Judith Merkle Riley Read online

  And all the while the poets praised Diane, a thousand annoyances had gathered around the queen like a swarm of flies. How dare the latest pamphlets from Paris call her sons degenerate! A sickly heir conceived during the queen’s menses, because of the advice of a quack fertility specialist, they said. What nonsense! All her children were perfect! The pamphleteers should be found and executed! The only problem with her boy, François, the Dauphin, was that his betrothed, the Queen of Scotland, was a year older and so much taller. Spoiled, that girl, and pushy. She doesn’t set him off. A few colds, that’s all that’s wrong with him. Part of his age. Growth, a better tailor, a little more Latin instruction will do everything necessary to make him the very figure of a king. Besides, a group of Italian players doing knockabout comedy, her favorite, had come to court…

  And now, her devious magician, reminding her of all that had gone wrong. “Ten thousand, a hundred thousand apologies, my great, my merciful queen,” said the worm at her feet.

  “Cosmo, you’re staining my shoe. Get off. You know she got the ring back. You deserve to be hanged.” The dwarves and the dogs prudently withdrew.

  “Oh, my beloved queen, do not withdraw the sunshine of your presence.” The rain was letting up outside. A thin ray of sun shone across the parquet floor on which the leather-clad figure lay. “Tell me how your humble Cosmo can atone. For what mighty deed do you wish my humble services?” Now he was attempting to kiss the hem of her gown, but the queen withdrew it.

  “I have asked the Duc de Nemours to throw vitriol in her face. An eyeless, faceless monster will not please the king, no matter how many rings he wears. I want you to do a reading of the stars for the proper date.”

  “A poor idea, most noble Majesty. I need no stars to tell me that. Even if the Duc de Nemours flees instantly, your connection to him will be found out.”

  “But his family is a known enemy of the Guises, her relatives.”

  ‘And he is a known friend of yours. Believe me, Madame, the walls in this place have ears. They even have little eyeholes.”

  “Cosmo—” the queen’s voice was menacing.

  “Oh, pardon, Majesty, I would never suggest for a moment—but, remember, if the king discovers you, his great love for her will make him take vengeance on you. He would not be the first King of France who had locked away a wife forever. Or he could cause your death. And I would hate that, Majesty, since it would seal my own doom. So you see, I speak only for your own good, since our interests are the same, in the end.”

  “I cannot describe the disgrace of being tied to you in this despicable way, you toad.”

  “Oh, indeed, it’s a pity, but it can’t be helped. It’s the stars that did it. Oh, curses on the day I made that ring!”

  “Curses indeed. Quit wearying me with your oceans of false tears. You did it all to cause me to increase your allowance.”

  “Me? Do that? You must think me greedy. It’s my cousin’s oldest son, his little girl needs a dowry, my sister is feeling poorly, she needs to go take the waters, my poor little godson—you see, I’m like a father to so many. The responsibilities, they’re crushing—”

  “I’m telling you here and now, Cosmo, I want my husband freed of that woman’s power. I want his love, his respect. I want the honor I am due as Queen of France. I never want to hear the phrase ‘Italian shopkeeper’s daughter’ out of that woman’s mouth again. Do it, Cosmo, or I’ll lock you up out of the sun until you wish you were dead, but haven’t got the means for it.”

  “My queen, my queen, how could you have so little faith in me? I had hesitated to tell you, but now—well, now, I must reveal a secret of power and terror to you.” At this, the queen looked interested. She cocked her head to one side, as if thinking, and Cosmo swore he could see her tongue run out at the corner of her lip. Good, safe again, he thought. How clever I was to discover Simeoni’s plan to displace me. The fool can’t even predict the coming of Saturday, and if he’d managed to keep The Master of All Desires—ah, Asmodeus! Don’t think of it—how fortunate that my servant got hold of it before it ever came into his hands. “Yes. I have come to acquire a diabolical object of profound magic, which is capable of granting all human desires but one.”

  “But one? Why not all?”

  “That one is redemption, which is not in Satan’s power to grant.”

  “Ah, indeed. I understand all now. I would sell my soul for the power to get rid of that woman. Just what is it you’ve got hold of?”

