The Italian Woman

by Виктория Холт

  ‘I have buried four serving wenches, all of whom I treated with this substance.’

  ‘And how long was it before death came?’

  ‘A matter of days. Except in one case, Madame. She was suffering from an ulcer. Her death was immediate.’

  ‘So you are sure you can rely on this substance?’

  ‘Absolutely, Madame.’

  ‘It seems similar to your aqua Tofana.’

  ‘Similar, Madame. But this substance leaves no trace.’

  ‘Tell me how you have procured such a substance. You know these matters interest me.’

  ‘It is a complicated process, Madame, but similar to that which produces our venin de crapaud.’

  ‘Arsenic is one of the most dangerous of poisons, preserving the body as it does. If there should be an opening of the body after death …’

  ‘But this, I would tell your Majesty, does not contain arsenic. It is similar to the venin de crapaud only in its early stages of production. I have fed arsenic to toads and when the creatures are dead, after a certain period have distilled the juices of the body. These contain the virus of arsenic and, of course, the poisons of decomposition. Then I eliminate the arsenic. Nor is that all. But the process of the details would weary you, and it is complicated and not easy to explain.’

  Catherine laughed. ‘Keep your secrets, Monsieur René. I shall respect them. Why should others reap the benefit of your experiments?’

  ‘If you would care to step into my laboratory, I would show your Majesty what I have prepared of this substance.’

  Catherine rose and followed him through several dark passages until they came to an underground cellar. It was warm in here because of the great fire which burned in the stove, the smoke of which fire escaped through a pipe in the wall. On the benches were skeletons of animals, and on the walls had been drawn cabalistic signs. Catherine was well acquainted with the tools of the trade of such men as René and the Ruggieri. Her eyes glowed as she looked at the bottles which contained liquids of all colours, and the boxes of mysterious powders.

  René took a phial of liquid of a sickly green colour which he showed her.

  ‘This, Madame, is the most valuable and deadly poison that has yet been made. In this it is possible to steep some article – a glove, a ruff, a trinket; the article absorbs the liquid immediately and is almost at once dry. The poison will remain in the article until it is placed in a certain temperature. The heat of the body, for instance, would draw the poison out in the form of vapour; it would be absorbed into the body through the pores of the skin.’

  Catherine nodded. This was no great surprise. The men of her country were the cleverest poisoners in the world. They guarded their secrets jealously, and it was said that some carried them with them to the grave because they could not bear to share them. No matter what qualities a new poison was reputed to possess, Catherine was prepared to believe in it; she had seen enough in her lifetime to know that these sorcerers from her native land could manufacture poisons, the action of which would seem incredible to the rest of the world.

  ‘It is good that you have such confidence, Monsieur René,’ she said, ‘for when an eminent person dies, there is much suspicion, and if there should be an autopsy and poison were discovered – well, it might be remembered that the lady called at your shop.’

  ‘That is so, Madame. But I believe in my work. I have tested this substance. Moreover, my wish is to serve your Majesty with my life if need be.’

  Catherine smiled. ‘You shall not be forgotten, Monsieur René. Now, if this lady comes here to buy gloves, a ruff or a trinket, you could take what she selects and treat it while she is here . . and let her go away with it?’

  ‘I could, Madame.’

  ‘Gloves would be simplest. Now listen. She shall come to buy gloves. You will show her of your best and, when she has selected them, you will treat them. In order to ensure that she wears them immediately, let those she is wearing when she arrives be soiled in some way. You have no doubt means here of doing this. Let her leave them for you to repair, and let her go away wearing the new gloves that you have treated. I would not wish the gloves to fall into other hands.’

  ‘It shall be as you command, Madame.’

  ‘That is well. And I should like a little of that … substance … for my own closet.’

  ‘Madame, it would not be safe. It is not as yet in the perfect form for keeping. When I can trust it, all my stock is at your Majesty’s disposal.’

