Catherine lingered too long in the kitchen in the days before her wedding, and now her fingertips smell of onions.
Their servant Marie scolded, sharp-voiced and anxious as a mother; told Catherine she should be attending to her packing, not dallying in the kitchen over tasks that were no longer hers to complete. But Catherine resisted, leaning into the solidity of the big kitchen table, letting the heat from the cooking fire curl the tips of her hair. “I have plenty of time,” she said, and flicked a wrist at Marie’s unhappy look. She turned her attention fully to her task, slicing the onions thin for the soup, breathing in their sharpness, and all the while feeling the sights and scents of the kitchen around her like a blanket tucked tight. Her shoulders hunched against the moment she would have to put her knife down and go heavy-footed to her chamber; when the blanket would fall away for good. Her eyes streamed.
Furtive, she raises her fingers again now and sniffs, and yes—onions. Unmistakable. Beyond the doorway of their sheltered alcove, the Château de Fontainebleau hums with sound, dizzies with its opulence. Catherine stands small and stiff and onion-fingered, and cannot concentrate on any of it. She misses Maman with such sudden sharpness in her chest that she thinks, just for a moment, that she is about to die.
Onions stay. Maman always said so, and here it is, the proof, dancing at the ends of Catherine’s fingers. Other smells need only a little soap, Maman used to say, but onions, raw and spicy, require thorough scrubbing; and even then, there is sometimes a ghost that remains days later.
Maman would have scrubbed the cooking smells from Catherine’s fingers; or better still, she would never have allowed Catherine near the kitchen in the days before her wedding. She would instead have spent those days readying Catherine for her wedding, bathing her with Venetian soap, brushing scented powder through her hair. She would have done everything that she could to ensure her daughter was in her very best looks, anxious that she not be disgraced before the entire court of France. She would have—
Catherine gives her head a sharp shake. Maman is not here; nor is Marie, with her motherly scolding. Only Papa stands beside her, fidgeting. He tugs at the hem of his doublet, rubs at his jaw through his beard as though it itches, twitchy as a child who has done something naughty and fears being caught. When he feels Catherine’s eyes upon him, Papa’s own eyes, watery blue and dearly familiar, meet hers for the briefest of instants and then slide away like secrets.
She tries to take in a breath, but it comes raggedly. All through the rattling journey from Lyons to Fontainebleau, she was too distracted by fear to realize that in all her preparations, she did not properly scrub the cooking smells from her fingers, and there is a stone inside her chest, now, heavy and grinding. It is her wedding day—nearly her wedding hour—and she cannot breathe, and her fingers stink—
“You look very beautiful,” Papa says suddenly. His gaze still darts, avoiding hers, and he speaks softly. “I should have said so earlier. The gown suits you. Your mother . . . would be very pleased. Very—very proud.”
Catherine puts her hand to her ribs; another to her hair. The gown he brought her is green, for love. An optimistic gown, the very color of the earliest, most tender leaves. She is like a painting, one that might be entitled Allegory of Spring. Where Papa found it—how he scrounged the funds to purchase it—she doesn’t know, and did not ask. He said, once she agreed to the match, that he would provide a new gown—such a pathetic offering, in the face of all that he should be providing, and yet she could not bring herself to spurn it. But on her wedding day, her hair should be dressed with more than ribbons of yellow and green. She has arrived at court like a rustic wearing a fine gown for the first time, a rustic with no idea that the gown ought to be the beginning of a young woman’s ornamentation, not the sum entire.
She is a softer variation of the countryside beyond Lyons, the fields green with dots of flower colors like splashes of paint, or gold and lush with wheat. All the things she had seen before only on the maps in Papa’s office, painted by an artist’s steady, diminishing hand.
And then, nearer to Fontainebleau, the rippling green of the forest, slashed with the black of bark. And then the palace, yellow stone walls and dusky roofs sprawled elegant, the broad staircase curling down to either side of the doors. A place that demanded the shine of gold, the flash of jewels. Her breath caught in her throat like a netted bird. Her hands going to her hair and its meager ribbons.
A little dizziness makes her sway, and she closes her eyes. She should have eaten more last night at the inn; should have eaten anything at all today.
“Will I please my husband?” she says when the world stops tilting; and she feels a jolt of surprise at the teeth in her voice.
Papa swallows, loudly. His fingers flutter. “How could you not?” he says. But then he falls silent, with a silence that feels final, the end of all their conversations.
When she was small, when Papa was home from one of his trips, he would drop his pack and leap down from his horse, dust puffing from his traveling cape, mud clinging to his boots. He’d hold out his arms and Catherine would barrel into them, hit his chest and knock the breath from it, feel herself lifted from the ground and spun, feet raised so she could imagine she was flying.
