Marvelous, p.32
Marvelous, page 32
Ercole is gone, his sweet, small body shrouded and taken from her; Madeleine is married and living in the fine house gifted to her and her new husband by the duke. Henri is with the cardinal, touring the vast lands controlled by the Farnese. It is only Catherine and Petrus and Antoinette in the house in the garden now, among the bees and the leopards and the visitors who are all eager to be astonished, to exclaim; and Petrus is far away, deep in his own head, his own misery, from which Catherine cannot seem to draw him. It is a cloud, gray and damp and shutting out all joy, this thing that seems to cling to him. And Catherine, trying to rouse him from his sad stupor, to tempt him with a morsel he might enjoy or with talk of Madeleine’s happiness, finds her chest feeling tight, her spine aching as if ropes are twisting around her, tighter and tighter. Soon they will have wrapped themselves down over her hands; soon they will stick her legs together. Soon they will strangle her throat and then up over her mouth, her nose, if she does not tear herself free, if she does not speak, if she does not start screaming. For she, too, has lost her son—her boy, her boy—and not just Ercole himself, but all the possibilities his life might have held.
Petrus told the children stories, sometimes, stories that he said had been passed down from the ancients, the scholars of the world. Stories of philandering gods and spiteful goddesses. Tales of wisdom and foolishness. Of Pan, the half-goat god, the tripping rhythm of his hoofed hind feet, the merry sailing notes of his piping.
(Some gods, he said, a hand touching their children’s cheeks, their backs, some gods used to look like us.)
And, too, he told them the story of Hercules—the strong, the bold, who killed the Hydra with its nine heads and wrestled even death itself. Hercules—Ercole, in the Italian. It was this name that they gave to their child, the child they have lost, whose final exhalation Catherine still hears, sometimes. Such anger, burning her up from the inside out, when Petrus will not speak to her now, when he only sighs and turns away. She lost Ercole as well as he, it is their loss, theirs. His name was a prayer in both their mouths; as if in naming him after a demigod, they might will some of that ancient hero’s strength into their son’s weak, pallid limbs, his watery lungs, his disenchantment with life from the first.
Petrus usually keeps away from the penned-up animals here as much as possible, just as he did in France, where, he once said, had King Henri not seen the intelligence in him, the boy and not the beast, he might have languished all his days in a cage beside the lions’ den. But today, one of the duke’s guests wanted to speak with him as she and her husband strolled through the pens, and so he and Catherine come with them, past the leopard, the peacocks, until they find Antoinette before the monkeys’ cage.
Back in France, Henri and Antoinette’s bond was set by their mutual love of the menagerie. Now that she is the only one left, Antoinette spends her days pestering the keepers here at the palace to let her help with the creatures’ feedings. She winds her hands around the bars of their enclosures; holds, for long minutes, the dromedary’s dull, long-lashed stare.
Today it is the near-human gazes of the monkeys she holds, those keen eyes under funny tufted brows; and as the duke’s guests cry out with delight, one of the monkeys reaches through the bars. Its hand is so much smaller than Antoinette’s, but perfectly formed, four slender fingers and a tiny jointed thumb, the skin shiny; with those fingers, it explores Antoinette’s, bringing them to its lips as if to taste her. She laughs.
And then the visiting lady says, “Look at the funny little monkey!” and hurries forward. Antoinette turns when she is bid, releasing the monkey’s hand only at the last moment, and, with practiced patience, allows the lady to take her hands and explore her fingers with her own.
Beside her, Catherine senses Petrus’s sudden stiffness.
“We are animals to them,” he says later, when Antoinette is sleeping and they are alone in their house, the doors and windows firmly shut. Catherine watches as he paces their chamber, as his fingers tear at the lacing of his ruff, struggling with the knot until it finally releases. He flings the stiff pleated circle away from him as if it were a rope, a noose, and Catherine is silent, uncertain what to do, what to say. This is the most animated she has seen him in months upon months; but the way that he and their children are viewed by much of the world is hardly news.