  “Well, ahem, will shortly get hold of. Have you ever, in your occult readings, seen reference to The Master of All Desires?”

  “The Master of All Desires? Well, perhaps I have. Say on, you toad.” She hasn’t, he thought. I shall dazzle her.

  “Surely, you recall the legend of Menander the Magus?”

  “Who is said to have discovered the Secret of Eternal Life?”

  “That is what they say. Nearly two thousand years old, he’d be today.”

  “Eternal life—eternal life,” mused the queen. “Then there is no hell, is there? One is free of God’s judgment—to do—anything—anything one likes—”

  “But the legend says he got infernal power by selling his soul to the Devil—”

  “Who couldn’t collect, because he was immortal. Yes, I remember that story. But what has it to do with your latest discovery?”

  “Great and magnanimous mistress, most high and puissant queen, the legend does not end there. The King of Persia found some fault in Menander, and for this, had him beheaded. My father once knew an astrologer who offered to sell him one of Menander’s very finger bones—”

  “So this is all foolishness on your part? Don’t play with me, Cosmo, I punish people who make sport of my worries.”

  “My queen, my queen, trust your poor old servant, your humble, weeping servant—”

  “Come to the point, Cosmo. What, and how much?”

  “My queen, Menander’s head was severed from its body, but it lived on. Thus Satan had his revenge for the trick he had been played. It is this living, severed head, its magical powers and secret wisdom entirely intact, which I have acquired for you.”

  “To be my slave?”

  “To grant your every wish, great queen. His powers, which are diabolical, know no limit, and his living head is condemned to serve whoever possesses it.”

  “Cosmo, if you knew about this all along, why did you never get it for me before?”

  “Your highest and most glorious Majesty, the Undying Head of Menander the Magus may grant your every wish, but from all accounts, it is not a happy object to possess.”

  “I am not a happy woman, Cosmo. Curses, damnation, or Satan, I want you to get me that head.”

  When the door had closed behind the backward bowing sorcerer, a thought occurred to the queen. If that despicable man ever gets possession of that thing, he’ll get his wishes first. Then he’ll ration out my wishes, and charge me for every one of them. That undying head is clearly not here, or he’d be boasting of having it. He must be having it sent from somewhere. I think I’ll just have him followed, and have it intercepted before it gets to him. Why, if it’s as good as he says, I’ll just wish my way free of his treachery, after I’ve dealt with the duchess.

  Seven

  “Beware the House of Guise! They will strip your children to their waistcoats and your poor subjects to their shirts.”

  King Francis I on his deathbed

  to his son and heir, Henri II

  It is time, my lords, to join the ladies.” Henri II, King of France, tall and grave, led his courtiers to the queen’s chambers. The king was a man of great courtesy and permanent gloom. A childhood spent as a hostage in a Spanish prison had left him forever joyless. Around him spun the farces, practical jokes, and intrigues of a pleasure-bent court, but he never took notice. High wit and low humor had no hold on him. Music, drink, ribaldry all passed him by. He diverted himself with hunting, combat, and his aged mistress, who reminded him vaguely of his long-dead
mother. He scheduled his days like a clock wound up by duty. No one had ever seen him laugh.

  On his left hand, slightly behind him, strode his chief advisor, the Old Constable, Anne de Montmorency, Grand Master and Constable of France, who held in addition, either within his own hands or those of his family, the Colonelcy of the French Infantry, the Admiralship of France, and the four great Governorships of Provence, Languedoc, Picardy, and the Isle of France. Square-set and gray haired, the Constable walked with the confidence of one who had known King Henri in the cradle, who had been advisor and friend to his father the great King Francis, and to whom no human treachery was surprising.

  On the king’s right walked the Old Constable’s chief rival, the Duc de Guise, head of the second great family of the realm. Tall, hard-eyed, elegant and remote, one side of his face had been smashed in by a lance, causing him to be known as “The Scar.” His permanent favor in the royal court was assured by his alliance through marriage to the king’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers, as well as by his link to the Dauphin himself through the boy’s betrothal to his niece Mary, who had inherited the crown of Scotland in her infancy. Behind The Scar walked his younger brother, Charles, the Cardinal of Lorraine, in the full red silk robes and pectoral cross of a cardinal of the Church of Rome. The Guise brothers had a great enterprise in the making: the unification of the Kingdoms of France, Scotland, and England under their power, to be followed by the purging of the Protestant heresy from all of these realms by fire, sword, and the noose.