  Catherine smiled faintly. She understood René. He was not prepared to lose his sole right to such a valuable discovery.

  She came out into the streets, drawing her shawl about her. So far, so good.

  * * *

  The Queen of Navarre lay sick in her room. She could not understand the sudden faintness which had come over her. She had had a pleasant enough afternoon, choosing some clothes she would need for the ceremonies which would follow the wedding. She was not interested in fine clothes, but she did not wish to appear dowdy among the Parisians, who she knew would be gorgeously apparelled.

  She had bought a new ruff and new gloves. Catherine had been helpful, telling her where to go, accompanying her to some of the places. And finally she had gone to the glove-maker and parfumeur on the quay opposite the Louvre, and there she had bought a pair of those exquisite gloves such as were now worn at court. She had put them on there and then and come back to the palace wearing them, because of some slight accident to her old pair.

  And then had come this strange faintness, this nausea. It had been necessary to take to her bed, for there was a violent pain in her chest. She was unable to attend the banquet that day; and the night that followed was passed in a fever of restlessness; a terrible lassitude had taken possession of her limbs, and by morning she had lost the power of them. She could scarcely breathe, and the pain in her chest had become an agony.

  Her apartments in the Hôtel de Condé were filled with anxious men and women of the Huguenot Faith. The greatest physicians in the country were at her bedside, but none could discover the strange nature of her illness. Catherine sent her doctors. ‘I beg of you,’ said Catherine, ‘spare no effort to save the life of the Queen of Navarre. It would be terrible if she were to die now that we have settled the arrangements for the marriage in such an amicable manner.’

  Jeanne asked that Coligny might be brought to her. She felt, vague and hazy though she was, that there was much she should say to him. She knew that Coligny was in great danger; that the Huguenot cause was in danger; she remembered something of what her little son had overheard in the gallery of Bayonne; but her mind was failing her, and she could not clearly recall what it was.

  She knew that she was dying. ‘Your prayers,’ she said, ‘will avail me nothing. I submit myself to the Holy Will of God, taking all evils from Him as inflicted by a loving Father. I have never feared death. My only grief is that I must leave my children, and that they, at their tender age, are exposed to so many dangers.’

  She begged them to cease their weeping.

  ‘Ought you to weep for me?’ she asked. ‘You have all seen the misery of my last years. God has taken pity on me and is calling me to the enjoyment of a blessed existence.’

  She longed for death now, longed to escape from the pain of her body. But she thought of her children: her son, Henry, who was in such need of guidance; her dearest little Catherine, who was so young. What would become of them?

  Catherine must return to Béarn. She was insistent on that.

  ‘Oh, please, please,’ she cried in a moment of acute consciousness, ‘take my little daughter home … take her far away from the corruption of this court.’

  Then she began to speak of her son’s coming marriage, and Catherine, who stood by her bed, said: ‘Rest, my dear sister of Navarre. Fret not for the sake of your children. I will be a mother to them. Your son is to be my son through marriage … and I am the godmother of your daughter.’

  Catherine put her lips to the clammy
brow of her enemy. This was the woman for whom she had always felt uneasy hatred. Now was the end of the woman. Jeanne had sought to pit herself against Catherine, so now here she lay, a poor weak woman, dying, stripped of all her earthly possessions, of all earthly desires.

  The Queen Mother was triumphant.

  The Princess Margot looked on at the scene – a humble scene, for the apartment did not look like the death chamber of a Queen. There were no tapers, no priests, none of the ritual which attended a Catholic death.

  She looked at the faces of the people in the room; she looked from the dying Queen to the woman who stood by the bed, the woman with the full pale face and large expressionless eyes from which now and then the delicate white hand wiped a tear.

  Margot shivered. Death was terrifying, but she was not so much afraid of death as of the woman in black who conducted herself with such calm and sorrowful decorum.

  * * *

  ‘The Queen of Navarre is dead!’

  They were whispering this in the streets.

