Judith Merkle Riley Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Judith Merkle Riley

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  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

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  First published in 1999 in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Previously published in 2000 by Penguin Books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Riley, Judith Merkle.

  The master of all desires / Judith Merkle Riley.

  pages ; cm.

  (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. France—History—Henry II, 1547–1559—Fiction. 2. Catherine de Medicis, Queen, consort of Henry II, King of France, 1519–1589—Fiction. 3. Nostradamus, 1503–1566—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.I3794M37 2013

  813’.54—dc23

  2013010788

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A Guide to Historical Figures in The Master of All Desires

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from The Oracle Glass

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  To the memory of my parents

  “Guess now who holds thee?”—“Death,” I said.

  But, there,

  The silver answer rang…“Not Death, but Love.”

  —Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  A Guide to Historical Figures in The Master of All Desires

  The Valois Dynasty in 1556

  Henri II, King of France. The second son of King Francis I, he became Dauphin after the mysterious poisoning death of his older brother and king after the death of his father, in 1547.

  Catherine de Medici, Queen of France. Great-niece of two Medici Popes.

  Their Children

  François, Dauphin, born in 1543. Heir to the throne.

  Elisabeth, born in 1545.

  Claude, born in 1547.

  Louis, born in 1548, died in 1550.

  Charles-Maximilien, born in 1550.

  Henri, born in 1551. Originally christened Edouard-Alexandre.

  Margaret (Margot), born in 1553.

  Hercule, born in 1554. Later renamed François.

  Victoire and Jeanne, twins, born in 1556. Died in infancy.

  The Bourbon Dynasty in 1556

  Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre.

  Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon, his brother.

  Louis, Prince de Condé, youngest brother of the King of Navarre.

  Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, daughter of King Francis’s sister Marguerite, and a leader of the Protestant reform.

  Henri of Navarre, son of Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne d’Albret, born in 1553.

  French Courtiers

  Diane de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois, the mistress of Henri II, allied to the Guises.

  Mary, Queen of Scots, betrothed to the Dauphin François, raised with the royal children since the age of six. Her mother was Mary of Guise, elder sister of the Duc de Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine.

  François, Duc de Guise (“The Scar”). Leader of the powerful Guise family and uncle to Mary, Queen of Scots.

  Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, his younger brother and co-conspirator.

  Anne de Montmorency, Grand Constable of France, and head of the powerful Montmorency family, rivals to the Guises.

  Henri de Montmorency, Baron de Damville, second son of the Constable, and Marshall of France.

  Gaspard de Coligny, Colonel General of the Infantry, later Admiral of France, the nephew of Montmorency.

  Rival Astrologers and Fortune-Tellers to the Queen

  Michel de Nostre-Dame, known as Nostradamus. The celebrated author of The Centuries and other works of prediction and medicine.

  Cosmo Ruggieri, head of the numerous Ruggiero clan, traditional astrologers to the Medici.

  Lorenzo Ruggieri, his brother.

  Gabriel Simeoni, royal astrologer.

  Luc Guaric, known as Guaricus. Famous astrologer and mathematician, fortune-teller for various Popes.

  Foreign Monarchs

  Philip II, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.

  Edward VI of England (1537–1553), only son of Henry VIII. Promoted Protestant reform.

  Mary I, Queen of England, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Wife of Philip II, who became King of England with the marriage. Pro-Catholic.

  Elizabeth I, became Queen of England in 1558, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Pro-Protestant.

  Prologue

  Here’s the place,” said the Queen of France, whispering in Italian. She pointed to an almost invisible seam in the floor of the gilded room. The flickering light of a single candle cast distorted shadows on the walls. The night air of summer was fetid and oppressively hot. The stone halls and bare summer fireplaces reeked of urine, of dankness and mildew, of summer fevers. The court had remained too long at Saint-Germain, and the palace had begun to stink. In another month or two, the king would order the court’s removal to another, breezier stronghold. One where the game in the park had not been exhausted by his hunts. One where his nose would not signal for yet another few weeks that it was time once again to move. “I’ve had the carpenter make two holes in the floor,” whispered the queen. “Her bedroom is below. Tonight we’ll learn how that old woman does the witchcraft that steals my husband’s love from me.”

  “She is twenty years older than you both. Surely, if you could find someone younger, more beautiful, but utterly obedient to you, you could break her hold, and then…” the queen’s Italian dame d’honneur whispered in reply. The alien language seemed to flow like smoke, swirling past the carved satyrs’ heads on the fireplace, and clinging in the corners, the sound of foreign conspiracy in the ancient stronghold of the French kings.

  “Do you think I have not tried that? A moment or two, and then he is back with her, flaunting the ancient whore in public, hiding me as if I were the mistress. I want to destroy her influence over him forever. I want to be rid of her.”

