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

by Jeanne Kalogridis

  What was done out of fear must now be done out of love. Madame la Reine, these children should not be.

  I shook off my dizziness and refocused my gaze until I saw the Cardinal’s features again. He was addressing Navarre.

  “Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife? To love her, and cherish her, so long as you both shall live?”

  Navarre’s strong voice carried over the hushed, breathless city. “Yes.”

  The Cardinal looked to my daughter. “And do you, Marguerite, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband? To honor and obey him, so long as you both shall live?”

  The crowd waited. Margot bowed her head and answered nothing. After a torturously long pause, the Cardinal—assuming that heat or emotion had overwhelmed the bride—repeated the question.

  Margot did not reply. Her lips were pressed together tightly, her face flushed from something other than the heat. Her groom resolutely fastened his gaze on the Cardinal.

  “God be damned,” Charles muttered beside me. “God be damned, haven’t I endured enough?” He leaped from his seat; beside me, Edouard tensed as the King marched up to Margot. He put his hand firmly upon her jeweled crown and began to pump it up and down, forcing her to perform a parody of an affirmative nod.

  Margot’s features crumpled with humiliation and fury—but the relieved Cardinal took it as an answer and pronounced the couple man and wife. The crowd’s response was thunderous. The couple rose, and the Cardinal presented them to the assembly—Henri de Bourbon, King of Navarre and Prince of France, and his wife, Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre and Princess of France.

  I rose to embrace my daughter and her husband. But as I stood up, daylight suddenly flickered. I looked down at my feet and saw there a dark, spreading stain. It traveled quickly until the entire platform bled crimson.

  Margot had married the Huguenot king, but it was not enough.

  Something prompted me to look over my shoulder and down. On the northern edge of the platform, an arm’s breadth from the halberd-bearing Swiss, was Cosimo Ruggieri.

  He stood near a group of black-clad Huguenots and might well have been mistaken for one of them were it not for the red satin stripes on his black sleeves and breeches. The past thirteen years had taken their toll: His blue-black hair was streaked with silver, his shoulders markedly stooped. In the midst of the jubilant revelers, he alone did not smile. He stared somberly, intently, directly at me.

  I wanted to run to him, to ask him if he, too, saw the river of blood. But I could only stare fixedly at him until Edouard hissed at me: The time had come to go into the cathedral for the proxy ceremony. While Navarre and his party waited outside, I reluctantly entered the church with the others.

  When the ritual was over and we came back out onto the platform, accompanied by the deafening chorus of Notre-Dame’s five bells, I turned my searching, anxious gaze to the crowd, but Ruggieri had vanished.

  A banquet followed at the Cardinal’s palace; afterward, the sated diners headed for the Louvre’s ballroom. I ate and danced and kept an anxious eye on my daughter, who had apparently resigned herself to her fate; she danced and smiled with apparent sincerity, though she scrupulously avoided meeting the admiring gaze of her husband.

  I had unwisely joined in a vigorous saltarello and was returning to my chair, fan pumping madly, when Ambassador Zuñiga caught my eye and motioned me aside. He, too, had just performed the jumps and twists of the challenging dance; his face was streaked with rivulets of perspiration.

  “Madame la Reine, forgive me,” he gasped. “I do not mean to dampen the joy of this celebration, but I must lodge a protest.”

  I looked at him from behind my frantically gyrating fan. “What now, Don Diego?”

  “It is that ill-bred boor Coligny. Go and listen to him now: He is bragging openly that he will return victorious from the Netherlands and present Charles with the captured banner of Spain. How can I listen idly to this blatant affront to my King?”

  My fan stilled. “He is a traitor,” I said softly, “and he will soon pay for his crimes against our King, and yours. But not today, Don Diego. Today, we will celebrate my daughter’s wedding.”

  The intrigued tilt of the ambassador’s head indicated that he could guess very well what I had not said, and that it would be to his benefit to forget our conversation.

  “Thank you, Madame la Reine,” he said and kissed my hand. “In that case, I must apologize for interrupting your joyful day.”