  ‘They say she visited René … the Queen Mother’s glove-maker. People have visited René before … and they fall into a decline … their teeth break like glass on their bread … their skin shrivels … and then they die.’

  ‘The Queen of Navarre has been poisoned!’

  The Parisians were mainly Catholic, and they must therefore regard the Queen of Navarre as an enemy; yet they did not care to think that she had been lured to their city to be poisoned.

  ‘It is that woman!’ was whispered in the market-place, in the streets, on the quays. ‘It is the Italian woman at her tricks again. Was it not her glove-maker to whom the Queen of Navarre went?’

  The people of Paris shuddered; they turned horrified eyes towards the windows of the Louvre; they whispered; they spat in contempt; and there was one name which was mentioned more than any other – that of Catherine de’ Medici, the Italian woman. ‘Italian! Italian!’ they hissed. These Italians were past-masters with the poison cup, and the very word ‘Italian’ was almost synonymous with ‘Poisoner’.

  The Guises came riding to court.

  The Queen of Navarre was dead. Here was one enemy out of the way. It might be that the Queen Mother, in favouring the Huguenots, had been playing just another of her tortuous, cunning games.

  Margot watched them as they rode into the courtyard of the palace, and looked for the figure at their head; Henry of Guise had grown more handsome during his absence.

  She was tired of resisting. Soon they would throw her to that oaf of Navarre; and when she thought of his clumsy hands caressing her, her longing for Henry of Guise was more than she could endure.

  She met him, as if by chance, in one of the ill-lighted passages near her apartments.

  He stood looking at her. She tried then to turn away, but he came swiftly forward and caught her; then she remembered afresh all the enchantment of his kisses.

  ‘Margot,’ he whispered, his voice tender and broken with passion.

  ‘Henry … they are going to marry me … to Navarre.’

  ‘I know, my love, my darling.’

  ‘I will not,’ she sobbed. ‘I hate him.’

  He tried to soothe her. ‘My darling, how I have missed you! How I have longed for you! Why do we torment ourselves?’

  She shook her head.

  He went on: ‘It is stupid pride … fighting against what we know has to be. Margot, let us take what we can. Let us take what is left to us.’

  Memories surged back to him as to her. He caressed her eager body.

  ‘There was never anyone like you, Margot.’

  ‘There is nothing,’ she said, ‘but this.’

  ‘Do you remember that little room where we were together? We will go there … to-night and every night.’

  ‘The wedding is months away,’ cried Margot. ‘Who knows … perhaps it will never be. Perhaps there will be a rising, and you will become King and marry me … as we used to plan. You would be all-powerful then, and you would see that nothing stood in our way.’

  He stopped her impulsive words with kisses. The walls of the Louvre had ears.

  ‘To-night?’ he repeated.

  ‘At midnight.’

  ‘I shall be waiting … most eagerly.’

  ‘And most eagerly shall I come.’

  ‘Go now, my darling. Let us not be seen. Let us be wiser than we were.’

  There was a last lingering kiss, one more passionate embrace; and Guise went back to his apartments, and joyously to hers went the Princess, who, but a short time before, had been the most miserable, and was now the happiest, woman in France.

  * * *

  There was tension in the Louvre. Catherine had realised suddenly what power Coligny had over her son Charles. She had forgotten that he, so malleable in her hands, would be equally so in those of others.

  Surrounded by his courtiers, Charles spoke to his mother, his eyes flashing, his mouth working:

  ‘There are evil rumours concerning the death of the Queen of Navarre. It is said that she met her death through foul practices. I command therefore that the body should be opened and examined in order that the cause of her death may be ascertained.’

  Catherine felt herself go cold. Her son’s gaze was malevolent; and she knew with sudden horror that he, like the whispering women in the streets, believed that she had killed Jeanne of Navarre. That in itself was not so shocking; but that he, though thinking such a thing, should demand an autopsy, was incredible. Did he want to incriminate his mother, the one person who, so she had believed, had dominated his life? Catherine had been outwitted – outwitted by that great, good man, Gaspard de Coligny. He had crept up slowly with his religion and his self-righteousness and had taken possession of the King’s feeble mind. Coligny wanted an autopsy, and the King, in spite of his mother, would see that there was one.