He does not say anything more but is restless beside her in bed, fingers tapping against his lips, as if in thought.
Chapter 70
Pedro
All through the night, he lies hot and agitated, his mind far too unquiet for sleep. As Catherine breathes softly beside him, dreaming, Petrus moves wakeful through the world inside his own head, peering into windows and doorways, watching men at work. Blacksmiths and wheelwrights, musicians and merchants. Scribes, butchers, fellers, cheesemongers, bakers, tailors, cobblers, goldsmiths, glovers, painters. Life upon life into which he tries to imagine himself, to fit himself, each and every one like a too-tight shoe, uncomfortable because he does not possess the skills needed for it to be a good life, a successful one; or because he fears to try.
Sometime in the darkest hour, that time when it is neither truly night nor truly morning but some dark and watchful nether place between, he begins to fall asleep. His eyelids drooping, blinking, falling slowly once again; his jaw slackening. Sleep mere moments away.
And then his eyes open again, fling themselves wide and wondering. Tutor, he thinks, and begins to smile. Slowly at first, a testing of the expression, a slow curling of lips, a gentle crinkling at the edges of his eyes, and then he speaks the word aloud, into being—“Tutor,” quietly at first and then a little louder so that Catherine shifts and snuffles beside him and he falls at last, grinning, to sleep.
The next morning, he dresses with purpose in a doublet of black velvet, which—he hopes—lends him an air of scholarly seriousness. He does not tell Catherine of his hopes, his plans, his skin itching at the thought of having to tell her should he fail.
He goes in search of the Duke of Parma, hoping that he is not closeted with business, with family, with anything upon which Petrus would feel he was intruding. But luck is with him, for he finds His Excellency breaking his fast on a terrace overlooking the gardens, and when Petrus approaches, he is greeted with a smile and an offer of a seat at the little table.
“Don Pietro! A fine morning for a stroll,” His Excellency says.
“It is, it is,” Petrus says, and oh, his voice is unsteady, trembling. He clears his throat. “I am—it is fortunate that I came upon you, Your Excellency, for I have been thinking about something that I would like to discuss with you.”
The duke smiles, makes a gesture of generous welcome, arms spread wide. “Of course,” he says.
For a moment, Petrus cannot speak. Only once—once, in all the years since he was taken—has he asked for anything, and he can still remember the humiliation, the way his very skin seemed to tighten, as if trying to shrink him down to nothing. King Henri dead, and Petrus’s position as bread bearer given to one of the new king’s favorites. The faint amusement on King Charles’s face when his father’s pet asked him for something, anything, to do. The laughter that ran in circles around the room, from throat to throat. The way the boy-king turned from him without responding, as if the request were nothing at all and not Petrus’s pride, his worth, laid at His Majesty’s feet, an offering and a plea.
He swallows and swallows around his throat’s sudden stickiness. “I was hoping—if it would please Your Excellency—that I might be given a position here. I would like to—to work. And I thought—as you know, I was given a nobleman’s education in France. I thought perhaps you might know of a family in need of a tutor. I can teach Latin, or Greek, or French. Philosophy, history, geography. I’m a fair swordsman. I—even small children. I could teach them to write a fair hand, to read . . .”
The duke has been looking uncomfortable throughout this awkward speech, his fingers drumming upon the tabletop, his lips pulled in. But at this last, his eyes go pitying.
“You don’t think,” he says, his tone gentle, “that your . . . unusual appearance might frighten small scholars?”
Petrus’s blood thunders. He grips the edge of the table, that he mightn’t topple over; tightens his teeth together to keep himself from the mortification of tears.
“I am a man,” he says, voice tinged with panic, with desperation. “I would earn my family’s keep like one.”
As quickly as it showed pity, His Excellency’s face transforms itself into a mask of irritation, and Petrus realizes that he was meant to take the escape the duke thought he was offering with those words; that the other man did not actually wish to refuse Petrus outright, but that he will, now he has been pressed.
