The court will move to Paris for the summer. The queen mother has made a match for her daughter, the Princess Marguerite, a match that sends whispers, hot as flames, through the court. The princess’s intended is a Huguenot prince, and the rumors claim that Her Majesty means for her daughter’s marriage to be balm that heals the country’s wounds, knitting Catholic and Protestant flesh together, neighbor to neighbor, husband to wife. But the pope himself has refused to grant the couple a dispensation and how healing, go the whispers, can an unsanctioned union be? Unease makes snakes of Petrus’s insides, and when he tries to catch Ludovico, who seems always to be with the king, to ask his opinion of the queen’s plan, his friend has nothing to say that lessens the sensation of coiling, of hissing.
“All will be well,” Ludovico says, smiling with one side of his mouth and neither of his eyes.
There is always a great upheaval when the court moves from one palace to another. Like an army—an entire town—a great, thousand-headed beast, with so many bits of itself to bring along it seems a miracle that so few are ever forgotten. The royal family, of course, and all their attendants, and all the courtiers who must or care to come. Servants, guardsmen, musicians, priests. Physicians and astronomers; cooks and tailors. Spit boys, their hands scabbed from fire sparks. Dwarfs, in their miniature coaches. Foreign dignitaries, who follow the king like beggars hoping for a scrap of his time.
And all the carts—full of furnishings, rugs, tapestries. Pots for cooking; glazed bowls and plates for eating; glasses for drinking. Casks of wine and sacks of provisions. Trunks of furs and silks and velvets. Hunting dogs and falcons. Weapons for the soldiers and the guardsmen; needles and thread for the ladies. A hundred other details Petrus is grateful not to have to know.
His wife is big with their child, and pale with it, the brightness disappeared from her cheeks like the landscape when the sun drifts beyond the horizon and drags all color away with it. He cannot think how to speak to her, even more so now than when they were first wed; she is remote as a sculpture, her eyes always cast down or up or otherwise away from him, her mouth chewing over prayers like a nun’s or a madwoman’s. She says nothing at all about their coming travels, though something bright as a candle flame flares in her eyes when he speaks of it. But the flare is not for him—her eyes still avoid his—and he does not understand her well enough to know the reason for its short existence.
Sometimes he finds himself wondering whether she might be a little witless, for of late she mumbles her prayers and little else; and then he remembers her question the first time they lay together, when he asked her whether she had been willing: It is rather late for that question, is it not? There is something sharp under her softness, her prayers.
At night they lie beside one another, and he listens to her sleeping sounds, and wonders if she ever dreams.
Ludovico will ride with them most of the way, then break off for his townhouse, where his neglected wife, two daughters, and infant son await him. He shakes his head when Petrus speaks of his own wife’s impenetrability, all of her—expressions, mind, soul—enclosed behind a bricked-up fortress, too thickly guarded for him to enter. Amusement creases the skin beside his eyes.
“I haven’t the smallest notion what Henriette thinks most of the time,” he says. “I believe we both prefer it that way. She has her small intrigues and the children to keep her busy; no doubt your Catherine will be just as contented when she has a babe in arms and not merely in the belly. Henriette is always a misery when she is breeding.”
Petrus kicks at a stone. “It does seem . . . a burden.”
Ludovico shrugs. “It is a man’s misfortune that we risk death in war. To bear children is a woman’s risk and misfortune.” He squints at the sky, where a hunting bird circles above the distant trees. “You might show her a bit of this magnificent palace before we leave it, if you’d like to shake her from her misery.”
The feasting hall; His Majesty’s salle; the tennis courts. The chapel, daily. Of the entire palace, hundreds upon hundreds of rooms, this is what his wife has seen. Petrus glances at the sky, where the sun burns white and threatens to slip, any moment, into a bed of clouds.
He leaves Ludovico to return to their chamber. His wife is dozing when he finds her at last. Her head lolls; her work—a very small white gown, embroidered all about the hem, which makes his heart stutter in his chest—is a tumble in her lap, the skirt drifting over the disconcerting round of her abdomen.
He was far too young, on Tenerife, to give any real thought to his own future. If pressed, he’d have said that he would live with Isabel and Manuel forever. And here at court—well. What does he know of marriage, or children, except those strange examples set by the people around him? Wives left on country estates while their husbands travel to Paris to curry favor with the king; mistresses given their own fine palaces, their children raised high. He thinks of the hairy girl from the pamphlet, her proud stance, her tilted chin, and thinks of how much easier it would have been had the queen mother found her for him to marry instead.
Years upon years of let me be, of never approaching unless approached, has left him without words. Almost, he backs from the room again before his wife wakes. But he forces himself to remain, leaning a little forward on the balls of his feet, rooting himself through them into the floor.
