Château de Fontainebleau
1571
It has been years and years since anyone called him La Bestia. Neither do they call him Pedro. Here in France he has been Petrus since that day in the salle when the late king proclaimed him a clever, a thinking human being, the name under which he was baptized cunningly altered to shake off its Spanish influence. A joke, at first; gentle enough from King Henri, but less so in the mouths of his courtiers. So funny, the little hairy boy lisping Latin verbs. But he likes to think its dignity suits him now.
Of course, sometimes he is not Petrus; he is Pierre. Pierre Sauvage. Another clever twist on Pedro, this one purely French.
And purely cruel, says Isabel inside his head, spitting each word. Purely ignorant. Usually, he is able to ignore her; but some days—like today—it is difficult.
He does not think of his old life very often anymore; the French court has beaten it out of him like dirt from a carpet, leaving in its place a different past, one woven of interlacing fibers of fact and figment. But he has woken this morning—his wedding morning—to a chest stuffed tight as if with flock and an ache for the woman who raised him.
Isabel, he thinks, lying in the near-dark. He so rarely thinks of her anymore that her sudden name is like a blanket thrown across his face; he sucks in air, just to prove that he still can. Isabel. Isabel, with her gruff patience and her grumbling. Isabel, whom he has not seen for almost twenty-five years; who will not be sitting in the chapel today, watching as he is wed. Whose name—Isabel—was not even truly hers, forced upon her by the Spanish who conquered her island. Isabel, who was old even when he was a boy, and who is probably long dead.
He remembers his toes in the sand the day he left her, in the surf. The warm lapping of the waves, like the tongues of friendly dogs. The trail of his footprints on the cool hardened shoreline. These are memories as clear as the tips of the waves themselves, caught in his mind like beetles under glass, every moment of that day on the beach there for him to examine, even from this great distance, whenever he closes his eyes. His footprints are still distinct as the blue-green rainbows of the pinned beetles’ shells.
By contrast, so many of his memories seem removed and unreal as half-recalled dreams. In his worst moments, he thinks he imagined everything from before: that Isabel’s hands, with their big rolling veins and their palms and fingertips all stained with dyes, never smoothed the hair back from his brow; never rubbed his back during thunderstorms. That he never walked barefooted upon the black gritty beach on Tenerife; never ran quick as a darting fish along twisting streets, the sun hot on his head and shoulders. He has told the false story of his life so many times that its falseness has been smoothed out and worn down, like the soles of shoes that have walked too far.
Petrus rises, now. His bare feet touch the skin rug spread across his chamber floor. It is made of several skins stitched together to form a larger whole, gray and brown and dun and white-spotted; they shield his feet from the chill but are too thin and worn to do much else, the sleek fur rubbed away in places to shiny patches by a quarter century of his footsteps. The court moves frequently, from palace to palace across the country, according to the king’s whims or his need to be seen by his far-flung subjects, and Petrus’s skin rug has always appeared in whatever chamber he is assigned. Like the queen mother’s retinue of dwarfs, who travel with their own miniature everything, he has had his skins to make the French court more comfortable for him. More home-like.
He wonders what his wife will make of them.
You will have a beautiful wife. A fine new chamber. A soft new bed. Her Majesty made many promises when she told Petrus of his impending marriage; later today, servants will come to bring his things to some larger chamber, suitable for a man of the court and his new bride. Yesterday, he made certain that his best clothes were brushed, his finest ruff perfectly white. He bathed with fragrant Venetian soap, trimmed the hair at his chin and jaw so that it lies now like a short beard. Not so neat as King Henri’s beard once was, but tamer than the drooping locks of his childhood, which grew from his cheeks in strands as long as the hairs on a girl’s head. Whoever the poor woman is, he will not dishonor her by looking worse than he must.
Most days, he does not bother to look at himself in the small, round mirror hanging on his wall. There is no need. His fingers suffice to find snarls in his hair; his comb to smooth them. He keeps his clothing neat and in good repair; there is no reason to look at himself in it. Vanity, that’s what mirrors are for; and he has little enough of that.
But this morning, he looks. Tentatively, like a man edging, belly-down, toward a cliff drop to peer over the edge. The dizzying sensation of being uncertain whether he wanted to see that long, jagged fall. The swooping beauty and danger of the world from such a height.
