Marvelous, p.16
Marvelous, page 16
The woman has her by the arm before Catherine understands what is happening, is tugging her, stumbling, from the bed. Her hip bumps a table, the midwife’s fingers dig bruises into her flesh, and Catherine says, all baffled, “What? What?”
The midwife’s other hand comes up, cupping itself over Catherine’s mouth. “Hush, Madame,” she says, and even in the darkness, Catherine can see that the other woman’s eyes are wide, fear showing in all the white. They are silent for a moment, Catherine breathing in the sweat of the midwife’s palm, lipping as she gasps at the mound under the thumb. And then she hears it—the tolling of bells, the shouting of men, cries like those pigs make when they are butchered. Thought disappears from Catherine’s head; she clutches at the midwife, heedless, now, of the other woman’s hairy arms. The midwife takes her hand away from Catherine’s mouth.
“Who—what—?” Catherine whispers, and the midwife shakes her head.
“It’s got to be the Huguenots, no? They say the king should never have opened the city gates to them. He invited our doom right into this place.”
“Oh, God,” Catherine moans, and tucks her arms around herself, around the babe who is turning merrily within her. Her throat tastes suddenly sour, as if she has already been sick. Oh, God—
“They know nothing of God,” the midwife says, and Catherine sees a silver flash, a knife from the woman’s kit. “Heretics, heretics—”
They are going to die. Another scream rends its way down the corridor, and the sound of thudding. Behind Catherine, the midwife has dropped to her knees, prayers spilling from her mouth like vomit, the slim silver knife caught between her fervent palms. “Our Father, Who art in Heaven . . .”
Her prayers sound like nothing, nothing; for the first time in her life, Catherine cannot feel the weight of the familiar holy words. Instead, she feels the walls threatening to collapse around her; feels each shout from beyond the closed door like a blow to her own body; feels her child, her child, the weight of it, pressing down, grinding inside her pelvis, a foot or a fist pushing upward into her ribs as if trying to punch its way to safety. She will never see her child’s face, she thinks with sudden, terrible certainty, a hollowness under her breasts, a fullness inside her throat. This babe, whose welfare she has tried so hard to protect, sheltering it within her own body, doing her best to keep her thoughts pure—it has all been for nothing.
“ . . . forgive us our trespasses . . .”
Another shout, furious, murderous, and Catherine flinches, tears stinging the outside corners of her eyes.
“ . . . deliver us from evil . . .”
“No,” Catherine says, the word coming from her belly. Her child speaking through her. “No.” She turns this way, that way, seeking something to do, and her eyes alight upon the trunk pushed up against the wall near the covered-over window, across the room from the vulnerable door. She is bending toward it before the thought is fully formed, her belly changing shape as the babe sloshes forward, a sharp pinching at the base of her spine as she begins to shove. An animal growl coming up from her throat as she heaves the heavy trunk across the floor.
Chapter 27
Pedro
Petrus’s sword has come into his hand somehow, and prayers have come into his mouth, though he could not say to whom he is praying, only that he is. There is a rush and thud of footsteps in the corridor outside, voices much nearer than those that have been screaming. Someone cries, “To me!”
Petrus huddles back against the wall, clutching his sword. He has never used it in any real sense, only for spectacle’s sake; never has he wielded it with the intension of carving through skin and muscle, catching on bone. His back is sweating, his breath coming in frantic gusts, terror rattling his ribs. He has not felt the like since the hands, and the ship, and the selling of him. He knows that he should push himself away from the wall, out from behind the bed, and seek out the screamers to defend them, whomever they are. But his muscles have hardened and will not move except to hunch his shoulders around his ears, to rock his body back and forth as he prays, the tip of his sword scraping the floor in time to his movements. There will be scratches there in the aftermath, like claw marks, as if a beast were trapped and terrified in this room, trying with no success to pare away fear with its scrabbling, to leave the clean lines of rational thought in its place.