She comes awake all at once, as if his thoughts clanged through her own head. Her eyes blink away sleep and then fix upon him—widen—hasten away. He sees her tongue come out to wet her lips, and those lips move soundlessly for a moment before she rises, setting aside her work and facing him without actually raising her eyes again to his.
“Husband,” she says; no more. Question and statement at once.
Anger behind his breastbone, like the stirring of embers. Her hands cupping the mound of her belly; her eyes carefully keeping away from the sight of him. The smooth loveliness of her cheeks. He swallows to dampen the embers, forces himself to say, “We leave so soon for Paris and I—well, it only just occurred to me that I have been rather remiss—that is to say, you’ve seen very little of this place, and that seems a shame, for there is so much to see—”
Several expressions ripple over her face as the words fall helplessly from his tongue, a cataract of stupidity. He cannot guess at any of them. Another swallow, and then he says, “A tour, I thought—and if the weather holds, we could explore the grounds.”
“If you like,” she says.
Their footsteps make hollow echoes in the corridors. The servants and guardsmen they pass offer curious glances, but nothing more. Catherine’s right hand rests light as a petal upon his elbow, her left under the heavy globe of her belly, as if holding it up, and Petrus tries to keep his pace slow to match hers.
The gallery, which was the work of King Henri’s father, should dazzle, should honor anyone lucky enough to see it. His wife looks at the frescos and sculptures and gleaming woodwork with the late king’s salamander emblem without expression.
“This king was a great supporter of art and modern learning,” Petrus says. “He was a patron of Leonardo da Vinci himself—King Henri told me that his father was with the great artist upon his death.”
She makes a small humming sound that might be an acknowledgment of his words. His teeth clamp together.
Into the great ballroom—where they have sat small among the rest of the court during feasts and entertainments, but which she has never seen empty and echoing, without all the noise and movement of courtiers and servants to detract from the mythological stories that cover the walls and the glory of the coffered ceiling. The room gleams warm, all oak and gold and the colors of the frescos, and Petrus loves it as much as he has ever loved any place.
“King Henri commissioned this room,” he says; and now he is speaking more to himself than to the mute woman on his arm. “When I was a child, I thought I had seen all the wonders that man can create—until this was built, and I was certain I had entered Heaven itself.”
“It is very splendid,” says his wife, and he looks down at her, surprised. Her eyes are fixed upon the crescent moons in the ornate ceiling, a line between her pale brows. He looks away again from the brown-gold of her hair, the stretch of her throat above her gown’s high collar.
Unexpectedly she says, all on her own, “My father covered the walls of our dining room with tapestries showing classical Greek stories. My favorite was the simplest—only the three Fates, holding the thread of some poor person between their fingers, woven all in blues.” She turns a little, carefully not looking at Petrus, her eyes roaming over the walls. “These remind me a little of home.”
It occurs to him, like a tap in the center of his brow, that he has no idea what sort of home she lived in before their marriage. He clears his throat, says, cautious as a man trying to catch a skittish horse, “Was it very grand, then, your father’s house?”
“Oh,” she says. “Not so grand, I think. It was a merchant’s house—my father’s offices on the ground floor, and the kitchen, too; then upstairs the receiving room and the room where we dined. Our bedrooms above that, and then the attic, where our servants slept.”
“It sounds a great deal grander than where I spent my earliest years,” Petrus says; and now her eyes fly to his face, sticking there for long moments before she wrenches them away, whispering words to herself that his ears cannot snatch. His chest fills with a quivering sensation, too tentative to be identified.
“Was it—did you have a house, then? Where you came from?”
The quivering lessens a little. “Yes,” he says; but the word comes out all wrong, too sharply, a claw slice. He sees the flinch that ripples over her features and draws in air.
“You thought, perhaps,” he says after a pause—more careful now, but with an underlying bitterness he cannot mask—“that it was as the stories say? That my hairiness comes from being reared in a cave, suckled by—what, by bears, by wolves?”
There is wariness in the line of her shoulders. “I—I don’t know.”
He says, “That is what you heard, though?”
She turns her face away from him entirely so that all he can see is her ear, from which one of the amethysts dangles, and the strong line of her neck. “Yes. Or—not precisely, but—”
Anger is irrational. It is what everyone thinks, for he has never renounced the tale. King Henri introduced him so to anyone new who came to court. This is our savage prince, he would say, glance bright and affectionate. See how tame?
“Come,” Petrus says now. “You have not seen the grotto.”
She comes along, eyes cast down upon the sway of her skirt over its frame as she walks.
She would rather be anywhere than here with him. He suspected, when the queen informed him of his betrothal, that it would be so; but he had not fully understood how deeply his wife longed to be away from him until this moment, with her eyes canted sideways, her body turned a little so the breadth of her belly is in no danger of touching him accidentally. They step into the gardens, and though there are of course no mirrors here, he sees his own face reflected in the eyes of everyone they pass. These reflections show nothing of his personhood, only his strangeness to them all. And beside him his wife, who refuses to look at all.