  I was tempted to go and hear Coligny’s boasts for myself but decided against it: I did not want to be seen reacting to his arrogance. I sat in my chair listening to the music for the rest of the evening, until most of the guests had left.

  Near the end of the revels, an exhausted Navarre approached me. “Tante Catherine,” he asked, “might I have a private word?”

  “Of course.” I patted the empty chair beside me. “You are my son now.”

  He sat down and handed me a small velvet box and a letter. “These are from my mother. She asked me to give them to you after the wedding.”

  I took them from him. The sealed letter was addressed to me in Jeanne’s careful hand; I knew it well, from all the many lists of demands we had shared with each other during the marriage negotiations.

  “I will read this later, in private,” I said and slipped it inside my sleeve.

  I opened the dusty little box. Nestled inside, against white silk that had yellowed with age, was a brooch made from a large, perfect emerald surrounded by clusters of diamonds.

  “This is exquisite,” I murmured. “And it must be worth a small fortune. But I never saw your mother wear it.”

  “Nor did I,” he admitted. “I don’t know how she came by it, but she wanted you to have it. Her gentlewoman told me she wrote the letter on her deathbed.”

  “Thank you,” I said, touched, and kissed him upon the cheek. He flushed with charming shyness; I took advantage of the moment to speak frankly.

  “So,” I said, closing the box, “will you be going with the Admiral to the Netherlands after the celebrations?”

  His eyes widened before he caught hold of himself and frowned. “No,” he said firmly. “I must apologize for him, Madame la Reine. He has overstepped his bounds. I have made my opinion known to him, yet he ignores me.”

  “What would that opinion be?” I asked.

  Henri’s expression hardened. “It is mad to bait Spain; it can bring only disaster. We are just recovering from years of war. Now is the time to recover and rebuild, not tear down.”

  “Well put,” I said, though I did not believe he had meant any of it.

  The smiling Cardinal de Bourbon, with Margot and Charles in tow, approached us and leaned down to speak into my ear.

  “The time has come, Madame la Reine.”

  I led Margot upstairs to her own chamber, outfitted as a bridal suite, with satin indigo sheets and pale blue velvet hangings. With my ladies, I dutifully scattered handfuls of walnuts over the antechamber floor. Then I helped my daughter undress and settle beneath the silk sheets. As she pulled the top sheet over her breasts, tears slid down the sides of her face. I embraced her tightly.

  “My darling,” I whispered, “you will be happy, and this marriage will bring us peace.”

  She was too overcome with emotion to answer. I went out to the antechamber to find the Cardinal and Edouard looking troubled.

  “His Majesty refuses to come witness the consummation,” Edouard said irritably. “He insists I do so in his stead.”

  The Cardinal was shaking his head. “This is unheard of,” he said. “The King must sign the contract as a witness, to verify that the act took place.”

  “And he will,” I told the Cardinal and turned to Edouard. “Tell him that he must come!”

  “I did, Maman,” Edouard said. “He refuses to listen.”

  I let go a sound of pure exasperation. “Where is he?”

  “In his bedchamber. I tell you, he will not come,”
Edouard said.

  I was already out the door. I found His Majesty huddled in his bed with the sheet pulled up, fully dressed in his wedding garb.

  “Get up, Charles,” I said.

  “I won’t do it,” he whined. “You don’t understand, Maman. No one understands me . . . no one, except Margot. And now this—this Huguenot bastard means to take her from me.”

  “Don’t be a child,” I said. “Get up. The Cardinal is waiting.”

  Tears came to his eyes. “Everyone is trying to take her away from me. Edouard, Henri . . . and now you. Don’t you see, Maman? I love her . . .”

  I slapped him so hard that his skull struck the headboard.

  “How dare you!” he snarled. “How dare you touch the person of the King!”

  I moved to strike him again, but he raised an arm defensively.