  The cards were already in play: Mary, the girl queen of Scots, was, through her mother, the eldest sister of the Duke and the Cardinal, a Guise. But through her dead royal father, the King of Scots, Mary was a direct descendant from Henry VII of England. This made her the last legitimate Catholic heir to the throne of England once Edward, the sickly son of Henry VIII, and Mary, the childless daughter of Henry VIII’s first, Catholic queen, were dead. The English Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, was the darling of the English Protestant faction. But to the Catholic faction she was a bastard who had no claim, since Henry VIII’s divorce and remarriage to Mistress Boleyn had no standing in the Catholic Church. To the French then, the Guises’ Mary was the legitimate heiress, born to bring England back to the Catholic fold. Her uncles, the Guise brothers, dazzled the king with her claims, and the possibility that his oldest son, the Dauphin, through marriage to their niece, could be king of three realms.

  But the actual moment of the Queen of Scots’s marriage to the Dauphin would seal the Guises’ supreme power permanently. For this reason, the shrewd Old Constable, Montmorency, was doing his best to delay or undermine the wedding, for the sake of his own family.

  The Guises were patient and brilliant; they did not play for short-term gains. They had smuggled little Mary out of Scotland at six, and seen to it that for all these years she was raised with the Dauphin, and trained by Diane de Poitiers in the graces that would charm the king and control his sickly, simpleminded son. The girl herself was encouraged in uselessness, vanity, and feminine frivolity, and to turn for any serious advice to her dear uncles, the Duc and the Cardinal. Their puppets were almost in place. Someday, through Mary, they would rule. She would be queen of beauty, and they, in all but the crown, kings of France, of Scotland, and of England.

  Behind these scheming rivals and supports of the throne came a throng of courtiers, the highest lords and military commanders and landholders in the realm, dressed in satin and gold-embroidered velvet, tight silk hose with shining garters, codpieces as puffed and embroidered as their padded doublets. The Dauphin, ill-grown and bad tempered, also accompanied his father. Shorter, with goggle eyes, bulbous nose, and a receding chin that resembled his mother’s, his face was marred with great patches of angry red, and his mouth hung slightly open with adenoids. He had none of dignity of the king, whose somber, long-nosed profile gave him an air of great seriousness and gravity of purpose. Still, parents must work with what they have, and the king, now at the height of his powers, intended for his son, someday, to be an even greater king than he had been.

  “Ah, the garden of delights,” breathed the King of Navarre, first of the princes of the blood, as the courtiers entered the queen’s tapestried reception chamber. Musicians were playing in a gallery, games and food were laid out here and there on little tables. The queen herself sat on a low, cushioned chair, with a slightly grander and higher one empty at her side. The colored tile floor was covered with rare carpets and soft, embroidered silk cushions, on which the gloriously dressed ladies of the court sat around her on the floor, their bright skirts spread about them. After making their formal greetings to the queen, the gentlemen joined the little groups of women to play cards, tell stories, and hear the latest gossip and songs. The evenings with the queen were something no gentleman would willingly miss: there one could carry on flirtations, make assignations, and trade an old mistress for a new. Harmless diversion, they thought, as they looked over the ladies of honor assigned to the duchess’s and the queen’s households. Women, so light-headed, so delicious, so easy.

  But these women were pledged in loyalty either to the queen or the royal mistress, who clothed them, financed them, and ruled their lives like a pair of generals. They assigned them their lovers, controlled their affairs, and required the reporting of their pillow talk. Yet so subtle and perfumed was this rule that the gentlemen of the court never understood that they were in the hands of two rival espionage services, deployed with all the brilliance of two military commanders in the field.

  The king, with a half dozen of his lords standing behind him, joined the queen, making polite conversation with her. “My lord,” she said, trying to find a place where their disparate interests might join, “have you read this strange new book of prophecies by this Doctor Nostradamus? There are many curiosities there, about the future of the realm.”

