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

by Jeanne Kalogridis

  The Dauphin remained in Tournon to nurse a slight case of catarrh—an excessive precaution, but the King was adamant. Young François made a joke of it, of course, and left me laughing as our carriages rolled away.

  At Valence, I rode alongside Madame Gondi through forests of pine and eucalyptus and inhaled the scent of wild lavender crushed beneath the horses’ hooves. I never rode long or ventured too close to the banks of the Rhone, where the mosquitoes were thickest. The sun and river conspired to leave the air ruthlessly sultry. We stayed at an estate set atop a promontory, with sweeping views of the valley and river. In the late afternoons, as the heat was breaking, I sat with my embroidery in the vast reception chamber adjacent to the King’s quarters, perched upon a window seat overlooking the river.

  The King spent long hours in his cabinet conferring with his councillors and, surprisingly, Henri. He and his father remained recluses, eating in private, forgoing audiences, even missing Mass; the Cardinal of Lorraine, one of his councillors, would interrupt the long sessions to grant the King absolution and administer the Sacrament.

  This manner of life continued for a week, until the morning I woke in my bed to hear heart-wrenching keening. I threw on my dressing gown and ran downstairs toward the source.

  At the reception chamber near the King’s apartment, I paused on the threshold to see the Cardinal of Lorraine. Though it was barely dawn, he was already dressed in his scarlet robe and skullcap, but he had not shaved; the first rays of the sun glinted off the grey stubble on his cheeks. At my approach, he turned, his gaze dulled by horror.

  Beside him, the King was on his knees near the edge of the little window seat where I liked to embroider, dressed in only his nightshirt and dressing gown, his hair uncombed. He reached up suddenly to clutch his skull, as if to crush the misery there, then just as quickly let it go and pulled himself up onto the velvet cushion. There he knelt, his arms spread to the river and the sky.

  “My God,” he cried. “My God, why could you have not taken me? Why not me?”

  He collapsed in a storm of tears.

  I began to weep myself. This was not a commander’s regret but a father’s sorrow. Poor sweet Madeleine, I thought; she had always been so sickly. I began to move toward His Majesty, but the Cardinal sharply waved me off.

  Still bowed, the King lifted his head just enough for his words to be understood. “Henri,” he groaned. “Bring me Henri.”

  The Cardinal disappeared, but his mission was unnecessary. Within seconds, Henri appeared of his own accord, fully dressed and ready for a dire emergency; he, too, had heard the King’s cries. He walked over the threshold, our shoulders brushing, and shot me a questioning gaze for which I had no answer.

  At the sight of the King doubled over in misery, Henri rushed to his side.

  “What is it?” he demanded. “Father, what has happened? Is it Montmorency?”

  He put his hand upon the King’s shoulder, and the old man reared up onto his knees.

  “Henri . . .” The King’s ravaged voice was quaking. “My son, my son. Your older brother is dead.”

  François, my smiling, golden-haired friend. The room whirled; I caught the edge of the doorway and let go a torrent of involuntary tears.

  “No,” Henri snarled and lifted an arm to strike his father. Before the blow could land, the King seized his son’s forearm and held it fast. Henri strained against his father’s strength until both were trembling. Abruptly, Henri dropped his arm and began to shriek. “No! No! You can’t say such things! It’s not true, it’s not true!”

  He reached for a nearby chair and overturned it with such force that it skittered across the stone. He reached, too, for a large, heavy table, and when he could not upend it, he fell to the floor.

  “You can’t take him,” he sobbed. “I won’t let you take him . . .”

  I ran to him and gathered him into my arms.

  He was limp. In his eyes was a shattered vacancy, a fathomless despair—a look I had seen only once before. His spirit had broken, and I did not have the means to mend it.

  I guided him to his father and retreated to the threshold to give them their privacy. I was a latecomer, an interloper in terms of their grief.

  Once the King had calmed enough to speak, he said, “My son. You are the Dauphin now. You must become as good as your brother François was, and as kind, so that you are loved as much as he was. You must never give anyone cause to regret that you are now the first heir to the throne.”

