The journey is strange and straggling, groups leaving in untidy lines from Fontainebleau. Her husband rides beside Nevers before their paths diverge, but Catherine is bundled into a coach, with cushions for her back. She sits for what feels like a very long time before they actually depart, dozing lightly, listening, when she is awake, to the snorting of the horses, the calls of harried servants, the creak of harness leather.
When the coach door opens, she startles, then stares as the small woman who undressed her for her wedding night climbs inside and settles on the seat opposite.
“I hate these trips,” the dwarf says cheerfully, smoothing her skirt. “I think I’d have done better as a wife to some peasant who at least was rooted to the earth.” She tips her head, eyes assessing. “You’re nearing your time?”
Catherine licks her lips. “I’ve a few weeks yet, I hope.”
“Don’t want to whelp in this coach?” The dwarf laughs. “I do not blame you at all.” She must have seen Catherine flinch, for she sighs with mock-frustration. “My dear, you really must grow a heavier skin if you are to survive at court. Or heavier pelt, as your husband has done.”
Catherine looks down at the round of her belly and says nothing.
Another sigh. “Well. We are to be together here for a good long while—you mustn’t blame me for seeking gossip.” She leans forward. “How is marriage suiting you? You were like an aspen on your wedding night, you trembled so—I hope Monsieur Sauvage no longer frightens you, at least.”
Catherine’s eyes flick to the window of the coach, where the curtains are parted just enough to show a seam of sunlight.
“I’ve known him since I was a child, you know,” the dwarf continues, undaunted by Catherine’s silence, “but I confess I never imagined him wed.” A long pause, during which Catherine stares at the line of light until her eyesight blurs with it. “Ah,” the dwarf murmurs then. “But he is happy about the child, yes?”
“I—do not know his mind,” Catherine says to the curtains.
“Ah, men. Who can know their minds?”
The coach lurches to a slow roll then, and they both settle back, Catherine wincing with every jolt over the pitted roads.
Much later, she is forced at last to knock upon the roof of the coach so that it might stop long enough for her to scramble down to relieve her bladder behind a tree. The dwarf—Agnes, Catherine recalls belatedly—crouches beside her, raising her skirts without shame. Catherine looks away, wonders whether she has ever done so before the entire court, recalling one memorable feast during which another dwarf made water upon request, prompting uproarious laughter throughout the hall.
The road is lined to either side by trees that stretch out and out, deepening shadows between them, blackish moss and the rustle of underbrush. Behind them, Fontainebleau; before them Paris. She closes her eyes, pictures Papa’s maps, sees the long blue snake of the Seine. Remembers the dance of Papa’s plume as his horse trotted away from them. So much to see. To smell, to taste. To hear. Music and languages. Spices and wines. Until she came to court, Catherine had never seen a dwarf, or a giant, or a man like her husband, except in rough woodcuts. It is a giddy thought, how much more there must be.
For a moment, she forgets the heaviness of her belly, the ache of her back, and feels instead only the urge to walk, move, stride out over the land like the old men in one of Papa’s stories. The stretch and burn of muscle, the road firm and dusty under her shoes, the world spreading out before and behind and to either side of her, everywhere a newness, a discovery; over each horizon something more.
They just stood up and walked away, and explored the great wide together by sea and soil.
Back in the coach, resettled against the cushions, she draws the curtain over the window to shut out the sky and the road and the ache she cannot satisfy, and says, not caring if the question is rude, “Why does the queen keep so many dwarfs?”
Agnes stares at her long enough that Catherine can feel it; only when she meets the other woman’s eyes does Agnes respond.
“We’re magical, you know,” she says, with a funny, quick raising-and-lowering of her brows. “We offer Her Majesty protection. We are very valuable.”
For a moment, Catherine cannot decide whether she is serious or jesting. And then Agnes rolls her eyes to the coach’s low roof, and Catherine smothers a startled laugh behind her palm.
A little later: “He is . . . indifferent to me, I think.”
Her voice is low; she ought not speak of her husband so, and particularly not to a near-stranger. But she has suddenly remembered Agnes’s laughing face when the physician examined the cup with Catherine’s urine, and after her own almost-laughter now, the words come fast and slippery as salmon through a narrow neck of river.
“He hardly speaks, except to tell me the most—the smallest, barest details of himself. He has not mentioned the child, though he must of course know of it.” She gestures to indicate the swelling in her lap. “I have no idea what he cares for. If he cares for anything at all. He is—not cold, not cruel, but . . . indifferent.”
