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

by Jeanne Kalogridis

  “You didn’t hurt me, Your Highness,” I lied, without turning to look at him. “I cried out only because I was startled.”

  “I wasn’t speaking of that,” he said, “although I’m sorry for that, too.” He paused. “I’m sorry that I haven’t been more pleasant. You’ve been so kind. My brothers and sisters like you very much, and so does my father.”

  I stared at the tapestry bed hanging in front of me, at the play of the firelight on the threads of shining gold woven in among those of burgundy and forest green. “And you?” I asked.

  “You’re charming,” he answered shyly. “Dignified, yet cordial. Everyone at Court is very impressed. But . . . I know I’m not as cheerful as my brothers, a fact that annoys my father. I’ll try to do better.”

  “You need not apologize,” I said. “I know you didn’t want this match. I’m a foreigner, a commoner, and ugly . . .”

  “Don’t speak of yourself in such a manner!” he exclaimed indignantly. “I forbid it. Your looks are pleasing enough; one doesn’t need to be pretty to be handsome.” His words were so honest and guileless that I was moved to roll over and face him.

  “Oh, Henri,” I said, reaching for him, but I had moved too quickly. He flinched and recoiled in such involuntary disgust that I withdrew at once. His gaze met mine, but he didn’t see me: instead, he stared at something beyond me, something hideous. I saw the poorly veiled loathing in his eye and shrank from it.

  How, I thought, shall I ever be able to tell you of my bloody dream, if you will not love me?

  He dropped his gaze. “Please, I . . . I’m sorry, Catherine, truly I am. I’m just so very tired.”

  “I’m tired, too,” I said tightly. “I think I would like to sleep.” I turned my back to him.

  He hesitated—trying, perhaps, to think of the words to ease my hurt—then finally turned away. He lay awake for some time, but in the end, sleep took him.

  Had there been a place within my new home to find solitude, I would have gone there; but the room where I had spent my last virginal days in the temporary palace was full of servants, the corridors full of revelers. Women stood watch in our antechamber; if I had risen, or stirred, they would have known. I remained all night where I least wanted to be—in Henri’s bed.

  It was there, in the hours before dawn, that an ominous thought jerked me from a light doze.

  Perhaps what Henri had seen, when he recoiled from me in disgust, was not his hated father or an unwanted marriage. Perhaps, with his innocence and sensitivity, he had looked beyond those things at the dark blot on my soul.

  Seventeen

  In the weeks that followed, Henri never came to my quarters or summoned me to his. He spent his time hunting, jousting, or playing tennis with his older brother. Many times I sat with the gentlemen of the chamber in the great indoor gallery and watched Henri and François. One brother would lift the ball high in his left hand and bellow: “Tenez! I have it!”—a warning to his opponent that he was about to smash the ball against the high stone walls. That either ever managed to avoid being struck by the madly ricocheting projectile—or braining one of the spectators—was a testament to his skill.

  Young François, pale and golden in contrast to his dark brother, won the crowd’s affection and sympathies, grinning at his errors and bowing to the audience immediately after their commission. In his presence, Henri came alive. He was athletically gifted, while François was shorter, heavier, and not as lithe. Henri could easily have taken every game but often made intentional errors so that his brother could win.

  When Henri was not engaged in sport, he spent a great deal of time with the blond widow from Queen Eléonore’s entourage. Young François, by contrast, liked to dine with his sisters and many days shared lunch with us.

  On one such occasion, I asked him about the widow. She was Diane de Poitiers, wife of the late Louis de Brézé, a very powerful old man who had been the Grand Seneschal of Normandy. Her grandmother had been a de La Tour d’Auvergne, which made us second cousins. At the age of fourteen, Madame de Poitiers had come to Court to attend the King’s first wife, Claude. In the twenty years since, she had earned a reputation for dignity and temperance, dressing modestly and eschewing the white face paint and rouge used by the other women. A pious Catholic, she was scandalized by the infiltration of Protestants into Court.

  “In which subject does she instruct my husband?” I asked François.

