The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine de Medici Read online

  When I heard the pounding at the convent gate, I felt little surprise. For a moment, we women sat very still and listened to it echo off the worn cobblestone.

  Sister Antonia directed a pointed look at Mother Giustina; the abbess nodded, and Antonia rose and walked out of the refectory, her gaze guarded and avoiding mine. As she did, masculine voices at the door began to shout.

  I set down my spoon. The walls that for two and a half years had afforded protection were now a trap. I jumped up, thinking to run, knowing I could go nowhere.

  “Caterina,” Mother Giustina warned. When I gaped at her, she ordered sternly, “Go to the chapel.”

  Outside at the gate, Sister Antonia cried out, “You cannot come inside. This is a nunnery!”

  Something slammed against the door, something heavier and thicker than a human fist. Giustina was on her feet.

  “Go to the chapel,” she repeated and then ran, veil and full sleeves fluttering, to join Antonia. Halfway across the cobblestone patio, she called out to the men behind the wall, but the battering was so loud her words were lost.

  Sister Niccoletta rose and seized my arm. “Come.” She pulled me with her toward the refectory door, and suddenly we were encircled by others—Maddalena and Sister Rafaela, Barbara and Sister Antonia and Sister Lucinda—all of us moving together.

  Lisabetta and Pippa remained at the table. “They’ve come for you,” Pippa gloated. “They’ve come and God will see justice done.”

  The others engulfed me. We swept out into the corridor, past the archway that opened onto the patio, past the nuns’ cells.

  Behind us, the hammering abruptly stopped, giving way to voices calling back and forth over the wall: Mother Giustina’s, a man’s. The sounds faded as we moved deeper inside the convent, passing the scriptorum and emerging from the other end of the building. Outside, the dying light colored the clouds in sunset shades of rose and coral against a greying lilac sky.

  We crossed the walkway and entered the chapel, the candles already lit for vespers, the air hazy with frankincense. The sisters brought me to the altar railing and formed a half-moon barrier around me. I knelt trembling at the railing; Saturn weighed so heavily on me I could not breathe. I reached for the rosary on my belt and began to recite from memory but stumbled over the words. My mind was not on the beads in my hand but on the black stone over my heart; my prayers were not truly to the Virgin but to Venus, not to Jesus but to Jove.

  Giustina’s shouts filtered in through the open doors. “You commit sacrilege! She is a child, she has done no one harm . . . !”

  Bootheels hammered against stone. I turned and saw them enter: men with heads unbowed, hearts uncrossed, as though these walls were not hallowed.

  “Where is she?” one demanded. “Where is she, Caterina of the Medici?”

  I crossed myself. I rose. I turned and looked beyond the shoulders of my sisters at four soldiers armed with long swords—as if we were a danger, as if we might give fight.

  The youngest of them, all gangling limbs and nerves, had eyes as bright and wide as mine. His chin was up, his hand on his hilt. “Back away,” he told my sisters. “Back away. We must take her, by order of the Republic.”

  Niccoletta and the others stood fast and silent. The soldiers drew their swords and advanced a step. A collective sigh, and the women scattered.

  All of them, except Niccoletta. She stepped in front of me, her arms spread, her voice hard. “Do not lay a hand on this child.”

  “Move away,” the young soldier warned.

  I caught hold of Niccoletta’s arm. “Do as he says.”

  Niccoletta was stone, and the soldier so nervous, he swung his sword. The flat hit Niccoletta’s shoulder and dropped her to her knees.

  The sisters and I cried out at the same instant Niccoletta did. I knelt beside her. She was speechless, gasping in pain, but there was no blood; her spectacles were still in place.

  The other more seasoned soldiers elbowed the younger man back before he could do further harm.

  “Here now,” one said. “Don’t press us to violence in God’s house.”

  As he spoke, two more soldiers entered, followed by a dark-haired man with silver in his trimmed beard and an air of authority. He had come to take me to die.

  Mother Giustina, red-eyed and resigned, walked beside him.