Is it the Huguenots attacking, as some of the courtiers feared they would? There was meant to be peace in Paris for this wedding, a cessation of bloodshed, but no matter who is responsible for whatever is happening beyond his chamber door, it is clear the fragile peace is ended, torn to ribbons, stomped upon.
Scratch, scratch, scratch goes his sword point.
Another scream, this one high, a sound like a fox. A woman’s voice. And all at once, Petrus’s head fills with shoving, clamorous thoughts. Isabel’s family, slashed, felled, stolen. The bars of the cage, immovable as he shook them. His wife, grown big because of him.
The fox’s cry comes again, more weakly now. The sword scrapes the floor again, this time as Petrus rises, gathering the flayed strips of his courage about him, feet taking him to the door, and then out—out—
The corridors are full of shadows, thickets of torchlight jouncing somewhere ahead of him. Petrus clings to the wall, his sword arm trembling, his heart a hammer in his throat. The familiar palace corridors are turned unfamiliar by the sounds echoing along them. War cries, that is the only word for them, carrying so strangely that they seem to be coming from every direction at once, closing in upon him. The shadows flicker and dance and fall away, leaving him in near-darkness.
He knows the way to his wife’s room. It is not so far—just down here, only his bare toes touching the floors as he moves, and then around this corner—a quick look finds only more darkness.
There is something up ahead, a shape, darker than the darkness. Petrus approaches, toes now curling painfully. One step, two, three—
It is a man, not one he knows by sight. Slouched nearly to the floor, his legs spread and crooked. In the dark, all Petrus can make out are the eyes, half-lidded. The man is still, with a stillness that makes Petrus’s skin curl in more tightly around his muscles. He lets out a short huff of breath and does not stop, for he is nearly there, nearly to his wife’s door, though the corridor seems to shift around him, stones rearranging themselves, making him doubt his own recollection of the distance from his chamber to hers. He is moving faster now, running, each foot scarcely making contact with the floor before it is off again, moving up and forward.
When he reaches the door, he still does not stop moving, hurtles himself against it, a shock of pain along his arm and neck and shoulder. He hears a cry from inside, and all he knows is relief—she is there, she is alive—and he shoves again, but the door moves only a fraction, the tiniest of spaces appearing between it and the wall. He pants, peering in through the narrow cleft, and finds an eye peering back, as near to his own as if they lay in their wide bed together, whispering secrets in the night.
“It is I,” he says, and through the crack hears a sound that might be a sob or a laugh.
“The trunk,” his wife says a moment later. “I moved the trunk, and now I cannot shift it. Here—quick”—this to someone else, someone inside the room with her—“help me, help me—!”
Petrus pushes from his side, and they tug from theirs, and the door inches open, bit by bit, until there is a gap wide enough for him to slip through. He half-trips over the trunk when he is in, and drops his sword, turning immediately to close the door behind him, pushing hard so that the trunk slides back into place against it. His body is made of water, and when he turns she is looking at him—and then away, as is her usual habit—and then back, quick flitting glances, and he wonders if she can see the puddling of his flesh on the floor beneath him, every once-solid bit of him melting with each noise from beyond the barred door, each flash of memory, the too-still man huddled in the corridor, the torchlight dancing away from him as if with a terrible joy.
Chapter 28
Catherine
They sit together on the floor behind the bed, and though Catherine’s eyes still slide off of him like shoes over the slickness of ice, she lets their sides press. “What is happening?” she asks him, but he shakes his head.
The midwife is on her knees, endlessly praying, and Catherine cannot even make out the words now, ears filled with her own heartbeat. Her husband is silent. He is dressed only in his shirt, open at the throat, his legs bare. His sword rests across his lap, the tip angled away from Catherine’s body; she fixes her eyes on the point of it and thinks of the day he bested Nevers, his sword hooking itself around the other man’s, the swift end to their bout.
