Château de Blois
1589
News that the king has murdered two of his greatest enemies at Blois whips like a storm through the palace, so loud and ferocious that Petrus cannot stopper his ears against it, cannot deny its stormy force. The two men murdered were brothers; though Catholic like the king, they wanted to take his throne for themselves. Petrus stands beside Catherine, listening to the rumbling voices of the other courtiers, and reminds himself to breathe in and out, to keep standing, though panic scrabbles at his rib bones with its terrible claws. The queen’s astronomer walks about looking grave and portentous but stays clear of the clusters of courtiers who murmur together, plot, plan. As if he knows that he has nothing to say to them that any will wish to hear; or as if he has never had anything of consequence to say at all.
“A mistake,” he hears one man murmur to another. “His Majesty has made a terrible mistake.”
“Two fewer enemies,” the other man disagrees. “That can only be a good thing, no?”
But a third man shakes his head, the cant of his brows etching a fierce V above his nose. “Impulsive,” he mutters. “A man with so many enemies as the king cannot afford to act so. This will be the ruin of him. With the Huguenots rising, how could he do it—how could he strike a blow against good Catholics?”
“But these Catholics would have dethroned him, if they could,” the second man objects. “His Majesty faces traitors both within and without our faith—”
Such talk would have seemed impossibly disloyal even a few months earlier. But now, though they keep their voices low, these men speak their minds, hands curled around the hilts of their daggers. Petrus has sidled nearer to them against his own will, drawn, desperate, by the juddering fear of what effect His Majesty’s actions will have on the court, all these lives that have tied themselves to the king’s fortunes. The king’s younger brother died some years ago, and now there is no heir but the Huguenot who married His Majesty’s sister, who Petrus imagines will scour the court of all Valois influence. He looks down to find that his hands are shaking, trembling in the air like aspen leaves.
The murmuring men take no more notice of him than they might of a piece of furniture that happened to be situated near them.
A thundering at their chamber door wakes Petrus from his sleep that night. He pushes himself upright, blinking through the shadowed room, still dream-caught. Catherine stirs beside him, unbending from the sheltering curl she formed around Antoinette in the night. When she hears the frantic knocking, her breathing hitches; when Petrus swings his legs out from under the bedclothes, she tries to catch his sleeve.
“Wait—” she hisses, whites glinting all around her irises. But Petrus reaches for his sword, removes it from its scabbard with a scraping of steel, the warlike noise of it out of place in this room. It wakes his older children, makes them sit up on their pallets, questions in their yawning mouths. Petrus makes a slashing motion in the air with his free hand—Silence!—and creeps toward the door, where the pounding has begun anew, echoed now in the frantic beating of his heart. He puts his mouth very near the door, almost kissing it, and says through the stout wood, through the noise of the battering fist on the other side, “Who is there?”
When Agnes’s voice comes, muffled, Petrus folds over with relief, half collapsing against the door. “I have news,” she says. “Sauvage—please let me in—”
He opens the door at once and Agnes hurries through, shutting it again immediately behind her. Catherine has climbed out of bed and lights a candle from the embers of the fire. In its wavering light, Petrus can see that Agnes is not dressed in her nightclothes like the rest of them, despite the late hour, but in the same fine gown she wore that day. Her hair, though, is unbound and disheveled, as if she has been pulling at it.
“What is it?” Catherine says, coming toward her friend. She stops, however, beside Petrus and leans just slightly into him, the flesh of her upper arm warm against his own. He shifts his weight so that their arms press together more firmly.
Agnes glances at the children, as if wondering whether she ought to speak before them, then shakes her head. “Queen Caterina,” she says. “She was—she has been so angry, furious with the king. She has been ranting . . .” A gulp of air. “She has been unwell for some time, as you know.”
They nod; despite her best efforts, news of the queen’s weakness, the gasping of her breath when she exerted herself, was impossible to keep secret.
“But tonight, she has become worse, much worse. She complains of a pain in her chest, like a knife stab. Her body burns with fever, but she shakes as if with cold. She breathes with the greatest difficulty.” Agnes presses her hands to her face, fingers spread across her brows. “The doctor is grave, and will not tell us anything, but I think—” Her shoulders shake.
