The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine De Medici (49 page)

We both knew, of course, that neither of us would mention this again—I, out of the need for secrecy; Bourbon, out of a sense of shame.

Even so, I continued warmly: “Please stay with us awhile at Blois. You are among family here, and ever welcome.”

He murmured barely coherent phrases about his gratefulness for my hospitality, about his pressing need to return to Paris. I offered him my hand and repressed a shudder when his lips touched my flesh.

I did not need Cosimo Ruggieri, I told myself. I had just averted a potential war using my wits, and nothing else. Yet after Bourbon had sidled out the door and closed it behind him, I lowered my face to the cool, smooth surface of my desk and sobbed.

After my meeting with Bourbon, I made my way down the winding staircase that led to the King’s apartments. The Duke of Guise was bounding up the steps and was so distracted that we nearly collided. He was gasping, his native arrogance overcome by blind panic; in his eyes, I saw the death of dreams.

Abandoning protocol, he seized my arm. “
Madame la Reine!
We have been searching everywhere for you! Doctor Paré needs you to come to the King’s bedchamber at once!”

We flew. I kept pace with Guise on the stairs and pushed past the solemn assembly in the corridor to enter the royal antechamber. I was met by Doctor Paré’s bleak, weathered face. Mary stood beside him, a wide-eyed wraith with a twisted kerchief in her restless hands—waiting, all this time, for me and for her uncle the Duke of Guise, who put his arm about her shoulder.

Doctor Paré did not waste time with pleasantries; he was a man unimpressed by titles and, certainly, by Mary, Queen of France. He understood that a mother’s love trumped that of a political wife and so addressed himself to me.

“His Majesty has worsened, Madame,” he said. “Within the last two hours, his fever has risen sharply. The infection has spread to his blood.”

I closed my eyes. I had heard the same words from Doctor Paré before, when they had sealed my husband’s doom.

“What does it mean?” Mary demanded. “What must be done now?”

“There is nothing more I can do,” the doctor told her. “It is a matter of hours now, at most a day or two.”

She lunged at him; the motion caused me to open my eyes just as she was raising her hands to claw the doctor’s face. The Duke of Guise struggled to hold her back as she screamed, “He cannot die! You must not let him!”

While the Duke and Doctor Paré did their best to calm her, I went into the sickroom to sit vigil beside my son. François lay with his eyes tightly shut and crusted, his cheeks flushed an unhealthy violet hue. A heavy fur throw had been drawn all the way up to his chin; even so, his teeth chattered. I crawled into bed beside him and wrapped my arms around him, pressing my body against his in an effort to warm him. I remained there even after a calmer Mary entered and sat nearby. Her face hung over us, a wan and anxious moon.

There is little more to tell. François never came to himself, though at times he groaned with pain. At the end, his body convulsed pitifully, again and again. He fell still to the sounds of Mary’s whispered recitations of the
Ave Maria
and
Pater Noster,
and when he let go his last rattling breath, citrine pus streamed from his nostrils.

Only then did I open my arms and climb slowly from the bed. Mary had given up praying to gape with horror at her husband’s body; she remained limp and unresisting as I embraced her, only long enough to whisper in her ear: “Go home to Scotland now. I promise you, it will be safer for you there than here.”

I left François to Mary and the Guises’ hysterical ministrations and went off to find my surviving children. The prescient governesses had dressed the children in black and assembled them in the nursery. Charles was sitting impassively watching Edouard, Margot, and little Navarre throw a tennis ball for the spaniel, who fetched it, safely beyond Charles’s reach. At the sight of me, Charles glanced up, scowling.

“Is he dead, then? Is François dead, and am I King?”

I could only nod. Edouard threw his arms around Margot as she and little Henri began to cry, while Charles’s lips curved in a self-satisfied smirk.

“You see?” he told Edouard. “I am King, after all, and now you shall have to do everything I tell you!”

At the sight of the children’s tears, I had been on the verge of loosing my own, but Charles’s words drew me up short.

