Duchessina - A Novel of Catherine de' Medici

by Carolyn Meyer

  “French disease?” I asked innocently.

  “It wasn’t only naive servant girls whom Lorenzo bedded,” she informed me, pouring her poison into my ear. “But prostitutes as well. They infected him with their filth. It couldn’t have been a pleasant way to die. A wonder he didn’t make me a gift of the pox as well as of a daughter.”

  I somehow shook myself free of the paralyzing fear that had nailed me in place. “No more!” I cried. “No more!” And I ran blindly away back to my cell. Her words echoed in my head: Somewhere in Florence is your half sister . . .

  SUOR IMMACOLATA continued to make my life a misery, although it would have been miserable enough even without her. Santa Lucia felt like a prison, and I was surely a hostage. The food was only a little better than the scraps the Medici cooks threw to the dogs. Sharp straws poked through the mattress cover and scratched my skin, and vermin crawled out at night to feast on my flesh. Hot weather arrived, and my cell became an oven.

  By early June of each year our household at Palazzo Medici had always moved from the city to one of the Medici country villas, most often to Poggio a Caiano, where mountain breezes cooled us on even the hottest days and Betta took me to wade in the Ombrone River that flowed past sprawling orchards and vineyards. Never before had I endured the sweltering days of summer in the city. But that summer of my eighth year there was no escape.

  I begged Suora Madre—Mother Superior—to send for Aunt Clarissa. “Not possible,” she told me coldly. “Accept the fate God has given you.”

  I LEARNED the rhythm of life at Santa Lucia by imitation, doing what the nuns did.

  Seven times during a twenty-four-hour day, from before dawn until bedtime, a bell in the convent tower summoned the nuns to the chapel to chant psalms and prayers. The bells marked the canonical hours beginning with lauds while the stars were just beginning to fade, followed by prime at sunrise and then the “little hours” with the Latin names: terce, or third, at midmorning, sext—sixth—at noon, and the ninth hour, none, in midafternoon. Vespers was sung before suppertime, and compline before the start of the nighttime silence.

  At first I had nothing to do in the periods between the prayers in the chapel. Then the mother superior decided that I must be put to work. She sent me to help in the washroom, stirring the household linens in great vats of steaming water with a wooden pole—work that had been done by slaves in Palazzo Medici. I hated it, but at least the nuns assigned there were not cruel, and one—Suor Caterina, who shared my name—was kind enough to explain the convent rules as we wrung out the sheets.

  “Whatever you do, don’t complain about anything,” Suor Caterina warned me, twisting the linen one way as I twisted it the other. “One of the rules here is that anyone who complains will be punished. You’d be ordered to prostrate yourself on the stone floor for hours at a time.”

  I scratched a flea bite. “Just for saying the soup tastes like rotting garbage?”

  Suor Caterina giggled. “Exactly. Even though you’re right.”

  “No talking!” called the nun in charge.

  For a few hours each day in the washroom my loneliness was lessened a little, when Suor Caterina and I managed to exchange a few words without being noticed.

  Each night I pulled a straw through the mattress cover and hid it in a crack in the bed frame. When I had seven straws I tied them in a bundle with a thread drawn from the hem of my tunic. In this way I kept count of the weeks of my captivity as they dragged by. But no matter how earnestly I prayed for this nightmare to end, or for a visit from my aunt or a message from Betta, God remained deaf to my pleas. Maybe my desires weren’t worthy of his notice. Or maybe I wasn’t deserving of his graciousness. I began to lose hope.

  Someone came to my cell when I was not there and found my bundles of straw. They were gone the next time I looked. I opened my cassone and saw that someone had taken my mother’s ruby cross and my father’s gold ring out of their silk wrappings and put them back carelessly so I’d be sure to notice.

  And always, there was the specter of Suor Immacolata, her eyes following me. I believed that she whispered her venom to the other nuns; they were watching me, too. I tried to avoid her, but that was often impossible. I looked for another place in the chapel to kneel during prayers, but there was none. She trapped me.

