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.”
Francois, my smiling, golden-haired friend. The room whirled; I caught the edge of the doorway and let go a torrent of involuntary tears.
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 Francois 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 Francois to rest in a temporary tomb.
Until one afternoon shortly thereafter, when Madame Gondi was speaking of some trivial matter and addressed me as
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 Francois’s death as straightforward, but the King and many of his advisers and courtiers thought otherwise.
Left behind at Tournon, Francois 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 Eleonore 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 been 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
