The duke builds them a house, right in the palace gardens. Catherine and the children watch the builders at their work, watch the stones set upon stones, a place for them, just for them. When it is completed, they run through every room, dashing about the legs of the servants, who carry in stools and chests, tables and linens. They bear heavy rugs between them, brightly dyed, intricately woven; roll them out over the stone floors to the delight of the children, who pause in their explorations to roll over this new softness. Ours, they cry. Ours, ours, ours.
Catherine and Petrus wander more slowly from room to room. Here, she says, here, we shall put the table for dining. Here, the chairs where we will sit each evening. Up the steps, his hand on her back, as if to keep her from falling, her hand on the rope of the handrail, the coils tight under her palm. This chamber, they decide, they will take for their own; this one, with its window overlooking the back of the house, away from the busier areas of the palace gardens, shall be Madeleine’s; this one Henri’s; this one Antoinette’s. There is an extra chamber, and Petrus kisses her there, closes the door, grins at her and draws up her skirts, her petticoats.
Come, he says, and Catherine allows him to pull her down, down, and they knot like two hands fisted together upon the floor, there in the empty room. He is giddy, drunk with glee, with joy. Ours, he says, an echo of the children, whose running feet they can still hear on the floor below them.
Ours, she answers. Ours.
The following years are gilded ones, for all that their new house is not so wholly theirs as they first imagined. The duke expects that they will welcome all visitors he sends to them into their home, at all times of day and night. A pair of visiting cardinals, tipsy on the best wine from His Excellency’s vineyards, takes it into their heads to see the duke’s wild family long after they have been abed for hours, while the moon is still bright in the sky. Catherine, fine hairs escaping her nighttime plait, flushed in her chemise and mantle, pours them more wine from their own cellar, arranges cheese and olives and fruit on a plate with flustered hands, all while Petrus sits with them in the receiving room, Antoinette sleeping on his lap, Madeleine and Henri yawning on stools beside him, heads bobbing like flowers in a wind.
Their house is like a palace in miniature, with every luxury they could desire. A cook for their meals; servants to fetch wood and clean, to fill tubs for their baths, and to launder their clothing.
This frees Petrus and the children to spend their time at court, or to play in the gardens, that visitors might easily happen upon them and be amazed. The duke encourages the children to wander where they wish, gives them leave to pick fruits from the orchard. Henri chases Antoinette through the grove of orange trees, all the small white blossoms giving way to heavy bright fruits, the air thick with a sweetness that can almost be licked. He scrambles up the tree, quick as a squirrel to evade the notice of the gardeners—not because they would mind the taking, but because evasion was so much dizzy fun—and returns to earth with his arms laden with fruits, which the two of them eat, sitting together beside the fountain that is shaped like the shell of a scallop, scraps of orange peel scattered about their feet, sticky juice matting the hair on their chins. And then they are off again, racing for the evergreen labyrinth; lying on their bellies to watch the waters of the pond, so swollen with fish.
Madeleine prefers, most days, to walk with Catherine and Petrus. They promenade at a more dignified pace than that which is set by the younger children, allowing Petrus to read aloud from the rare letters that come from Ludovico. Catherine waits for a letter from Agnes, though as the months roll into years her hope turns gossamer, tattering at the edges, moth wings broken and useless. Instead, she concentrates her attention upon the light crunch of their shoes over the stone pathways; the raised hands and grins from the gardeners, who hail Petrus as Don Pietro and Madeleine as Maddalena Pelosa—Hairy Maddalena. Under the sun, they meander past the water chain, a channel elegantly shaped like a very long crayfish that cuts between two rustling hedgerows. Into the knot gardens above, where Catherine spreads her fingers over the splayed toes, crusted with lichen, of a sculpted stone river god. She inhales, listens—sunlight on green, and her younger children shrieking with laughter just out of sight.
The duke ordered their house erected in the same part of the gardens where his wild beasts are kept, and it is this which jars Catherine with the reminder that their new home is not just a refuge, but a sprawling, beautiful cage. When important guests visit the palace, if the weather is fine, they are certain to take a stroll to see the leopard in its cage; and if they are lucky, they might have a glimpse of the wild man as well, or one of his cubs.