  At the instant I heard it, I thought only that His Majesty was cruel and unthinking to say such things to Henri at this time of terrible sorrow. How could one speak of political matters when one’s own son was dead? Indeed, I thought so for some days, until after we had laid poor François to rest in a temporary tomb.

  Until one afternoon shortly thereafter, when Madame Gondi was speaking of some trivial matter and addressed me as Madame la Dauphine.

  The sound of it stole my breath—not because I craved the power that would come when I was Queen, nor because I feared it, but rather because I realized that the astrologer and magician Cosimo Ruggieri had, from the very beginning, been right about everything.

  Twenty

  I penned another letter to Cosimo Ruggieri, explaining my new circumstances and asking him to join me at Court to serve as my chief astrologer, though I had little hope. Ruggieri was dead or mad, but I had nowhere else to turn. With increased power came increased vulnerability. Like Henri, I felt there were few I could trust. One was Ruggieri, who had long ago proven his loyalty to me.

  I was uneasy, and rightly so.

  I saw the details of young François’s death as straightforward, but the King and many of his advisers and courtiers thought otherwise.

  Left behind at Tournon, François had appeared to recover quickly from the catarrh. He’d felt so well, in fact, that on one of the hottest afternoons of that miserable August, he had challenged one of his gentlemen of the chamber to a strenuous game of tennis. The Dauphin had won handily.

  Afterward, however, he felt strangely winded. Thinking it was the heat, he ordered his Page of the Sewer, Sebastiano Montecuculli, to bring him a glass of cold water. Soon after drinking it, the Dauphin collapsed and fell ill with a high fever. Fluid filled his lungs. Pleurisy, one doctor said; the other had doubts. Neither could save him.

  Perhaps it was because Montecuculli was Florentine, and had come to France as one of my entourage, but Henri could hardly bear to look at me and stopped visiting my chamber.

  The King was desperate to blame someone for his suffering. Montecuculli was the convenient choice, poison the convenient charge—the man was, after all, Italian. When he was arrested and his belongings examined, a book on the properties of chemical agents—some nefarious—was discovered, along with a paper granting him safe conduct through Imperial strongholds. His death was inevitable.

  Montecuculli was anxious for a swift execution instead of the torments reserved for those guilty of regicide, so he confessed his guilt immediately, claiming to be a spy acting on Emperor Charles’s orders, with his next target the King.

  The seventh of October brought cloudless blue skies. I mounted the pine-scented steps of the hastily constructed dais behind Queen Eléonore and Diane de Poitiers; Marguerite—not quite thirteen then—followed me, plucking anxiously at my skirts. We had come to Lyon—close enough to Valence for the King to receive any important news of the war but far enough from the fighting to ensure everyone’s safety.

  More than two hundred courtiers awaited us on the dais. All wore black—like the four coal-colored stallions, caparisoned in the same color, who paced anxiously in the empty plaza in front of us. Only Madame de Poitiers had diluted her black with an underskirt of white, and a grey band on her hood. To me it seemed that Madame was admitting to no fresh sorrow; the scent of her lily of the valley perfume, especially strong that morning, seemed an affront to the somber proceedings.

  We royals—as well as Madame de Poitiers—had b
een provided with padded chairs at the very front of the crowd. We found our places but remained on our feet as we awaited the King and his two surviving sons.

  Charles climbed the stairs to the dais first. He was fourteen; over the past year, he had sprouted in height until he stood only half a head shorter than the King. Like his late brother, he was golden-haired and blue-eyed, with a round, handsome face, a gift from his mother.

  Behind him came his father. In the past two months, large shocks of white had appeared at the King’s temples; the hollows beneath his eyes had deepened. Rumor said that his insides were rotting, that he had developed an abcess in his privates. I prayed this was untrue, for I loved him so. Once he had mounted the steps and taken his chair, the King stared straight ahead but, blinded by grief, saw nothing.