  “You’re hated here, you know,” she hissed as we knelt for terce. “And not just because of your treacherous father. All the Medici are hated! Someday all of them will be driven out, murdered in their beds as they deserve. Florence will become a republic, and freedom will flourish once more.”

  I put my hands over my ears and refused to listen.

  I’D LOST COUNT of the weeks I had been at Santa Lucia, but I could guess how many from changes in the weather. Early in September the rains came. At first they brought relief from the oppressive heat, but when they continued day after day, the dampness penetrated everything. Our clothes were always clammy. Mold flourished in every corner. We heard that the Arno River had overflowed its banks, sweeping off entire households.

  Then the rains slackened and stopped. Chill winds swept down from the north, heralding the arrival of autumn and the coming of winter. I shivered through the cold nights with only a thin blanket, and soon I developed a persistent cough. The water froze in the washbasin. My lips were cracked and raw. My hands were bleeding.

  I was not the only one who suffered. Suor Caterina, my friend in the laundry room—my only friend—became too sick to work. Many others had fallen ill as well, so many that the chapel was only half full at prayers. Then I learned that two of the sisters had died. One of them was Suor Caterina.

  I wept harder at the news of the little nun’s death than I had since my arrival at Santa Lucia. My despair deepened. No matter how tired I was, I couldn’t sleep; no matter how hungry I felt, I couldn’t eat.

  Then one day the mother superior summoned me. “A gentleman has come to visit you,” she informed me, sullenly. “This is against convent rules, but I am powerless to prevent it.”

  “Who is it, Suora Madre?” I asked, curious but also uneasy.

  “Find out for yourself,” she snapped.

  She escorted me into a dismal parlor furnished with two crude wooden stools. A moth-eaten tapestry showing Our Lady with the infant Jesus hid some of the broken plaster of the walls, but there was no way to disguise the stained ceiling. A tall man in an elegant cape stood impatiently slapping his fine leather gloves against the palm of his hand. I had never seen him before. When I entered, the gentleman swept me a deep bow.

  “Mademoiselle,” he said, and kissed my hand. I wondered if he noticed how rough it was. “Signorina,” he said, correcting himself with a smile, “I am the ambassador from France, representing His Excellency the king, François, on behalf of your late mother, Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne.”

  The ambassador bowed again and turned to the mother superior, who lurked stonily nearby, her hands tucked in the sleeves of her tunic. “If you would be so good, Suora Madre, as to give me some time in private with la duchessina,” he said politely.

  The mother superior pursed her lips. “This is strictly against the rules, signore,” she said coldly.

  His voice hardened. “It would be well for you to do as I ask, madame!”

  The mother superior backed slowly away, and the ambassador’s pleasant smile and kindly voice returned. He gestured for me to sit on one of the wooden stools, and he took the other, his long legs bent nearly double. “Now, Catherine—may I beg leave to call you by your proper French name?—tell me, s’il vous plaît: Are you all right here? Are you treated well? Because your mother was French, our king has an interest in your well-being. I understand that you were brought here for your own safety, due to the upheavals that are disturbing your city. But your father’s sister, the good Signora Strozzi, wrote to me and asked that I intercede on your behalf and assure her that you are being properly cared for.”

  I remembered the convent rule: no complaining. I was
afraid that if I told the ambassador anything about the wretchedness of this place, I would be found out. The best thing, I decided, was to remain silent.

  The ambassador was looking me over carefully. I tried not to cough, but I couldn’t suppress it.

  “Mademoiselle?” he asked softly. “Catherine, will you answer me truthfully? Are you treated well here? You must trust me to help you.”

  I pressed my fingers to my chapped lips, imagining what would happen if the mother superior were listening. I wiped away first one tear and then another, but the effort of holding back was too much, and everything began to pour out of me—everything but the special kind of torment inflicted on me by Suor Immacolata and her hateful stories of my father.

  The ambassador listened in silence, interrupting from time to time to ask a question or to have me repeat what I had said through muffled tears. When I finally finished my list of grievances, he touched my shoulder.

