The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine de Medici Page 6

  She leaned out the door and shouted, “Out of the city, quickly! I’ll tell you then where we’re going!”

  She fell back against the seat and stared down at her injured wrist as if astonished that it had not betrayed her. Then she stared up at the dirty wooden interior; unlike me, she made no attempt to look back at the home she was leaving.

  “We’ll go to Naples,” she said, “to my mother’s family. But not today. They’ll expect us to go there.” Shivering but unshaken, defeated but indomitable, she turned her fierce gaze on me. “The Orsini will help us. This is not the end, you know. The Medici will retake Florence. We always do.”

  I looked away. In the beginning, I had not wanted to take the knife, but it had drawn me like the darkness in Cosimo Ruggieri’s eyes. Now I stared down at the palm that had wielded the blade and saw that same darkness in me. I had told myself that I did it for the House of Medici; in truth, I had done it because I was curious, because I had wanted to see what it was like to kill a man.

  Like Lorenzo, I learned early that I was capable of murder. And I was terrified to think where that capability might lead.

  Five

  Poggio means hill, and the villa my great-grandfather built at Poggio a Caiano rests atop a sprawling grassy prominence in the Tuscan countryside, three hours from the city. The home Lorenzo obtained in 1479 had been a plain, three-storied square with a red tile roof, but in il Magnifico’s hands, it became much more. He encased the ground floor by a portico with several graceful arches that opened onto the front courtyard. A staircase originated on either side of the central arch and the two curved upward to meet at the grand middle-floor entrance, where a triangular pediment rested atop six great columns in the style of a Greek temple. The structure stood majestic and alone, surrounded by gentle hills and streams and the nearby Albano mountains.

  No one would think to look for us there, Aunt Clarice explained, as it lay northwest of the city, and the rebels would be searching all the roads leading south. We would spend the night there, during which she would formulate a plan that would eventually take us safely to Naples.

  We rolled through the open gates, coughing from the dust, and tumbled barefoot and disheveled from the carriage to be met by a dumbstruck gardener. Exhausted though we were, our nerves would not let us rest or eat. Her gaze distant, her mind working, my aunt paced through the formal, painstakingly groomed gardens while I dashed ahead of her in an effort to tire myself. Dove-colored clouds gathered overhead; the breeze grew cool and smelled of rain. I thought of the astonishment and reproach in the stableboy’s eyes. I had learned a fundamental truth about killing: The victim’s anguish is brief and fleeting, but the murderer’s endures forever.

  I ran and ran that afternoon, but never succeeded in leaving the stableboy behind. Clarice never spoke to me of him; I honestly believe that she, lost in her efforts to transform a bleak future, had already forgotten him.

  When evening came, my aunt and I shared a supper of greasy soup, then went upstairs. Clarice undressed me herself. When she undid the laces on my bodice, the smooth black stone hidden there dropped to the marble floor with a click, and the battered bit of herb followed mutely. I bent to pick them up, bracing for angry words.

  “Did Ser Cosimo give you those?” my aunt asked softly.

  I nodded, flushing.

  Clarice nodded, too, slowly. “Keep them safe, then,” she said.

  She sent me to bed while she sat just outside, in the antechamber, and laboriously penned letters by lamplight. I put the herb and gem beneath my pillow and fell asleep to the halting scratch of her quill against the paper.

  Some time later, I was awakened by a wooden bang; an early summer storm had ridden in on a cold wind. A servant girl hurried into the room and closed the offending shutters to keep out the rain. I stared at the antechamber wall, where Aunt Clarice’s shadow loomed and receded as the flame danced, and listened to the shutters’ muted complaint.

  My sleep, when it finally came, was troubled by dreams—not of images but of sounds: of Clarice screaming for men to let go of her skirts, of horses neighing, of rebels chanting for our downfall. I dreamt of hoofbeats and the pounding of rain, of men’s voices and the faraway roll of thunder.

  Consciousness returned like a lightning strike; with a start, I realized that the drum of hoofbeats, the strident cadence of Clarice’s voice, and the lower one of men’s were not part of any dream.

