I spent the remaining daylight hours restlessly inspecting my new property, wandering through empty rooms. When dusk came, a sliver of moon rose over the dark river. I stood upon my balcony, watching the light play on the rippling water.
Within a few hours, Madame Gondi’s knock came at the door. I followed her through a gallery that led outdoors to the building that housed the chapel. She took me inside, to the foot of a winding staircase leading up to the bell tower. I refused the lamp and left her there to climb the high, narrow stairs in the dark. The tall door at the top was closed, its edges limned with pale, feeble light. I pushed it open.
The room was vast, high-ceilinged, and empty, all of which conspired to give the sense of infinite, uncharted darkness. At its center, Ruggieri waited in the heart of a large circle. Candles flickered faintly at each of the four cardinal directions-one of them just behind a low, silk-draped altar, which held a small wooden birdcage and a human skull, its crown sawed away to admit a censer. Smoke streamed from its eye sockets, perfuming the air with the resinous, sacred smell of frankincense.
He moved to the edge of the pentagram but no further; a double-edged dagger glinted in his left hand.
“The circle has already been cast. Come.” He pointed at a spot just outside the black perimeter. “Stand there and do as I tell you.”
I went to it and watched as the magician wielded the dagger, touching the tip to floor at the circle’s edge and lifting it up to carve an invisible archway just wide enough to permit me passage.
“Enter now,” he whispered. “Quickly!”
I hurried through, and he performed the reverse motion swiftly, sealing the gap.
Inside the circle, the darkness was dancing, alive. Ruggieri sheathed his dagger and returned its center. The pale blur of his hand moved swiftly, and I found myself suddenly staring at an apparition: a tiny woman, dressed and veiled in black, her white face haggard with grief.
I reached toward her; my fingers brushed cold metal and recoiled. It was a large oval mirror upon a stand, draped in black until that instant. Ruggieri set aside the cloth and pulled a stool in front of the steel mirror.
“Sit,” he commanded, and I obeyed.
He moved to the altar and took a white pigeon from the cage. It sat trustingly in his hand until he reached out to wrest its neck suddenly, savagely. The dagger flashed; the pigeon’s head fell to the floor as blood gushed onto white feathers. Ruggieri lifted a quill from the altar and, dipping it into the bloody stump, painstakingly formed strange, barbarous letters upon the steel. Red sigils soon covered my reflection, until the mirror was almost filled; he set down his gruesome inkwell and quill to stand behind me.
“Catherine,” he said. “Catherine…” It was a chant, musical and strangely sensual. “You wish to know your sons’ fates,” he sang. “Let the mirror now reveal the future kings of France.”
Bitterly weary from grief, I closed my eyes and leaned back against him, passive and on the verge of slumber. My breathing grew deep and languorous; I wanted never to stir.
“Catherine,” he hissed.
I opened my eyes with a start. I was sitting unsupported on the stool, and Ruggieri had vanished. I called his name, but no answer came-only the gentle trill of the surviving bird. The slab of polished steel revealed two shining candles at the circle’s edge, nothing more.
The mirror suddenly filmed as if censed with smoke. As I stared into it, a countenance formed in the mists. I thought at first that the magician had come to stand behind me again, but the face was not his. The features were blurred and translucent, the specter of a dark-haired boy with dark eyes.
“Francois?” I whispered. The features, the cant of the head and shoulders, could well have been those of my eldest son.
The face gave no answer but grew slowly incandescent. It pulsed once, dazzling as fireworks, then quickly dimmed.
The mirror darkened and began to swirl. As the mists cleared a second time, a face appeared, this one in profile but again blurred and indistinct. It, too, was of a boy, round-cheeked and sullen, with an ugly red mark on his upper lip: my second son, Charles.
Francois, my poor frail boy, was doomed. I pressed my hands to my eyes in an effort to hold back tears. Ruggieri had been right; I had not wanted to know.
When I parted my fingers, Charles’s countenance was pulsating with light. Bright and dark, bright and dark alternated until I began to count the fluctuations: four, five, six… Were these increments of time? Years? If so, how many had I missed?
A black tear trickled down Charles’s ghostly cheek; I pressed my fingertips to the mirror’s cold surface. Dark liquid rushed from the top of the mirror downward, spilling like a black curtain to blot out the sight of my son. I pulled my hand away and spread my fingers-sticky, red, smelling of iron.
At once, the bloody curtain vanished. I let go a sob at the realization that Charles’s face had also disappeared; within the mirror, clouds roiled. A third face formed, one bearded and handsome, very like my husband’s.
“My precious eyes,” I gasped. Of all my children, Edouard was most suited to be King. I began to count the oscillations but did not get far: The bloody veil soon fell again.
The steel flashed as if reflecting the sun. Dazzled, I cried out and covered my eyes.
When I looked again, the mirror was clear, unclouded-a mirror, nothing more. I peered into it and saw my own reflection clearly.
Above my right shoulder hung the sun-browned face of a little boy, perhaps six years old. It was solid, not ghostly, with close-cropped chestnut curls and large eyes-green, like those of his grandmother Marguerite of Navarre, like those of his mother, Jeanne.
I whirled about, the stool skittering beneath me as I struggled to my feet. The boy stood near the door-a real boy, flesh and blood, mouth gaping at the sight of me.
“You there!” I shouted and started as a strong hand gripped my arm above the elbow. The boy dashed out the door and disappeared.
“Don’t go after him,” Ruggieri warned. “Don’t break the circle.”
“But I know him!” I said. “Henri of Navarre, Jeanne’s son. What is he doing here? He should be in Paris!”
“It’s only a groom,” Ruggieri countered, “from the stables. A curious boy who needs a beating, nothing more. Let him go. We must close the circle properly.”
Ruggieri sighed wearily and stared at the candle flame behind the altar and the smoke that streamed up from the skull.
“All right then,” he said at last. He took the second pigeon from the cage and wrung its neck, then wiped the mirror clean with his sleeve.
“Give me your hand,” he said. I balked until he added, “He knows you, Catherine. Your blood will draw him the fastest.”
I surrendered my hand and did not flinch when the blade stung the tip of my finger. The magician milked it a bit, then pressed it to the mirror’s cold surface.
Ruggieri sat upon the stool and began to breathe rhythmically. Soon his head lolled, and his eyelids trembled.
“Henri,” he whispered hoarsely. It was an invitation, a plea. “Henri de Valois…”
His eyes closed, and his body sagged upon the stool; his limbs began to twitch. Abruptly he straightened, though his head lolled forward, as though he were sleeping. The dagger flashed again: The pigeon’s severed head softly struck the floor as the magician’s left hand fumbled for the quill.
I watched, transfixed, as Ruggieri dipped the nib into the pigeon’s bloody stump and wrote across the mirror’s gleaming surface. The script was my husband’s.
Ruggieri’s hand ceased its spasmodic efforts and hovered above the steel-waiting for a question.
“Our sons,” I whispered. “Will they all die without heirs?”