  “Madame, you are queen—”

  “And my hand must never be seen in anything that happens to her,” said the queen. “While he loves her, should ill befall her, he will take revenge on me. But if he ceases to love her…” />
  “Then you must find the witchcraft that holds him,” whispered her companion.

  “Exactly. And then destroy it with more powerful sorcery.” Catherine de Medici, Queen of France, her bulging, heavy-lidded eyes lit deep from within with long-concealed resentment, fingered a magic talisman cast with human blood that hung around her neck. “She has found a powerful spell-caster. But where? Only the Ruggieri have such powers, and they are mine. I swear, if Cosmo has betrayed me—”

  “Surely not, Majesty. There are other sorcerers in the realm. Cosmo Ruggieri came with us from Florence. His father served your father—why would that woman turn to your servant? He might betray her.”

  “And he might not. Never underestimate the slyness of the Ruggieri. They are as treacherous as a nest of snakes—I know them well. I will find the magic and make Cosmo remove it, and he and I will both pretend that he never had knowledge of it before. It is time; I have lived long enough under the shadow of that old woman. She turns all my happiness to dust.”

  “Surely, Majesty, it can only be the ring,” whispered her dame d’honneur, Lucrèce Cavalcanti, Madame d’Elbène. “All the court whispers that the ring she gave him was cast with the blood of an unbaptized infant. It is the ring that enslaves him. Tonight you will see that that is so.” She leaned down and held the candlestick closer to the spot, while Catherine de Medici knelt and scrabbled for the catch that would release the floorboard.

  “Blow out the candle,” the queen whispered to her. “I don’t want them to see the light from above.” Only faint starlight illumined the room, as the two women lay on the floor to peer into the brightly lit bedchamber below.

  The king’s mistress lay stretched naked upon her back on the canopied, heavily draped bed, her arms behind her head, and her graying hair fanned behind her on a jumble of richly embroidered silk pillows. The pallor of her flesh formed a stark contrast to the rich green velvet of the coverlet below her. Her black eyes glittered in the candlelight, and her narrow, painted lips smiled triumphantly, while the king, vigorous, black haired, and twenty years her junior, stripped off his robe de chambre. It was almost as if she knew there were witnesses, this night, to her power.

  Diane de Poitier’s face, taut, seamed with fine lines, the eyes set in sunken, dark circles, held no surprises for the watchers. But at the first sight of the older woman’s body the two watching women suppressed a gasp of amazement. It was white, slender, agile, like the body of a twenty-year-old set beneath an old woman’s head. With icy discipline, the barren mistress had protected this pallid imitation of a younger woman’s form, while the queen, with steel stays and jeweled dresses, could not conceal the shapeless body ravaged by annual pregnancies. Schemer, monster, thought the queen. The Devil has done this for you. When I am rid of you, I will make myself beautiful, too. I’ll have masseurs, I’ll have potions. Then I will ride at the king’s side at his grand entries, with my colors and device displayed at every tourney, instead of being hidden like an ugly secret. Today the sight of me humiliates him. But tomorrow he will love me.

  In the gilded bed beneath the peephole, two athletic bodies, one dusted with dark hair, the other whiter than milk, entangled in complex postures completely novel to the watchers above. There in the dark, the queen’s eyes widened and she gasped softly. Now they had twisted about, and the old mistress had mounted King Henri the Second. His face was distorted with pleasure. Never had the queen imagined that such curious embraces, such lingering caresses could exist. Why had she not known of such things? Why had he never shown her these things? Was she that unworthy of passion, as well as respect? Now the king and his aged mistress had rolled to the side, and the fierce, furious rhythm so shook them that they fell from the bed in a cascade of sheets, completely oblivious, onto the cool, hard tiles of the floor. The king’s cry of passion was still resonating in the room below when his wife replaced the floorboard. Tears of rage, invisible in the dark, ran down her podgy face.

  “In all the years we have been married,” she whispered, “he never once has touched me like that. My hair—it was beautiful—he never stroked it like that—never—ten children, and he never kissed me. He comes in the dark, and leaves without a candle—what am I, that he treats me like a cow, and her like a woman?”

  “But, Majesty, you are the true queen. She is, after all, only the king’s whore.” The dumpy little woman with the chinless, goggle-eyed face wiped her eyes secretly, there in the dark.

  “Yes, I am queen,” she said. “I am queen, and she is not.” She straightened herself up, and brushed down her crumpled, dusty skirts. “Can’t he see that she is old, old? I was fourteen when I came to him. My uncle the Pope sent me in honor, in a gilded galley with slaves in silver chains. Who was she? A nobody. An old nobody. It has to be the magic ring that’s blinded him. The ring she gave him. I don’t care what it takes; I’ll have that ring from his hand.” And then I’ll have Cosmo compound me a love potion, she thought. Something strong, something that will bring me more than cold leftovers.

  “It’s just a matter of waiting for the right moment,” said Madam d’Elbène.