  I pushed myself from bed and hurried to the shuttered window. It was low enough that I could look out easily—but the shutters were latched, and I too short to reach them. I looked about for a chair, and in that instant the door opened and a servant entered. She was not much older than I, but she was tall enough to unfasten the shutters at my impatient command and open them, then step back, her eyes enormous with fright.

  I stared out. On the vast, downward-sloping lawn, two dozen men sat on horseback in four militarily precise rows, sheathed swords at their hips.

  In that instant, my faith in Ruggieri’s magic crumbled. The Wing of Corvus was at best a harmless piece of jet. I would never grow up to rule; I would never grow up at all. I backed away from the window.

  “Where is she?” I whispered to the girl.

  “Madonna Clarice? At the front door, talking to two men. They told me to fetch you.

  “She is so angry with them,” the girl continued. “She did not want them to wake you. She is swearing at them so, she will surely provoke them—” She pressed her hand to her mouth as if she was going to be sick, then forced herself to calm. “Last night, she summoned me and said that, if anything happened to her, I was to see you safely to her mother’s people.” She glanced nervously at the door. “They will come looking for you, if we don’t appear soon. But . . .”

  I lifted my brows questioningly.

  “But we could leave by the servants’ stairs,” she continued. “They wouldn’t see us. There are places to hide here. I think Madonna Clarice would want that.”

  I expected Clarice did want that, and that she knew if I did not appear, the rebels would torture her in the hope of learning my whereabouts; they might well kill her. Escape seemed possible but unlikely—but my disappearance would undeniably put Clarice in terrible danger. Weighing this, I moved slowly to the bed, reached beneath the pillow, and found the hidden stone. I stared at its glassy surface, a black mirror in my palm, and saw my aunt reflected there:

  Aunt Clarice, lifting me up to touch Lorenzo’s childish face. Clarice, lifting me out of the rebels’ reach, even as they tried to tear her apart. Clarice, who could well have departed with her husband and children, leaving us heirs in rebel hands. But like her grandfather, she did not abandon those of her blood, no matter how fatally afflicted.

  I placed the worthless gem upon the pillow, then pulled off the silver talisman, on its leather cord, and coiled it beside the stone. Then I looked up at the servant.

  “Get my gown, please,” I said. “I will be going down to meet them.”

  PART III

  Imprisonment

  May 1527–August 1530

  Six

  Images from that day are etched clearly in my memory: the long walk down the stairs, the sight of Clarice in the vestibule, a shawl tossed over her shoulders to hide the fact that a swath had been torn from the back of her gold gown. Her wrist—resting now in a sling—had left her pale with agony. Although the man she spoke to was more than a head taller and flanked by two aides of similar height, she seemed larger than them all. Gesturing sharply with her free hand, she railed as fearlessly at him as she had at Passerini the morning he came to tell her Pope Clement had been routed.

  As I moved down the stairs, the man listening to her glanced up. He was intense and very quiet, and made me remember something Piero had once said, that a dog who did not bark was far more likely to bite. His hair and beard and eyes matched his new brown cloak. He was Bernardo Rinuccini, head of the rebel militia.

  I remember how his eyes grew rounded at the s
ight of me, how Aunt Clarice’s mouth fell open as she glanced over her shoulder, stricken and profoundly speechless.

  “Promise me you won’t hurt her,” I told the general, “and I will go with you.”

  Rinuccini stared down at me. “I have no reason to hurt her.”

  “Promise me,” I repeated, gazing steadily at him.

  “I promise,” he said.

  I walked past Clarice to Rinuccini’s side; there was horror in her eyes as she watched me slip irrevocably from her care. But the greater horror was mine, to glimpse the proud spirit behind those eyes and to mark the instant it broke.

