A pause; Ruggieri’s fingers trembled.
“One heir?” I pressed. “Francois alone will rule?”
The quill steadied and did not move. Francois was sickly; if he was the only Valois heir, what was to become of his brothers?
“Why the blood?” I demanded. “Why was there blood on Charles’s face, on Edouard’s? Why did Navarre appear? Is it because he will kill them?”
“Should I kill Navarre first?” I whispered. “Before he takes their throne?”
“No!” I said. “I cannot…” I cradled my face in my hands and did not look up until Ruggieri gripped my shoulders and shook them.
“Catherine!” His voice was harsh. “I have undone the circle. We must go.”
“I can’t do it,” I sobbed. “I cannot kill Navarre, too. A sweet, innocent boy…”
“Navarre never appeared.” Ruggieri was adamant. “I saw no one but a stableboy, a black Ethiopian, with straw in his hair.”
“I thought that I was strong enough,” I moaned. “But I am not strong enough for this.”
“The future is not fixed,” the magician said urgently. “It’s fluid, like the ocean, and you, Catherine, control the tide.”
I stared up at him. “A tide of blood. Tell me how to stop it, Cosimo. Tell me how to save my sons.”
My plea disarmed him. For an instant, his composure fled, revealing infinite tenderness, helplessness, pain. Stricken, he reached unsteady fingers toward my cheek, then withdrew them and gathered himself.
“Come,
Thirty-three
I returned to Paris in time to see my daughter Elisabeth off on her long journey to the welcoming arms of her new husband, King Philip of Spain. I wept as I kissed her farewell, knowing what awaited her: the loneliness of finding oneself surrounded by strangers, the frustration of wrestling with a foreign tongue. As her carriage rode away, I wrote her the first of many letters, so that she should not have to wait long before receiving a reminder of home.
During my absence, Charles of Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, had been busy trying to put France’s financial affairs in order. The recent wars had left the country near bankruptcy-and the Cardinal, arrogant fool, decided that the best solution was to refuse to pay the French soldiers returning at last from battle. That, combined with his energetic persecution of Protestants, left him and his brother despised by the common folk.
Protestant leaders had gathered near the port of Hugues and birthed a plot to overthrow the Guises and replace them with the flighty Antoine de Bourbon. The Cardinal’s face was livid as he relayed this to me. “Those damnable Huguenots,” he said, “will not stop until they have overthrown the Crown itself.”
Worst of all, Francois’s health had failed in my absence. The young king’s ear pained him constantly now and exuded an evil smell; his mottled cheeks were covered with boils. Terrified, I consulted with his doctors and agreed to whisk him from the city’s oppressive heat to the Chateau at Blois.
By the time we boarded the coach, Francois was so miserable that he laid his head in my lap and groaned pitifully the entire way-pausing three times, when we signaled the driver to stop, to lean out the window and retch.
When we arrived at Blois, the Guises carried Francois to his bed while I sent for the doctors. I sat at my stricken son’s bedside next to Mary-she still in a queen’s white mourning, her regal composure stripped away to reveal a frightened young woman. Her affection for her young husband was not entirely feigned; she clung to his limp hand and murmured reassurances. He was fifteen years old-an age at which his father had been a man-yet the body that lay prostrate upon the bed was a child’s, narrow-shouldered and spindly, with cheeks that bore no trace of a beard.
“Francois!” she begged. “Speak to me, please…”
He opened his eyes a slit. “D-don’t m-make me,” he stammered. “It hurts…” And he closed them again.
Charles and Edouard entered the room, their eyes wide with uncertainty as they solemnly studied their eldest brother.
Homely and hot-tempered, with a wheezing cough that had plagued him from infancy, Charles turned to me and asked, in a loud, heartless tone: “Will he die, then? And will I be King?”
Francois’s eyelids flickered. Mary let go her husband’s hand and leaned past me to slap Charles’s childishly plump cheek.
“Horrid boy!” she exclaimed. “What a dreadful, ugly thing to say!”
Charles’s face contorted with rage. “It’s Edouard’s fault!” he bellowed at his younger brother, who was handsome, intelligent, tall, and endearing-everything Charles was not. “He told me what to say!” He whirled on Edouard, who cringed in my arms. “You want Francois to die. And me, too. You can’t wait until we are both dead, so that you can have your way in everything!”
“It’s a lie,” Edouard whispered. “Francois, forgive him…” He began weeping softly.
I handed the boys over to their governess, with strict instructions that they were not to come back until I sent for them.
Mary and I spent the rest of the day and night with Francois. Each of us gripped one of his hands and held it tightly while the doctor poured warm oil of lavender into his ear; Francois thrashed and howled piteously.
Hours later, he sat upright and shrieked; a foul-smelling yellow discharge trickled from his affected ear. Mary and I were horrified, but the doctor was pleased: The abscess had burst. If the patient could be strengthened with tonics, he might still overcome the infection.
With the swelling and pain reduced, Francois fell asleep at last. Relieved, I took the doctor’s advice to go to my bed, where I dropped into fitful slumber.
I dreamt: Again I stood staring out at a field-the torn lists in front of the Chateau des Tournelles, I thought at first, but there was no palace, no stands, no spectators-no one, save myself and the black, silent form of the man at my feet. The barren ground stretched to the horizon and the fading sky.
My Henri lay dying. I did not call to him or ask how I might help: This time I knew there was nothing I could do save hear him whisper,
When his final breath was free, blood bubbled up from his wounded eye and flowed forth onto the earth. Farther and farther it spread, streaming outward, until the ground was covered and a thousand separate pools appeared.
From each pool grew a man, in his final anguished throes. And from each man, a fresh spring gushed forth, to form more and more soldiers, each one mortally wounded. A groan slowly rose in strength until it became a roar, until I pressed my palms against my temples to crush the noise echoing in my skull:
My voice was drowned out by the rising crescendo. I began to shout, more loudly, more insistently, until I woke in my own bed, to a crushing realization.
My sons were not the only ones endangered. Henri’s death had marked not the end of the bloodshed but,