Agnes screws up her mouth. Catherine looks at her, and then away, already regretting her words.
“Monsieur Sauvage does not care to mingle with the rest of us oddities,” Agnes says after a time. “Not Her Majesty’s dwarfs, not the giants who guard the gates. He holds himself quite apart from us all.”
Catherine’s brows come together above her nose.
“He came to me today,” Agnes goes on. “Braved our chambers to speak with me—because he thought I was kind to you on your wedding day. I’ve spoken to him only a few times in all the years we’ve been at this court together, and I suspect he was happy to keep it that way. But he saw you were unhappy, and thought you could use a little kindness. A friend, I believe was his word.”
Catherine realizes, quite suddenly, that she is staring; and that her nose is dripping. And her eyes as well. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand, and Agnes lets out a sound halfway between laughter and disgust.
“Ah, you pathetic thing,” she says, and Catherine would be offended, but there is no tinge of malice to the words at all, only great swathes of understanding.
The Château du Louvre rises high, pale and imposing. Catherine and her husband are assigned a chamber furnished exactly as their chamber was at Fontainebleau—the same rug upon the floor, the same wooden cross and ugly painting and round mirror upon the walls. At night, as the babe rolls within her, Catherine listens to her husband sleeping, his sounds at once soft and rumbling, childlike and bestial. In the dark, refusing to look at him, Catherine can pretend, if she wishes, that an entirely different husband lies beside her, one she can look upon without worry that doing so will harm their child, one who speaks more than a few words to her at a time. One who does not come with a false story attached to him, whose history is true, and as comprehensible as her own.
He sent Agnes to me, she thinks, guilt stilling her thoughts. Something almost too tender to prod blooms behind her breastbone. Without conscious thought, her hand goes to the basin between her hips. Beside her, her husband murmurs in his sleep.
For her confinement, the period before the babe decides to come, their chamber is hers alone, her husband banished to some other part of the palace. The room is turned dark and airless—a womb, the servants call it, as they tack a heavy tapestry over the precious window. A tomb, Catherine thinks, balking, frantic. She presses her hands together to stop herself from tearing the tapestry down again. Feels the imagined burn of muscles working at the tug of the heavy fabric, the glare of sunlight gilding her. As all the light disappears from the room, she sucks in a great gasp of air; and then it is as if she holds that single breath fast inside her mouth.
She thinks, then, of her mother’s visard, the black velvet mask she wore whenever she was forced to be in the sun for any length of time. When she was a small girl, whenever she saw her mother wearing the mask, Catherine’s breath grew cold and short, as if the faceless, voiceless devil before her were freezing the air on its way to her lungs. Maman, slipping the visard off to show her own pale face behind it, had chided Catherine for a silly thing; but still the fear remained.
As she neared womanhood, to keep her from venturing too often into their courtyard when the sun was high, her mother used to threaten her with a visard of her own.
“You will have to wear one someday,” she would say. “If you don’t want that day to be today, come inside at once.” Her white hand just barely venturing beyond the shadow of the doorway, beckoning.
She died before she ever dispatched her threat.
After Maman died, Catherine put the visard for the first time to her own face. Her heartbeat quickened and she sucked in a great breath of air before taking the bead—which dangled on a short length of ribbon from the mouth of the mask—between her lips. She worked the bead behind her teeth to hold the mask firmly in place, and dropped her hands.
With the bead in her mouth, she was voiceless; in the mask, featureless. Her nose was compressed against the leather, making it difficult to draw air in through her nostrils. She had a sudden feeling, panic flaring, that if she kept it on for even a moment longer, she would suffocate entirely.
Standing now in the airless room—womb—tomb—the breath she held feels solid as the bead of Maman’s visard. Both breath and bead prevent her from screaming as she is closed away.
Days edge into a week, and then two, the weight of the child beginning to feel like a stone holding her underwater. She cannot breathe fully, cannot find a position in which to lie that does not make her hips ache, or her spine, or numb her legs all the way down to her toes. Except for Agnes’s visits—kept brief, for, as the small woman says, the air in the room is too thick for two people to comfortably breathe it for long—she is mostly on her own, but for the servants who bring her meals and lay her fire and take away her pot. She lies and stares at the Virgin and her child, and hopes and hopes, though she dares not give words to her hope, even inside her own head.