“I do not know any families in need of a tutor,” he says, and now his tone is a lid slamming down, a key turned in a lock. Petrus nods and pushes back his chair, bows hastily and mutters a thick-voiced thanks. Takes his leave, feeling the duke’s eyes upon him as he stumbles away.
Many hours later, Petrus has dragged a stool from his own house to sit before the monkeys’ cage, and is watching the quick little creatures. The sun is hot overhead, and he is sweating, but he cannot seem to move. Twice, Catherine has come to offer him food, water, but both times he shook his head and she returned to the house with a touch to his shoulder.
“Many men would be glad of so easy a life as you enjoy, Don Pietro,” a voice says from behind him, and the surprise of it is enough to make Petrus turn, look, to see the Duke of Parma standing a few steps away, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat, expression lost. Petrus stands and bows as His Excellency approaches, and tries not to let his own face show the jumble of his emotions: the springing hope, the mud pit of embarrassment, the sword-slash of anger.
“I hope you never think that I am ungrateful, Your Excellency,” he says. “But—”
But the duke interrupts him. “Something occurred to me after our discussion,” he says. “If it’s work you want, I might have something that will suit.”
Petrus curls his fingers into his palms. “I—would be very grateful.”
“Your request might be a solution to both your problem and one of my own. Providential, you might say. I’ve a property in the village of Capodimonte whose overseer only recently left quite abruptly; there’s a temporary man there now, but he won’t do for long. You are a man of integrity and intellect—and initiative, which I had not realized.” The duke looks at him for a long moment while Petrus listens to the glad and terrified whoosh of his own blood. “The position is yours, if you’d like it.”
His first glimpse of the lake at Capodimonte is like being netted and dragged, stunned, back to his childhood, when he would sit watching the sea. All the brilliant, shifting colors—blue to green, gold and orange dappling the swells, all the foam so white and seething at the crests.
The lake is little like the sea, of course; it is far more placid, and far less noisy. But it is almost as bright as the waters of Tenerife, that peculiar blue that Petrus has only seen once before, in a Turkish stone of smooth green-blue worn by a Paris nobleman; and fishing boats bob along the water here, just as they did in Garachico. He allows Catherine to guide his footsteps, for his eyes are moons again, too full from looking and looking to mind where he walks.
Their house here is smaller than their home in the Farnese garden, but there is a great hearth, wide enough that he could lie stretched out full within it. There is welcome in its width, perhaps; a promise of warmth, of full bellies. Of conviviality. There is space enough to draw up chairs for every one of their family before this fire. Petrus puts his hands to the smooth pale walls, pressing against them, as if to assure himself that they will not topple; that they are real.
From the highest window, he can see the gentle undulations of the patchwork hills and the ruffle of the wood beyond. Fields of wheat the color of Catherine’s hair; a grove of olive trees with their trunks twisted, as if they have been sculpted by the very wind, silvery leaves at their crowns and plump green fruits dangling from their boughs. A vineyard, too, the berries sweet bunches of blue on the vines. Beyond his line of sight lies the village and the beauty of the lake.
He feels again like a young boy, new-come to a brilliant court; but this is a court of earth and water and air. His to tend; his to make prosperous. His.
Here, they wake and sleep to the rhythm of the farm’s needs. Petrus has been entrusted with the cultivation of the fields and orchards; the harvesting of the fruits; the breeding of the duke’s fine cattle. And, too, the collecting of coin from the villagers in Capodimonte, who must pay the Duke of Parma for the right to use his woodland, his pasture, for grazing their animals. For this, he receives a fine stipend, along with wine and wheat from the farm’s bounty for his family’s use. For the first time since crossing the sea in a ship sailed by pirates, he refuses to let fear and self-doubt make themselves his masters. He has much to learn; but he has a brain that is more than equal to the task, a brain that has been longing, all these years, for something to do.
He has a wife, too, a wife of intelligence and practical knowledge. They will set themselves to this great task with all their combined energies; and they will succeed.
