“His Majesty told me the tale, once, of his own captivity by the Spanish, when he was just a boy. Slouched in his chair, informal before me, as if he were tired of holding himself kingly. His father traded both his sons to the Spanish in return for his own freedom, promising to free them as soon as he possibly could. The princes were given a dwarf to keep them company. His Majesty said the little man could clown better than any other dwarf he met before or after, that he made their confinement that much brighter. Petit Georges was his name, and King Henri claimed his elder brother would have succumbed to misery, those first months, were it not for his antics.” Petrus licks his lips. “But after a time, the Spanish took the dwarf away.”
“What happened to him?” Catherine asks, and Petrus looks at her with something like gratitude.
“I asked His Majesty the same thing,” he says, and now his voice is breaking all to pieces in his throat. “He . . . squinted. As if he were trying to remember something. And then he shrugged and told me he could not recall what happened to Petit Georges; said that perhaps he never knew.”
Catherine makes a sound of disgust.
“After that, His Majesty said the Spaniards kept them in conditions that became less and less congenial. Wet walls, black with mold; water that dripped all day and night until they thought they’d go mad. They forbade the princes to speak their own tongue.” A pause. “And the king told me that he never thought he would willingly speak theirs again. Until I appeared in his receiving room.”
Catherine is silent. When Petrus speaks again after a moment, his voice is dreamlike, moonlight on water.
“I always used to think of this memory with gladness,” he says. “It was evidence that King Henri was a captive like I myself once was; that we had something in common with one another, something large. But now—” He swallows. “Now, I cannot stop thinking of myself, of my cage; how he did not at once release me, though he spoke so bitterly of his own captivity. I saw him in myself, and myself in him, but I do not think he ever truly saw himself in me.”
He falls quiet, thoughts pressing outward against his skull, too many of them, all of them at once eager and afraid of what their release might bring. They have left the children in their chamber and come out into the hush of the night-chilled gardens, the dew a clutching dampness, creeping up the hem of Catherine’s gown and darkening the seams of Petrus’s shoes. Sculptures and hedges cast deep shadows over the ground, for the moon above is round and bright, hanging low and heavy as the belly of a breeding woman who is near her time.
Years ago, when Madeleine was small, Petrus used to bring Catherine outside when the swell of black sky winked with a thousand pinpricks of light. He would point to star clusters, naming them, reciting the stories of the swan, and the dragon, and the twisting, sinuous form of the many-headed Hydra, finally bested by Hercules. He traces with his finger in the air the twins, Castor and Pollux, so devoted to one another that when the one died the other begged for death as well, until Zeus placed them, forever together, in the sky. The bright points of their joined hands, the dancing angle of their legs.
He looks up at them now, but it is as if the heavens have shifted, and he cannot recognize anything he sees. The constellations tell different stories than those he learned from his tutors. He squints. There—a cluster of young men, very fine in their smooth leather jerkins, caught in the act of kicking a workbasket, sending a scattering of beads, turned to a trail of stars, rolling all down the sky’s broad street. There, crouched, is Isabel, those five stars her outstretched fingers as she scrabbles to retrieve her work, her livelihood. There are no stars for her eyes, which are flat as stones, as empty sky. And there, beside her, Manuel, a cracking fury in the sharp line of his shoulders. Guanche, hiss the boys, as if the word is a curse.
Petrus staggers a little, suddenly dizzy.
It was not until he was grown and gone from her that he understood the deep basin of anger that must have existed beneath Isabel’s stony surface, hot and ever present, sending fissures up and up. She had seen her father killed, unarmed; her brothers chained; her mother taken for a slave. She was saved from her mother’s fate by catching the eye of a soldier, a soldier who had not touched her family but who must have torn to tatters dozens, hundreds, of others. After such things, she sometimes said, attempting to smother Manuel’s rages, what are little nicks here and there?
Isabel, with her private prayers to her god who was meant to be dead; killed by good Catholics. His wife still prays nightly on her knees, though Petrus long ago gave up the pretense, and he does not miss the ache in his knee bones, the sense that even in his own chamber, with the door closed firmly against the prying eyes of the court, he must still be something he is not. Beyond a look at him over her folded hands on the first night that he climbed into bed without kneeling beside her, Catherine has never said a word, and when he thinks of this, of her quiet acceptance, his stomach swoops like a giddy bird with something like gratitude, like wonder.
But when he sits in church, he tries to feel whatever it is that Catherine feels, the mysteries upon mysteries toward which she leans, yearning. There is great danger in stepping even a toe-end outside the narrow circle of the Church’s proscriptions. Huguenot worship has been condemned, the bodies of its followers mutilated; and how much worse for someone who cannot find God in any church, Catholic or Protestant; whose entire being, so thickly haired, so wolfish, raises thoughts of witchcraft, easy as a necromancer raising the dead?
Since he came to France, witches and werewolves have been burned by the thousands. Yet at court, the queen mother keeps her portentous dreams, keeps her dwarfs for their magic, consults the stars rather than the church. Sent her son’s Catholic soldiers to kill Huguenots, as if it were the only natural thing to do.
“All I could think of, while the massacre was happening that day in Paris,” he says now, speaking in a whisper, “and after, when I saw the true horror of it all—the abandoned bodies, men, women, children—all I could think of was Isabel. The slaughter of her family, so many people she knew. She never even taught me the old ways, so great was her fear that I might be killed for them. Killed by the very people beside whom we sat each Sunday for Mass. And I cannot—I cannot separate—it is all entangled, Isabel and her people, the Huguenots worshiping secretly in barns, in hidden rooms—”
Catherine lifts up on her toes and kisses him. Pulls back and looks at him, long and silent, then drops her head back to rest upon his chest.
He says, “King Henri . . . he continued—he expanded his father’s edicts against heretical worship.” He shakes his head. “When I had been at court for only a year, the king himself watched the burnings of seven heretics. You must have heard of the burning chamber, no? That is what the people came to call his court for the trying of heretics. I loved him . . .” A swallow, his throat working desperately. And then, “I loved him—and he did terrible things. But I did not . . . I was not witness to those things, and so it was easy to pretend—to ignore—”
Petrus presses his eyes closed. He knows, all at once, why he has felt this compulsion to comb through his memories. He needed to unsnarl them, and his feelings about them; and now that they are laid out in the open air, flung bright across the sky, he can at last release them.
He opens his eyes, tilts his head back, exhales up, up, up, toward mysteries upon mysteries. Exhales his breath, his memories, his Isabel; imagines them hanging between the twins and the bear, suspended and bright and forever.
Then he takes Catherine by the shoulders, looks at her face.
“We cannot remain in France,” he says. “I am going to speak to Ludovico.”