Henri and Madeleine sit on stools at the queen mother’s knee. Madeleine wears a gown of yellow, her toes, in round embroidered shoes, peeking from under the hem, Henri a belted white doublet and blue trunk hose, both, against the queen’s black skirts, bright as spring flowers nestled in the dark, damp roots of a tree. Each sits straight and still, Henri sucking on a lump of sugar offered to him by one of the queen’s ladies.
Antoinette sits on Her Majesty’s lap. She was the bud rooted inside Catherine when the artist sketched them all. Born with her eyes open, wide and wet, as if she were all eager to see as much of the world as she could as quickly as possible, she has not changed in the two years since. She sits like a little bird, the hair that covers her from head to feet soft as down feathers, eyes bright, inquisitive, alive with questions she does not yet have the language to ask. Her hair is plaited with ribbons; she is as fine as one of the springtime festive trees about which Papa told Catherine long ago, their trunks trailing ribbons colorful as rainbows.
When Antoinette was born, Her Majesty was delighted by her. Three! she exclaimed at Antoinette’s baptism, where she held the child to her own stout bosom and examined every strand of hair. To Catherine, she gave a gold ring set with a ruby; to Petrus, a fat purse.
Petrus stands beside the queen today; the men to whom she has granted an audience have been sent from Spain. He speaks to them in their own language, though even Catherine, unschooled in Spanish, can tell that his tongue stumbles a little over syllables it has not spoken in many years. She stands to the back, rather like a servant, unnoticed by anyone, but there if the children need her.
The men seem awed by Petrus, which was surely the queen’s intention, scarcely listening to what he says, instead gazing at his face, and at the children, as if they are dream and nightmare at once. When the queen speaks, their eyes snap to her like trained dogs, but Catherine knows in her chest that their eyes long to drift, that they hold them still and attentive to Her Majesty only by a great force of will. The queen smiles a mild smile, her hand reaching out to stroke Henri’s head.
Only when their business has been conducted do the Spaniards give rein to their desires, kneeling, with Her Majesty’s permission, to look more closely at the children. Madeleine returns their looks with a bland stare of her own, but Henri tries to shrink back, recalling himself only when Catherine steps forward to tap him—behave!—in the center of his back.
“They speak French, Your Majesty?” one man asks.
“Like natives,” the queen says, smiling more widely.
“Will they say something if I ask? Would that be a presumption, Your Majesty?”
A tap upon Henri’s head from the queen’s forefinger. “Henri, ma petite. Say something to the ambassador.”
Henri gives a grave nod. His voice, like piper’s music: “Je m’appelle Henri. C’est un plaisir de faire votre connaissance, Monsieur.”
The delighted widening of the men’s eyes. The admiration in their voices.
“Remarkable! Like hearing a lion sing. May we touch it?”
The queen nods, and the men hold their fingers out to the children, as if for them to sniff. The room feels suddenly very close; the high ceilings look as if they are dropping. Catherine touches the space between her ribs, under her heart, where something inside feels tight and desperate.
Sometimes in the afternoons, she asks her elder children to read to her from their hornbooks while she sews. They are not so well educated as Petrus, but they can read and write in French and Italian, the language of the queen’s birth and, still, of her heart, and when they read Catherine finds herself swaying to the rocky rhythm of their words, as if they are singing hymns. When she catches a glimpse of her face in the mirror, it is smiling, her eyes shining like coins with pride for them.
Impossible, she thinks now, when the queen has bred her and husband so true—when she dresses them in finery, when she educates even the girls—to protest now what she does with their progeny. As Catherine watches, the men pet her children, murmuring together, fingers drawing back between their brows and over their skulls, as if they are cats. And though Madeleine and Henri both remain carefully still throughout, Antoinette smiles, and, like a cat, seems almost to purr.
When Catherine flicks her eyes to Petrus’s, she finds him already watching her; finds an echo of her own impotent distress at seeing their children so diminished painted across his own face. She feels the press of his eyes like the cupping of his hands around hers, warm and steadying. When he tries to smile, she does, too.