  “I, of all people, have learned how to wait,” said the queen, patting back her tight, artificial curls. “I have waited for many things. Still…”

  “Yes, Majesty?”

  “When I was young, they called me beautiful. Why did the king, my husband, never love me like that?”

  One

  Paris, 1556

  Left Orléans early yesterday. Inn of the Three Kings. My curse upon them. Inn of the Three Robbers would be a more honest sign. Beds despicable. Breakfast, 3 sous. Inedible. Has frozen my bowels. The city itself highly overrated. Sour people. High prices. An excess of heretics. The Bishop wanted a horoscope. Charged double.

  Entered Paris by Porte St.-Jacques. Near the rue de la Bûcherie, annoying swarm of students from the medical faculty blocked my way with some prank. Rudeness when I demanded passage. Insults to my gown, which was not of their faculty. Shouts that I was a foreign spagyric, the loosing of missiles composed of street ordure, accompanied by vulgar offers of a free bloodletting. Paris is always enraged at the sight of the livery of its better, our own medical faculty of Montpellier. Toadies. Lickspittles of the Faculty of Theology. The only things they know how to do are bleed and purge. And they dare to denounce the great Paracelsus! We would never let a graduate of that wretched Paris faculty practice in the south.

  Have Léon arrange for the cleansing of my doctoral gown.

  Inn of Saint-Michel, Paris. My own name. A good omen for an inn. Linens clean. Dinner, 5 sous. Ragoût passable, wine deserves the name of vinegar.

  Find new edition of Scaliger. Try Barbe Renault’s. It is doubtless overrated. Morel tells me Simeoni’s new prediction of the end of mankind in the year 1957 is all the rage. Simeoni is an ass. He couldn’t predict the end of the month. If he doesn’t find a better novelty than that, I predict he will lose royal favor within the next six months. Sent Léon to the Louvre to announce my arrival to the queen’s household office.

  They seem to want an advance on my bill here. Something about foreign physicians flying by night. See if Morel will lend me fifty nobles.

  Curious signs on the road yesterday. A serpent with two heads sunning itself on a rock. Truly, I am besieged with two-headed creatures. This two-headed kid of Aurons, the two-headed child of Senas. The time of bloody schism draws closer. Later that very day on the road from Orléans, a rustic young lady in mourning traveling in the opposite direction with an ugly hound. Silly, pretentious, headstrong character. But a strange aura. I have the haunting premonition that for some brief while, she will hold the future of France in her hands. What an awful idea. Bad dreams. Check with Anael.

  Michel de Nostre-Dame

  The Lost Journals of Nostradamus

  A.J. Peters, tr. and ed.

  (Sedona, AZ: Cemunnos Press, 1974)

  Vol. 3, Entry 209, August 15, 1556

  You,” said the stranger in the for
eign doctor’s gown and square hat, eyeing me up and down, “you write bad poetry.” He had an annoying eye, and one of those long gray beards that catches crumbs. I did not deem him worthy of an answer. It was not clear to me how he had gained knowledge of my little effusions of the spirit, but I would never think to entertain conversation with such a rude personage in a public place. “You tinkle at the lute, write banal études for the virginals, and irritating essays on Nature,” he went on. “A dabbler at everything, who can’t resist prying into other people’s affairs.”

  “We have not been introduced,” I said in my most cutting voice, as I set down my cup of bad-tasting cider beside me on the rustic seat. Above us, the birds twittered in the trees that shaded the outdoor benches. Behind us stood the wayside tavern, a peasant’s thatched hut scarcely distinguishable from an overlarge haystack, marked as a place of refreshment only by a broom over the door. It was the summer of the year 1556, the twenty-second year of my life, that time when the last freshness of youth irrevocably gives way to long, lean spinsterhood. The peasant boy who walked at my bridle was at the watering trough with my mare, too far away to summon. Gargantua, my big brindled hound puppy, lay at my feet panting in the heat, with his long pink tongue hanging out. A useless dog, too lazy even to growl. How should I rid myself of this lunatic old man?

  “We do not need to be introduced,” said the stranger, peering at me from under bushy white eyebrows. “I know you already. I have come to tell you to turn around, return home, and dwell with your family, as a proper woman should. Both you and the kingdom will be better off for it.”

  “I have absolutely no intention of it,” I said. “Besides, it is an impossibility. I must reach Orléans before the gates are closed at sundown.”

  “You cannot undo what you have done, but you can avoid what is to come: go home, I say.” A cold shudder transfixed my physical person. Suppose he wasn’t mad? Suppose he was an informer? Had he somehow discovered the reason for my precipitous flight from my father’s estate? I stood up suddenly—too suddenly—to flee him, overturning the cup and spilling the last of the cider on the hem of my mourning gown. Hastily, I bent to brush the drops from the dark wool and catch up the cup from the dust. I thought I heard him chuckle.