was pregnant again. This time I did not remain sequestered in my chambers or the nursery but sat in on cabinet meetings with Henri and his ministers. Montmorency and Diane soon learned that I was no longer the silent, invisible Queen.
Henri began to spend more time with the First Prince of the Blood, Antoine de Bourbon. I approved heartily of this, for Bourbon despised the Guises. He was also a Protestant again by that time, as was his wife, Jeanne. I hoped that Henri’s relationship with the man would soften his prejudice against non-Catholics.
While Henri spent more time with Bourbon, I spent a good deal of time with Jeanne. She assisted the midwife at the birth of my daughter, whom I named Marguerite, in honor of Jeanne’s mother, though we all called her Margot. In the difficult hours before Margot’s birth, Jeanne confessed that she had just learned of her own pregnancy.
My dark-eyed, dark-haired Margot, as precocious and stubborn as her own mother, was born on the thirteenth of May, 1553. Jeanne’s son, Henri of Navarre-named to honor both his grandfather and my husband-was born seven months later, on the thirteenth of December. I remained beside Jeanne throughout her labor, just as she had stayed with me throughout mine. And when I first held her squalling newborn son, love pierced me as keenly as if he were my own.
Even then, I believed the two children were linked by fate. When Jeanne’s father died a year later, leaving her Queen of Navarre, she chose to remain in France for her son’s education. Little Henri, or Navarre, as I sometimes called him, grew up at the Court and spent his days playing with my children in the royal nursery and sharing their tutors. He and Margot became especially attached to each other.
For many years, I would not understand just how intricately their fates were intertwined, or how deeply both were bound to the coming bloody tide.
This is how a dozen years of my marriage passed. As I lived them, I perceived them to be difficult and tumultuous, but perspective has revealed them to be sweet and halcyon compared with the evil that followed. I was deeply relieved that Henri did not return to war, though he and Emperor Charles remained enemies. Shortly after Margot’s birth, a new queen ascended the throne of England: Mary Tudor, champion of Catholicism, determined to purge her country of the Protestant blight. Perhaps we should have been glad of the fact, but when Mary wed King Philip, uniting the thrones of England with Spain to create an invincible military giant, I grew uneasy.
Three years after Margot’s birth, I became pregnant again. My stomach grew so distended that I soon realized I carried more than one child. A strange dread settled over me during my confinement. I had labored hard to forget my crimes, but the memory of them began to overwhelm me. My fear was underscored by an event in the last moments of my last pregnancy.
Henri had continued his father’s tradition of collecting a copy of each book printed in France; my librarians knew to bring works of interest to my attention.
Such was the case with a volume titled
On a warm night in June, I was lying propped up against the pillows in my bed, uncomfortable and sleepless because of the weight in my belly and the relentless kicking of two pairs of little legs. I had chosen to give birth at the Chateau at Blois, and that night, the dank air rose from the Loire River, bringing with it the stink of decay. I had trouble balancing the heavy book on my swollen stomach and was about to give up the effort when I turned the page, and my gaze fell upon these lines:
I sat up with a gasp, recalling the words penned by the great astrologer Luca Guorico:
Fear wrung my midsection like a sponge. I cried out at the sudden physical spasm and let the heavy book slide off my lap.
The labor of childbirth had always gone easily for me, but the agony that gripped me now was malicious, dire and unknown. I climbed out of the bed, but when my foot touched the floor, pain felled me.
I went down shrieking for Madame Gondi, for Jeanne, and, most of all, for Henri.
I am stout in the face of pain, but this labor was so cruel and protracted that I thought I would die before the first infant was born.
Jeanne sat beside the birthing chair, and Henri visited me at the beginning of the labor, gripping my hands when the pains worsened and encouraging me throughout the long morning and into the heat of the summer afternoon. We pretended that the added agony I experienced augured nothing ominous, that it was only because there were two children instead of one. My longest previous labor had endured ten hours-but when ten hours had passed, then twelve, without progress, our anxiety increased. When the evening lamp was lit, I was no longer able to maintain a cheerful front. Henri paced helplessly until I grew peevish and told him to leave. Once he had gone, I lost myself to the pain, barely aware of Jeanne’s soft, perfumed hands bearing cool compresses, of the midwife’s whispered instructions. I fainted, and woke to find that I had been spirited from the wooden chair to my own bed.
The first infant, Victoire, arrived at dawn, almost thirty-six hours after the initial excruciating spasm. She was weak and grey, with a sickly mewl, but her arrival brought joy to Jeanne and the midwife, who thought that this signaled the end of my travail. But her birth brought only a glimmer of relief before the savage pain returned.
I slid into delirium. I cried out for Aunt Clarice, for Sister Niccoletta, for my dead mother; I cried out for Ruggieri. I must have called out for Jeanne, for when I came to myself, she was clasping my sweaty palm.
The hairline part at the center of the velvet drapes glowed with dying orange light. I felt the midwife’s rapid breath upon my legs, smelled a familiar perfume, heard soft weeping. I wanted to tell Jeanne that I was going to name the second girl for her but found I could not speak.
The lamplight caught the curve of Jeanne’s cheek, turned the crimped curls at her temple into a glowing halo. Her voice was stern, as if she were explaining a hard fact to an unreasonable child.
“Catherine, the midwife must remove the baby now, to save your life. Squeeze my hand, and yell if you must. It will be over quickly.”
I gripped Jeanne’s hand. The midwife’s deft hands added to my anguish; I ground my teeth when her fingers found the unborn child inside me and remained silent when I felt that child turned.
The midwife’s hands came together inside me, clutching little limbs. They moved swiftly, sharply; I heard-no,
I wailed at Jeanne that God was punishing me because I had purchased my children with the darkest magic. I begged her to let me die instead, to put things right; I begged her to go to Ruggieri, to have him undo the spell.
I remember nothing more.
The infant Jeanne died at birth as a result of the wounds inflicted by the midwife. I hovered in feverish limbo for two weeks, then rose from my bed to learn that Victoire, the twin who had survived, was dying.
I went to my tiny, gasping daughter. For three days I sat in the nursery, holding her in my arms, staring into her pinched yellow face, feeling as though my heart were melting and spilling out all my love onto her. I whispered apologies into her perfect little ear; I begged for forgiveness. She breathed her last with her father standing close