  The words tumbled out of me. “We all must do things we despise, my son—but I would remind you that your sister is not your wife. She belongs to another man—rightly so—and you will now behave as a good brother ought, and do what tradition demands.”

  A spasm of grief contorted Charles’s face; he let go a wracking sob. “I want to die,” he gasped. “No one else can abide me . . . no one else is kind to me, because I am so wretched. What will I do without her?”

  “Your Majesty,” I said, “you speak as though she is lost forever. You forget that she is, even now, under your roof—and she will likely remain here for years to come. Now that Henri’s mother is dead, he will spend little time in Navarre.”

  Charles looked up at me, his face damp; mucus had collected on his dark mustache. “You are not lying to me?”

  “I am not lying,” I said, without trying to hide my irritation. “Charles, if you ever speak of her again as though she were anything more than your sister . . . I will do worse than strike you. Now get up, and perform the duty all French kings have performed before you.”

  In the end, he came with me to the antechamber and went, trembling, to sit beside the Cardinal while Henri and his bride performed the nuptial act. The Cardinal later confessed to me that Charles had spent the entire time with his hands over his eyes.

  When the King emerged from Margot’s bedchamber, he looked down at me with red, swollen eyes. “By God, I will kill him,” he whispered. “I will kill him, too . . .”

  Three days of nonstop festivities followed—although the more vigorous entertainments, including the joust, were canceled after too many of the participants fainted in the merciless heat. On the last day, the twenty-first, Edouard reported to me that he had witnessed a confrontation between Coligny and the King outside the tennis gallery. Coligny had demanded an audience; Charles had stalled him, saying, “Give me a few more days of celebration, mon père—I cannot think with all these parties going on.”

  “If you will not see me sooner, then I shall be obliged to leave Paris,” Coligny reportedly responded. “And if I do, you will find yourself embroiled in a civil war rather than a foreign one.”

  The comment prompted Edouard, as Lieutenant General, to station troops at strategic points around the city, ostensibly to keep the peace between the Guises and Coligny. It also worried me that our victim might quit the city too soon—but the Admiral had responded with an emphatic affirmative when I asked him later that day whether he would attend the Council meeting on the following morning. Poor fool; he actually believed he still could sway us.

  Late in the evening, against the backdrop of distant music and laughter coming from the final masked ball, Edouard and I met with Marshal Tavannes, whom we had entrusted with the news of the coming assassination, as well as Anna d’Este, her husband, and her son the Duke of Guise. Anna’s husband, the Duke of Nemours, reported that the arquebusier, Maurevert, had already arrived on the rue de Béthizy property and was busily determining which location gave him best access the street.

  The conspirators’ expressions displayed grim exhilaration and the occasional pang of conscience. I felt nothing, only the sense that everything around me—the conversation, the faces, the music and voices of the gay revelers in the distant ballroom—was unreal.

  That night I lay abed in a pool of sweat and struggled to relax my limbs, my quickened breath, my curiously throbbing heart. A sickness settled over me, the same burning chill I had often experienced during pregnancy just before a bout of retching. This time, I could not expel what troubled me; this time, I was not giving birth to life.

  I did not dream because I did not sleep. I did not sleep because I feared the dreams that had dogged me for so long. I stared up into the darkness, praying that the stifling air above me would not suddenly transform itself into blood and spill down on me like mortal rain, drowning me in my bed.

  I wish now that it had.

  Forty-three

  Friday, August twenty-second—the day the government resumed its business—dawned the hottest of them all. There had been no rain since the previous Sunday; in the streets, carriage wheels and horses’ hooves kicked up clouds of dust. The air was heavy with unspent moisture: I traded my soggy nightgown for a chemise and petticoats that immediately clung to my shining, damp skin.

  Edouard and I had agreed that the best course of action on that fateful day was to make as many public appearances as possible, so that it was clear we royals were consumed by far happier things than an assassination. I went to early Mass at the nearby cathedral of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois with Anjou and Margot—who was exhausted but remarkably cheerful—as well as all the Catholic members of the wedding party.