But the heaviness of the child, the thickness of the room’s air, the twin pressings of fear and hope—even these cannot occupy all her time, and boredom creeps in through the chinks. Boredom, and something else, a restlessness that is not entirely to do with being shut away like a gown in a trunk. Catherine paces the length and width of the room, pauses before the window, aching to tear away the concealing tapestry, not merely to feel the sun upon her face, upon the too-white skin of her hands, but to see what she can of Paris through the glass. All her life she has imagined coming to this place, this city; hungered for it as a beggar hungers for bread. Now she is here, but she has seen almost nothing of it—she could be anywhere, this room could be anywhere, she might be buried in a tomb in the bowels of a church. She imagines her fists battering against the wall at the outer edge of the room, the stones there crumbling under their assault, chunks falling to whatever lies below, outside, until there is a hole large enough for her to stand in, to perch upon, to look through, to hear the things Papa used to hear when he came here. For it is to this palace that Papa often journeyed, bringing with him bolts of bright cloth, spools of thread to match. Fabrics so fine that when she was small, he would only allow Catherine to touch them with the tip of one finger, scrupulously cleaned beforehand, before he wrapped them up safe for their journey to the queen and her ladies in Paris.
She stands before the wall, before the tapestry covering the window, her hands fisted. And then, all at once, her fingers unclench, make their way to the heavy slope of her belly, holding it as gently as her father once held his bolts of velvet and silk.
“When you arrive,” she whispers, the first words she has spoken directly to the person who swims inside her, “we will see Paris together.”
The day of the Princess Marguerite’s wedding, Agnes comes to see Catherine early. The smaller woman is roped with pearls; they coil through her dark hair, wrap themselves about her throat to trail over her chest to the dip of her waist. She finds Catherine in her chemise, the bloat of her belly lifting the hem higher at the front, showing her legs to the tops of her knees. The room is hot, for it is August; outside, the city smells of excrement.
“I never thought I would say this, but you’re lucky to be shut away right now,” Agnes says, wrinkling her nose. “It’s a foul day for a wedding.” She swings her legs, feet dangling more than a handspan above the floor, fanning herself against the closeness of the air. “Is Sauvage entirely barred from this room, then?” she says.
Catherine, feeling peevish, all the more so at the thought of the royal wedding she is going to miss, all the things Maman would have gloried in seeing, says, “Why must everyone call him that?”
“What? Sauvage?”
“Yes.”
A pause. A faint laugh. “Well—it is what he is, no? We are all called what we are. The queen is the queen; I am petite. Your husband is sauvage—or looks it, which is near enough to satisfy almost anyone.” Agnes taps her fingers on her knees. “And you? Did your family have no pet names for you?”
Ma belle, Papa called her. Catherine blinks him away—his plump smile, the affection in his voice. Her jaw tightens. She has let few thoughts of him into her head since he left her at Fontainebleau; she will not, will not let him in now.
But her thoughts, instead, edge toward her husband. The rumpled look to his face when he turns to her. His sudden smile when he was briefly cheered after he bested Nevers at swordplay.
Catherine’s breast hums with fear. “How do you bear it?” she says, low.
Agnes hops down, landing with a surprising thud upon the carpet.
“I know nothing else; except hunger, that is, in my parents’ home, they were so poor. When they sold me, my stomach was full for the first time I could remember. And then when I came here—” She snorts. “It is no small thing, to have food in your belly, a warm bed.”
Catherine says, “If this—if it—”
But she cannot—will not—speak the words, lest speaking make them true. Instead, she puts her hands on either side of her belly.
“If it is,” Agnes says, “then Monsieur Sauvage will know best how it feels.”
Later that morning, while the Catholic princess marries her Huguenot prince at Notre Dame Cathedral, the midwife arrives in Catherine’s room and sets herself up immediately to stay. Three servants lead her into the stifling chamber, bearing between them a bundle of fresh linen, a chair with a sloping back and a half-moon carved out of the seat, and a pallet to lay for the midwife at the foot of Catherine’s bed.
The midwife is a round woman with a chip-toothed smile and sturdy forearms that prove, when she pushes up her sleeves, to be covered with hair almost as dark and thick as a man’s. Catherine cannot stop staring at the woman’s arms as her belly is pressed like dough, the midwife grunting a little in satisfaction when she feels a foot where it ought to be, a head down near the curling hair between Catherine’s thighs.
“The babe is hearty,” she says. “And in a good position. Won’t be long now.”
Catherine swallows. She knows that she is staring, and she knows that to stare so is rude; but there is something about the midwife’s hairy arms that mesmerizes.
And then she heaves her eyes away, horrified. Her eyes pinch closed and she promises herself and the painting beside her bed that they will never again stray to the woman’s hairy arms.