Henri is the first to leave them.
The duke’s brother, a cardinal, has taken a fancy to their boy and wants him for himself. The duke informs them of this one afternoon, sitting in the gardens with Petrus and Catherine and his own wife, who nods and smiles, as if this is the most natural thing in the world, the gifting of a boy, the stealing of a child. Catherine holds her hands over her belly, rounding with new life, and presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth, that she not shout at the man to whom they are so indebted, who keeps them so richly.
It does not seem so terrible when she realizes that Henri will not be going far. The cardinal lives in the palace, after all; and if the cardinal wishes to take their boy for a coach ride through the streets of Rome, dress him in the finest silk and linen, comb his hair to a glossy shine—well, there are certainly worse fates, Catherine tells herself. She kisses Henri’s cheek, lets him go; hugs him when he returns, full of gloating over the wonder on the faces of the people to whom the cardinal introduced him.
Madeleine seems happier here than she did in Paris. In the open of the gardens, they can pretend they are not confined. She wears gowns in the Italian style, which dip low to show her bosom; she plaits blossoms into her hair, and sings when she thinks no one can hear her. Catherine watches her, wondering; her eldest girl is beyond old enough to take notice of men, and for them to take notice of her. She thinks of what the artist said all those years ago, that Madeleine would be pretty, were it not for her hair.
And then, one day, she comes into the house to find Madeleine on a kitchen stool, bent in half over her own thighs, her hands over her face. The cook, in the garden outside, is harvesting lettuce and pretending she cannot hear Madeleine’s sobs. Catherine finds herself across the room, kneeling before her daughter, reaching for her wrists, before she has had time to think. And then Madeleine’s hands come away, and the sunlight gleams, obscene, upon her bare, shaven face.
She looks roughly peeled, her skin scattered with angry red bumps, with scrapes from the blade. She removed it all, though there are little tufts near her hairline, as if she feared getting too near the hair on her scalp. Even her eyebrows are gone, giving her a startled look. Catherine takes a breath and holds it in her chest; it is as if she looks at Madeleine through warped glass. It is her daughter’s face, and it isn’t. It is her daughter’s face as it might have been; it is Catherine’s mother’s face, alive again. Rounded cheeks, a deep, graceful sweep between her lower lip and the knob of her chin. For the first time, she knows the line of Madeleine’s jaw; the worry lines on her brow. Catherine’s chest is filled with that single breath, filled to bursting; and with grief and gratitude and a strange horror at the sight of so much of Madeleine’s skin, so pink and tender, like the private bits that no one is meant to see.
Petrus once told them all of the time he used cat urine and walnut oil to try to melt his hair away. All it did, he said, was make him a reeking laughingstock. King Henri shook his head and said, Now, why would you try something like that? What would we do with you without all that glorious hair?
“Oh,” she says at last, blowing the word out on a desperate exhalation. “Oh, sweet girl, what have you done to yourself?”
Madeleine puts her hands—still hairy—up to her naked face, then jerks them away as quickly again. “It burns!” she cries, and Catherine sighs. Pulls her to her breast, stroking the hair on her head.
“I only wanted,” Madeleine says, gulping in breaths, “to see if I was pretty.”
Catherine rolls her eyes upward, as if she can find guidance on the ceiling.
“You are even better than pretty, cara mia,” she says, stroking and stroking, resting her chin atop Madeleine’s head and closing her eyes. She thinks of her mother, whose face she thought she would never see again; she thinks of herself, all those hours before the glass. “Prettiness, you see,” she says, “it is—well, it is applied like cosmetics, and just as easily lost to time. You, my sweet one, are . . . beautiful. Beauty is different. It’s nothing to do with this”—smoothing a hand over Madeleine’s blotched cheek. “It is the—the truth of someone. And that is eternal.”
The hair begins to grow back within a day, of course—little rough stubbles that prick like needles to the touch.