But there is no fall when his eyes meet their reflection in the mirror. There is only his face, slightly distorted by the warp of the glass. He touches his cheek, his temple, his brow—all thickly covered in hair—then looks down at his hand. The nails precisely trimmed so that not the smallest ledge grows beyond the boundary of his fingertips, the palm smooth. The back softly furred. He thinks, just for a moment, of his hands unlacing his bride’s gown, then looks again into the mirror, where his eyes gaze back at him, blank and sheenless.
He walks without aim for a time while the morning is still newborn and there is no one but sleepy-eyed servants and yawning guardsmen to see him. It is raining, the grounds of the palace churned and flattened by a thousand sharp droplets, the tall windows running with water, leaving the world outside a colorless smudge. Petrus’s shoes sound too loud on the stone steps, and he pauses for a moment, waiting for the echo of them to fade, listening to his own harsh breathing. The stairs spiral like the shell of a hermit crab; standing as he is near the center of the delicate curve, he feels himself one of those reticent creatures. For the moment, safe.
Somewhere within this palace, beyond the shelter of this smooth stone wall and the sweep of these stairs, is his wife-to-be. Catherine Raffelin, the queen said, and the name repeats now through Petrus’s skull as the only thing he knows about her, this woman who will be his wife; a reverberation of certainty attempting to out-clamor all the clamorous uncertainties. Assuming no terrible troubles on the roads, she will have arrived yesterday from Lyons, after enduring a journey of days in order to wed him. To wed him.
He remembers with sudden dread the wedding of two of Her Majesty’s favorite dwarfs—a rowdy procession, the bride so draped in jewels she half-blinded onlookers in the winter sunlight; feasting and dancing that went on and on, a giddy whirlpool of wine and music. The new husband and wife dancing a galliard before the eyes of all the court, though he was clearly drunk and she well on her way. The rousing songs as they were effortlessly lifted, feet kicking in feigned foolishness, acting their part, and carried off to bed.
Let it not be like that, he thinks. Eyes closing briefly. It has been several years since he has been asked to play a part in one of the court’s entertainments—mock battles, mock sieges, mockeries made of them all. Once, he was made to play a wolf-man attacking a castle. He was meant to pull a lady from a tower that had been built of wood, painted to look like stone, and rolled into the grand ballroom on wheels like a cart’s. Though the lady must have known it was all an act—though she herself was part of the act—her face twisted with true panic when he appeared over the rampart; her scream was genuine. Petrus’s entire body shuddered with shame as he pretended at ferality, face buried in the lady’s neck as if he meant to tear her throat out, half-dressed in breeches and nothing else, the hair covering his arms and back, chest, belly, and calves exposed to all the court, gleaming in the brightness of all the fat candles. It was with relief that he relinquished the lady to her rescuers, allowed himself to be heaved from the tower by King Charles in his shining armor. The tower was not so tall that the fall truly hurt, and yet tears drew up from his lower lids like dew from dawn grass.
He begins walking again, his vision narrowed to a sliver just broad enough to let him move without falling, without blundering into walls or doorways. When he pauses at last, he is standing before a stone sculpture set into a wall: two women, nymphs perhaps, smooth-limbed, and rounded like jugs of wine, framing the head and torso of a curly-headed, curly-bearded man, with two horns jutting proud from his skull. Though his legs have not been sculpted, a goat head and two delicate hoofs have been hewn above him, as if to ensure that no one viewing the work might mistake him for anything too near to human. The nymphs’ necks arch and turn, their gazes shifting away from the goat-man between them. Their hands clutch the gilded edges of the frames of paintings to either side of them; they hold themselves as far from the inhumanness of the satyr as they possibly can.
Petrus finds he cannot look away. A beautiful wife, he thinks again. A beautiful wife. A fine new chamber. A soft new bed. Looking at the wretched satyr now, and at the nymphs’ desperate, clinging hands, the bow of their bodies toward the painting frames and away from the goat-man, his chest goes tight to the point of hurt. Oh, let his wife not be beautiful; let her be a plain woman, someone who can bear to look upon his face as the nymphs, who owe the sculpted perfection of their faces and bodies to the gods who sired them, cannot bear to look upon the satyr, for all that his parentage is no less prestigious than their own. A widow, perhaps, he thinks; a widow with years of laughter etched beside her eyes. Someone who would have little enough hope for a handsome husband, and might be easily reconciled to one as unnatural as he; and who might also find in all his education a source of respect. Someone who will not turn from him.
