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.
On a small table pushed against the wall beneath the shuttered window, a lamp revealed the room’s other contents: two stools, a shelf holding half a dozen books and several instruments, including a double-bladed dagger, a censer, a goblet, a quill, inkwell, parchment, and several small stoppered vials. A large pearl on a silver chain and a polished onyx lay beside the censer. The table and stools rested on the dirt floor, the shelf upon the slate, just inside the circle in front of one of the large candles.
A young woman with her back to us sat at the table. Her thick, waving hair-a gold so pale it was almost silver-fell heavily to her waist. She paid us no notice but continued to address herself to a roasted duck. Our shadows fell upon the wall near the table; the girl saw them, set down the half-eaten drumstick in her hand, and turned.
She was only twelve or thirteen years old. Her face was abnormally broad, and her blue eyes wide-set, tiny slanting almonds in a pale expanse. The bridge of her nose was flattened; the tip of her tongue protruded between her lips. At the sight of me she let go an agitated grunt and gesticulated at Ruggieri.
He shook his head and swept his arm in a downward, dismissive manner, but she continued to stare at me with a dull, clouded gaze. I had seen such children before, usually in the arms of older mothers.
“She is a deaf-mute,” Ruggieri said, “born an imbecile.”
He smiled sweetly at her and gestured for her to come to him. She rose and turned toward us, revealing breasts too ripe for one her age, pushed high above her tightly laced bodice to create the illusion of greater volume. These were set over a swollen belly, which strained so hard against the waistline of her gown that the seam had torn. She looked to be more than halfway through her confinement.
Sickened, panicked, I turned to Ruggieri. “She is too young!”
“How many years would you buy?” he challenged coolly. “She is a trained prostitute; her guardian used her for income until her pregnancy became obvious. Now she is outcast and wandering, and will certainly starve or be raped and murdered. Even if the child is born…” He let go a small sound of disgust. “What sorts of lives will they have if I put her back on the village streets? You told me that our use of her must come as a kindness. In her case, it will.”
I took a step away from him and thought of the girl’s slack face and vacant eyes. “I can’t do this,” I whispered.
Ruggieri’s black eyes flared; beneath his calm tone lay an undercurrent of coiled violence. “Leave if you must,” he said, “and your Henri will die before you can give him sons.”
I stood frozen, unable to answer.
By then, the girl had eaten most of the duck and turned her attentions on Ruggieri. Without preamble or finesse, she pulled up his doublet and wormed a hand down his leggings. He pulled away and caught her wrist.
“She is quite insatiable,” he said, studying her with perfect detachment. “She had just finished servicing one gentleman when I discovered her, and it has taken me a great deal of effort to avoid her advances.” He held the girl’s wrist tightly until she began to struggle, at which point he glanced over his shoulder at me. “Go stand inside the circle.”
I went to stand in the circle’s heart. A breeze had stirred, sending cold drafts through holes in the thatched roof and rattling shutters, yet I felt the sudden nauseating weight of suffocation.
Ruggieri let go of the girl’s wrist and smiled as he pinched her cheeks playfully. This relaxed her, though when he moved the plate of duck beyond her reach, she grew anxious. He sat down beside her, his arm about her shoulders, and lifted a cup of wine to her lips. Again and again he urged her to drink, which she did without hesitation.
Abruptly, the girl swayed upon the stool and would have fallen had Ruggieri not caught her. He gathered her up and carried her into the circle, where he laid her, limp as a corpse, onto the slate. Her eyes were open and glittering, her breath shallow and slow.
“Don’t move,” Ruggieri whispered hoarsely at me. “Don’t speak or in any way interfere. Above all else, do not step outside the circle.”
He pulled a metal basin and a folded sheet of yellowed linen from the shelf, then unfurled the cloth and dragged the girl onto it.
As he had on the night he had summoned my mother’s ghost, he unstoppered a vial and anointed his forehead and mine, then lit the censer on the bookshelf. Smoke streamed languidly up from the coals, carrying the resinous smell of myrrh and something earthier, deeper, faintly putrid. He lit the candles with the lamp, starting with the one behind the makeshift altar and proceeding clockwise until each bore a flame. Then he blew out the lamp.
By then the sky outside was dark; despite the draft, the filmy air blurred the edges of all objects, rendering the scene indistinct. Ruggieri’s cape and doublet merged into the blackness so that his face, alabaster against his beard and eyes, appeared to float.
It seemed unreal-the girl’s flaccid body at my feet, the curling smoke that veiled the candles’ glow, the magician’s tools upon the shelf-and the vastness of our crime a distant thing. Ruggieri took up a dagger-double-edged, black-hilted, wickedly sharp. Holding it in both hands, he plunged it above his head as if to pierce the sky and chanted loudly as he lowered it to touch the flat to heart and shoulders. He seemed to grow physically larger, all-powerful, more than human. When his eyes snapped open, fierce and focused and impersonal, I thought I looked upon a god.