Of all Catherine’s children, Agnes loves Antoinette best of all. “What a sweet,” she cried upon seeing Antoinette’s newborn, sleeping face, so round and covered with such lovely, silky hair. “What an absolute, perfect love.” Agnes’s face alight with some passion Catherine had never before seen there. Agnes is kind to all of Catherine’s children, but with an indifferent sort of kindness—the kindness a good person would show to any small, vulnerable creature, whether she loved it or not. But it is, from the first, different with Antoinette; a perfect, inexplicable, immediate love.
She spent much time in Catherine’s chambers after Antoinette’s birth. “I’ll hold her,” she would say, “so that the little mother can rest.” And she paced the chamber, all patience, even when Antoinette turned fractious, giving her a finger to suck, crooning bawdy songs gleaned from God-knew-where. Petrus was mildly horrified, but Catherine shook her head at him, struck by the way Agnes’s head bent to their babe’s, the tender curve of her neck.
“Have you never wanted a child of your own?” she said one day, and Agnes gave a laugh so lacking in humor it sounded like a cry.
“Never,” she said, short and pointed, and Catherine knew better than to ask anything more.
When Catherine comes to the dwarfs’ chamber, Antoinette in her arms, Agnes consents to turn from her writing. She never lets anyone know what it is she writes—or at least, she never lets Catherine—and the other dwarfs, who tease her occasionally about her mysterious scribblings, seem obviously in ignorance of their contents as well.
Even Catherine, so untutored, can see that Agnes writes a crabbed and desperate hand, her thoughts flying from the pen, the ink blotting the page. Sitting at her small table, Agnes hunches over the words, a mother bird above her nestlings, fingers stained and cramped, etching a deeper and deeper line between her dark brows. Reflexively, Catherine longs to smooth that line away with her thumb, to keep Agnes’s brow smooth and pretty, as her mother used to do for her when she frowned. And then she loathes herself, just a little, for the impulse.
But when Antoinette is in the room, Agnes leaves her table to sit with Catherine by the fire. Jeanne might join them, too, with the infant on her embroidered blanket on the floor before them, kicking her feet and crowing. The line between Agnes’s brows smooths then, of its own accord, and her fingers uncurl.
Sometimes she and Agnes go out together into Paris.
Once—only once—does she say to Petrus that she would like to take Madeleine with them, and perhaps Henri as well, though he is likely to scamper away, to twist his wrist in her grip and dart, careless, into the path of a horse. But they both would love the city; she can see in her mind the fierce wonder on each small face, the way her son would stand up on his toes to peer at the goods on display at each stall; the way her daughter would inhale the reeking city smells, smiling.
But, “No,” Petrus says, without looking up from the small book he is reading.
The word is so softly spoken that Catherine thinks that perhaps she has misheard, or imagined it. She sets Antoinette on the floor, away from the fire, and leans closer to him, repeating her intentions.
His hands curl in a spasm about the book edges before he flexes and releases them. “No,” he says, louder. His face closed as a walnut’s green husk. Catherine takes a step back.
“But—” she begins.
“No, I said.” The book thumping against the table; his teeth clicking together as he sets his jaw.
“Petrus,” she says. Her hands turn outward, her voice drops. “Do you not think they would enjoy being outside the palace grounds? Seeing the rest of the world?”
He turns back to his book, stares at its binding, the leather dark as wine; his hands go into the hair at the crown of his head, fisting it, twisting it. “The palace,” he says, each word precise and clipped, dignity like a pike prodding her away, “is hardly a prison.”
She is glad, then, that Madeleine and Henri are at their lessons; she can feel her next words rising inside her throat, clawing their way out. “They go nowhere,” she says. “Nowhere, but from one palace to another! Don’t you think they would like to see something of the true world—”
He stands so quickly that his chair of heavy oak tipped and crashed, the noise of it reverberating in Catherine’s ears and setting Antoinette to screaming. Catherine scoops her daughter up, lets the shoulder of her gown absorb her tears, and stares at Petrus. Here, all at once, is a man she has never before seen, a man as wild in appearance as any caged creature: his fists come away from his hair, leaving it stiff and bristling as the hair on a boar’s back; his lips draw back from his teeth; his eyes stare back at her, but sightlessly, as if they are seeing something else entirely.