  “I do not take political advice from soothsayers,” said the king. “That was sufficient for the pagan emperors of Rome, and led them into misery. We are fortunate to be a Christian kingdom.”

  “Still, I have here the book, and it might be considered a curiosity,” she said, showing him an open page. Slowly, the king read the verse to which she had pointed.

  Le lion jeune le vieux surmontera

  En champ bellique par singulier duel:

  Dans cage d’or les yeux lui crèvera:

  Deux classes une, puis mourir, mort cruelle.

  Behind him, the courtiers shifted. “The young lion will overcome the old in single combat—” The lion was a king, no doubt of that. Books of prophecy were quite the vogue these days, and this one was something of a scandal. There were those on the street who said this very verse prophesied the death of Henri II. Yet wasn’t prophesying a king’s death treason? “This doesn’t mean anything,” said the king. “If a man’s going to be a prophet, he should say it straight out. Look at these verses. Mixed up Latin and French, with anagrams and dialect stirred in for good measure. He just wants to be cryptic so he can claim he was right after the fact. And who can say no? Nobody can figure out a word he’s said.”

  “My Cosmo says it prophesies danger which you must avoid.”

  “Your Cosmo?” said the king, his voice scornful. “That ghastly quack magician you brought with you?”

  “The Ruggieri have served the Medici well for generations,” said the queen.

  “Ever since they took up pawnbroking and peddling,” whispered Diane de Poitiers to her little protégée, the Queen of Scots, who snickered. Catherine heard, but the only sign was a brief flicker of her eyes sideways toward the source of the comment.

  “Still, how does he propose to interpret this verse? It is far too cryptic for me,” said the Old Constable, an ally of Queen Catherine’s in the secret struggle against the Guise, trying to smooth over the situation.

  “He says that the king bears great danger of being killed in single combat. My lord, this verse has troubled me so much that I sent to the celeb
rated Guaricus in Rome to inspect your horoscope.” The king sighed. Horoscopes, diviners, cards, anything foolish and superstitious diverted his wife. That and those horrible Italian comedies everybody else laughed at. Didn’t she have any normal interests?

  “Very well, did he inspect it thoroughly?”

  “He sent this letter, which M. de l’Aubespine has put from Latin into French. He says in particular to ‘avoid all single combat in enclosed spaces, particularly around the forty-first year, because in this epoch of the king’s life, he is threatened with a head wound that will lead rapidly to blindness or death.’” The queen handed the king the translation of the letter from Italy, and the monarch’s somber gaze rested a moment on the offending passage. He was silent for a long time before he spoke, not to the queen, but with a turn of his head to the Old Constable.

  “Well, just see that, my friend, how they all predict my death,” said the king. It was said in a sardonic tone, but the Old Constable smelled the despair that lay beneath. The king did not need to be encouraged in his natural gloom and pessimism.

  “Ah, sire! Do you want to believe these boasting, lying quacks? Throw that stupid letter in the fire.”

  “My old friend,” said the king, his voice weary, “sometimes these folks tell the truth.” The King Who Never Laughed shrugged his shoulders and spoke again. “I don’t mind one kind of death more than another; but I’d prefer, no matter at whose hand I die, that the man be brave and valiant, and that the glory would be mine.”

  Oh, that damned Diane de Poitiers, thought the queen. She’s poisoned his mind with all that romantic swill from old ballads. A king should be more practical. The purpose of a good fortune is to evade danger. Why, if my cousin Ippolito had listened to his fortune-teller, he would never have been poisoned by my cousin Alessandro. And in a great court, enemies are everywhere. And look how my husband rose to the throne when his own brother, who didn’t even keep an astrologer, was poisoned! For the good of his subjects, a king should struggle against the hand of Fate by keeping many magicians, as I do. Aloud, and well aware of her audience, she said, “Sire, you are king of a mighty realm. For the sake of your people and in thought of the youth of your son, to say nothing of myself and your other children who are devoted to you, I beg you to take care of yourself in your forty-first year. It is not such a long time, and after that the prophecy of Luc Gauric does not hold.”