“No, he doesn’t,” I corrected him. “You are King in name only, Charles. It is I who rule France now.”

After François’s death, Mary wisely sailed home to Edinburgh. In an effort to tighten their loosening grip on the Crown, the Guises formed an ultra-Catholic group dedicated to eradicating the Huguenots. Because of Antoine de Bourbon’s reconversion to Catholicism, his wife, Jeanne—Queen of the now-Protestant kingdom of Navarre—separated from him. Although she remained at Court, the growing political tension caused her to avoid my company.

Bourbon’s younger brother Louis, the Prince of Condé—a man of more impressive constancy—took his place and proved an able leader alongside Admiral Coligny. Protestantism continued to spread. Many intellectuals at Court—all sincere, rational people—were drawn to it; I therefore failed to sense the enmity growing beyond the palace walls.

The Guises threw themselves wholeheartedly into their zealous anti-Huguenot campaign. One Sunday the Duke of Guise was riding through the countryside when he heard the distant singing of psalms. With his entourage of armed guards, he discovered the source: a barn, packed with Huguenots worshiping in secret.

Under French law, heresy was punishable by death—a technicality that my husband and his father had often chosen to overlook. But Guise loosed
his guards upon the singers, slaughtering seventy-four innocents and leaving a hundred more savaged but alive.

The Huguenots took revenge swiftly. Catholic Paris remained at peace, but battles were fought in the countryside. Condé and Coligny led the Huguenots, Guise and the inconstant Bourbon the Catholic royalists.

For a year, fighting was fierce. I argued in favor of negotiation, but Guise, a popular war hero, argued strenuously against it and garnered enormous support. Resigned, I went to rally the troops; when I walked the ramparts, old Montmorency scolded me: Did I not realize the terrible danger I had put myself in? I laughed, not knowing that, just outside the walls, Antoine de Bourbon had taken an arquebus shot to the shoulder while relieving himself beneath a tree. He died shortly thereafter, leaving his nine-year-old son, Henri, King of Navarre.

His widow decided that it was time for her and her son to return permanently to the tiny country Henri now ruled.

“No tears,” Jeanne warned sternly, as I embraced her in the instant before she boarded the coach.

I obeyed and kissed her solemnly, and put my arms around little Henri.

“Whatever frightening things you see,” I whispered into his ear, “you mustn’t be afraid. They appear in order to guide you. Write to me about them if you wish, and I will try to help.”

As I pulled back, he nodded shyly. I put a copy of Italian poetry into his hands—Tasso’s
Rinaldo,
a fine adventurous romance for a precocious boy—then stepped back as the Queen and her son boarded the carriage.

Bourbon was not the only loss suffered by the royalists. The Duke of Guise once again distinguished himself in war by capturing the Huguenot leader Condé in battle—only to die a few months later outside Orléans, shot in the back by Gaspard de Coligny’s spy.

I used the opportunity to prevent further bloodshed. Over the protests of Guise’s family, who craved revenge, I negotiated with the rebels. In exchange for Condé’s release and a limited right to worship, the Huguenots laid down their arms. I appointed Guise’s son Henri to his late father’s position of Grand Master and welcomed the Huguenots back to Court. During those years of peace, my children grew.

Margot became a high-spirited creature with dark, glossy ringlets and
expressive features. When she smiled, her dark eyes came alive and made otherwise sensible men swoon. Supremely healthy, she adored riding and dancing, and proved herself a prodigy at mathematics.

Edouard—now the Duke of Anjou—grew to be tall, with his father’s long, handsome face and black eyes. He also showed a Medicean taste for elegant clothing and favored jewelry, the more glittering, the better. With Edouard, I shared all that I knew about governing, and he proved himself an apt pupil, quick to understand intrigue and the more delicate nuances of diplomacy.