  She stared into that poor weak face in which the whites of the eyes were beginning to turn red, the mouth to foam. Her voice was cold. She had put all her trust in René, and if René had spoken the truth all would be well.

  ‘My son, if it is your wish that an autopsy should take place, then so be it. To my mind, the Queen’s death was natural enough. She was not strong, and she had suffered a good deal; the effort of the journey to court and the strain of arranging the marriage has been too much for her.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ cried the King, ‘I will have her body examined.’

  He was a man now, twenty-one. Her mistake had been that she had considered him nothing but an unbalanced boy.

  * * *

  The doctors were closeted together. Catherine’s and the King’s physicians were with Jeanne’s. At any moment now the result of their examination would be known. If René had failed, thought Catherine, that would be the end of René, and there would be just another rumour attaching itself to the Queen Mother. Already she was hated. What did she care? Let them hate as long as they let her rule France.

  Jeanne was dead. Philip of Spain would be smiling – or getting as near to smiling as he was able – into that beard of his. Elizabeth of England would hear the news with concern. Coligny was stricken down in grief. Jeanne’s boy Henry would not yet have heard, but soon he would be forced to come to court; he would be delivered into the hands of the Queen Mother, who would take him under her wing as one of her sons, to be dominated and guided in the way he should go.

  There was nothing for her to fear – only hatred and suspicion. She had had her share of them already, and no one would dare harm the Queen Mother of France.

  * * *

  In the dim chamber the lovers lay in an enchanted weariness. Margot wept a little. ‘For happiness,’ she said, ‘because I have missed you and longed for you, and there is no one in the world who can take your place.’

  Henry of Guise said angrily: ‘How happy we might have been, you and I! I shall never forget nor forgive the one who parted us.’

  ‘My mother terrifies me, Henry.’

  ‘I meant your brothe
r. He is the one who has separated us. We might have married in time but for him. I mean your brother Henry, not the King. He is afraid of me – your brother Henry. One day I shall kill him … or he will kill me. I shall take my revenge for what he has done to us, and I shall kill Coligny to honour my father.’

  ‘Do not speak of hate when we have love,’ said Margot. ‘Now we are together let us enjoy it and think of nothing else. Let us not think of your revenge on my brother and Coligny, of my marriage with Navarre. Let us live in happiness while we may.’

  She flung herself into his arms once more, but he felt her trembling. He tried to soothe her, but she said: ‘Henry, I cannot stop thinking of my mother. Do you think she poisoned the Queen of Navarre?’

  He did not answer, and there was a long silence between them. But after a while they ceased to think of the Queen of Navarre, of Margot’s coming marriage and of revenge. They were together, and they had been apart too long.

  * * *

  Through the streets of Paris walked a stout woman with a shawl over her head. She joined a group in the market. They were, she knew, talking of the Queen of Navarre.

  ‘So it was an abscess on the lungs,’ said one woman.

  ‘So they say …’

  Catherine said: ‘You think then that the physicians may have been wrong?’ She drew the shawl about her to hide her face.

  ‘How do we know what devilries the Italian woman is up to?’

  Catherine laughed. ‘You think then that she can make abscesses on the lungs of her enemies?’

  The group laughed with her. ‘She is a witch. She is a sorceress. These Italians … they know too much about poisons, and the poisons they give leave no signs. We should never have let them come into our country.’

  Catherine moved away. She joined another group who were arguing together. Someone was saying: ‘The Queen was poisoned. It was the Italian woman who arranged it, mark my words. The Queen went to a glove-maker … the Italian’s glove-maker. The doctors can say what they like. It may be that they dare say no other. If they did, it might be that they too would soon be suffering from some mysterious illness which their friends could not understand.’