Later, after dinner, sitting before the fire, Tell me a story, Papa.
His hand, calloused from riding, cupping her cheek. His belly soft and comfortable against her back when he pulled her onto his lap. The creak of the chair as they settled into it together.
What sort of story, ma belle?
Any story.
A smile, half-hidden behind the cup of wine Maman poured him. Well, that leaves us with a lot of ground to cover.
Maman’s token protest that it was late, that Catherine should be abed, and Papa’s answering protest that their daughter had a tale or two in her. And Catherine always did; she ate Papa’s stories up like warm bread. They sustained her between his long trips abroad, though her mind creaked with hunger by the time he finally returned, laden with gifts for her and for Maman. Gifts, and still more stories. He brought the world into their home, impossibly wide and smelling of river stink and road dust and spices.
He spoke of things both prosaic and astonishing: roads so riddled with holes they had to journey entirely over fields; a swindling spice seller. Twins born joined together at the waist, still living when Papa passed through their town and held aloft by the local priest as proof of their mother’s heresy; already dead when he traveled back the same way.
A boy brought to court from a far-off, primitive country, the son of a savage king, a prince all covered in hair like a dog, head to toe, a marvelous brew of human and animal who was welcomed by the French king, and then educated, civilized, tamed.
Until her wedding, Catherine had never left Lyons. Fontainebleau was a small spot on one of Papa’s maps. All her life, she had waved goodbye as her father ventured forth on his sturdy brown mare; had watched the plume in his hat disappear into the thronged city streets. And then, always, she had followed the trail of his intended route on his maps. Whispered the place names over to herself—Paris, Genoa, Brussels, Basel—as if they were spell words, and she a witch.
But she never managed to transport herself anywhere, except inside her own head.
Papa’s newest clerk, Nicolas, had lately kissed her in furtive courtyard meetings. He professed to be just as ambitious as Papa, too ambitious to sit long behind a desk keeping tally of endless columns of numbers. Like Papa, he dreamed of ships, and fortune, and adventures one after the other like pearls on a string.
“I’ll bring you with me, everywhere I go,” he had murmured against the tender place behind Catherine’s jaw, words humid as all the foreign places contained within them. And then the sweet stretch of muscle and sinew as she reached up to receive his kiss.
She was half with him, there in the courtyard with the kitchen cat folded watchful near the doorway and the forbidden sun hot upon her upturned face—so damaging to pale skin, Maman’s remembered admonishments whispering through her mind, warning of early wrinkles, of little brown speckles. And she was half gone, a wagon jolting beneath her, jouncing over rocks and ruts, past the countryside she’d previously seen only on her father’s maps, great tracts the greens of emeralds, of sage leaves. The sky unfurled, a bolt of blue silk overhead, and she and Nicolas smelling like Papa when he arrived home from a trip, their skin and clothing crusted with salt water and thick with road dust.
When her father told her of the lost ship—their fortune, and her own dowry, effectively pulled to the bottom of the sea along with it—he seemed a skeleton of the man she had always known. When he told her he had found a husband for her, despite their ruin, she thought at first, foolishly, of Nicolas. But no—
“Monsieur Gonsalvus,” her father said. “He is a learned man. A member of the royal court. The queen mother thinks highly of him, and wishes him to take a wife. It is a good match—a great honor. The queen mother herself suggested you. And she herself will pay your dowry.”
Catherine stared. Impossible—every word he spoke was entirely impossible. At last, she managed, “Why?”
“As thanks,” Papa said, too quickly. “I have served the court for many years as draper; and, of course, I have never shied away from boasting about my lovely daughter. The queen wants a pretty, intelligent girl for Monsieur Gonsalvus. Who better than you?” He stepped forward, looked down at Catherine’s lute, lying round-backed and silent on the chair opposite hers. “Monsieur Gonsalvus plays as well,” he said, almost pleading. Her boastful, confident Papa, who never pleaded, whose gambles in business had never lost. Until now.
Catherine looked at the lute, too, looked at it until her eyes watered.
“It’s this or a nunnery,” Papa said then; and now his voice had a stretched and whimpering quality.
“Is that his name?” Catherine said at last. “Monsieur Gonsalvus?”
“Yes,” he said, but his voice fractured. A pause, so long and heavy she could feel cloudbursts of terror at her temples and the nape of her neck. “Everything will be lost, you understand,” he finally said, words dragged like enormous stones from a quarry. “Not just your dowry, but this house, my business—the clerks are gone, they have deserted us. I can sell our things, but they will not cover a quarter of the loss. I am so . . . so very sorry. I overreached myself.” His big hands pressed briefly to his face.