Charles grew, but I cannot say that he ever became a man. His chin was weak, his eyes and forehead too large; this unfortunate combination of features was not improved by the glaring birthmark beneath his nose. The slightest exertion left him pale and gasping. He was angered by his poor health and slow-wittedness, and deeply jealous of his brother’s good looks and brains, and often flew into incoherent rages.

I thought that he would outgrow his fits of angry mania, but over time the frequency and intensity of them worsened. When His Majesty reached fourteen—the age of majority—he continued to rely on me to govern the country; I passed a law requiring him to have the approval of his Privy Council before issuing a command. In public, Charles did a fine job of parroting the speeches I wrote for him. But he made a show of rebelling against me in every other way, and on his fourteenth birthday he insisted, against my wishes and those of his physicians, on joining the hunt.

Edouard, almost thirteen, and his younger sister, Margot, rode alongside the King and me. It was late June, and the Loire Valley rolled out before us, lush and alive. Even white-haired Montmorency had accepted our invitation to the hunt, adding to the feel that it was just like old times.

It was difficult for me not to cast a thousand nervous glances in Charles’s direction, or to call for a halt when his breath grew wheezing. But the chase filled him with such excitement that he spurred his mount to go faster and burst into unrestrained laughter, his eyes wide and bright.

I had told the Master of the Hunt to make the chase short and the prey easily taken. In half an hour, the hounds trapped our target in a thicket: a wild hare, the least threatening victim for a sickly boy.

“I have it!” Charles crowed, as the Master called the hounds off. My son dismounted and began to thrust a spear savagely into the thicket. When the hare emerged, Charles skewered the creature through its stomach, pinning it to the ground. By then, Edouard and Margot and I had dismounted and approached, in order to congratulate Charles on his first kill—but the odd light in my son’s eyes silenced us.

The hare struggled to free itself, legs scrambling, yellow teeth bared. Laughing, Charles crouched down to touch the animal’s wound and the hare bit him.

He let go a terrible howl and feverishly worked his fingers into the creature’s wound, then pulled outward until the hare screamed; its skin tore, revealing glistening red muscle beneath. This excited Charles even more; he reached inside the dying animal and pulled out its entrails. With a maniacal grin, he held them up—intestines trailing from his fingers—for the world to see.

As the other riders arrived behind us, Charles lowered his face to his hands. Against a backdrop of alder leaves and evergreen, he looked up, his eyes bright, his teeth bared in a ferocious grin. From between them, the entrails—sinister red, like the birthmark above his lips—dangled.

He growled and tossed his head like a dog snapping the neck of its prey. I stepped in front of him, vainly trying to shield the others from the sight.

“My God,” Edouard whispered.

He strode up to Charles and, with a hard blow, sent the King reeling. Charles roared and choked on the gore, then spat it out.

“Damn you to Hell!” the King bellowed. “How dare you strike my person!” He lunged at Edouard.

I tried to position myself between them: Charles struck out blindly, forcing me away, while Edouard tried to grab his brother’s arms. Old Montmorency appeared in the middle of the melee; in the scuffle, Charles was knocked down and Edouard pulled off.

The King shouted incoherently. Tufts of sod flew as his fingers and teeth tore spastically at the grass, as if he meant to murder the innocent ground.

The other hunters left quietly. In the end, Charles exhausted himself and had to be carried away on a litter. He coughed so long and so hard that his kerchief grew soaked with blood.

I sat at his bedside that night, his only attendant besides Doctor Paré, who could not entirely mask his alarm at the sight of the blood. Fortunately, Charles developed no fever and, during breaks in the coughing, became his usual sour self.

“I shall die young,” he announced gloomily, “and everyone will be glad.”

“Don’t speak so!” I chided. “You know very well that, if you were ever to die, it would break my heart.”

He lifted a thin brow. “Surely you would rather Edouard be king.”

“What a horrible thing to say! I love all my children equally.”

“No, you don’t,” he said wearily. “You love Edouard best. And that is sad,
Maman,
because when I am dead, he will show himself as the monster he really is.”