I had forgotten how very beautiful his voice was, how very deep. “We meet again at last.”

I stepped down from my throne. When he rose, I took his cold hands in my own.

“Monsieur Ruggieri,” I said. “How I have prayed that you would come.”

I immediately appointed Cosimo Ruggieri my court astrologer. He brought with him no belongings, as though he had materialized from the ether with no purse, no trunk, no wife, no family.

I led him at once to my cabinet. I asked after his past: He had left Florence for Venice and, on the day of his arrival there, had fallen ill with plague. From Venice he had gone to Constantinople and Araby, though he would not explain why or what had happened there. I told him of my joy at receiving, during my imprisonment, the volume of Ficino and the Wing of Corvus. I told him how my mother’s words had proven true, how a man named Silvestro had saved me from a hostile crowd. I shared with him the details of my self-education in astrology, and my efforts to cast nativities.

If anything in my long tale surprised him, he did not show it. Never once did he remind me of his prediction that I would become a queen.

At last I said, “I have had a recurring dream ever since you gave me the Raven’s Wing. I dream of a man with his face drenched in blood. He calls out to me in French. He is dying, and it is my duty to help him—but I don’t know how.” I lowered my gaze, troubled. “It’s Henri. I knew the instant I met him. I feel bound to protect him from a gruesome fate.”

He listened dispassionately. “Is that all? Only Henri, in your dream?”

“No,” I said. “There are others in the field—hundreds, thousands, perhaps, but I cannot see them. The blood . . . it swells like the ocean.” I lifted my fingers to my temple and massaged it, as if to work the memory loose and make it fall away.

“This is your destiny,” he said. “Yours is the power, Madame, to spill that ocean . . . or to stanch its flow.”

I wanted suddenly to weep. “But Henri . . . Some ill will soon befall him. If I can stop it, then perhaps the others won’t die. Tell me what will happen to him, and how I can stop it. You’re the magician—there must be spells to protect him. I tried; I made a talisman myself, another Wing of Corvus, but he wouldn’t wear it.”

“A simple talisman, a simple spell, could never be enough,” he said.

I flared. “It was enough for me, when I was in the hands of the rebels.”

“You faced danger of the sort that could be overcome, with the potential for a long life. But Prince Henri . . .” Regret flickered in his gaze. “His life will end too soon, in calamity. Surely you have read his stars.”

His words stole my breath. I had read the sinister signs, but I had never permitted myself to believe them.

“If simple magic will not do,” I persisted, “then what will? Exchange my life for his. You have the knowledge, surely.”

He recoiled from the suggestion. “I have the knowledge. But there are others in your dream, yes? What of them?”

“I don’t care,” I said, miserable.

“Then France will be torn apart,” he replied. “For they are as much your responsibility, as much a part of your fate, as Prince Henri is.”

“They are another reason, then, why I must stay,” I said. “But there are those at Court who intend to see me cast aside and Henri wed to another. He’ll be left unprotected without me. I must have his child. I
must
.” The muscles of my face hardened. “Only tell me what I must do to keep Henri alive, and to have his child.”

He considered this a long time before replying. “We cannot outwit fate forever. But we can bring Henri more years than he might otherwise have had.” He paused. “Is that truly your will? To bear the Dauphin’s child?”

It seemed a ridiculous question. “Of course. I would do anything. I already
have
done everything: I’ve made talismans, cast spells, worn disgusting poultices, and drunk mule’s urine. I know of nothing else to do.”

He considered this, then said slowly, “And the child must be the Dauphin’s.”

It was a statement, yet I heard the question buried in it, and my face grew hot.
How dare you,
I wanted to say—but this was Ruggieri, and propriety was immaterial. No secret was hidden from him, no topic too wicked to be broached.

I blushed and said, “Yes, it must be. He is my husband. And . . . I love him.”

He cocked his head at the desperation in those last three words. “I am sorry to hear this,” he said softly. “It complicates matters.”

“How so?”

“Surely you have studied your own nativity in regard to children,” he said. “Surely you have studied Prince Henri’s. Scorpio rules your Fifth House,” he continued, “and that of your husband. You are far too intelligent to miss the implications: barrenness—or, if you wish, lies and deceit. The choice is yours.”

“I won’t accept either,” I countered.

“There has to be a third way.” “There always is.” He leaned forward, his skin sickly pale against his blue-black hair. “But it depends entirely on what you are willing to do.”

Despite the crookedness of his nose and the pitting in his cheeks, his voice and manner were magnetic, intoxicating. Beneath an icy surface ran a hot current, one that would pull me under if I dared test it.

“Anything,” I said, “except to lie with another man.”

He nodded slowly. “Then I warn you,
Madame la Dauphine,
that to get blood, you must give blood.”