  They led me away. When I appeared in the doorway, the troops waiting on the lawn cheered. I moved quickly so that they had no cause to touch me, not until I was lifted up onto a horse and into the lap of a well-born soldier. He wore not a sword but a weapon I had never seen before: an arquebus, a contraption of wood and metal designed to blast balls of lead into distant victims, like a miniature cannon one might hold in one’s hand. He regarded me with victory and loathing; never was a trophy more scorned or prized.

  The ascending sun coaxed the previous night’s rain from the earth; the horses moved through low swirls of mist as we rode across the quiet countryside. Numbed by the enormity of my decision, I rode in mindless dread, my back pressed to my guardian’s chest.

  By midmorning we had returned to the city. We headed not south to the great Piazza della Signoria and the gallows but north. As the streets were busy, we attracted much attention, but most failed to notice a little girl huddled against one of the soldiers; by the time a few had, we had already passed, and their faint curses, like stones hurled from too great a distance, did not frighten me.

  Our procession turned onto an unfamiliar street lined with stone walls. They were thick and high, unbroken save for three narrow doors at long intervals.

  We stopped at one of the doors. Set into it were two iron grates, one at eye level, behind which a black cloth had been hung, and an uncovered one at foot level.

  An aide dismounted and called at the covered grate, while another soldier swung me down from the horse. The door opened inward, an aide pushed me inside, and someone quickly shut the door behind me.

  I stumbled forward onto a stone patio that lay in the shadow of a large building and glanced up at the woman who faced me. She was worn and colorless and dressed in black but for the white wimple beneath her long veil. She put her finger to her lips for silence, so emphatically that I followed her without a word into the building, which was as plain and aged and soundless as she. She led me up two flights of narrow stairs, then past a long row of cells, before depositing me in a tiny room, with a bed pushed against the wall opposite the window and two chairs.

  The latter were occupied by two young women clad in shabby brown dresses. They dropped their mending after making the same gesture, finger to lips, before they hurried to me.

  Clumsily, they began to remove my gown. I doubt they had ever seen anything as fine, for they didn’t understand how to unlace the sleeves, but at last my gown slipped free and I stepped out of it into an uncertain future.

  Seven

  On one of Florence’s most oppressively narrow streets lies the Dominican convent known as Santa-Caterina da Siena. The convent’s denizens fiercely opposed the Medici and supported the rebels, no doubt because it catered to the poor. Its six boarders—girls of marriageable age or younger, from families who had discovered that it was cheaper to keep them at the convent—were born of the lowest class of workers: the dyers, weavers, and carders of wool and silk, men whose occupations stained their hands, twisted their bodies, scarred their lungs. These were men who fell sick and died young, leaving behind daughters who could not be fed. These were men who had torn down our Medici banners and ignited them out of hatred for the rich and well-fed.

  Santa-Caterina stank because its ancient plumbing and sewers were in disrepair. Nuns were always on their knees scrubbing floors and walls, but no amount of cleaning overcame the smell. The inhabitants were all thin and hungry. There were no Latin lessons here, no efforts made to teach the girls letters or numbers, only work to be done. The abbess, Sister Violetta, had no energy to like or dislike me; she was too busy trying to keep her charges alive to worry about politics. She knew only that the rebels paid for my care on time.

  I shared a cell—and a dirty straw mattress alive with fleas and a family of mice—with four other boarders, all of them older than I. One of them hated me bitterly, as her brother had been killed in a clash with Medici supporters. Two of them did not much care. And then there was twelve-year-old Tommasa.

  Tommasa’s father was a silk merchant whose mounting debts had prompted him to flee the city, leaving his wife and children to deal with his creditors. Tommasa’s mother was sickly; Tommasa, too, was frail and suffered from frightening bouts of wheezing and breathlessness, especially when she over-exerted herself. She had the long, thin bones and delicate coloring of a Northerner: pale hair, white skin, eyes blue as sky. Yet she worked as hard as the others without complaint, and her lips were always curved in the gentlest of smiles.

  She treated me as a friend, even though her brothers were passionate advocates of the rebel cause, so much so that Tommasa never mentioned me to them.

