The wedding feast is a reeling nightmare of pressing eyes and whispering mouths that seems to go on and on. Catherine and her husband sit silently beside one another as trumpets announce the arrival of each course and musicians play unendingly upon their instruments. In darting glances, she takes him in—there, his hand, its nails brutally short, the candlelight gleaming upon its haired back; there, his face in profile, and it is a gargoyle’s profile, a creature’s. Only the nose, straight and long, pointed as an arrow at its tip, looks human from this angle.
Once, she catches him as he looks at her, and his eyes are as they were at the wedding, serious and dark. They drop to his plate when she meets them, and he takes up his fork, then puts it down again, his food untouched.
He can speak, Catherine thinks. He spoke at the ceremony, and Papa had assured her that her intended spoke French like a native. He is a man. He can speak. But she can think of nothing to say to him; nor, it seems, can he think of anything to say to her. A gathering of worms curls and uncurls inside her belly. She looks around again for Papa but does not see his familiar head, with its ruffle of graying dark hair, among all the others; does not hear his voice, so resonant, over the fluting tones of the courtiers. Catherine thinks, desperate, of how he always kissed her cheek in farewell whenever he left for one of his long trips. The dampness of his kiss; how his exuberance led him to lift her feet from the floor; the scratch of his beard. But now he has gone, leaving her alone amidst the strange, false-seeming gaiety of the court; and though she had not expected any of the old jauntiness from him, she thought he would have a kiss for her, at least.
Though it is large, the room is warm, filled with so many people. The air smells of meat, of perfumed bodies, and of the ranker odors below the perfume. Of, faintly, the flowers laid at every table. Each table laid also with glazed plates and silver forks; with birds cooked and then redressed in their fine feathers; with spinach leaves cooked in cream, bright splashes of green. Everything further gilded by the shivering flames of candles, their winking reflections caught in the jewels worn by women and men alike, reverberating back and glinting off silver platters and all the broad, shallow glasses filled with wine gleaming purple and gold. Giddy laughter, the clink of forks upon plates, the careless sloshing of wine over the rims of cups and onto the long tablecloths. Even accustomed as she is to parties with fine people, fine food, music and dancing, it is all so much, so much of every possible thing, of food and gold and music and wine, all of it unfathomably endless, as if all the wealth and greatness in the world has settled upon this place, these people. There are paintings upon the walls, but Catherine is too dizzied to make them out; when she tips her head back, she sees that every bit of the ceiling is painted and gilded, molded with crescent moons and initials and intricate knots.
Tumblers perform for the king’s pleasure, a whirl of limbs and ribbons, though King Charles at his table seems to take no pleasure in anything, sitting as silent as the newlywed couple, sometimes wetly coughing. The woman beside him, though—a fortress of black towering over a retinue of dwarfs—looks at Catherine and her husband, smiling a thin smile.
There is a moment in which Catherine’s mind stutters and jumps; and then it catches upon understanding. The woman—who has already turned away, saying something to her son (who is the king, the king!)—is the queen mother. The woman who came to France when she was younger than Catherine is now to wed the king-to-be; who brought fine Italian manners to the French court. The woman her own mother revered.
Maman, she thinks, staring at the queen. Her mother used to speak of Catherine’s wedding day, of the rich man her father would find for her; of the music, the dancing. All Maman’s loving plans, rotted away like Maman’s flesh, which was so fair in life.
We will serve ices, of course, she always said. Just as Her Majesty, Queen Caterina de’ Medici, served at her own wedding to King Henri.
If her mother had lived, Catherine’s wedding feast would have brought her such joy.
Maman loved the queen, who—just like she had—came to France from Florence to be wed. That Her Majesty was the daughter of one of the most powerful Florentine houses and Maman was the daughter of a weaver did not signify; she felt kinship between them.
Papa laughed at Maman’s romantic notions about the queen.
Do not listen to her, ma petite belle, he would say to Catherine, gathering her onto his knee. Her Majesty is no saint. I’ve seen her, don’t forget.
What does she look like, Papa?
Her teeth are sharp and pointed as those on a trap, he would answer. Her eyes are black as her gowns, the pupils overtaking the irises. She has talons rather than fingernails.
Maman always clucked her tongue at such blasphemy, and Papa always laughed; and Catherine was never certain whether his words were truth or jest.
Now, she can see that Her Majesty is an ordinary-looking woman, solid as a tree, with a chin that recedes a little into her jowls. She is too stout, now, to ride the horses she once loved so well, and she dresses all in black, mourning always for the long-dead husband who—according to the whispers—never wanted her.
Catherine’s husband leans toward her suddenly, and she jerks her eyes away from the queen.
“You’ve got moon eyes,” he murmurs, quietly enough that only she might hear him.
She stares at him—brown eyes, brown hair, mouth appearing from the great thatch of it and looking as if it is trying to smile. “What?” she says.