Abruptly, he began to retrace the circle, above and parallel to the black line on the slate, pausing at each of the candles to slash a symbol with the dagger. At each candle, he thrust the dagger forward and boldly intoned a name, until he again stood in front of the altar.
He dropped to one knee beside the girl and slid his arm beneath her shoulders to prop her torso against his chest. When her head lolled forward, he wound her thick golden hair around his left hand and pulled her head back to expose her white throat.
The girl was still awake, wide-eyed at the sight of the knife. She whimpered; a shudder passed through her as she tried vainly to move her limbs.
Sup
remely commanding, infinitely assured, Ruggieri called out a foreign word, harsh and sibilant, then made a nick with the dagger beneath the girl’s ear. She moaned ferally as darkness streamed down her neck onto her collarbone and between her high, full breasts.
The magician thundered the word again.
The candles dimmed, then brightened; the smoke thickened and began to swirl. I fancied that a shape was forming within it, that something unspeakably cold and heavy and cruel had just entered the room, raising the hairs on my arms.
Ruggieri called out the term of the agreement: this woman’s life for Henri’s; her child for an heir.
Clutching the girl’s hair, Ruggieri maneuvered her throat over the basin and plunged the dagger’s tip into her throat, then made a swift, certain slash beneath her jaw to the opposite ear. The blood spilled out in a sheet, striking the basin with a tinkling sound. Ruggieri’s eyes narrowed at the spray, but his face was immobile, the corners of his lips pulled down by infinite determination.
It was how I should have killed the stableboy. I stared down at the blood. It did not frighten me as much as the knowledge that I could so casually command it, that I could look upon it and not be dismayed. The anticipation had been hard, but at the actual moment of the killing, I remembered how very easy it was. A flash of Ruggieri’s knife, and she was gone.
When the spilling stopped, he pulled the girl’s head up; it dropped back against him to expose the raw, gaping grin beneath the jaw. He let go of her hair and torso and let her drop lifeless to the floor. Her face was white as bone, her neck black with blood; her gaze was fixed on some far distant sight.
Ruggieri went down on both knees over her as if he meant to pray, but instead he slid the dagger beneath her tight bodice and pulled; the thin fabric ripped easily. She wore no chemise; her breasts were round and very firm, the skin a lovely lunar white, so translucent that one could glimpse a vein here and there leading to the large pink nipples. Her body, though unwashed, was young and perfect and plump.
Ruggieri smoothed a hand over her belly as if reading a map with his fingers. With the finesse of an experienced surgeon, he inserted the tip of the dagger beneath her breastbone and drew it neatly down over the mound of the unborn child to her pubis. The knife left a red stripe in its wake, which blurred as her gown absorbed the blood; there was less of it than I expected. He set the knife aside and tried to part the flesh with his fingers, but it did not yield easily because she wore a good deal of fat. He took up the knife again and cut more carefully. I covered my nose at the smell.
Amid a stew of quivering fat, raw muscle, and glistening entrails, something lay exposed: the curve of a tiny red skull, the corner of a purple shoulder smeared with birth cheese. Ruggieri worried his fingers deeper into the woman’s womb and pulled. The silent child emerged with a sucking sound, its bloodied cord intact. I could not see its face, and the magician did not clean it but set it aside on the sheet, a sad little unborn corpse with a great head and frail limbs, still connected to its mother.
At Ruggieri’s soft gasp I looked up. His hands disappeared again inside the dead girl, and when he lifted them up they bore a second red tangle of flesh and bone, this one smaller than the first. Again his hands disappeared, and again brought forth a child.
“Triplets,” he said, amazed. “Chance smiles on you, Catherine.”
Four lives to buy Henri’s, and three sons.
“Never again,” I whispered. “Never.”
The magician knew well what I meant; my words replaced his sudden lightness with something very dark.
“How often,” he said, “I have uttered those words myself.”
I remember little of the ritual afterward. Ruggieri applied a drop of the girl’s blood to the onyx, then a bit of blood from each child to the pearl. When the circle was broken, we left the bodies on the slate and Ruggieri lit the lamp. We sat on the stools while he explained that I must lie with my husband as soon as possible, then handed me the two tainted stones: The pearl was mine, the onyx Henri’s. I was instructed to hide the latter where my husband spent most of his time. I was to wear the pearl always, and never let it from my sight.
As the magician spoke, rain drummed on the roof and crashed against the stones outside. He opened the shutters just enough to admit the sound of a downpour and distant thunder.
“Madame Gondi’s horse,” I said, absurdly worried that it might get wet when my bloodied victims lay nearby.
“Stay,” Ruggieri ordered. “I’ll lead it beneath the eaves for shelter. You’ll need to remain here until the storm passes.”