Catherine leaves Petrus’s side and folds Agnes into her arms. Petrus feels a heaviness, a weight at the end of his arm, and looks down, dazed, to see that he still holds his sword, the tip of which drags lightly against the floor. He looks at his wife and her friend, their embrace tight as ropes, their faces both an agony of fear. He looks at his children, two of whom stare up at him in bewilderment from their pallets at the foot of the bed, the other of whom has continued, in the miraculous way of small children, to sleep through the commotion. They exist because the queen willed it so. They exist because she bought Catherine for him. It is this thought that rises above all the rest in his head, which smooths out and brushes away the decades of bitterness he has felt toward the queen. She wanted them, and so they are here. She wanted them—but she is almost certainly dying. He must put his palms against the wall, brace all his weight upon them, and gasp heavy through his open mouth.
Catherine draws away from Agnes and looks between her friend and Petrus. “What are we going to do?” she says, but Petrus has no answer.
“We’re all of us awake, if you’d like to wait with us for news,” Agnes says. Catherine agrees, and Petrus nods as well, and they both, without having to discuss it, reach for their children, Catherine drawing Henri and Madeleine by the hands to follow her and Agnes down the corridor, Petrus scooping Antoinette up from the bed and cradling her against his chest, her head lolling upon his shoulder. They could leave them in the room, let them sleep; but any separation just now feels too risky with the queen’s life thread floating gossamer just out of reach of the waiting sheers, as if anything might happen, the very worst things their minds could conjure.
They go together to the female dwarfs’ chamber, the first time he has entered it since he knocked upon the door when Madeleine was still curled tight inside her mother and asked Agnes to ride to Paris with his wife. The dwarfs are all there, men and women both. The monk and the gray-headed songbird pass a wineskin back and forth—wet smacks of their lips and overloud gulpings of their throats—but all the rest sit very still, tight with the same fear that wraps around Petrus.
Agnes takes Antoinette from Petrus’s arms. The other children press together to form a hillock of arms and legs and great, staring eyes, not certain what is happening but alert to the terrible tension. “Will you stay with the court? If the queen—” Catherine says, but Agnes makes a shushing sound.
“Hush, you,” she says, as if she had not just wept her terror into Catherine’s shoulder. “Don’t you know better than to speak of such things aloud? Besides”—rubbing her nose to Antoinette’s, who sneezes; Agnes grins, just for a moment—“it is you I am more concerned about. I don’t know that His Majesty has much care for your protection. But we’ll be taken care of.” She nods to the other dwarfs, still sitting wooden about the room; and she clears her throat, clutching at it above her ruff, as if it is closing itself. “We must. We will. Her Majesty—well, she has assured us all that we are to be provided for in—in any eventuality.
“But you.” And now she looks at Petrus; a look that makes his skin tighten, and his heart pound within his breast. “You must provide for yourselves, I fear.”
Then she takes the wineskin from the monk and takes a hefty gulp.
They wait together, all that long night, for news—for life, for death. When Antoinette wakes, she looks around and says, “Where is the queen?” An odd question, given that Her Majesty has never joined them in the dwarfs’ rooms, given the night-blackness that fills the room, only a little softened by candles. Antoinette is accustomed to being called to sit with the queen almost daily; accustomed to the sugared fruits, tough as leather, that the queen’s ladies slip her to keep her still and quiet during Her Majesty’s audiences with important visitors. But despite Catherine and Agnes both shushing her, murmuring reassurance, telling her it is time to sleep, not time to visit with Her Majesty, Antoinette’s voice rises higher and higher.
“Where is the queen, where is the queen?” she says, over and over, voice rising toward a screech until Catherine gathers her up and holds her close, her face a closed and stoppered jar of feeling. Petrus looks about the room and thinks he sees his own feelings reflected in the faces of all the dwarfs, Antoinette’s frantic keening giving voice to all his—all their—fears.
He must fall into a doze, for he wakes to more keening, a terrible moaning that seems, in his sleep-drugged state, to come from everywhere, above and below and all around them, as if the very walls and floor are grieving, and he knows at once that the queen is dead.
The dwarfs cling to one another, to Catherine, to Madeleine and Henri and Antoinette. Petrus curls into a corner alone and weeps without shame, great eddies that wet down the hair of his cheeks and jaw. But then come Catherine’s arms about his middle, her head resting on his thigh. Her fingers shake, and she clenches them around the hem of his shirt. Her tears wet through to his skin. He bends over her, making a bower of his body. He hasn’t the words to tell her that he weeps not merely for the terror of their circumstances, but also for the woman who once taught him to use a fork and who—whatever her motives—kept her husband’s long-ago promise to find a wife for his wild man.