“This,” he says, breathing as if winded, “this is our world.” He gestures with both hands, taking in the wide soft bed, the children’s truckle beds tucked away, the fire in the grate, the cool panes of the windows, which overlook all the bright and green of the palace grounds. He makes a fist of one hand and pounds it once against the wall behind him, hard enough that he winces, hard enough that the frame of the Virgin’s ugly picture tap-taps against the plaster. But in spite of the wince, the rattle, he continues without stopping, ignoring Antoinette’s renewed crying at the ripping sound of his voice.
“What’s out in the wider world for them? You—you can come and go, you’ve nothing to fear in the markets, the streets. You’ve your skin to hide behind.”
He says this with his teeth still bared; with a sneer in his voice. As if, Catherine thinks, she is separate, apart from all the rest of them. From the children she has carried, fed, rocked in the night; from the man who has been inside her body, who has planted their children within her.
Apart, she thinks. Apart—
“But for her,” Petrus says, pointing to their smallest child, who is gulping in too much air against Catherine’s neck, “for Madeleine and Henri? Beyond the court is—nothing. There is nothing for them. Have you no sense? Do you not remember what happened to me—because of this?” And his hands go again to his hair, fingers dragging through it as if he would tear it out, like weeds, at the roots. In his face, Catherine sees the terror of a boy in the arms of a sea monster, stolen away, lost.
“I—I am not trying to send them out into a life without us—without the court’s protection,” she says. “I only wished for them to see—” He begins shaking his head, slowly at first and then faster, faster. “In Lyons,” she says, voice pitched too high in her confusion, “we took Madeleine out in Lyons. We walked to my house—we spoke to Marie—we passed so many people—”
“It was to see your father,” he says. “And it was poorly done. Madeleine could have been snatched from us—”
“But she wasn’t! Nothing happened! Agnes comes out with me—”
“And how do people speak to her?” Petrus says; his voice is a hammer, and she the nail, relentlessly driven. She wants to throw up her arms to stop the blows. “Are they kind? Do they jeer?” He does not wait for her answer, only steps forward, jabbing with words and a single, accusing finger. “Even if you are so—so naive, so careless, as to ignore the danger to our children, do you truly want them exposed to the world’s cruelty?”
“They are exposed here,” Catherine says, her voice rising to a cry. “They are exposed here! You know that—you must know that. You’ve experienced it yourself, I have seen it. There is cruelty everywhere. Madeleine and Henri are exposed to others’ stupid remarks, their cutting ignorances, every single day.”
Only the day before, Madeleine stabbed at her needlework with such force that Catherine asked her, half-laughing, whose face she was imagining when she stuck the needle into the linen. And then her daughter’s face crumpled, as if it were linen itself, and the whole sorry story—a ring of servant children, who turned the spits and swept the ashes, carried slop bowls to the pigs and mucked out the horses’ stalls, suddenly around her; their voices, a low, chanting taunt. Devil girl, devil girl, devil girl, devil girl. Your father’s mother lay with the devil, cried one. Your mother is the whore of a devil, shrieked another. A clod of earth, a handful of pebbles; Madeleine’s hands over her eyes, her shoulders curling down, her mouth stuffed with curses she didn’t dare utter.
“They usually ignore me, or just whisper things as I walk past,” she said, weeping into Catherine’s lap; and Catherine stroked her head and wished she were a witch in truth, with the devil at her beck and call, that with a glance she might smite those foul children with warts and boils that grew and grew, bubbling upon the surface of their cheeks, their arms, their fingers, until no smooth flesh could be seen between them; rashes that stung and itched and disfigured.
But Petrus’s mouth turns down; and his breathing still whooshes through his nostrils like storm winds. “They are not going,” he says, and rights his chair as Catherine watches, opening his book once more with a pointed deliberation that makes her jaw ache. It is only the trembling of his fingers as he turns a page that keeps her from arguing further.