  I speared a piece of venison—I had brought my own fork from Italy and still suffered the bemused glances of the French for using such an exotic implement—and paused before taking a bite.

  Young François held his meat in his fingers and bit off a large chunk before answering. “In protocol, comport, and politics,” he said, chewing, his words muffled. “She’s quite good at all three.” He swallowed and shot me a curious glance. “You needn’t be jealous. The lady is famous for her virtue. And she’s a good twenty years older than Henri.”

  “Of course I’m not jealous,” I said, with a little laugh.

  François dismissed the thought with an easy smile. “You must understand, Henri was only five when our mother died. He had always been very attached to her, so the loss was particularly hard on him. Madame de Poitiers looked after Henri and tried to be like a mother to him. That’s why he looks to her for approval now.”

  François was not the only dear friend I discovered in my new family. The King’s sister Marguerite, Queen of Navarre—that tiny country south of France and north of Spain, bordering the Pyrenees—lived at Court with her five-year-old daughter, Jeanne. Marguerite and I adored each other at first glance; our affection was strengthened when we discovered our shared passion for books. Marguerite was tall, warm, and sparkling, with such prominent cheeks that, when she smiled, they partially eclipsed her eyes.

  Like her brother, she had been born in Cognac, not far from the central eastern coast, where Italian art and letters were properly appreciated, and she had insisted that King François bring the aging Florentine master Leonardo da Vinci to France and pay him handsomely—“even though,” she said, with gentle, rueful humor, “he was too old and blind to do much painting.” He had brought with him some of his best works—including a small, lovely portrait of a smiling, dark-haired woman, one of my favorites, which still hangs at the Château of Amboise.

  “However,” Marguerite warned, “don’t believe the King when he tells you that Leonardo died in his arms. My brother likes to forget that he was not in Amboise at the master’s final hour.”

  She also spoke with pride of her brother’s work to create the grandest, most complete library in Europe—housed at the country Château at Blois. I promised that at my first opportunity I would visit it.

  Meanwhile, I settled into an ostensibly magnificent life. We quit Marseille’s sunny coastline for the country’s wintry interior as King François grew restless after a month or two in any one location.

  Before I arrived in France, I had thought I lived in luxury, with my needs attended to by many servants, but my error was one of scope. In Italy, power was scattered and a ruler’s subjects few. The Sforzas ruled Milan; the Medici, Florence; the d’Estes, Ferrara; a hundred different barons ruled a hundred different towns. Rome lay under the authority of the Pope; Venice, under that of a Republic. But France was a nation with a single monarch, and the greatness of that fact struck me when I first traveled with François I’s Court—not so much a court as a city of thousands.

  Most of the royal employees served in one of three domains: the chamber, the chapel, or the hostel. Under the first, the Grand Chamberlain supervised the provision and maintenance of clothing, the ritual of dressing the King, and all activities related to the King’s personal toilette. Its staff included valets, gentlemen of the chamber, cupbearers and bread carriers, barbers, tailors, seamstresses, laundresses, chambermaids, and fools.

  The domain of the chapel, managed by the Grand Almoner, included the King’s confessor, dozens of chaplains, almoners, choirs, and
the King’s reader.

  The domain of the hostel, run by the Grand Master, fed the King and his enormous entourage. There were other lesser domains, including those of the stables, which encompassed the royal messengers; the hunt, which cared for the dogs and birds; and the fourriers, who faced the harrowing task of moving the Court and its belongings from location to location. In addition, there were councillors, secretaries, notaries, bookkeepers, pages, apothecaries, doctors, surgeons, musicians, poets, artists, jewelers, architects, bodyguards, archers, quartermasters, sumpters, and squires.

  And these were only those who were in the King’s employ. There were also those who attended his family—his sister, children, and cousins—as well as the foreign dignitaries and ambassadors, and all of the King’s friends whose boon companionship pleased him.

  I left Marseille in a sumptuously appointed carriage and turned to look at the winding caravan of wagons, horses, and heavy-laden mules behind me. Twenty thousand mounts, five hundred dogs, and as many hawks and falcons, as well as a lynx and a lion, traveled with our circus. We stayed at various lodgings—mostly the châteaus of nobles happy to entertain the Crown—until we made our way into the Loire Valley.

