The Medici Queen aka The Devil’s Queen

Amid a stew of quivering fat, raw muscle, and glistening entrails, something lay exposed: the curve of a tiny red skull, the corner of a purple shoulder smeared with birth cheese. Ruggieri worried his fingers deeper into the woman’s womb and pulled. The silent child emerged with a sucking sound, its bloodied cord intact. I could not see its face, and the magician did not clean it but set it aside on the sheet, a sad little unborn corpse with a great head and frail limbs, still connected to its mother.

At Ruggieri’s soft gasp I looked up. His hands disappeared again inside the dead girl, and when he lifted them up they bore a second red tangle of flesh and bone, this one smaller than the first. Again his hands disappeared, and again brought forth a child.

“Triplets,” he said, amazed. “Chance smiles on you, Catherine.”

Four lives to buy Henri’s, and three sons.

“Never again,” I whispered. “Never.”

The magician knew well what I meant; my words replaced his sudden lightness with something very dark.

“How often,” he said, “I have uttered those words myself.”

I remember little of the ritual afterward. Ruggieri applied a drop of the girl’s blood to the onyx, then a bit of blood from each child to the pearl. When the circle was broken, we left the bodies on the slate and Ruggieri lit the lamp. We sat on the stools while he explained that I must lie with my husband as soon as possible, then handed me the two tainted stones: The pearl was mine, the onyx Henri’s. I was instructed to hide the latter where my husband spent most of his time. I was to wear the pearl always, and never let it from my sight.

As the magician spoke, rain drummed on the roof and crashed against the stones outside. He opened the shutters just enough to admit the sound of a downpour and distant thunder.

“Madame Gondi’s horse,” I said, absurdly worried that it might get wet when my bloodied victims lay nearby.

“Stay,” Ruggieri ordered. “I’ll lead it beneath the eaves for shelter. You’ll need to remain here until the storm passes.”

He pushed open the door and disappeared into the darkness.

I stood at the window, though the night and rain blotted out sight and sound. He was gone for so long that a sudden paralyzing fear stole my breath: Something old and shrewd and evil waited outside in the darkness for me.

Cosimo Ruggieri was an inhuman fiend: I had just witnessed the proof. He had once said that he had protected me because it served his best interests; what might serve them now?

The rain crashed down harder. Childishly, knowing I could not be heard, I cried out to him. Ruggieri appeared upon the threshold abruptly, as though the utterance of his name had forced him to materialize.

Water pooled upon his shoulders; beads of rain coursed down his cheeks. I was still trembling and tried to cover my fear of him by sneering, “Poor man. Do you cry now, for her and her children?”

He stepped inside the door. The edges of his eyelids and nostrils were red; he was indeed weeping.

“Don’t tell me you feel remorse,” I said.

He looked up at me with a face I had never seen, one wearing Ruggieri’s features, but younger and haunted by many ghosts; in its eyes was self-loathing that verged on insanity.

“For no one else, Catherine,” he said hoarsely. “For no one else.” Words welled up and caught in his throat, bitter things he could not bring himself to expel.

I heard but refused to understand. I shook my head and backed away from him. “No. No, that isn’t true. This isn’t the first time you’ve done something so horrible. I heard of your crimes when I was only a girl.”

“When you were in the hands of the rebels,” he hissed, “how do you think I protected you? How do you think I knew of the danger that was coming?”

The talisman, I wanted to say. It was the talisman that kept me safe. I closed my eyes and felt it hard against my heart, hiding the wickedness that lurked beneath. I did not want to know what he had done to charge it.

He bowed his head; the words he had fought so hard to contain finally tore free. “Only ever out of love, Catherine.”

The girl’s mutilated body and those of her unborn children lay inside the circle, the candles extinguished. The lamplight chased away all sense of unreality, leaving behind a stark heaviness. Pierced to my bones, I sank onto the stool, the one on which the girl had sat as Ruggieri plied her with tainted wine.

Love.

Do not tell me that you did this for me. I understood suddenly how my husband would feel were I to confess my crime. The magician’s words, uttered more than a decade earlier, returned to me:

We are tied, Caterina Maria Romula de’ Medici.

Aghast, I said, “I love only Henri. I will forever love only Henri.”

His face was taut with grief, his voice shatteringly mournful.

“I know, Madame la Dauphine. I have read your stars.”

Twenty-three

The rain did not last long. Numbed, I rode back to the palace, stopping a short distance away to hand over the horse’s reins to Madame Gondi, who returned it to the stables. I said nothing to her, but even in the darkness, she must have read the horror in my bearing.

I went directly to my chamber, and did not go down for supper; I was still too shocked to be charming and talkative. I fastened the pearl pendant around my neck with trembling fingers.

Despite my disquiet, I needed to lie with Henri that night. I made a chambermaid wait while I penned a note urging my husband to come to my chambers immediately after supper, implying that some emergency had occurred.

One of the ladies undressed me to my chemise, then left while Madame Gondi brushed out my hair, still damp from the drizzle on my ride home. Her eyes held many questions, but she came and went in silence.

After a time, Henri knocked on my bedchamber door; I opened it myself. He hesitated on the threshold, his face sun-browned from the hunt, a slash of concern separating his brows. His eyes were easily read: He had not wanted to come, but Diane had sent him.

“Are you unwell, Madame la Dauphine?” he asked formally. He held his brown velvet cap a bit nervously in both hands.

Before his arrival, I had thought that my nerves would fail, that I would be unable lure him into a liaison. But at the sight of him, a surge of feral heat swept over me-wild and foreign, from someplace far outside me-carrying away with it all my notions of propriety and dignity. I wanted to devour him alive.

I put a finger to my lips and reached past him to close the chamber door.

He was embarrassed by my forwardness and eager to leave; I would not let him. Like the imbecile prostitute, I snaked my hand beneath the waistband of his leggings, found the flesh between his legs, and closed my fingers around it; with my other hand, I pulled his leggings down to the middle of his thighs.

I knelt before him and did something I had never done: I lowered my head and took his swelling flesh into my mouth, at the same time glimpsing a veil of waving golden hair where my own mousy brown should have been.

My actions caught him off guard. At first he tried to push me away, then held very still, and finally seized my skull and groaned as his cap fell to the floor, forgotten. His shaft was veined and purple and more swollen than I had ever seen it-like me, hardened by blood and ready to burst. I moved my mouth up and down, so fast that I cut my upper lip and tasted blood. I rose quickly on my toes, seizing Henri’s shoulders and pulling him down to kiss his mouth and tongue, to make him taste blood, too.

This time, he did not pull away. My madness infected him, and he lifted me off my feet into his arms, our tongues entwined, our bodies pressed so fast together that the effort made us tremble; so tightly, Ruggieri’s pearl burrowed painfully between my breasts.