Later, alone, she ducks her head against her knees, wraps her arms tight to shield her brow. She listens to the murmur of her breath, the skittering and scratching of mice in the walls, the beating of her heart in her ears. There is a point of pain inside her belly, hot as metal heated to glowing brightness within the fire of a forge.
His words are like a shirt too long worn, the patches that held the fraying fabric together no longer enough to keep the holes from showing. It is passing strange to realize this—that those exposed holes, those words, were there all along, barely held back. For years—since their meeting, probably, and even before. Does he hate her—resent her—just a little, for her ordinary skin? Will her children, someday? She thinks of all the nights she has lain awake, fear for them moving through her mind like a burrowing insect. Of all the days and nights of terror before Madeleine’s birth, when she could not look at Petrus for fear of what might come of the looking.
Then she looks down at the backs of her hands; reaches up to prod the flesh of her cheeks. Feels ashamed of the smoothness she finds there, and then angry about the shame. Her throat tastes of curdled milk.
She and Agnes go out the following day, one of the manservants who serves the queen’s dwarfs following at a sullen distance. They pass into the city proper and both let out their breath in a rush of giddiness, hands clasped tight together. Catherine breathes in again, dirt and horse droppings and sweat and sunlight and release, and decides to ignore the pricking thought: Madeleine and Henri should be here. Free.
Though all the people within the vastness of the city of Paris must feel the fearful vibrations under their soles, just as Catherine does, of the country at war with itself, they do not behave as if they do. She and Agnes stroll among the market stalls outside the Palais de la Cité, examining gloves lined warm with the fur of hares and hats in red velvet, jaunty with feathers. Sellers call their wares with cheerfulness or aggression; buyers step up eagerly to touch and sniff and see, rolling coins between their fingers. The women who sit at the stalls mostly ignore Catherine and Agnes unless they turn to them with clear intention to buy, coins clinking in their purses; the sellers’ eyes are upon the noblemen, and the wealthy students from the university, who might be tempted into a bauble for their wives or sweethearts.
Agnes stands for a long time, however, at a stall of quills while Catherine enjoys the bustle, so like that of Lyons and her girlhood. She watches as, with a timid finger, Agnes brushes the plumes; as, with a critical eye, she examines the nibs.
“I really could use a new quill,” she says to Catherine; but her hand does not move to her purse.
“Do you—not have the coin for it?” Catherine asks softly, but Agnes shakes her head.
“Oh, I do. But . . .” A shrug of one shoulder. “It all feels rather . . . futile at times. Do you not think?”
“I—” Catherine swallows, suddenly prickling with strange, frightened heat. “I suppose yes, at times. But it would be—I imagine it would be a great shame if you did not—that is—”
But Agnes takes her hand, which is colder than the rest of her. “I am not about to do myself a harm, dear Catherine,” she says, smiling with half her mouth. “But no one shall ever read anything I pen; it seems . . . a waste of time, though I confess I’ve no idea what I would do with all that sudden excess.”
Catherine curls her fingers around Agnes’s palm, pulling her a little aside that the other shoppers mightn’t jostle them. “Why do you write?”
“It—oh, I suppose it keeps my head clear, and my humor high. It’s a . . . an itch almost, but inside my very skull where my fingernails can’t reach. I have thoughts, and they must come out or forever pester me, like fleas.”
“What sort of thoughts?”
Agnes’s cheeks go pink. “All of them, really. Songs, sometimes; very poor ones, I am sure. I wrote—well, I wrote to my mother and father recently, a very long letter of great eloquence, the contents of which I will not bore you with. Of course, I couldn’t anyway; I burned it to finest ash once it was written. They cannot read in any case, even if they are still living. But I like to imagine the smoke of it reaching them, wherever they are.”
She moves back to the quill stall, brushing a goose feather with two fingers. Glances over her shoulder at Catherine with a sly look. “If I ever write a song about la bête and his beautiful bride, I promise not to burn it. Perhaps someone shall find it long after we are both gone and know the story of your great love.”