Ruggieri shivered and wrapped his Doctor’s robe closer around him, the empty mask swinging from his hand.
‘We do not usually hear you so quiet, Bruno. Is it because you dislike being told you are wrong?’
‘I was only wondering,’ I said, ‘why you are so certain she took her own life? Did she have particular cause that you know of?’
Catherine made a gesture that seemed to imply the question was redundant. ‘Young women. Thwarted affair of the heart or some nonsense. She would not be the first to fall into despair because a man had cast her aside.’
‘But you just said your women do not involve themselves with men except at your command,’ I said. Her eyes narrowed. ‘I wondered,’ I continued, keeping my tone light, ‘if perhaps it could have been because she was with child?’
The silence that followed this was so profound I could hear the ice cracking on the window panes.
‘What makes you say that?’ Catherine asked, in a voice like a knife on a whetstone.
I was about to answer, but at that moment King Henri burst in, distraught and dishevelled, his doublet unlaced and his cream silk stockings caked with mud. He threw himself to his knees beside Léonie’s body and manoeuvred her torso clumsily into his lap.
‘Mon Dieu,’ he moaned softly, rocking her back and forth, her head hanging limply in his arms like a grotesque doll. He repeated this lament, the words muffled as he pressed his lips against her hair. The rest of us stood awkwardly watching this performance until Catherine clapped her hands and ordered her son to get up.
‘Have you been drinking? You know what the physician said about your constitution – you are not supposed to touch wine. Put the girl down, Henri,’ she added briskly, as if talking to a dog, though the King appeared not to hear. He remained folded over Léonie’s body, his face wracked with pain, but I could not have said for certain whether it was grief or remorse. Henri was prone to dramatics either way.
‘I will speak to the King in private,’ Catherine announced. ‘Ruggieri – take Doctor Bruno to the library and keep him there until I send for you again. Have the servants bring you meat and drink. And you—’ she raised her walking stick and pointed it towards me with finality – ‘will not repeat to anyone what you said just now. If that idle speculation finds its way into common gossip, I will have you arrested for slander. Do you understand me?’
I nodded. I, too, would have liked to speak to the King in private, but there was no question of that at present. Catherine meant to manage this situation in her own way. I tried to catch Henri’s eye, but he would not raise his head from the corpse in his arms.
I followed Ruggieri along the corridors, empty now of guests but with a noticeable increase of armed guards, halberds bristling at every set of doors, though they parted swiftly for the astrologer as he strode towards them with his hand raised like Moses before the Red Sea. When we reached the library, he bade me take a seat at a table in front of the fireplace, on which large star maps and charts of the heavens lay unfurled, curling at the edges, held flat by several measuring instruments. Though the papers were upside down to me, I leaned across and peered at them with curiosity while he bustled about lighting a sconce of candles. It looked as if Ruggieri had been plotting a natal chart; the margins of the map were filled with gnomic scribbles in his cramped handwriting. In the top right-hand corner I saw that he had drawn the figure of a dolphin.
‘Whose chart?’ I asked, tapping the map.
He blew out the taper and leapt across with surprising speed, gathering the papers and rolling them tightly together. ‘No business of yours.’
The way he pursed his lips, all puffed up with the importance of his confidential knowledge, made me determined not to give him the satisfaction of pressing him any further. He paced behind my chair while I ignored him. ‘Whatever made you say the girl was with child?’ he asked, at last. I swivelled to face him.
‘You did not observe her during the masque tonight?’
He made a derisive noise. ‘I did not. I was in here all evening, working. I don’t need to see those girls writhing about. Give me a seizure, at my age.’
‘Nonsense. I knew a man in Nola older than you, fathered twins.’
‘Well. No idea of continence, you Nolans. What would I want with twins?’ He raised his hands in retreat, as if someone were threatening to hand him a pair. ‘Tell me about the girl, then. I have seen her recently – I did not remark that she had a big belly.’
‘Not especially big at this stage. But there was a tell-tale sign, visible only because her gown tonight was so thin. She had the line on her belly, though very faint – she was still in the early months.’
‘Line?’ He frowned.
‘The dark line that forms on the skin from the navel to the pubis. Have you not observed this in a woman expecting?’
‘I am not a midwife, Bruno,’ he said, with a little shudder of distaste. ‘Your experience of looking at pregnant women unclothed is clearly broader than mine, but then you are a Dominican. Ah. I see that amuses you.’
I could hardly tell him I was nodding because it was true that my only previous experience of seeing a pregnant woman naked had been as a young novice at the convent of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, though not in the way Ruggieri imagined.
‘Of course, I may be mistaken,’
