When Henri’s son is born, Catherine takes the babe in her arms whenever his wife, Girolama, will relinquish him. She sings and rocks, walking the floors of Henri’s house as she used to walk with her own babes, remembers how she used to sing these songs even when her children were too old for rocking, when they piled together like puppies on her bed. The dip of the mattress under her weight as she sat beside them; the stroke of her hand over their backs. Their breaths all interweaving as the fire burned low, and how she sometimes fell asleep there with them, still in her clothes, the song unfinished. How she wept, once, when she could not recall the words, words that her mother sang to her, and her grandmother to her mother, and back and back and back.
Girolama watches, eyes dark and impenetrable as closed doors. She is often miserly with her thoughts and feelings, but she holds her son—who is as hairy as his father—with such tenderness that Catherine cannot dislike her.
They should be better friends, she and her daughter-in-law, for their stories are near-perfect twins. Just as Queen Caterina de’ Medici paid Catherine’s dowry when her father could not, so did the Duke of Parma pay Girolama’s when Henri spied her in the square and decided he wanted her. Catherine’s bold, audacious boy, a notched arrow, always eager for release; but still more eager for the impossible, to be the one who decided where he was to go. He demanded to be seen, to be heard, luxuriating, as a child, in the attention his hair brought him—along with the sweets court ladies popped into his mouth while he sat beside them, allowing them to stroke his head.
She cannot approve of what he did to this girl, this woman, his wife; roping her all unwilling into a life with him. Thoughtless, as she had not thought he could be. Insensitive, as he never was before.
She wants to sit before Girolama and tell her of Henri’s sweetness as a boy. How he played at seek with Antoinette, always pretending he could not find her even when she stood in plain sight with her hands over her face. How he cried when one of the lions at the Paris menagerie died.
It took two keepers to drag it from its cage by its great clawed paws; and then they let Henri play with it, to Catherine’s horror. The beast’s eyes were open and rolled mostly back, its tongue protruding from between its yellowed teeth. She had thought the creatures magnificent when she first saw them, but in death they were as bloated and stiff as human corpses, and monstrous in their massiveness.
Henri had stroked the fur over the lion’s ribs, murmuring something that Catherine could not quite hear, but which sounded in tone like something soothing she would say to him and his sisters if they were tucked up in their beds with illness. He then explored the tuft at the end of the lion’s tail, and trailed his fingers upward along its spine, ruffling the fur in the wrong direction until he reached the deep expanse of its mane. But then he paused, noticing for the first time the flies that landed and circled about the creature’s head, their movement making more obvious the lion’s own unnatural stillness. He drew his hands out of the mane as if it had caught fire.
She had to explain death to him, then; and what words existed to convey the well of misery and mystery? They did not exist; or if they did, Catherine could not find them. Death, to her, was still entirely sewn of wrongness. Priests and scholars might go on about its natural cycle; its ultimate beauty. But she could not see it.
So she did the only thing she could do, and wrapped her arms tight about her son as he wept.
“Will you die?” he cried.
“Yes, sweet boy.” Smoothing his hair; heart splitting like the shell of an egg. And then, with a silent prayer that she would not be made a liar: “But not for a very, very long time.”
This calmed him, but only briefly.
“Will I die?” he said, the horror of the thought writ large upon his face; and then he shook his head before she could answer, as if the idea were simply too big to keep.
“But what if you do die?” he said then. “Who will play with me?”
“I have no intention of dying until you are a grown man, my sweet,” she said; but his brow furrowed, as if she were being stupid.
“But who will play with me then?” And then, narrow back heaving with his sobs, “What if you die and I want you to sing to me?”
She wants to plead with this woman who has given her a grandson to see the sweet boy under Henri’s arrogant facade. But then she thinks of Papa—how he released her to Petrus, how he did not say goodbye—and of the amethysts that hung so heavy from her ears. The terror of being thrust into a life she had never once wished for, or even imagined. Of her daughter taken from her, and no word, none at all—Petrus has written to the duke, has asked for news, and always the same reply, that the marchesa has not corresponded, that his wife attended one of her famous gatherings and there was no sign of a little hairy girl. The frantic scratch of it in Catherine’s chest, the clawing of it, of not knowing where her child is, what she is doing, if she is well and whole and happy. The rending of it, and how, too, it has rent great tatters in the cloth of her marriage. She can see through them, as if her marriage is a sheet on a line, and all the sparkling sunlight winking through the holes as it does through tree boughs in summer. In her head, they both try to sew the tatters closed again, little patient stitches; but she is not certain they will ever quite succeed.
And then she wants to shout at her son; to grasp his wife’s hands and beg forgiveness on his behalf.