They wait and they wait. It must, she thinks, be after dawn by now, this endless night at an end—but the tapestry is still spread wide across the window, and none of them move to take it down, as if fearful of what they might find outside. At some point Catherine looks down and is mildly surprised to see that her fingers have entangled themselves with his, tree roots clutching, keeping one another upright on the earth. His hold is so tight that the tips of her fingers are bloodless.
Despite the creak of fear, she eventually sleeps, drifting uneasily, eyes opening now and again to find that the midwife has gone silent, her lips pressed closed.
Chapter 29
Pedro
It is Ludovico who comes to them, though it is so long before he does that Petrus has tried twice to leave the room only to have Catherine clutch at his hand. After hours of stillness, of clenched muscles and waiting for the worst, for the door to be battered down, the trunk shoved away, his swordsmanship put to the test to defend his family—his family! Despite the fear-sweat that still dampens his armpits, the trembling of his fingers, he feels the need to move.
The palace has grown quiet, but now there are noises from outside; it sounds as if the city of Paris is pulling itself apart. His wife, again awake, is biting her lip, a little blood running under the edge of her tooth. In his hand, hers has grown damp and limp, but she has not released him.
The knocking at the door makes all three people in the room sit tall, their heartbeats rapping a half beat faster. Petrus drags himself upward, ignoring the silent, frantic shaking of his wife’s head. He holds his sword and steps to the door, places his palm against the wood as if he might somehow, in that way, discern the identity and intent of the person on the other side.
“Friend,” comes a familiar voice, and Petrus sags. He drops his sword upon the floor with a sound like a struck bell, and pushes at the trunk to move it. Then his hand is on the door latch, and the door is open, and Ludovico is standing there, half-smiling. There is a crust of red across his cheekbone, a spray of blood.
“I looked for you in your chamber, but I should have known to seek you here,” he says. Looking over Petrus’s shoulder, he says to Catherine, “I am glad you are unharmed, Madame.”
Petrus’s wife, in her chemise and nothing else, nods stiffly, even as she edges away, looking for a wrap.
“What is happening?” Petrus says, and Ludovico looks back at him. He shifts, beckoning Petrus into the corridor; Petrus follows after telling his wife he will return in a moment. Her face is pale as snow as he closes the door.
“It was . . . an attack. On the Huguenot leaders. Coligny is dead,” Ludovico says, naming the Protestant leader who, only days earlier, survived the assassination attempt. “So are most of the others.”
Petrus is silent, stones filling his belly one by one and leaving no room for anything else.
“They would have attacked us,” Ludovico says, strangely fierce. “Do you not see that? They blamed us for the attempt on their leader’s life.”
The stones pile higher, threatening his heart. “And so we forestalled them by . . . completing the thing at which we—at which someone—failed before.” We, he says without thought, though once spoken the word has the feeling of rough cloth. Of untruth.
But it seems to calm whatever excited Ludovico a moment ago. “They are not a danger now.”
Almost, he asks who gave the order that set this butchery in motion. His mind fills with the image of the still man in the darkened corridor. Instead, he says, “But—what is happening?” For he has heard the sounds from the city, loud enough to carry through stone, through the tapestry slung over his wife’s window.
Now Ludovico swallows, his eyes flitting. “Ah, well. There has been—that is to say, men will sometimes take matters into their own hands, and this has been brewing for many years. The, ah, fury with the Huguenots has spread beyond even their leaders. The city is . . .” He shakes his head, and Petrus feels his throat closing off, stones stuffing it so fully that he could not ask his friend what his part was in this even if he was sure he wished to know the answer.