An unpleasant thrill coursed through me at his words: He spoke of the very darkest sort of magic. But I had always felt that my soul was already lost.

“I will give every last drop,” I said, “to save Henri.”

His gaze revealed nothing. “Ah, Madame. Here is where a strong will and a strong stomach are needed, for it is not your blood of which we speak.”

I resisted for weeks. I met with Ruggieri daily, consulting him on trivial matters and begging for instruction in the magical arts. As to the latter, he refused:
I knew too little, and he too much; it was far safer for him to cast spells at my request.

“It is enough,” he said, “that one of our souls is imperiled.”

During those weeks, I lived in uneasy dread. Madame Gondi reported to me that the Guises—family of the nubile Louise—had met secretly with the King to discuss, again, the possibility of a marriage contract with Henri. It was almost enough to make me consider Ruggieri’s suggestion that I be impregnated by another man.

But even though Henri had betrayed me, I could not do the same to him. The House of Valois was mine now; and I longed for a son with Valois blood who would inherit the throne. I had found my home, and would not be taken from it.

In the end, I yielded to the unthinkable. In the middle of the night, I took up my quill and listened to the scratch of the nib as my hand wrote impossible, barbarous things.

I sent for Ruggieri early the next morning and met him in my cabinet. Behind the locked door, I handed him the paper, folded into eighths, as if that somehow decreased the enormity of the crime.

“I’ve thought it through carefully,” I said, “and these are my restrictions.”

The paper whispered in his fingers. He frowned at the message, then lifted his dark gaze from the page.

“If I follow them,” he said, “I cannot say what effect they might have upon the outcome.”

“So long as we meet with success,” I said.

He refolded the paper and slipped it inside his breast pocket, his gaze never straying from mine; his eyes were black, like my Henri’s, though they lacked any light. His lips moved faintly toward a smile.

“Oh, we shall meet with success, Catherine.”

I did not see his use of my given name as impertinence. We were equals now, after the grisliest of fashions. I had given Henri my heart, but only Ruggieri knew the evil it contained.

I trusted only Madame Gondi to make the arrangement directly with the Master of Horses. She ordered her own mount saddled and brought to the
far side of the stables, where it could not been seen from the palace windows. A scandalous thing for a woman to be riding near dusk, alone; the Master no doubt assumed an illicit rendezvous was in the offing. He was not wrong.

Madame Gondi rode out of sight of the stables and past the gardens to the nearest copse of trees; beneath their shelter, she and I made the exchange. We both wore black; someone watching from a distance would think that the woman who rode into the woods was the same woman who rode out.

Hours earlier, morning had revealed the strangest of spring skies, troubled and overcast, with a diffuse coral glow where the sun should have hung; now, at dusk, that glow had slipped to the horizon. The air was cool and redolent of rain. I rode well beyond the woods; several times I reined my borrowed horse to a stop, thinking to turn around, but the thought of Henri spurred me on.

Eventually I came upon an unkempt vineyard flanked by an orchard of dying pear trees, their gnarled limbs speckled with feeble, struggling blossoms. On the outskirts of the orchard, a black figure held up a lantern. As I neared, I discerned Ruggieri’s face, phosphorescent in the yellow glow. He turned and walked slowly past the trees to a thatch-roofed cottage of crumbling brick. Candlelight shone dimly through cracks in the drawn shutters.

I dismounted; Ruggieri set the lantern on the ground and helped me down, catching both my hands in his. For an instant he stared at me, his complicitous gaze intent, searching for something he did not find.

He had not wanted me to come. I wasn’t needed, he said, and there was always the chance of danger, both magical and practical. I felt that his real reason was to spare me upset, and the revulsion of seeing firsthand what he was capable of, yet I had insisted. I did not want the crime I was about to commit to be distant, a mere tale without the attending visceral reality.

I did not want to be able to do such a thing again.

The sudden coldness in his gaze stole my breath; the talon touch of his fingers, separated though they were from mine by two layers of gloves, chilled me to the core. He was capable of acts worse than murder, and I was alone with him, where no one could hear my screams.

I thought to pull away, to jump onto Madame Gondi’s horse and ride off. But the magician’s eyes were powerful, compelling. With a dreamer’s languid helplessness, I followed him to the entrance of the cottage.

Ruggieri flung open the rotting portal to reveal a single room with a dirt floor half covered by a large piece of slate. The pale walls were covered in pigeon droppings, the hearth so long unused that greenish mold had sprouted from the bricks. Someone had painted a perfect black circle on the slate, one large enough to comfortably contain two men lying end to end. Unlit candles, each on a brass holder tall as a man, rested at four equidistant points on the circle’s circumference.