  Tommasa was my sole link to the world beyond Santa-Caterina’s walls. Her mother visited weekly and always brought news. I learned how the Medici palazzo had been pillaged, how its remaining treasures had been seized by the new government. All the banners bearing the Medici crest had been torn down, and all sculptures and buildings bearing the same had been crudely edited with chisels.

  I asked about Aunt Clarice, of course, and tried not to cry when Tommasa told me she was still alive, though no one knew where she had gone. Ippolito’s and Alessandro’s whereabouts were also a mystery.

  When I commented on Tommasa’s kindness to me, she was taken aback.

  “Why should I treat you otherwise?” she asked. “They say your family has oppressed the people, but you are kind to me and the others. I can’t punish you for something others have done.”

  I loved her for the same reason I had loved Piero, because she was too good to glimpse the blackness hidden in my heart.

  I spent a dismal summer fearing execution and hoping for news. Neither came, and by the time autumn arrived, I dwelled in a haze of hunger and grief. I lost will and weight and stopped asking questions of Tommasa as she relayed the latest gossip.

  Winter came and brought an icy chill. Our room had no hearth and was freezing; I never stopped shivering. The water froze in the tiny basin we five shared, but we were too cold to bathe anyway. The fleas guaranteed that, if I slept at all, it was poorly. The cold never eased but grew more bitter.

  One morning in late December, I headed with the other girls to the refectory. As we passed by a cell, a pair of nuns were carrying out a third. The last was completely rigid, and her sisters had lifted only her head and feet, as if she were a plank of wood. The two nuns glanced up at us, their forbidding gazes intended to silence all questions.

  As they passed, Tommasa quickly crossed herself, and rest of us followed suit. We held our tongues and our places until they had disappeared down the corridor.

  “Did you see that?” Lionarda, the oldest girl, hissed.

  “Dead,” one of the others said.

  “Frozen,” I said. But at the refectory, as we were waiting to have our bowls filled, one of the novices in front of us fainted and was taken away. I thought little of it: I swept floors and patched worn habits, unflinching when I pricked my chill-numbed fingers with the needle. I didn’t worry until that evening at vespers, when I noticed that the chapel was only half full.

  I whispered to Tommasa, “Where are the other sisters?”

  “Taken sick,” she answered. “Some sort of fever.”

  That night, I counted five separate times that the nuns hurried up and down the corridor. In the morning, four of us rose from the mattress. Lionarda did not.


  Her breath hung as white vapor in the frigid air above her face; despite the cold, her forehead shone with sweat. One of the other girls tried to wake her, but neither shouting nor shaking could make her open her eyes. We called for the nuns, but no one came; the cells near ours were empty.

  Tommasa and I stayed with Lionarda and sent the other two girls to get help. Half an hour later, a novice came in her white veil and black apron. Silently—for it was during an hour the nuns did not speak—she slipped her hands beneath Lionarda’s nightgown and ran them swiftly over her neck, collarbone, armpits. She then reached under the gown to feel the area around Lionarda’s groin and drew back with a spasm of fear.

  She lifted up a corner of the nightgown to reveal a lump the size of a goose egg at the top of the girl’s thigh, encircled by a dark purple ring, like a perfectly concentric bruise.

  “What is it?” Tommasa breathed.

  The novice mouthed an answer. I looked up too late to see it, but Tommasa gasped and lifted her hand to her throat.

  “What is it?” I echoed, directing the question at Tommasa.

  She turned toward me, her eyes and nose streaming from the cold, and whispered:

  “Plague.”

  After they carried Lionarda away, Tommasa and I went to the refectory for the morning meal, then headed to the common room. Sister Violetta normally assigned us our chores there at that time. But the room had become a hospital, with a score of women lying on the floor—some groaning, some ominously quiet. An elderly sister intercepted us at the doorway and gestured for us to return to our cell. There we found the other two boarders, Serena and Constantina, sewing shrouds.

  “What happened to Lionarda?” Serena demanded, and when I explained, she said, “Half the sisters were missing from the refectory this morning. It’s plague, all right.”