  In one sense I was relieved to be spared his gaze, for I feared it might have held recrimination. A fortnight earlier, an outraged Emperor Charles had responded to the charge that he had ordered the Dauphin’s assassination: “Had I wished to,” he declared, “I could easily have murdered father and son years ago, when both were in my possession.” His agents at the French Court spread the rumor that I, a power-hungry Medici, had persuaded Montecuculli to poison the Dauphin, with the full support of my husband.

  King François loved me and did not believe this accusation, yet it pained him all the same. The day the rumor surfaced, he withdrew even further from me, avoiding my gaze and my questions, until I became for him the same mute, invisible creature I was now for my husband.

  Henri, now the Dauphin, mounted the stairs last. His grief was so black, so pervasive, that he had refused visitors since his brother’s death. There was no cold light of vengeance in his eyes that morning, or even grim satisfaction, only uncertainty tinged with fresh grief. The thought of more suffering, more death, brought him no joy.

  I did not smile as he stepped onto the platform but directed my most loving gaze at him. He saw it, and at once averted his eyes, as if he could not bear to look on me. The ring with the black stone, the Wing of Corvus, which he had faithfully worn every day since receiving it, was gone. His finger was bare.

  Such tiny gestures—a shift of the eyes, the missing ring—left me crushed. I hung my head and did not lift it when little Marguerite, thinking I mourned her lost brother, squeezed my hand and told me not to be sad.

  Once the King and the Dauphin were seated, the rest of us followed suit. A shout came from a guard in the plaza, one of the King’s kilted Scotsmen, who stood beside the four grooms with their restless black stallions.

  In response to the summons, a solemn group walked into the center of the open. First came the scarlet-clad Cardinal of Lorraine and the Captain of the Scottish guards, consummately masculine despite his kilt and flowing auburn hair. Behind them followed two guards, who flanked a prisoner.

  This was Sebastiano Montecuculli, the unfortunate soul who had set a glass of cold water into the Dauphin’s sweating hands. Montecuculli was a count, of considerable grooming, education, and intelligence. He had so charmed the Dauphin that the latter immediately offered him the only available position in his household, Page of the Sewer, which consisted of bearing the prince’s cup. I knew that if young François had been alive to see the cruelty visited upon his unfortunate page, he would have been horrified.

  Montecuculli had been a handsome, lively man of some thirty years. Now he was stooped, his legs crooked, his gait stiff and halting from the iron shackles at his ankles and wrists. I would never have recognized him: His face had become puffed and purple; the bridge of his nose had been smashed flat. Whole handfuls of his long hair had been pulled out, leaving large patches of bare scalp encrusted with dried blood. His captors had left him only a nightshirt, stained with blood and excrement, to cover himself. It fell just to his knees; the slightest breeze lifted the hem to expose his genitals.

  The Cardinal of Lorraine and the captain approached the dais as the guards dragged Montecuculli toward the King. The Page of the Sewer fell to his knees, partly in supplication, partly from weakness. In a loud voice, the Cardinal implored him to confess his sin.

  Montecuculli had already retracted his earlier confession to the crime. When torture was applied, he confessed readily, but when it was removed, he disavowed all guilt. He looked to the King and tried to reach out with his trembling, shackled arms, but could not raise them.

  “Your Majesty, have mercy!” His words were slurred and barely comprehensible, the result of the recent loss of many teeth. “I loved your son and never wished him harm! Before God and the Virgin, I am innocent and I loved him!” Sobbing violently, he fell forward onto the cobblestone.

  Every face turned to the King. For a long moment, François sat motionless save for a muscle spasming in his cheek, then made a sharp downward motion with his hand.

  The captain nodded to his men. The guards tried to pull Montecuculli to his feet, but the poor man’s legs had given way; he was dragged back to where the horses waited. As the guards pushed him down against the cobblestones, he began to shout:

  Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum . . .

  His captors unfastened his shackles and stripped away his filthy nightshirt, revealing skin that was completely mottled in shades of red, purple, green, and yellow. Montecuculli continued to pray so wildly, so swiftly that the words ran together.

  Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae . . .

  Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

  At the captain’s bidding, the grooms led the four stallions into position around the naked, supine man: north at Montecuculli’s right hand, south at his left, northwest at his right foot, southwest at his left. A leather strap—thick as my arm, corded and reinforced—was fastened to each horse’s harness by a series of heavy buckles. At the end of each strap was a collar of leather and iron.

  When one guard first tried to set Montecuculli’s wrist into a collar, the unfortunate prisoner howled and bucked and flailed, requiring an additional two men to hold him down while four worked quickly to slip on the collars, tighten and buckle them securely: one at each wrist and one at each thigh, just above the knee. The Scotsmen finished their work and quickly receded to a place of safety with their captain.

  One man—the executioner, with a long whip in his hand—stayed behind. Though he addressed the prisoner in a low voice, no doubt making the traditional request for forgiveness, Montecuculli was too tightly in terror’s clutches to stop screaming. The executioner lifted his head and called a command to the grooms, who mounted their horses. Each horse took a single step forward in one of the four directions, and Montecuculli, spread like a starfish, lifted slightly off the ground.

  Beside me, little Marguerite began to weep softly.

  The executioner—a handsome young Scot with a close-trimmed golden beard and emotionless expression—looked to the King. François let go a long breath and gave a slow, single nod.

  The executioner moved out of the horses’ paths and as far away from the prisoner as he could, then struck the animals’ rumps with the whip. Urged by the lash and their riders, the horses took off at full gallop.

  Marguerite buried her face in my lap and clutched my skirts, but I was compelled by position and by horror to watch.

  Blood sprayed, crimson fireworks. In one second, two, Montecuculli’s arms had been torn off at the shoulders, his legs torn away at the groin, the large thigh bones yanked clear of the hip sockets. Momentum caused the abandoned torso to roll once, twice, before finally coming to rest faceup. What was left was a frightful, inhuman thing, spurting blood from each of four gaping holes edged by raw, jagged flesh. A strand of glistening intestine slid out from the largest of them as the torso convulsed against the cobblestones like a fish plucked from the sea.

  He was alive. Montecuculli was still alive.

  Not far off, the stallions had been reined in, and the riders and horses slowly returned, each dragging a limb behind them so the p
risoner might see. One trotted up and positioned the bloodied stump of a still-twitching leg, with the ivory ball of the thighbone protruding from the top, next to the dying man’s face.

  In the crowd of courtiers behind me, a man retched.

  I sat still and composed, my hand upon little Marguerite’s shoulder as she sobbed into my lap. I watched every hellish, interminable second until Montecuculli stopped screaming, until his mutilated body stopped spasming, until his corpse stopped spewing blood.

  When His Majesty, apparently satisfied, rose, I stood with the others. I looked at my husband and read in his features no less grief; if anything, this day had added to it. I stared hard, too, at King François’s expression. His was no longer the face of the loving father; it was that of a relentless ruler with a thirst for revenge that had yet to be quenched.

  After the execution, the King went to Mass and took the Sacrament without hesitation. If he felt any compunction over the page’s death, it was not great enough for him to confess it.

  After Mass, we all retired to our chambers. I went to my cabinet and continued my calculations for Henri’s nativity.

  Saturn is a cold, brooding, dismal planet. It augurs burdens and loss, and fosters melancholy. A birth chart heavily marked by Saturn indicates an unhappy life and the early deaths of loved ones. Any planet that appears in the house or sign it rules will have its attributes greatly magnified. And my poor Henri’s Saturn appeared in the sign it ruled, Capricorn.

  Seeing this, and meditating on all the wounds this day had pricked, I decided to commit a forward and impetuous act. I left my chambers and went to my husband’s. I did not plan what I wanted to say; I only wanted to offer comfort, perhaps distract him with pleasant talk. In truth, I hoped that such comfort might bring him again to my arms.

  By then it was late afternoon, but Henri was not in his chambers; his valet claimed to have no knowledge of his whereabouts. After charging the man to send word when his master returned, I returned to my cabinet.