  With one hand, I gestured at my white veil and raised my voice; it echoed, clear and ringing, throughout the chapel. “What sort of excommunicated fiend would enter a sanctuary to drag a bride of Christ from her convent? Would dare to drag her to her doom?”

  The commander’s eyes crinkled in amusement.

  “I dare do neither,” he said, in a tone so good-natured that it broke the spell of fear. The women, arms raised in protest, slowly lowered them; the soldiers sheathed their weapons. “I have simply come to transport you, Donna Caterina, to a safer place.”

  “This place is safe!” Mother Giustina countered.

  The commander turned to her and politely said, “Safe for her purposes, Abbess, but not the Republic’s. This is a den of Medici sympathizers.” He settled his gaze again on me. “You see that we have sufficient force to take you, Duchessa. I would sincerely prefer to use none.”

  I studied him a long moment, then lifted my fingers to Sister Niccoletta’s face and stroked it; she touched her forehead to mine and began to cry.

  “Stop,” I said softly and kissed her cheek. Her skin was powder-soft and weathered, and tasted of bitter brine.

  Ten

  The commander asked me to dispense with the habit and change into a regular gown, but I refused. He did not ask a second time. Haste was critical, and when, for the first time in two and a half years, I stepped outside Le Murate’s walls into the street, I understood why.

  Eight soldiers on horseback had fanned out in a half circle around the cloister gate. Four of them held torches; four of them brandished swords against a crowd thrice their number but steadily growing.

  As the soldiers and I passed through the gate, a man in the crowd shouted, “There she is!”

  I could not see much of the crowd beyond the men on horseback, only a leg here, an arm there, a glimpse of a face. Color fled in the wake of twilight, leaving behind black and grey.

  In the center of the group of soldiers, two men held the reins of unmounted horses and a donkey. One of them handed off his reins to the other as he caught sight of us and hurried over.

  “Commander,” he said apologetically. “I don’t know how word got out . . .”

  No, it’s her, it is! The little nun—

  The Pope’s niece—

  Pampered in a rich nunnery all this time while we starve!

  The commander’s face grew still, save for a muscle that spasmed in his cheek. He looked out at his men and said softly, “I chose you because I thought you could hold your tongues. When I learn who has done this—I care not why, I care not how—I will see him swing.”

  Death to the Medici! a woman cried.

  A hurled stone struck just inside the ring of soldiers; it skipped and clattered to a stop near my feet.

  Bastards! Traitors!

  Give her to us!

  The commander looked down at it, then back at his second. “Get her mounted,” he said. “Let’s move on before it gets worse.”

  The troops ran to their horses. The second, a large, sullen-faced man, took my elbow as if I were an unruly commoner and swung me up onto the donkey. The animal looked reproachfully back at me, showing large yellow teeth that worried the bit.

  The commander, now astride a pale grey stallion, rode up alongside me and called to his men. We began to move: the commander and I side by side, each flanked by a mounted soldier. In front of us, behind us, men rode three abreast.

  Before all the men were in formation, three street thugs dashed between the horses’ bodies; one reached for me, the tips of his fingers grazing my leg. I cried out. The commander bellowed and leaned toward him with such urgent ferocity that th
e filthy youth shrank back, and was trampled by a horse.

  Abaso le palle! someone shouted. Death to the Medici!

  The soldiers closed ranks around us, and we made our way down the broad Via Ghibellina at an earnest trot. The crowd followed us for a while, hurling curses and the occasional missile. We soon outpaced them and made our way onto a quieter thoroughfare. We passed monastery walls, cathedrals, and rich men’s houses, the windows dark because the owners had fled in the face of the siege.

  I clutched the saddle horn and slapped, stiff with dread, against the donkey’s saddle. Too late today for a public execution; it would have to wait until morning—unless a quick and private death awaited.

  The streets grew narrower. The grand estates gave way to shops and tradesmen’s houses.

  As we turned onto a broader avenue, our caravan slowed. In the near distance, black forms blocked the street. They had been waiting silently in the dark.

  “Damn you,” the commander cursed his men. “Before God, if one of you is the traitor, I’ll send you to Hell myself . . .”