“‘Swallow-the-moon eyes,’” he says. “That is what King Henri said of me in those early days, when I was just arrived at court.” He takes a sip from his glass and looks out at the tumblers, juggling apples in an endless loop. Children, all but one.
His voice is an ordinary man’s voice, neither very high nor very low. There is no growl in it, no animal threat. She tries to steady herself on the sound of it.
“I used to feel that this was all for me,” he says, as if to himself, his eyes on the tumbling children.
His words, the wistfulness in them—she can almost see him as a boy, looking about him in wonder. Almost. Catherine opens her mouth; closes it again. Looks down at her plate, and feels her belly clench.
One of the queen’s dwarfs, garbed in a monk’s robe, clambers suddenly onto the table where Catherine and her new husband sit. His feet rumple the fine cloth and endanger the plates and glasses as he steps over them, the hem of his habit raised to show each weaving footfall. He stops directly before them and crouches, face near enough that Catherine can see the white threaded through the red of his beard and the fine bursting of broken vessel across his nose and cheeks. Leering, he says, “How happy a bride you seem, Madame Sauvage. And so beautiful—a fitting contrast to our wolf man, hmm?”
Her lips part; her cheeks prickle as if with sudden sunburn. The dwarf fixes his eye upon hers, raises his glass and cries, “To Madame Sauvage!”
His cry is taken up by others in the feasting hall, sluggishly at first then spreading until nearly the entire room is toasting them. To Catherine’s spinning mind, it seems that not a single eye is not turned their way; even the king’s lips quirk in faint amusement. Her husband sits stiff beside her, long after the dwarf monk has made Catherine a mocking bow and jumped down from the table; and she sits, too, utterly dumb. With sudden, crushing thoroughness, she thinks she understands how it will be, married to the wild man of the court.
There is a small round mirror on the wall of her new bedchamber, just beside the bed with its shadow-thick hangings. Catherine stares at it, a small, vicious part of her mind wondering why Monsieur Gonsalvus would have such a thing. And even as her mind reproaches her, her face in the glass remains as expressionless as if she were masked.
A dwarf readies her for the night. She is quietly efficient, with sharp dark eyes and nimble fingers. She brushes Catherine’s hair, removing the green and yellow ribbons threaded through it one by one, leaving the heavy mass of it loose around her shoulder blades. Undresses Catherine one hook, one lace, one layer at a time. She lets the farthingale drop into itself, pooling on the floor around Catherine’s feet, then takes Catherine’s hand in her smaller one and says, “Step over it, please, Madame.”
Madame. Catherine obeys, stepping out of the circle of hooped fabric, watching, shivering, as the dwarf crouches at her feet and taps her lightly on each ankle, removing shoes and stockings and leaving Catherine in nothing but her thin linen shift, her legs bare from the knee down. Her toes tense against the rug, which is woven in faded reds and blues.
Maman’s lack of presence is like a slick river stone. There is the same falling sensation, the world slipping sideways, the ground that was once so solid now lurching out from underfoot. It should be Maman and Marie readying her now. Not this—unknown person.
She shivers as the dwarf smooths a cloth, scented with rosewater, over her arms, down her calves and between her toes. Her breath wheezes tight and fast. She closes her eyes against the sight of the dwarf’s pity, and the unfamiliar room.
The dwarf touches her hip, turning her back toward the mirror. “Look,” she says, sounding pleased with her work, and Catherine reluctantly does. Her own face looks back, calmer than she feels, paler than usual, her hectic heartbeat sending her blood anywhere, it seems, but into the gentle rounds of her cheeks. The dwarf has smoothed Catherine’s hair back again, and the shape of her breasts and darker blush of her nipples shows through the shift’s thin fabric.
“So pretty,” the dwarf says, and she sounds so much like Maman that Catherine cups a hand over her own mouth to stifle the sudden sob. For the first time in her life, she does not want to be beautiful.
“You’ve nothing to fear,” the dwarf says. She steps back from Catherine, and her smile is small and pitying. “You are so beautiful, Monsieur Sauvage cannot help but be delighted by you. And he is no monster.”
Catherine looks down at her. She is actually rather pretty—perhaps fewer than ten years Catherine’s senior, with dark eyes and a smooth pale brow, dressed richly as a queen in a gown that Catherine’s merchant’s-daughter’s eyes recognize as costly Venetian velvet, jewels winking at the bodice. It is only her height that is unfortunate; the top of her head reaches no higher than Catherine’s waist. Another sob, half-strangled. Unfortunate was Maman’s word, the one she always murmured when they saw an unattractive woman. It was unfortunate that Madame du Parc had such a long, pointed face, marked so liberally with pox scars, and unfortunate that Madame LeBlanc’s sweet-tempered daughter had inherited her father’s nose, shaped like a lily bulb, and his pouchy cheeks. Unfortunate that Marie, their own servant, had uneven shoulders, one humped up much higher than the other. As if there could be no happiness without beauty.