Château du Louvre
1572
His story is many hours in the telling. It is interrupted when his wife drifts to sleep, or when servants come with laden trays. When Catherine relieves herself for the first time with the help of the brawny midwife, she moves gingerly, as if she has been wounded. Petrus almost does not notice the red-stained linen, many times folded, where she had been lying, for Catherine shifted their child into his arms before rising from the bed. The babe is heavier than he anticipated—there is true solidity to her. She is not a dream-child, but a soul made flesh—and bone and muscle, too. Though she sleeps, her sleep is restless, and he stares as her small face contorts suddenly, brow furrowing, mouth opening as if she would cry. Then her brow smooths itself and her mouth, impossibly, curves upward in a smile.
He leans a little closer. She looks—sweet. Familiar and strange. She looks like him, poor thing.
Months and months of praying—to whom, he couldn’t have said—ever since his wife’s body began to change; and she is the result. She is enough to at once buttress and crumble his disbelief in a god.
Catherine listens hard to him while she is awake, the line sharp between her brows, her lips folded tight. She does not look away from him except to adjust their child in her arms. She seems another woman entirely from the one who entered this chamber alone, but he cannot decide which is more likely: that a true transformation occurred within these walls, some alchemy of new motherhood; or that he simply did not recognize his wife before now.
When his mouth becomes too dry to speak, he falls silent for a time. Catherine looks at the thread-fine strip of sunlight visible around the edges of the tapestry that hangs over the window.
“It looks warm,” she says, starvation in her voice. “The sun.”
“It is—though it is nearly autumn, I’m afraid.”
“I was too delicate, in those final weeks, to risk too much light. My eyes, you know.” She rolls them a little, smiling; a true smile, face lined with humor, and Petrus finds his mouth feels dry now for a different reason entirely.
“Are your eyes still in danger?” he manages to ask, though his tongue is clumsy in his mouth.
She shrugs, smile going one-sided. “No one has said.”
Shadows lie thick as piled rugs upon the floor; stretch themselves out toward the corners of the room. She has been kept in here for weeks. Petrus pushes himself off the bed and strides to the window. He is too short to reach the nails that pin the tapestry to the wall, so he drags a chair over to stand upon, the chair’s legs bumping unevenly over the rug and teetering like a child just learning to stand when he steps up onto the seat. The tapestry falls at last into his arms, heavy enough to make him stagger precariously upon the chair, and with a puff of dust that leaves him sneezing. But the window pours forth a veritable waterfall of sunlight. His wife’s laughter, delighted and helpless, makes him smile.
He helps her rise, and together with their daughter they stand at the narrow window. Their view shows a slice of the palace, a swathe of bright sky. Though the babe sleeps, Catherine holds her up a little, as if to show her, letting the light bathe her face like the waters of baptism.
“She still must be named,” Catherine says a little later.
“Catherine . . . would be appropriate, would it not?” he says. For the child’s mother, of course; and in honor of the queen.
But she looks at him sharply. “No,” she says, so loudly that the babe startles in her sleep and begins to wail, eyes squeezed shut.
Catherine closes her own eyes, as if the noise pains her, shifting their daughter to her other breast. Then, more temperately, she says, “I do not . . . I had another name in mind.”
Petrus sits on the edge of the bed by her feet. “Yes?”
She flicks her eyes at him, looking almost shy. “Isabelle.”
She says it the French way; and yet still it slices. He flinches, and sees her flinch in turn. “No,” he says, and poppy flowers bloom over her face, patches of pallor between them.
She looks away, to the corner of the room where her clothes chest sits. “Why—why not?”
Petrus looks at her—the bunching of muscles at the corner of her jaw, the blotch of angry flowers over her skin. There is no sensible explanation for it, and she meant the suggestion kindly—honorably—she meant to honor Isabel and their daughter at once. He knows this. And yet, something says no, shouts it. The something bears Isabel’s lined face, speaks with her voice, reaches toward him with her dye-stained hands. Opens its mouth to say something else but speaks too quietly for Petrus to make out the word. As if there is danger in the speaking of it.
“That wasn’t even her true name,” he says at last.
They settle finally upon Madeleine. Petrus thinks at first that Catherine suggests it for no reason but that she likes the sound it makes; the feel of it in her mouth. But then she says, “The Magdalene is sometimes shown as hairy, is she not? And holy, in her hairiness?”
She says this looking not at him, but at their daughter, who lies in a little square of sunlight, the hair on her limbs and torso almost white in the brightness. Like the follower of Christ who so eschewed worldly concerns that her robe and veil fell all to tatters, until her hair grew to cover her body, to preserve her modesty, to keep her safe.
For all that the saints seem as distant to him as the stars, gratitude, like some thick sweet draught, closes Petrus’s throat to whatever words he might otherwise have formed.
“I thought the queen would want to inspect her immediately,” Catherine says the next morning. Her eyes are ringed with tiredness, but she eats her morning meal with gusto while Petrus holds Madeleine against his shoulder. The servant who brought their breakfast looked incredulous at the sight, but Petrus remembers how King Henri cradled his own babes, even laughing once when Charles spewed something white down the back of his fine velvet doublet.
“I think under other circumstances, she already would have,” he says. “But I think she has been preoccupied, what with the Huguenot killings.”
A swift inhalation. “The—what?”
Petrus squeezes his eyes. “The . . . they have continued,” he says. “First in Paris, and now there are reports that they have spread throughout the country.” The king himself has assumed responsibility for the earliest portion of the massacre, claiming that the Huguenots conspired against him.
Catherine shakes her head. “But…” A swallow. “What news of Lyons?” she says, and Petrus curses himself for a fool.
“I believe—the city has not been spared,” he says after a moment. And then he hastens to add, “But your father—he is a good Catholic, no? I am sure he is in no danger.”
His wife looks at him silently.
When she does at last send for her wild man and his family, the queen mother is enraptured. She presses one soft palm against the other in an attitude of prayer, then scoops Madeleine from Catherine’s arms. “What a perfect, perfect creature,” she says, tracing with one finger the child’s nose, her chin; lifting one hand and inspecting each knuckle. She pushes aside the swaddling blanket Catherine had embroidered and lifts the hem of Madeleine’s gown, a confection of pearls and blue velvet, which Catherine said, wincingly, she hoped their daughter would not soil, at least not in front of Queen Caterina. When Her Majesty finds Madeleine’s legs and arms, chest and belly as hairy as her face, she gives a strange little cry of joy.
“You clever, clever woman,” she says to Catherine when at last she relinquishes the babe. “You shall have a rope of pearls for your service.”