  Death to the Medici, someone in the darkness said uncertainly.

  The cry erupted with fervor: Abaso le palle! Down with the balls!

  A hail of stones followed.

  Beside me, the commander reined in his stamping horse and bellowed, “This prisoner is being transported at the command of the Republic! Anyone who interferes is a traitor!”

  “You are the traitors,” a woman’s voice cried.

  She stepped forward into the torchlight, a starving wraith wrapped in filthy rags. Beneath her jutting collarbones, her torn bodice had been rolled down to expose one breast, where a weakly wailing infant refused to suckle. She glared at me, her eyes two wild black holes.

  “Medici bitch!” she roared. “You kill me, you kill my child! Your soldiers starve us, while you grow fat! You should die! You!”

  You, the crowd echoed. Death to the Medici!

  Two youths ran out of the dark to accost the soldier on my left. One grabbed his heel in the stirrup and pulled him down; the other struck him with a club. He fell sideways in the saddle, grappling with the first youth.

  “Get his sword!” someone shouted, and the crowd rushed forward.

  The commander barked orders and reined his horse in until his leg pressed against mine. The fallen soldier had managed to unsheathe his sword and held the youths at bay.

  A grizzled beggar dashed into the light, gripped the skirt of my habit, and tugged mightily; the donkey brayed and I screamed. My saddle slipped, and the world canted sideways in a frightening whirl of animal hide and swords and filthy limbs.

  My legs became tangled in the stirrups; my shoulder struck bone and flesh. I looked up in midfall and saw the beggar’s yawning grin, studded with cracked and rotting teeth, maggots in a putrid hole. I felt his hands on me and screamed again.

  Suddenly he disappeared; I kicked free from the stirrups and was guided up by strong hands onto my feet. The commander’s right arm pressed me close; his left hand brandished his sword. On the stones before us, the beggar lay bleeding. The soldiers encircled us, holding back the now-quiet crowd.

  The commander pointed the tip of his sword at the beggar’s head and thundered, “The next one who touches her, I’ll kill.” He lowered his voice. “She’s just a girl. A girl at the mercy of the same politics you poor bastards are.”

  He mounted his stallion, then gestured at his second in command, who lifted me so that the commander could pull me up into his saddle. We began to move again. The commander’s arms were on either side of me as he held the reins, and momentum pushed me back against his chest, warm and hard.

  Now and then, I caught a whiff of raw meat left too long in the sun. The commander pulled out a square of linen and handed it to me.

  “Put it over your nose and mouth,” he said. “There’s plague in this neighborhood.”

  I put it over my nose and breathed in the antiseptic fragrance of rosemary.

  “You’re still trembling,” he said. “It’s all right now. The street rabble, I won’t let them harm you.”

  I lowered the kerchief. “That’s not what I fear.”

  He grew quiet, then said softly, “We don’t know what to do with you. Were it my choice, I’d free you now. It’s only a matter of time.”

  Eager, wistful, I half turned in the saddle. “You really think I’ll be freed?”

  The same muscle in his cheek twitched. “A cruel thing for a child,” he said. “You’ve been our prisoner—how long now? Three years? With luck, you’ll outlive me, Duchessa. Me and every one of these poor bastards here.” He indicated his troops with a jerk of his chin. “Your friends outnumber ours now.”

  Hope tugged at me. “Don’t lie,” I said.

  His mouth stretched in a cynical grin. “I’ll lay you a wager that, within two months’ time, you and I will see our fortunes reversed.”

  “And what are the stakes?” I asked.

  “My life.”

  I didn’t properly understand his reply then, but I said, “Done.”

  “Done it is,” he said.

  I settled against him. Whether he had lied or not, he had put my mind at ease.

  “For our wager,” I said lightly, looking out at the shopfronts and walls as the torches’ yellow glow swept over them, “if you lose, whose head shall I ask for?”

  The instant he opened his mouth, I knew what he would say.

  “Silvestro,” he said. “Silvestro Aldobrandini, a humble soldier of the Republic.”

  I thought of my mother’s letter, lying beneath my pillow at Le Murate, forever lost.