He pushed open the door and disappeared into the darkness.
I stood at the window, though the night and rain blotted out sight and sound. He was gone for so long that a sudden paralyzing fear stole my breath: Something old and shrewd and evil waited outside in the darkness for me.
Cosimo Ruggieri was an inhuman fiend: I had just witnessed the proof. He had once said that he had protected me because it served his best interests; what might serve them now?
The rain crashed down harder. Childishly, knowing I could not be heard, I cried out to him. Ruggieri appeared upon the threshold abruptly, as though the utterance of his name had forced him to materialize.
Water pooled upon his shoulders; beads of rain coursed down his cheeks. I was still trembling and tried to cover my fear of him by sneering, “Poor man. Do you cry now, for her and her children?”
He stepped inside the door. The edges of his eyelids and nostrils were red; he was indeed weeping.
“Don’t tell me you feel remorse,” I said.
He looked up at me with a face I had never seen, one wearing Ruggieri’s features, but younger and haunted by many ghosts; in its eyes was self-loathing that verged on insanity.
“For no one else, Catherine,” he said hoarsely. “For no one else.” Words welled up and caught in his throat, bitter things he could not bring himself to expel.
I heard but refused to understand. I shook my head and backed away from him. “No. No, that isn’t true. This isn’t the first time you’ve done something so horrible. I heard of your crimes when I was only a girl.”
“When you were in the hands of the rebels,” he hissed, “how do you think I protected you? How do you think I knew of the danger that was coming?”
The talisman, I wanted to say. It was the talisman that kept me safe. I closed my eyes and felt it hard against my heart, hiding the wickedness that lurked beneath. I did not want to know what he had done to charge it.
He bowed his head; the words he had fought so hard to contain finally tore free. “Only ever out of love, Catherine.”
The girl’s mutilated body and those of her unborn children lay inside the circle, the candles extinguished. The lamplight chased away all sense of unreality, leaving behind a stark heaviness. Pierced to my bones, I sank onto the stool, the one on which the girl had sat as Ruggieri plied her with tainted wine.
Love.
Do not tell me that you did this for me. I understood suddenly how my husband would feel were I to confess my crime. The magician’s words, uttered more than a decade earlier, returned to me:
We are tied, Caterina Maria Romula de’ Medici.
Aghast, I said, “I love only Henri. I will forever love only Henri.”
His face was taut with grief, his voice shatteringly mournful.
“I know, Madame la Dauphine. I have read your stars.”
Twenty-three
The rain did not last long. Numbed, I rode back to the palace, stopping a short distance away to hand over the horse’s reins to Madame Gondi, who returned it to the stables. I said nothing to her, but even in the darkness, she must have read the horror in my bearing.
I went directly to my chamber, and did not go down for supper; I was still too shocked to be charming and talkative. I fastened the pearl pendant around my neck with trembling fingers.
Despite my disquiet, I needed to lie with Henri that night. I made a chambermaid wait while I
penned a note urging my husband to come to my chambers immediately after supper, implying that some emergency had occurred.
One of the ladies undressed me to my chemise, then left while Madame Gondi brushed out my hair, still damp from the drizzle on my ride home. Her eyes held many questions, but she came and went in silence.
After a time, Henri knocked on my bedchamber door; I opened it myself. He hesitated on the threshold, his face sun-browned from the hunt, a slash of concern separating his brows. His eyes were easily read: He had not wanted to come, but Diane had sent him.
“Are you unwell, Madame la Dauphine?” he asked formally. He held his brown velvet cap a bit nervously in both hands.
Before his arrival, I had thought that my nerves would fail, that I would be unable lure him into a liaison. But at the sight of him, a surge of feral heat swept over me-wild and foreign, from someplace far outside me-carrying away with it all my notions of propriety and dignity. I wanted to devour him alive.
I put a finger to my lips and reached past him to close the chamber door.
He was embarrassed by my forwardness and eager to leave; I would not let him. Like the imbecile prostitute, I snaked my hand beneath the waistband of his leggings, found the flesh between his legs, and closed my fingers around it; with my other hand, I pulled his leggings down to the middle of his thighs.
I knelt before him and did something I had never done: I lowered my head and took his swelling flesh into my mouth, at the same time glimpsing a veil of waving golden hair where my own mousy brown should have been.
My actions caught him off guard. At first he tried to push me away, then held very still, and finally seized my skull and groaned as his cap fell to the floor, forgotten. His shaft was veined and purple and more swollen than I had ever seen it-like me, hardened by blood and ready to burst. I moved my mouth up and down, so fast that I cut my upper lip and tasted blood. I rose quickly on my toes, seizing Henri’s shoulders and pulling him down to kiss his mouth and tongue, to make him taste blood, too.
The Medici Queen aka The Devil’s Queen Page 23