  The royal Château at Blois was magnificent and contradictory. To one side stood a red-brick castle built by François I’s pre de ces sor, Louis XII, and inherited by his daughter, Claude. It was here that Jeanne d’Arc received a blessing from the Archbishop of Reims before leading her troops into battle. Claude had been fond of the property, and when she married François—thus securing his claim to the French throne—he added a modern four-story palace.

  The palace was unlike Italian palazzi. The interior apartments were connected to all other areas not by corridors but by spiraling staircases. My first few days at Blois, I was constantly short of breath, but within a week, I was running up and down the steps without a thought. The King was so fond of spiral staircases that he had a massive, dramatic one—adorned with statues, in Gothic fashion—placed outside at the building’s center.

  The King’s and Queen’s apartments were on the second floor—as was, in flagrant violation of tradition, that of François’s mistress, Madame d’Etampes. The children’s apartments were all on the third floor. Persons of lesser importance lived on the ground floor, where the refectories, kitchen, and guardroom were also located. Numerous outbuildings housed cardinals, clerks, courtiers, bookkeepers, doctors, tutors, and a host of others.

  Night had fallen by the time I ate and saw my trunks unpacked. I was shown my spacious apartment, next to that of Henri’s sisters, by lamplight; the King was expected on the morrow and would take up residence in his. I was used to a bedchamber and antechamber, but now I had a bedchamber, an antechamber, a garderobe large enough to hold all my clothes as well as a sleeping servant, and a cabinet, a small, private office. On the brick over my bedroom fireplace was the golden image of a salamander—King François’s personal symbol—and beneath it, the motto Notrisco al buono, stingo el reo, “ I feed off the good fire and extinguish the bad.”

  I dismissed all the French attendants and called for one of my own ladies-in-waiting, Madame Gondi, to undress me.

  Marie-Catherine de Gondi was an astonishingly beautiful woman of thirty with prematurely silver hair and delicate black eyebrows. Her skin was flawless, save for a tiny dark mole on one cheek, near the corner of her lips. She was well-educated, intelligent, and possessed of a natural daintiness that held no whiff of affectation.

  She was French but with a comforting difference: She had lived in Florence for many years before joining my entourage, with the result that she spoke fluent Tuscan. I was not of a mind to speak French that night, and her conversation was a comfort to me. After she undressed me, I asked her to read to me and gave her a copy of one of Aunt Marguerite’s poems, “Miroir de l’Ame Pecheresse, Mirror of a Lost Soul.”

  She read for some time, and I sent her to bed as the poor woman was exhausted after a long day of travel. I was still restless and recalled what Aunt Marguerite had told me about the royal library. I wrapped myself modestly in a cloak and, lamp in hand, made my way onto the spiraling staircase that exited my apartment.

  The layout of the château was confusing, but after several false starts, I found the staircase that led me to the library. The room was vast and as dark, on that moonless night, as a high-ceilinged cave. I held my brave little lamp close, my hand in front of me to prevent any immediate encounters with walls or furniture.

  As I sensed a looming presence in the darkness, I reached out and felt the smooth edge of molded wood and silk-covered spines—a shelf of books. Eagerly, I moved closer and lifted the lamp, whose glow revealed a wooden case stretching from floor to ceiling; in the shadows, even more cases stretched back into infinity. The books were all of a uniform size, bound in different colors of watered silk. There were the obligatory editions of Dante’s Commedia, Petrarch’s Trionfi and Canzoniere, and of course Boccaccio’s Decameron.

  There were also titles I had never seen before: a newly bound volume of Pantagruel, by Rabelais; Utopia, by Sir Thomas More, and an astonishing collection by Boccaccio, De claris mulieribus, On Famous Women.

