The weeks after the queen’s death are fogged, as if Catherine cannot see clearly. She and Petrus keep to their chamber with the children as much as they can, though Catherine ventures once or twice to the dwarfs’ rooms to gather news, like a mouse gathering crumbs. What she brings back with her is scanty, and terrible—soon after the queen was cold, the court physicians cut her corpse open to find all her insides rotten. The thought of it—Her Majesty’s body brutally sliced from breastbone to pelvis and stinking of rot—makes Catherine’s stomach roil, makes her heart clench with something like anger, something like sorrow.
The queen has loomed large over them all for so long that Catherine cannot entirely believe that she is forever gone. Her Majesty was like some sculpture in a church, distant, remote, meant to instill both love and fear at once. They hardly ever spoke to her, except when she bid Petrus and the children entertain newcomers to court with shows of great hairiness and surprising intelligence. She seemed to bear some true love for her dwarfs, whether she truly believed they were mystical tokens of luck or not. But she took no pains to truly know the hairy marvels she had bred, and it is so very strange to think how she affected everything—how she had determined the course of both Catherine’s life and Petrus’s—and yet knew them not at all.
Petrus spends those few days in a panic that he will not admit to, though Catherine tries to draw his thoughts from him.
After the night of her death, he does not speak of the queen at all. Instead, he speaks of King Henri, father of their current king, a man who, by Petrus’s account, was more saint than ruler.
“He told me I was a better gift even than the leopard,” he says, warmth and wryness tangled together in his voice.
Catherine wraps her arms tight around Madeleine, who has perched upon her lap for the first time in ages. She envisions her arms as a shield, a barrier against her child ever thinking that such words—even from the mouth of a king—were worthy of her. When she manages to reply to Petrus, her own voice is hard.
“Better even than a leopard. Imagine that,” she says.
“You judge him?” Petrus says, as if surprised. In that surprise, in the sudden slackness to his features, Catherine has the oddest sensation, as if she is watching the joy he once felt to hear the king call him a wondrous gift fading away, like color leeching from a fallen leaf, all the brightness gone and only a curled crumple of its memory remaining.
He has so few happy memories that Catherine’s chest hurts at the thought that she might unwittingly have taken one away from him. She tries to say something that will comfort him, but all she can think of is their own children and what their memories of the queen will be; whether they will think with fondness about the sweets her ladies gave them, the stroking of her palms over their heads, the times she told them how glad she was to have them as adornments in her court.
But Petrus surprises her by continuing to speak of the late King Henri, small memories, some of which he has shared with her before. It is as if he cannot help himself, as if he is purging himself, the queen’s death having cracked him open like an egg. And so she listens.