  “Catherine,” he murmured, “comfort yourself with the knowledge that this will end soon. I wish that I could offer you your freedom, but that’s not within my power. Florence is in turmoil. Word has reached the city that Pope Clement paid a ransom of a quarter of a million ducats from the Vatican treasury and slipped away in disguise, rather than face the people of Rome. Hatred of the Medici increases daily, here as well as in Rome, and the mobs are truly frightening. Now the governors of the Signoria worry that you will come to harm. They don’t want that. You’re far too valuable to them as a hostage. But as the ambassador from France I’m in a position to insist that you be removed from this dreadful place and taken somewhere more pleasant where you will be protected.”

  I didn’t understand all that the Frenchman told me, but I was willing to do whatever he asked.

  We had been conversing in low murmurs, but now the ambassador said in a normal voice, raised slightly for the mother superior’s benefit: “I’m pleased to see that you are well and content here, mademoiselle. Permit me to convey your greetings and your assurances to the governors of the Republic.”

  We rose from the two wobbly stools. I curtsied, and the ambassador bowed low over my hand and kissed it again. “Be ready to leave at any time,” he whispered. “Do not lose faith.” He called the mother superior, who appeared so quickly that I knew she had done her best to listen to our conversation. The ambassador thanked her for her courtesy and bid her good day.

  As soon as the door was shut, the nun turned on me. “Why did he come here?” she demanded. “What did he want?”

  “He came to see me because my mother was French, and therefore I am half French,” I said. “He asked if I was learning my prayers, and I assured him that I was.”

  She knew I was lying. I could see that she was racking her brain to find away to catch me in a betrayal. I met her probing look with a blank stare.

  THREE DAYS WENT by with no word from the ambassador, and with each day my desolation increased. Had he forgotten his promise? Where did he plan to take me? Or had the Signoria decided that I must stay where I was as punishment for being a Medici?

  Then, one night as I lay shivering on my straw mattress, the mother superior burst into my cell without bothering to knock. “Get up,” she said in her grating voice. “You’re leaving.”

  She dragged out from under my bed the clothes I had worn when the soldiers brought me there in May; it was now December. They were wrinkled and mildewed, but I put them on quickly. Clutching the cassone beneath my velvet cloak, I made my way alone to the portal. The mother superior had disappeared. Instead I found Suor Immacolata waiting for me.

  I was so relieved to be leaving that I managed to find in my heart a little pity for the bitter nun. “Addio,” I said, as kindly as I could. “Good-bye.”

  She pulled open the door and shoved me through it. “A curse on you and all the Medici!” she cried, slamming the door shut behind me.

  An iron bolt shot loudly into place. The night was moonless and very cold. I found myself alone in the darkness, quaking with fear.

  I stifled a cry of alarm when the French ambassador stepped out of the shadows. He draped me in a black veil that covered me from head to foot, lifted me onto a waiting horse, and swung up into the saddle. Just before the veil fell over my face, I noticed two men armed with pistols riding with us.

  “Hold tight, mademoiselle” the ambassador called over, his shoulder and I wrapped my free arm around his waist.

  As we rushed off into the night, I thanked God that I was gone from that horrible place. It didn’t occur to me then to pray that I would never return.

  5

  Le Murate

  A FREEZING RAIN had begun to fall as we raced from Santa Lucia through the narrow streets of Florence. Occasional shouts sent a chill of fear through me. I buried my face against the ambassador’s back, too frightened to speak. At last we halted. The men with pistols sprang off their mounts and lifted me down.

  “Where are we?” I dared ask when I could find my voice.

  “Santa-Maria Annunziata delle Murate,” the ambassador explained. “They’re waiting for you. Hurry Catherine.”

  There were dozens upon dozens of convents in Florence, but, as it happened, I was acquainted with Le Murate. The abbess, Suor Margherita, was my godmother. Visitors were rare, and the nuns never left, once they’d been admitted through a hole symbolically broken in the wall and then sealed up again—Le Murate means “the walled-in ones.” Goods were delivered into the convent on a wheel built into the wall, and sometimes unwanted babies, like Immacolata’s, were left there, too. I’d gone there a few times with Aunt Clarissa to buy delicate sweetmeats for special feast days or a book of devotions to give to one of her close friends. She’d placed her order on the wheel and turned it, and then waited until the sweetmeats or the Book of Hours had been sent out.