  Edouard and I returned for the Privy Council meeting scheduled for nine o’clock; we arrived early, and the Duke of Anjou took the King’s place at the head of the long oval table. I sat beside him. I had already warned His Majesty that Coligny would be present and would again press Charles to support his Netherlands war, more vehemently now that he realized he was in danger of losing the King’s tacit blessing. As a result, Charles decided to linger cowardly in his bed that morning and left the running of the meeting to his brother.

  Coligny arrived at the stroke of nine, just after the white-haired Duke of Montpensier, and before the dashing young Gonzaga, the Duke of Nevers, and the aging soldier Marshal Cossé. Last to enter was the bald, near-toothless Marshal Tavannes, whose years of service had earned him the right to keep royals waiting.

  I studied Coligny, knowing this would be the last time I should see him. His once sun-browned skin had faded after his prolonged absence from the battlefield, and he had gained a bit of weight on the Court’s fine fare. Despite his talent for duplicity, he had been unable to fully mask his disappointment at the King’s absence. I felt no anxiety at the sight of him, only a curious relief at the knowledge that he would be dead on the morrow. If I hated him, it was only as a mother might hate a viper that threatened her children; there was no personal animosity, only a desire to protect my own.

  After giving the assembled a chance to share complaints about the abysmal heat, the Duke of Anjou called the meeting to order. Coligny asked to present his argument for war in the Low Countries again. Just beyond our northern border, he claimed, fresh atrocities were being committed in Flanders. Given the location, we could deploy troops quickly there, and the victory would give us the needed momentum to move farther, into the Netherlands.

  Edouard listened to his request with exquisite composure, then said, “The matter of war with Spain has already been discussed, and a vote taken. There is no need to revisit the issue. Are my fellow councillors agreed?”

  We were.

  Fury flickered brightly in Coligny’s eyes and was replaced by hard determination. He had prepared for this probability; his decision had already been made. The meeting continued another two hours. During that time, the Admiral sat with his fist against his chin and stared out the window as he plotted war. Upon adjournment, he left quickly, without a word.

  Afterward, the Duke of Anjou and I made our way to a public lunch. The shutters had been opened and the curtains drawn in
order to light the vast, high-ceilinged chamber. Dust hung in the air and glittered in shafts of harsh sunlight.

  Edouard and I sat at one end of the long dining table. Guards hovered discreetly at intervals between us and the standing crowd of nobles. While Edouard and I were served the first course, an octet performed a pair of songs that spun witty tales of love peppered with misunderstandings, double entendres, and jokes, all of which led to happy endings. The crowd applauded them enthusiastically.

  As the music died, cathedral bells throughout the city marked the time: eleven in the morning, the hour of Coligny’s death. In the Guises’ château on the rue de Béthizy, Maurevert was lifting his arquebus and taking careful aim.

  I looked to my son. As we directed our attention to our bowls, Edouard seemed lighthearted and at ease. If Lorenzo, the wise-eyed boy from the mural on the Medici chapel walls, could have seen us, I wondered, would he have approved?

  We began our meal in silence. I was keenly aware of every sight, sound, touch: of the clang of my spoon against the porcelain bowl, of its handle, quickly heated in my hand, of the ripples in the broth when the edge of the spoon broke its surface. Edouard’s black eyes were very bright, his hands steady.

  “I should like to take Henri to the château at Blois,” I said languidly. “It would be much cooler there than in the city. I hope to go as soon as business allows.”

  “An excellent idea,” my son replied. “I would enjoy taking Henri on the hunt.”

  We soon finished the first course. Given the weather, I had little appetite and sent it back to the kitchen half-eaten. The second course—one of my favorites, eels in red wine—was delivered piping hot, and the steam from it prompted me to draw back in my chair and wave my fan. As it cooled, Edouard and I exchanged a few more inanities.

  My Edouard, I thought. My precious eyes . . . I could not bear this without you.

  How could Ruggieri have been such a monster? How could he ever have suggested that I harm my beloved child?