Petrus was seventeen, by the court physician’s count, before he lay with a woman.
His friend Ludovico was not wed then, and so did not yet hold the title of Duke of Nevers. He liked to tease Petrus about his fear of women, though never seriously; he knew his friend’s prickles, having spent the five years since he came to court observing the other children who were fostered at court by turns ignoring and taunting the strange, hairy boy whom King Henri had, inexplicably, thrown into their midst like a goat into a flock of starlings.
“The court is full of opportunities, even for someone like you,” Ludovico liked to say, with no meanness, only his usual cheerful honesty. “The courtisanes would be mad for you, with all that hair; or at least, they’d do a fine job of pretending. Such, after all, is the art of love.” He spoke with a casual knowing that rankled a little, being, as he was, two years Petrus’s junior.
It was true enough that many of the women with whom Ludovico and the other young men of the court spent their time approached Petrus occasionally, curiosity in their eyes and avarice in their smiles. King Henri’s favorite marvel, his very best gift, the boy on whom he lavished the same tutors who educated his own children; surely, that boy must have a few coins in his pocket aching to be spent. But he shook his head at them all, glad, for once, that his hairy cheeks made it impossible to read his blushes.
The woman with whom he finally lay had thin dark hair, lank with oil and smelling of her unwashed scalp. Her face was pinched, and a stain, purple as wine spilt across a linen cloth, dashed from the sharp corner of her jaw, across her throat, and down to the knob of her shoulder. The mattress to which she led him bristled with straw and rustled with other creatures. Ludovico remained behind, sipping sweet wine in the crowded main room of the tavern, with the lamps casting a greasy, smoky pall over the room. A smile twisted his mouth as Petrus sent a quick, desperate look over his shoulder before following her up the creaking stairs, and he raised his glass, as if to say, You wished to be far from court for this, my friend.
This tavern, in a narrow building on one of Paris’s many twisting side streets, was as far from the luster of court as he could wish without actually resorting to a quick poke in the shadows out in the street itself, with the aroma of piss and refuse surrounding them like bed curtains. The woman took his coin and lay without flinching on the stained mattress linen. She did not flinch, either, when Petrus’s face showed full in the light of the dripping candle stub, nor when he could not decide how best to go about their business together. She took him and led him where he needed to go, mumbling appreciative nothings about how virile he must be, to be so hairy. Her breath stank of rot, and her voice trailed off indifferently once he was hard enough to get where he must; but still, he fell asleep that night, back in his bed in the Château du Louvre, thinking about her hands fearlessly touching him, and dreamed, for the first time in years, of Tenerife.
He had a picture, once, of a woman like himself. A pamphlet, thrown at him by one of the noble boys fostered at court, and inside a rough woodcut of a girl. Look, the boy said. A monstrous wife for a monstrous boy.
Petrus kept the picture. He secreted it, crumpled in his fist, back to his chamber and looked at it from time to time. The girl was certainly not beautiful according to any of the usual definitions of beauty; but still, he looked and looked, the truth of her loosening something inside his chest. She was naked, her breasts small and round and hairy. Her legs long and hairy. He was old enough that the cushion of her thighs stirred him. For a foolish while that lasted years, he loved her.
For another foolish while, he loved the Princess Claude, who was born the year he came to France; loved her for her twisted foot and the hump on her back. All her life she was teased out of range of any adults by other children, and he always looked away from her tight mouth and reddened eyes. Hid himself among the hedges, that they not turn upon him as well with stones in their voices.
Once, just once, he spoke, years after he’d had his first woman. The princess was herself then just budding toward womanhood. Petrus did not speak in the presence of her tormentors, under no illusions that she would welcome the wild man as her public chevalier. But he came upon her weeping, and saw the cluster of children in their bright doublets and swishing skirts just disappearing from view, and said, all in a tumble, “You do not deserve their cruelty.”
A startled look, a straightening of her back as well as she could. A tilt of her head.
And then she rose and walked away without speaking, all dignity despite the unevenness of her steps, which set the width of her skirt to crookedly swaying. Leaving him to the splashing of the nearby fountain and the grainy rush of his own breath.
She was married to a duke later that same year.