  Our party encountered no more challenges, and we made our way quickly to the northern quarter of San Giovanni. Once there, we turned onto the narrow Via San Gallo and came to a cloister wall, behind which Sister Violetta was waiting to receive me.

  It was the convent of Santa-Caterina, where I had spent the first months of my captivity. Ser Silvestro had seen me safely returned.

  Eleven

  As she closed the wooden gate on Ser Silvestro, Sister Violetta received me as she had before, finger to lips. Her lantern revealed the toll the past three years had taken; she was even gaunter now. She turned and led me upstairs to my old cell. A young woman with pale golden hair sat on the straw mattress; when the glow of the lantern found her, she lifted a thin arm and squinted at the light. Like Violetta’s, her face bore the pinched look of the hungry, but hers was growing into womanly beauty.

  “Tommasa?” I asked.

  She let go a gasp of recognition and embraced me as Sister Violetta again signaled for silence, then turned and disappeared down the corridor.

  Tommasa broke the silence as soon as Violetta’s footsteps faded. “Caterina!” she hissed. “Why did they bring you back? Where have you been?”

  I took in the filthy straw mattress, the stink of the sewer, and slowly sat down on the edge of the bed. Back at Le Murate, Sister Niccoletta was surely weeping, and I wanted to weep, too. I shook my head, too heavyhearted to speak.

  Tommasa was too lonely to be silent. Most of the sisters and all of the boarders had succumbed to plague, she told me, and because of the siege, the convent’s larders were almost bare.

  I lay awake all that night on the hard, lumpy straw, listening to Tommasa’s soft snores. All the while, I thought of Sister Niccoletta and Mother Giustina, and the life I had lost at Le Murate.

  When morning came, I learned the new terms of my imprisonment: I was not to do chores, nor eat in the refectory, nor attend chapel. I was to remain day and night in my cell.

  A miserable fortnight passed. There were no books at Santa-Caterina, and my requests for mending to pass the time were ignored. I lost weight on watery gruel. My only distraction was Tommasa, who returned in the evenings.

  One hot August morning, the cannon started booming again, so loudly the floor vibrated beneath my feet. Sister Violetta, hollow-eyed with fear, appeared in the corridor outside to confer with my guardi
an nun. After several concerned glances in my direction, Violetta stepped forward and shut the door to my cell. Had there been a bolt or lock, she would have used it. From that point on, the door remained closed. Tommasa did not return, and I spent the night alone on scratchy, sour-smelling straw, vacillating between hope and terror.

  The next morning, I woke again to the thunder of cannon; the merciless assault against Florence’s walls had begun. My guardian sister failed to bring food. When night fell, the fighting and the cannon ceased.

  On the second day, there were only the cannon, closer than ever; on third morning, I woke to silence. I got out of bed and knocked on the door. No one responded; as I caught the handle of the door, a bell began to toll.

  It was not a church bell marking the hour or summoning the faithful to prayer. It was the low, sad chime of the Cow—the bell in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria, the Palace of Lords, the bell that called all citizens to the town’s central square.

  Overwhelmed by joy, I threw open the door to glimpse my captor disappearing swiftly down the hallway. I followed. We came upon other sisters, all rushing to the patio beside the convent wall. From there they ascended a steep staircase built into the side of the convent. I elbowed my way up the stairs to the slanting roof, dizzyingly free and open to the sky and the city; I spread my bare arms to the breeze. Florence sprawled out around me, her walls surrounded by rolling hills, once green but now dark earth, raw from the tread of enemy boots and the wheels of artillery.

  On roofs throughout the city, people were gathering. Some were pointing to the south, beyond the river, at Florence’s walls and their most ancient gate, the Porta Romana. There, just inside the city walls, huge white flags billowed as they slowly neared the gate. Soon they would pass outside, to the waiting enemy.

  Down below, people swarmed into the streets; beside me, the nuns sobbed openly. Their hearts were broken, but mine was sailing on the wind with the flags.

  Overcome, Sister Violetta sank onto her knees and stared out at the swelling white harbingers of defeat.