Anger, again: a vivid, chilling flare. And then it melts abruptly to a muckish pool. She follows him, to all appearances as tame as he has ever been; but he remembers again her question the night of their wedding, and the wild panic in her eyes as they stood in the ballroom, closed in by eyes and mouths and the room’s high walls, their two bodies brushing as he asked permission to kiss her. Her yes in his mind now seems to echo every one of his own to the people who inquired as to the veracity of the stories they’d heard of him. Yes his father was king of a primitive people. Yes he grew up clothed in nothing but his own hair. Yes he loves the lions in the menagerie, for they remind him of home, and of the lioness who fed him with her own sweet, hot milk.
Birdsong drifts over and between them as they walk, footsteps crunching over the cool pathways. The gardens are bright and tousled, and Petrus feels a little foolish, leading her briskly through them, not stopping, as he supposes he should, to give her time to take in their splendor. Into a small cobbled courtyard he takes her, surrounded by a stand of high maritime pines, whose trunks bend and curve, the needles a happy cluster at their crowns. The green here making the shadows deeper and the chinks of sunlight that pass through the top branches all the more golden by contrast. He slows his steps as they near the structure across the courtyard; and now he hears the quick gusting of her breath, though she does not complain aloud, only puts one hand to her back and another once more to cup the heavy curve that goes everywhere before her.
The nights upon nights that led to this broadening. His tongue goes dry. In the rustling of her breath, he hears his own whistling too fast between the oiled bars of his cage.
He hears her steps slow further as they draw nearer to the structure, though he does not look at her, his eyes, as ever, caught fast. Though it was clearly built by men, made of gray blocks of stone, with three narrow archways leading to a dim interior, the thing looks as natural as a hole in a mountain; a place at once elemental and sinister, where anything might lurk. When he was a boy, he imagined the malevolent spirits Isabel described lying here in wait for him.
There are male figures to either side of each archway, hewn from the stone like primitive people conjured by some ancient god. They are naked, their thighs and bellies muscled, their arms and feet not fully formed so that it looks as if they have been caught and hardened in the act of emerging from the stones behind them. Their heads and faces are thickly haired and bearded; though not so thickly as his own.
His wife makes a small sound, and Petrus pulls his gaze, with a great effort, away from the grotto and to her. She stands like a woman turned to stone herself, eyes huge, one foot frozen in a forward step—toward whatever her imagination has conjured in response to this place, to him. A bed of skins, a fire circle, a smear of blood on stone in a vaguely recognizable shape, perhaps; the ancient equivalent of all the paintings and frescos that adorn the palace walls.
“It was built before I came to court,” Petrus says. “Ten years before, perhaps? I am not entirely certain.”
At the sound of his voice her eyes dart to him and then away; her lips press, as if she is angry with herself. But then she looks back at the thing before them and says, “I thought—it seems much older, somehow.”
He shrugs, though she does not look at him so she cannot see the gesture. “Yes, I think so, too. I suspect that was the intention.”
Still, she stares.
“King Henri—he told me once that had his father not already created this place, he’d have made something very like it for me.”
Her eyes close, squeezing at the corners.
“He meant it kindly,” Petrus says, a lance in his voice; he is thinking of the king’s smile, usually so reticent, but which he gave so generously to his wild boy. And then, when Petrus showed himself capable of learning—showed his strong appetite for proving his brain was as thoughtful as anyone else’s—His Majesty’s teeth showed white above his dark beard. You were better suited to a palace than to a cave.
“I need to sit down,” his wife says now, the words like a frayed thread, and Petrus lurches instinctively forward, fingers curling around her upper arm to steady her. He releases her when he hears her teeth click together, only touching her elbow to guide her to the bench, a half-circle of cool stone, within the bower of pines. There she sits gracelessly, hands clutching the edge of the bench to either side of her lap, neck bent.
Petrus stands before her, arms hanging loose and empty at his sides. Inside his head, guilt and defiance clash together, scraping and grinding like two swords. This young woman, curled over the being they made together, is not his enemy. He is hurting her—unwittingly, perhaps. Or perhaps not; for the urge to make her see him fills him, the force of it like to split him open. He has been turned entirely inside out, every instinct that has kept him biddable and silent—shoulders hunched against jeers, palms poised to cover his ears against hisses of witchcraft and devilry—tumbling, without his skin to hold it in, out from between his ribs. In its place this new instinct sits screaming: Look at me, look at me!
But his wife’s knuckles merely tighten over the edge of the bench seat, and when she raises her eyes at last, they are vague and unseeing.