She gave a little laugh. “He made the somber pronouncement that I had given birth to a king. And I said, ‘But Monsieur, I am Queen of Navarre-so of course my son shall one day be King.’ It was all rather funny. What a silly little man.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. What a silly little man.”
Monsieur de Nostredame spent one night at Blois. His carriage left at dawn, and when I rose from my bed later that morning, I found that he had left me a quatrain, scrawled in a looping hand:
I was sorely tempted to cast it into the fire; my heart had already been shattered by the deaths of the twins, and Nostredame had dared to pierce it again.
Instead, I refolded it and put it in a compartment hidden in the wainscoting on my cabinet wall.
Those who have never lost a child at or before birth think that the grief would be less than for an older child or an adult, but they fail to account for the peculiar ache of loving someone one has never known. I cloistered myself in the months after the twins’ deaths, refusing to hold audiences or ride on the hunt or even to eat with my family. When my husband asked whether he might resume his evening visits to my chamber, I produced excuses until he stopped asking. I endured the regular company of no one but my necessary ladies, and my friend, Jeanne.
I conferred once with Ruggieri, who could not entirely hide his jealousy that I had summoned the famous Nostredame. Even if Monsieur de Nostredame had foreseen my husband’s death, Ruggieri said, the future was malleable. The seer was wrong: God indeed heard prayers. I did not have the heart to ask him whether the Devil heard them, too.
Twenty-nine
My husband’s longtime nemesis, the old and ailing Emperor Charles, unofficially abdicated in January 1556, leaving his brother Ferdinand to rule the German countries and his son, Philip, to rule Spain, Naples, and the Low Countries. I was happy to hear the news, thinking it would bring peace.
But war came in my husband’s thirty-ninth year. One of Philip’s viceroys, the Duke of Alba, launched an attack on the entire southern region of Campania in Italy. Alba’s army secured the area with startling speed and began marching toward Rome.
The new Pope, Paul IV, remembered the horrors wrought on the Holy City by invading Imperial troops more than two decades earlier. Terrified, he begged my husband for military aid.
Henri acquiesced, and sent Francois of Guise to Campania in his stead, at the head of a large army. Guise was a brilliant strategist and swore not only to protect Rome but to take Naples for France. We had great hopes that the campaign would go swiftly, but our Italian allies failed to produce either the funds or the men they had guaranteed.
We soon discovered that Alba’s attack had been part of a trap: Once we sent Guise and his army to Italy, Philip’s Imperial ally, the Duke of Savoy, invaded the region of Picardy, on France’s northeastern border with the Empire.
Henri sent his old friend Montmorency to lead the fight against Savoy’s invaders. Montmorency took with him his nephew, the brilliant but arrogant Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. Before leaving for Picardy, they conferred with the King and decided upon a strategy that Coligny swore could not fail.
In the final, brutal days of August, Montmorency and his men met the Imperial invaders at the French stronghold of Saint-Quentin, near the banks of the river Somme. My husband was a day’s ride away; in spite of my protests, he had insisted on being close enough to the battlefield to stay in constant touch with Montmorency. I served as the King’s regent in Paris, only two days’ ride from the front, a fact that made the citizens apprehensive.
I was at supper with Jeanne and the children when a messenger appeared at the door. Haggard and gasping from his long ride, the young officer wore an expression of total despair; before he could utter a word, I excused myself and stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind us.
“What news?” I demanded, rigid with dread.
“I come from His Majesty,” the young man gasped, and I went limp with relief.
“The King is well?” I asked.
“The King is well,” he confirmed. “But our army has suffered a terrible loss at Saint-Quentin. A third of our men were killed… and Constable Montmorency and his top officers have been captured and are on their way to a Spanish prison.”
I closed my eyes at the news. I grieved for the dead, but at least their suffering was over: I mourned more for Montmorency and the humiliation and torture he would now endure.
“The King,” I said. “Tell me that he does not plan to rally the troops, to lead them himself in the fight against the Duke of Savoy.”
“His Majesty is returning to Paris to confer with advisers. He has sworn to avenge this defeat.”
My legs threatened to give way; I pressed a hand to the wall and leaned heavily against it. “Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you…”
I heard only that Henri was coming home to Paris-to me. Tears of relief stung my eyes; I believed, foolishly, that my husband would never return to the battlefield and would be spared.
I did not know, then, that Montmorency’s imprisonment would bring about the very thing I most feared.
King Philip of Spain was not the brilliant strategist his father had been. He should have ordered his troops to march directly to Paris, which they could easily have captured; instead, he ordered his men to take several small northern towns-a waste of time that worked to our advantage. Winter loomed, forcing Philip’s men to retreat.
In the interim, my Henri returned home. I scarcely saw him: He spent the entire day closeted with his advisers, discussing plans too secret to share with his wife. Henri aged quickly during those bitter months: shocks of white appeared at his temples, lines beneath his eyes. His smile, which had once come so easily, now was infrequent and haggard.
I worried at a distance. The nursery was my only distraction-and even that joy was tempered by disappointment. Francois was almost fourteen, the age his father and I had been when we had married-but my son was still mentally and physically a child. His sister Elisabeth, almost thirteen, seemed years older, and his fiancee, Mary, was at fifteen a brilliant, capable young woman; I did not doubt that, when Francois inherited the throne, Mary would rule. My second son, Charles, suffered from abscesses and other infections, but physical weakness did not stop him from exhibiting signs of madness: He had to be restrained from biting the other children viciously enough to draw blood-and, during a momentary lapse of the governess’s attention, had managed to break the neck of the children’s little spaniel with his bare hands. My husband replaced the dog with a puppy, with the caveat that it was to be locked away whenever Charles was present. Only Edouard, then six, grew to be strong and tall and kind, like his constant companion, little Navarre.
On a cold winter’s day in Paris, with iron clouds that in any other northern city might have indicated snow, I sat with Edouard and Mary and the little spaniel in my antechamber, whose tall windows looked beyond the dull, muddy trickle that was the Seine River, to the twin towers of Notre-Dame. Mary had learned to be civil to me-she had resigned herself, I think, to the fact that I was healthy and disinclined to die soon-and began to come to my chambers to practice the art of embroidery. Edouard accompanied her that day and played nicely with the little dog, whose antics made us laugh.
On that morning, Mary and I were at work on her bridal gown-a sumptuous creation of shining silk satin in her favourite color, white. It was an odd choice for a wedding gown, especially in France, where white was the color of