  I soon stumbled onto greater riches: a copy of Theologica Platonica de Immortalitate Animae, Platonic Theology of the Immortal Soul, by Marsilio Ficino. I pulled it down at once, of course, and might have stopped my searching right there, but my appetite was whetted. A chill coursed through me at the sight of De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres by Cornelius Agrippa. I had just stumbled onto the King’s occult collection, and a lifting of my lamp revealed volume after volume on the subjects of astrology, alchemy, qabala, and talismans.

  In my mind, I heard the magician’s voice: The Wing of Corvus Rising, from Agrippa, created under the aegis of Mars and Saturn. Instinctively, I lifted a hand to my breasts, between which the talisman hung.

  It seemed to me that the sudden appearance of these works by Ficino and Agrippa was a providential indication: If Henri was the bloodied man in my dream, I needed all the secret wisdom I could find.

  This notion filled me with an eerie excitement; I opened Agrippa’s book and began to read. I was so utterly carried away by the words that I did not hear the creak of the door, with the result that when the King himself appeared in the darkness—hair uncombed, nightshirt hid beneath a gold brocade dressing gown—I gasped as if I had seen a specter.

  King François laughed; the yellow glow from the lamp in his hand had a ghoulish eff ect on his long face.

  “Don’t be frightened, Catherine. My supper awakens me far too often now that I am grown old.”

  “Your Majesty.” I shut the book and curtsied awkwardly. “I must compliment you on your library. I’m enormously impressed by your selection of titles. And I’ve barely begun to explore it.”

  He lowered his lamp and grinned, pleased, then glanced at the books in my hand.

  “Agrippa, eh? That manuscript is rare—it has yet to be formally published—but I was lucky enough to obtain one of the few copies in circulation. Quite esoteric choices, Neoplatonism and astrological magic, for a young lady. How do you find Agrippa?”

  I paused. Many priests disapproved of such subjects; indeed, many argued that these topics were blasphemous. It occurred to me that, although the King might see fit to include such titles in the royal library, he might not necessarily approve of them—or of my taking them to read.

  “I find it fascinating,” I said stoutly. “I am a student of astrology and related subjects, and fond of Ficino. In fact, I brought one of his works from Florence, De Vita Coelitus Comparanda.”

  His eyes widened and lit up. “That would be the third volume—”

  “Of De Vita Libri Tres, yes. I’ll write my family in Florence and ask for the first two volumes. And I shall make all three of them a present for your library.”

  He lunged at me and kissed each of my cheeks in rapid turn. “My darling! I could ask for no better gift! But I cannot ask you to give away one of
your own country’s national treasures.”

  “I’m French now,” I said. To my mind, the House of Medici and the royal House of Valois were one and the same.

  He embraced me with real warmth. “I will accept your generous gift, my daughter. But I would not see the books sent here, where we will be spending only a month or two. Have them sent to Fontainebleau, near Paris. You and I will be there by the time the books arrive, and thus will be able to enjoy them immediately.” He paused. “You needn’t read the books here, child; take them to your room and keep them as long as you’d like.” He moved back toward the shelves. “And now, some reading for me.”

  Lifting the lamp, he squinted at the titles.

  “Ah,” he said at last. “Here.” He drew a book from the shelf. The title was in French, the subject Italian architecture. “I’m of a mind to do more building at Fontainebleau.”

  I moved to stand beside him and spied a treatise about Brunelleschi, who had designed the great dome for Florence’s cathedral. I retrieved the book from the shelf and opened it.

  He turned his head sharply as he registered my interest. “So,” he asked, “you enjoy philosophy and architecture? Not generally subjects of interest for a woman.”

  I must have blushed, given the sudden rush of warmth to my neck and cheeks. “It is Brunelleschi, Sire, and I am from Florence. But I should think anyone would be curious to learn how such a huge cupola stands without any visible support.”

  He gave a toothy grin of approval. “Tomorrow, the third hour after noon, go to the royal stables and join me for a ride in the countryside.”

  “Your invitation honors me, Your Majesty,” I said and curtsied again. “I won’t be late.”

  By the time I finally drifted off to sleep in my bed, Agrippa’s book open on my lap, I had made a decision: If I could not win Henri, then I would win his father, in the hope of reconciling them—and, of course, reconciling Henri to me.