  Suor Margherita came to welcome me. The French ambassador leaped back on his horse and was gone before I could thank him. The abbess swept me inside, where several nuns were waiting to embrace me, though it was long past midnight. How different from the cold, sour greeting I had received at Santa Lucia!

  “If only the governors had sent you here in the first place!” the abbess exclaimed as she led me to my quarters.

  “But why didn’t they?”

  “Because you’re a Medici, dear child. The governors want you safe but not comfortable. The French ambassador convinced them you’d be safer with us.”

  The rooms were simple but clean and pleasant. The bed had been made up with a thick mattress, warm blankets, and an embroidered satin coverlet. There was a plain but nicely finished wooden table and stool, and a prayer bench beneath a silver crucifix. Two paintings, one of the Annunciation and another of the Nativity, hung above the bed.

  Adjoining my bedroom was a small alcove with a pallet for the lay sister, Maddalena, who was to be my maidservant. Maddalena immediately filled a brazier with glowing coals and began to warm the linen sheets.

  I placed the cassone on top of a larger chest. Suor Margherita smiled when she saw it. “A gift of our beloved Pope Leo,” she said. “I remember it well.”

  The abbess kissed my forehead and wished me good night. Maddalena took my wrinkled and mildewed gown and cloak and brought me a soft linen shift for sleeping. Soon I was snug in my warm bed, settling down with a sigh of peace and contentment, the first in many months.

  AT SANTA LUCIA I had grown thin and pale, my arms and legs were covered with scabbed vermin bites, and a lingering cough kept me awake at night. The abbess of Le Murate decided that I must be restored to health as quickly as possible. For the next few weeks I was petted and pampered, mostly at the hands of Maddalena, and I gave myself up to my servant’s gentle care.

  Every morning, as she carried in a basin of warm water to wash my hands and face and brushed my thick dark hair, I remembered the haunting story Suor Immacolata had told me about the infant she’d left at a convent and wondered about Maddalena. Questions began to trouble me: Had the child been left here? And what abou
t the other lay sisters who were our servants? Who were their parents? Was one of them my sister? These were questions I couldn’t ask anyone. But they were questions I couldn’t seem to forget.

  I had arrived at Le Murate during Advent, the month-long penitential season just before Christmas when the altars were hung with violet silk and everyone abstained from eating meat, eggs, milk, and cheese on certain days. Even with those regulations, the simple meals served in the large, bright refectory were delicious. The professed nuns ate first. When they’d finished, the young girls and a few elderly widows who made their home here entered for the second sitting. The novices and lay sisters ate last. The polished wooden benches and tables smelled of beeswax, and beautiful paintings of the Holy Virgin and the Christ Child hung on the whitewashed walls.

  Within a week of my arrival, my strength returning, I began to explore my new home. In room after room, the nuns produced goods that were sold to support the convent. The scent of cinnamon drew me to the kitchen, where the sisters made sweets of honey and nuts and dried fruits, and there was a room where they filled pomander balls with dried rose petals and spices. Looms clattered in a weaving room, producing fine linen for altar cloths and damask tablecloths. Nuns stitched dainty sleeping shifts and undergarments of embroidered silk, trousseaux for wealthy girls about to be married. They spun fine gold thread for costly embroidery and worked delicate lace for vestments and altar hangings. When the bell rang in the tower, signaling the next hour for prayer, the nuns put down their work and hurried to the oratory. I went with them.

  The chapel was close to the dormitories where the professed nuns slept, private spaces I’d been told were out of bounds to the rest of us. The door to one of these dormitories stood ajar, and, curious, I looked in when no one was around. At the end of the room stood an altar with a painting of the Annunciation, from which the convent took its name, Annunziata.