Charles’s smug grin. His tactic worked: Henri broke into a charming smile and giggled; King Francois relaxed and gave Charles a reproving but affectionate nudge. The Dauphin smiled, relieved for his father and brother.
Henri gathered himself and, in better humor, said, “Catherine, welcome to our family, the Valois.”
His voice was too deep to be a boy’s, too wavering in pitch to be a man’s. Though I had never heard it before, I knew it. His voice and face were young now, but given time and maturity, they would change. Somewhere, between my bridegroom’s voice and his father’s, somewhere between his features and the King’s, were those of the man who had cried out to me in my dreams.
That evening, in my gilded, timber-scented chamber on the Place-Neuve, I wrote another letter to the magician Ruggieri. There was little point to the exercise, save to vent my desperate foreboding: Ruggieri was at worst dead, at best mad and missing. He could not help me, trapped in a foreign land and a blood-soaked dream that threatened to become waking.
I paused in midstroke of the quill, set it down, and crumpled the page before feeding it to the hearth. I took a fresh sheet and addressed it to my cousin Maria. I asked that she send me
When the time came to sign the letter, I paused, then scrawled in bold letters:
Catherine
Duchesse d’Orleans
PART V
Sixteen
Three days of celebration followed-banquets, jousts, and balls. My betrothed participated reluctantly in them all. I, too, participated with only half a heart. The thought that Henri was the man in my nightmare had terrified me, and I had no one to confide in, no one who might say, with a laugh, that I was tired and anxious and so had let my imagination run unfettered.
Queen Eleonore, my soon to be mother-in-law, served as my chaperone. Three years earlier, she had married Francois, as reluctant a bridegroom then as his son was now. Ravenous to plant the French flag in Italian soil, Francois had unwisely taken on the Emperor’s forces and suffered a catastrophic defeat at Pavia, where he was captured. He had purchased his freedom with hundreds of thousands of gold ecus and a promise to marry Emperor Charles’s widowed sister, Eleonore.
Like her brother, Eleonore was Flemish, fluent in French, and well-versed in Parisian culture and customs but altogether unlike the sparkling, sly-eyed women of her husband’s court. Her chestnut hair was worn in an unforgivably old-fashioned Spanish style: parted down the middle, plaited, and wound in two thick coils covering her ears. She was solid, thick-limbed, and graceless, her movements lumbering, her eyes bovine.
I liked her. Her silence, patience, and virtue were genuine. She had waited a short distance from her husband and his sons, and when King Francois brought me to her, she had gazed up at him adoringly. He did not so much as glance at her to acknowledge her presence and uttered with bored carelessness, “My wife, Queen Eleonore.” She had embraced me with unsullied sincerity and introduced me to King Francois’s daughter, ten-year-old Marguerite; another girl, thirteen-year-old Madeleine, was sick with consumption and home abed.
Early in the morning on the day of the secular ceremony-the third day of my stay in the palace on the Place- Neuve-Queen Eleonore came to my chambers as I was being dressed.
Her smile was kind and simple, her gaze steady. “You have no mother, Catherine. Did anyone speak frankly to you of the wedding night?”
“No,” I said, and at the instant I uttered it, realized I should have lied; I had no desire to listen to a lecture on the rudiments of sexual congress. I felt I had learned all I needed to know from my encounters with Ippolito.
“Ah.” She looked on me with gentle pity. “It is not such an unpleasant thing; some women, I hear, enjoy it. Certainly the men love it so.” She proceeded to tell me that I should insist that my husband not waste his seed but put all of it in the proper receptacle, and that I must lie flat afterward for a good quarter hour.
“It is important that you give birth as soon as possible,” she said, “for I think they do not love you until you give them a son.” I heard the wistfulness behind her words. Francois had adored his first wife, Queen Claude, the mother of his children, dead for almost a decade.
Eleonore placed her hand upon mine. “It will all go well. Before it happens, I will make sure that you take a little wine so that you are comfortable.” She patted my hand and rose. “You will have many sons, I know it.”
I smiled at the notion. My husband to be was not fond of me now, but I would have his children-a family truly my own, from which I would never be separated. And I would never, like poor Queen Eleonore, have to compete with a ghost.
The betrothal ceremony was a simple matter of signing the weighty marriage contract and standing silently beside Henri while the Cardinal de Bourbon intoned a blessing over us. We were taken then to the great hall where I had first been introduced to the King and his family. Henri and I were prompted to kiss, the signal for the trumpets; the noise made us both start.
A ball commenced. I danced with Henri, and the King, and then Henri’s brother, Francois.
It was clear that Henri and his older brother were close. The Dauphin’s presence usually provoked an honest smile from my bridegroom; from time to time they shared a secret joke told by a single glance. The golden-haired Francois-the Dauphin, I prefer to call him, to spare confusing him with his father-was more talkative than Henri and passionately loved books and learning. He also enjoyed history and explained to me the evolution of his title. Five centuries earlier, the first count to rule the region Vienne, in western France, bore the symbol of a dolphin upon his shield, hence becoming the Dauphin de Viennois. The name stuck, even two hundred years later, when the position fell to the eldest son of the French king.
As the Dauphin spoke engagingly to me, I sensed a faint discomfort that never left him except when he and his brother Henri were alone. His discomfort was greatest in the presence of his father, who never missed an opportunity to criticize his two older sons, or to praise his youngest-nor did Henri ever miss a chance to direct spiteful glances at his father. I wondered, as I glided beside the Dauphin in a sedate Spanish pavane, whether he was the king that the astrologer Ruggieri had seen in my moles. Perhaps I was marrying the wrong son.
That night, I returned to my temporary suite and Henri to his father’s palace. I was awakened three hours before dawn, when the women came to dress me. Seven long, tedious hours passed before I was ready and word was sent to the King.