He returns to his own chamber, dresses swiftly. It is the work of a few moments to discover that the dead are mostly Protestant. To his surprise, the Huguenot prince who wed the Princess Marguerite survived, though his men did not. Already, the court runs with rumors: the princess shielded her husband with her own body when the assassins came; the prince has sworn he will convert to Catholicism. An official call ordering the end of the bloodshed has been issued; but still, the city seethes. The Huguenot leaders might have been the first to be killed, drawn to their doom by the lure of the wedding, of one of their own being joined to the royal family. But after the leaders fell, the Catholics’ eyes turned to other Huguenots, pillaging their homes, their shops. Unspeakable things done to the people within, with no care given for whether they were young men or old, or not men at all but women—old women, young women, breeding women—or children.
Petrus watches from his window, stomach sickening, as servants scrub the stones of the palace courtyard clean of blood. He thinks of his wife, her distended belly slit open to reveal the ropes of her insides, the tiny being curled within. Outside the palace, the rumors say, so many bodies have been tossed into the Seine that the river runs red.
When he returns to his wife’s chamber, it is with a lie on his tongue, his thoughts with the swelling of her body, the understanding that further disquiet might harm the babe she harbors. All is well, he tells her. A scuffle, only, between the Catholics and Huguenots. But all is now well.
Even as he speaks, the butchery spreads outward in rings. Thousands of souls will ultimately be lost in Paris, most of them Protestant, their only crime worshiping God in the wrong way. And in the days that follow, Petrus’s lips move with near-fervency at Mass, that he might not be mistaken for a heretic. During those days, he cannot look into the faces of the people around him for fear he will see the truth of their involvement in the slaughter. During those days, he hardly sleeps, hardly breathes, waiting for the torch, the shouts, the stones to turn upon him.
Chapter 30
Catherine
In the week after that terrible night, Catherine waits and waits for something worse to happen; but it does not. She remains padded inside her room. And yet, when twinges spark along the sides of her belly, across the meat of her lower back, she finds herself pausing where she stands, saying, “No!” with such firmness that the nips of pain subside. She must wait, she thinks, until she is certain it is safe before she brings this child into the world.
At night, she finds herself thinking of her husband. How he came to her, nearly naked, only a shirt for armor. How she woke from her doze to her cheek pressed against the hard knob of his shoulder. She shakes her head to stop these thoughts, as if in doing so she might shake off the influence of his hairy-handed touch; but still they return, shuffling in like rueful children who know they are doing something naughty. When she finally sleeps, the midwife snoring on the floor beyond her bed curtains, Catherine dreams of the queen.
Her Majesty is hunched and weeping, her black gown and veil painted all the colors of the bright glass windows of the chapel. In life, she is so formidable a figure that it is strange to see her so diminished, her spine bending into the shrimp-like curl of old age.
Catherine approaches this dream-queen hesitantly. She can see only in chinks, the edges of her vision dark, as if something sits there, blocking them. Her footsteps make no sound upon the stone church floor, and the air is humid with patient anticipation. Only when she draws close to the queen does she realize that someone sits beside her, someone round and sturdy who cradles a swaddled child in the thick, hair-covered arms that the queen herself chose to deliver Catherine’s babe.
Catherine stumbles back and tries to cry out, but her voice will not come. And she realizes she holds in her mouth a small, round bead, attached by a short span of ribbon to the mask that keeps the sun from her face and the air from her lungs. Something squeezes her, starting slow but steadily gripping tighter until Catherine’s knees buckle.
Her Majesty turns, smiling through her tears. “Saturn will rule you during the birth,” she says; and now her smile is a frozen thing, as if she set it down upon her face and forgot it there.
No, Catherine tries to say; but something is crushing her, and the bead is in her mouth and she cannot spit it out, however she tries.
She wakes to the midwife’s brisk and gentle hands, swimming up from the depths of her dream and into wakefulness, gasping like a drowned woman brought to the surface. But no—she cannot be awake—whatever was crushing her is still there. When she tries to wriggle away from it, it squeezes impossibly tighter until Catherine thinks her spine might snap.
Chapter 31
Catherine
It was Maman’s beauty that bought her a wealthy merchant husband, and she guarded it as carefully as if it were a pirate’s trove.
