Marvelous, p.6
Marvelous, page 6
Somewhere within this palace, beyond the shelter of this smooth stone wall and the sweep of these stairs, is his wife-to-be. Catherine Raffelin, the queen said, and the name repeats now through Petrus’s skull as the only thing he knows about her, this woman who will be his wife; a reverberation of certainty attempting to out-clamor all the clamorous uncertainties. Assuming no terrible troubles on the roads, she will have arrived yesterday from Lyons, after enduring a journey of days in order to wed him. To wed him.
He remembers with sudden dread the wedding of two of Her Majesty’s favorite dwarfs—a rowdy procession, the bride so draped in jewels she half-blinded onlookers in the winter sunlight; feasting and dancing that went on and on, a giddy whirlpool of wine and music. The new husband and wife dancing a galliard before the eyes of all the court, though he was clearly drunk and she well on her way. The rousing songs as they were effortlessly lifted, feet kicking in feigned foolishness, acting their part, and carried off to bed.
Let it not be like that, he thinks. Eyes closing briefly. It has been several years since he has been asked to play a part in one of the court’s entertainments—mock battles, mock sieges, mockeries made of them all. Once, he was made to play a wolf-man attacking a castle. He was meant to pull a lady from a tower that had been built of wood, painted to look like stone, and rolled into the grand ballroom on wheels like a cart’s. Though the lady must have known it was all an act—though she herself was part of the act—her face twisted with true panic when he appeared over the rampart; her scream was genuine. Petrus’s entire body shuddered with shame as he pretended at ferality, face buried in the lady’s neck as if he meant to tear her throat out, half-dressed in breeches and nothing else, the hair covering his arms and back, chest, belly, and calves exposed to all the court, gleaming in the brightness of all the fat candles. It was with relief that he relinquished the lady to her rescuers, allowed himself to be heaved from the tower by King Charles in his shining armor. The tower was not so tall that the fall truly hurt, and yet tears drew up from his lower lids like dew from dawn grass.
He begins walking again, his vision narrowed to a sliver just broad enough to let him move without falling, without blundering into walls or doorways. When he pauses at last, he is standing before a stone sculpture set into a wall: two women, nymphs perhaps, smooth-limbed, and rounded like jugs of wine, framing the head and torso of a curly-headed, curly-bearded man, with two horns jutting proud from his skull. Though his legs have not been sculpted, a goat head and two delicate hoofs have been hewn above him, as if to ensure that no one viewing the work might mistake him for anything too near to human. The nymphs’ necks arch and turn, their gazes shifting away from the goat-man between them. Their hands clutch the gilded edges of the frames of paintings to either side of them; they hold themselves as far from the inhumanness of the satyr as they possibly can.
Petrus finds he cannot look away. A beautiful wife, he thinks again. A beautiful wife. A fine new chamber. A soft new bed. Looking at the wretched satyr now, and at the nymphs’ desperate, clinging hands, the bow of their bodies toward the painting frames and away from the goat-man, his chest goes tight to the point of hurt. Oh, let his wife not be beautiful; let her be a plain woman, someone who can bear to look upon his face as the nymphs, who owe the sculpted perfection of their faces and bodies to the gods who sired them, cannot bear to look upon the satyr, for all that his parentage is no less prestigious than their own. A widow, perhaps, he thinks; a widow with years of laughter etched beside her eyes. Someone who would have little enough hope for a handsome husband, and might be easily reconciled to one as unnatural as he; and who might also find in all his education a source of respect. Someone who will not turn from him.
Petrus was seventeen, by the court physician’s count, before he lay with a woman.
His friend Ludovico was not wed then, and so did not yet hold the title of Duke of Nevers. He liked to tease Petrus about his fear of women, though never seriously; he knew his friend’s prickles, having spent the five years since he came to court observing the other children who were fostered at court by turns ignoring and taunting the strange, hairy boy whom King Henri had, inexplicably, thrown into their midst like a goat into a flock of starlings.
“The court is full of opportunities, even for someone like you,” Ludovico liked to say, with no meanness, only his usual cheerful honesty. “The courtisanes would be mad for you, with all that hair; or at least, they’d do a fine job of pretending. Such, after all, is the art of love.” He spoke with a casual knowing that rankled a little, being, as he was, two years Petrus’s junior.
It was true enough that many of the women with whom Ludovico and the other young men of the court spent their time approached Petrus occasionally, curiosity in their eyes and avarice in their smiles. King Henri’s favorite marvel, his very best gift, the boy on whom he lavished the same tutors who educated his own children; surely, that boy must have a few coins in his pocket aching to be spent. But he shook his head at them all, glad, for once, that his hairy cheeks made it impossible to read his blushes.