She did understand, then, though all his words sounded faint and far away. It was an old, familiar story, one she had witnessed many times from a distance: the merchant who tied his fortune to the wrong vessel. The ship dashed apart on some far-off sea. Its cargo lost, silks ruined instantly in the salt water, spices floating upon the surface of the waves, dusting them crimson and yellow before sinking away. The merchant’s reputation and fortune lost, too, and the lives of all those whose fortunes were knotted with his forever changed. Families with whom they used to dine suddenly vanished from the city, their big empty houses, all their beautiful things, abandoned to their creditors. She found, now, that she could almost hear the crack of the ship’s mast and the screams of the men. Papa seemed to crack as well, a splintery snap of the bones of his spine until he could scarcely hold himself upright. Her head filled with a wailing cacophony of no so that she could scarcely hear Papa’s next words.
“Her Majesty has been so very generous, ma belle—offered to pay your dowry—and whatever debt is left once I have paid all I can from what we have—a good match—a good man—high in the queen’s favor—”
Catherine’s hands pressed to her breasts; she could think only of Nicolas, his lips, his laughing eyes, his promises. Her father, after all, had also begun his manhood as a lowly clerk. Nicolas and Catherine were both young; they had time, he had murmured against her throat, for him to make his own fortune.
“Papa,” she said, “I hoped—”
Her hope was shaped like Nicolas; and breathed his wine-scented breath; and had his empty purse.
When she looked at Papa again, his face was crossed with strange, uncertain lines—lines, perhaps, of pleading; lines, perhaps, of anger. Catherine breathed in, out; tried to blink away thoughts of the boy she thought she would marry. The boy who was vanished, now, without a word.
The clerks are gone, they have deserted us.
A daughter’s duty is to obey her father. It is the first lesson instilled in girls by their mothers and fathers alike, by the priests at church. Catherine thought this, over and over; and she thought, too, of her mother, the daughter of a weaver, who would have been filled with joy to see her own only daughter wed to a member of the royal court.
It was this, even more than her father’s desperation, which decided her. She nodded.
“Very well, Papa.”
But he did not smile, as she expected; if anything, his expression grew more pinched. A hesitation; then he licked his lips and held out his palms. They showed damp in the candlelight.
“Do you remember,” he said at last, so slowly that she knew he wished not to say the words at all, “the story I used to tell you, of the little hairy boy?”
A servant comes at last to usher them to the chapel. Catherine’s limbs are pendulous and uncontrolled as those of a string puppet. A glance at her father’s face, and he finally meets her eyes. Wildly, for just a moment, Catherine thinks he is going to tell her he has thought of some other means to extract them from their misfortune—her lips part, her heart jumps—and then he says, “God bless you, my child.”
She is entirely outside of herself now. Someone else controls her strings as she moves on Papa’s arm down a corridor to the yawning chapel doors, passing people she does not quite see. And then inside, where the benches are only half filled but where it still feels as though the crowd presses, the air thick and full of eyes. Catherine takes in the chapel at a glance, all smooth sculptures and chinks of colored light.
She sucks in air, looks above the staring heads of the others to the priest in all his splendor at the end of the aisle. In her confusion, she does not take in the priest’s age or features, only his presence beside the man who will be her husband.
He could have kept his back to her. She would have seen only the soft brown hair on his head then, until the moment she was beside him. But he does not choose to hide himself; he stands stiff and straight, chin raised a little above his white ruff, eyes raised above the heads of everyone assembled, including Catherine, whose feet carry her forward even as her mind struggles to assimilate all the incongruities of his face. From the edge of her vision, she sees Papa’s face turn to hers, as if he cannot help it any more than she can help staring at the man waiting for her beside the priest; as if, like a sickness, he must know her reactions.
For her almost-husband bristles with hair—not only on his head and jaw, but all over his face. When she reaches him, he turns a little so that they are opposite one another and looks at her with steadiness. His eyes are entirely human, disorienting in what, at first glance, seems an animal face, and he is short enough that she has only to raise her own eyes a little distance in order to meet them. From outside herself, Catherine feels Papa’s arm fall away from under her fingers, and hears the crashing of her own breath inside her ears.
Now that she is standing still, everything else begins to float. The priest’s words, and the hairy man’s, and her own, which stumble from her tongue. Then it is over, and the people rise again, seeming to hover at the edge of Catherine’s vision, ill-defined even when she tries to make them out, a congregation of staring ghosts. She and her husband—oh dear God, dear God, her husband—retreat from the chapel to swelling murmurs, his arm inflexible under her palm.