Henri and Madeleine remain at court, but Antoinette comes to the farm, though she and Catherine wept a little as they packed their things, as the door to their garden house closed behind them. “We will be back, we will stay here whenever His Excellency requires us in Rome,” Petrus reminded them, and grinned, for he could not help himself. They were off—off! Off to a place away from court, to a house where no one would expect to come inside to see how the hairy family lives. Off to work, honest work, for which he must be respected. No longer curiosities.
The villagers stare and whisper and cross themselves when he and Antoinette come to church for the first time. The men and women who work the farm’s fields and orchards mutter at first when Petrus walks among them, when he records their harvests in his ledger. The creases of their hands and the wells of their fingernails filled with earth, their mouths with songs that lift over the vines and the groves as they bend and pluck. But Catherine’s presence smooths his way; she asks them about their families, their children, and speaks of her own, easing their fears, their superstitions. And Antoinette, too, who misses her friends in the duke’s menagerie, but who finds new ones among the goats and the cows; who watches the children of fishermen as they splash at the edge of the lake. Petrus watches her watching them and thinks he understands what she must be feeling. The simultaneous push and pull of longing to join and wanting to pass unnoticed. The ache of difference.
And then his daughter is stripping off her stockings, leaving them abandoned on the shore. Raising her skirt to show her hairy ankles. Stepping into the water with a gleeful shriek.
He finds Catherine standing at the cusp of one of the farm’s high hills. She is very still, her fingers flexed, as if poised to catch the wind. The sun bright upon her face. She looks, he thinks, like the captain of a ship, feet planted wide and eyes on the horizon.
He thinks, then, of mussels, of the seawater scent of them, the click of each shell against the others when he dropped them into his bag. The jounce of the bag against his shoulder blades as he ran back from the sea through the winding streets. He sees, clear as anything, Isabel’s grin when he returned with his bounty.
Part Six
Ninnananna
Chapter 71
Capodimonte, Italy
1618
Catherine
Sleepless, eyes dry with tiredness, Catherine twists like a corpse from a tree, trying to remember.
The rise and fall of Ercole’s chest; watching it in the night. The peculiar vulnerability of it, slightly concave at the center. How Antoinette slipped her fingers into the hollows under Catherine’s arms at night, worrying at the hair there as if it were a favorite blanket, ragged-edged from so much holding; as if she were comforted that even her smooth-skinned Maman had hidden hairy places.
Falling asleep curled on her father’s lap when he arrived home from a months-long journey, the unwashed smell of him, the firmness of his arms holding her in place. Her mother stroking her hair. Dried sprigs of rue among folded linens.
If only she were like the queen, with paintings of all her children through each stage of their lives. Resentment curdles, that the cardinal keeps her son’s grown-up image on his wall; and she wonders where those long-ago sketches went, the ones of herself and Petrus, Madeleine and Henri; whether they were, indeed, copied by other artists; whether other kings and queens paid to have her husband and her children in their collections. Wonders whether Antoinette’s likeness has ever been taken, and if the artist managed to capture her mischief, her intelligence, the beauty of her smile.
She sits and stares hard at the wall, blank but for a carved wooden cross. She tries to recall the particular expression that used to tramp over Henri’s face when he was angry as an infant; the tip of Madeleine’s head when she was pretending to listen to her lessons but really was woolgathering; Antoinette’s grin, alight with silliness, stretching her cheeks and showing every one of her little teeth; Ercole’s fists, pressed together under his chin as he slept; Petrus’s eyes, holding hers steady. But she cannot, quite; all she remembers now is the feeling of those things. The things themselves elude her, shadows that move away when she tries to catch them in her hands. She misses them as she would miss air.
She has a little glazed pot, brought with her from France to Italy, kept safe in her trunk among her petticoats and bodices. All of her children’s milk teeth are kept safe inside that pot, jumbled together like buttons in a sewing box. Antoinette had lost only four before she left them, and Ercole’s, of course, had never come in, were tucked away like secrets inside his mouth. Catherine wishes, now, that she had kept better account of which teeth had come from which child; for some reason, she had imagined she would know, that she would remember the shapes and sizes of their early teeth, which seemed as individual to her as the children from which they fell.