The woman with whom he finally lay had thin dark hair, lank with oil and smelling of her unwashed scalp. Her face was pinched, and a stain, purple as wine spilt across a linen cloth, dashed from the sharp corner of her jaw, across her throat, and down to the knob of her shoulder. The mattress to which she led him bristled with straw and rustled with other creatures. Ludovico remained behind, sipping sweet wine in the crowded main room of the tavern, with the lamps casting a greasy, smoky pall over the room. A smile twisted his mouth as Petrus sent a quick, desperate look over his shoulder before following her up the creaking stairs, and he raised his glass, as if to say, You wished to be far from court for this, my friend.
This tavern, in a narrow building on one of Paris’s many twisting side streets, was as far from the luster of court as he could wish without actually resorting to a quick poke in the shadows out in the street itself, with the aroma of piss and refuse surrounding them like bed curtains. The woman took his coin and lay without flinching on the stained mattress linen. She did not flinch, either, when Petrus’s face showed full in the light of the dripping candle stub, nor when he could not decide how best to go about their business together. She took him and led him where he needed to go, mumbling appreciative nothings about how virile he must be, to be so hairy. Her breath stank of rot, and her voice trailed off indifferently once he was hard enough to get where he must; but still, he fell asleep that night, back in his bed in the Château du Louvre, thinking about her hands fearlessly touching him, and dreamed, for the first time in years, of Tenerife.
He had a picture, once, of a woman like himself. A pamphlet, thrown at him by one of the noble boys fostered at court, and inside a rough woodcut of a girl. Look, the boy said. A monstrous wife for a monstrous boy.
Petrus kept the picture. He secreted it, crumpled in his fist, back to his chamber and looked at it from time to time. The girl was certainly not beautiful according to any of the usual definitions of beauty; but still, he looked and looked, the truth of her loosening something inside his chest. She was naked, her breasts small and round and hairy. Her legs long and hairy. He was old enough that the cushion of her thighs stirred him. For a foolish while that lasted years, he loved her.
For another foolish while, he loved the Princess Claude, who was born the year he came to France; loved her for her twisted foot and the hump on her back. All her life she was teased out of range of any adults by other children, and he always looked away from her tight mouth and reddened eyes. Hid himself among the hedges, that they not turn upon him as well with stones in their voices.
Once, just once, he spoke, years after he’d had his first woman. The princess was herself then just budding toward womanhood. Petrus did not speak in the presence of her tormentors, under no illusions that she would welcome the wild man as her public chevalier. But he came upon her weeping, and saw the cluster of children in their bright doublets and swishing skirts just disappearing from view, and said, all in a tumble, “You do not deserve their cruelty.”
A startled look, a straightening of her back as well as she could. A tilt of her head.
And then she rose and walked away without speaking, all dignity despite the unevenness of her steps, which set the width of her skirt to crookedly swaying. Leaving him to the splashing of the nearby fountain and the grainy rush of his own breath.
She was married to a duke later that same year.
Chapter 9
Pedro
Ludovico finds him there, looking up at the nymphs, and at the satyr they refuse to see. Petrus sees him coming from the corner of his eye, marks his familiar easy gait, the brightness of his cap and hose. His friend often rises early to be with the king, who likes to get much of the day’s business out of the way early, before he feels too unwell, falling into listlessness. Petrus would once have envied Ludovico his respected position, one of only a handful of courtiers thoroughly trusted as advisors by His Majesty; but this king is nothing like his father. This king is not someone in whose shadow Petrus longs to bask, as if it were sunshine.
Of course, Ludovico would no doubt remind him that the king’s temperament is irrelevant; he is king, and that is reason enough to seek a place by his side.
When his friend stops beside him now, Petrus glances his way, smiles tight but does not speak. He cannot; all his feelings, the churn of them, the boil, are caught behind his breastbone, making his breath come short.
Ludovico stands beside Petrus for a short time without fidgeting, before giving over to his natural inability to be still.
“That fellow could be your twin, near enough, if you were unlucky enough to be horned,” he says, nodding toward the satyr.
This is, of course, what Petrus himself has been thinking. But still he says, “He looks more like you, old friend,” with a small sideways smile. It’s true enough—Ludovico’s hair and beard curl every bit as riotously as the goat-man’s.
His friend chuckles. “I’d like to be a satyr. Wine, and dancing, and women—what more could a man want from life?” He grins in a parody of lechery, and Petrus laughs, the sound startled, half-choked, from his throat. Better, truly, to be a satyr than to be one of the other creatures to whom he himself has often been compared. Satyrs, at least, do not eat their victims, only ravish them.
Ludovico leans one elbow on the wall, upon one of the nymphs’ smooth carved thighs. “I saw your wife.”
Tightness in his chest again. “When? Where?”
“Yesterday. Around dusk. I was with—well.” A little smirk. “It hardly matters who I was with.”
Petrus’s brows rise; Ludovico ignores the implied question.
“But we were out for a stroll, and we saw the coach arrive. I think it must have been her—she’d a fine trunk with her. And an old man.”
“And?” Petrus curls his fingers into his palms, lets his short nails bite into the soft flesh there. “What is she like?”
His friend leans his cheek upon his hand, smiles sideways at Petrus, teasing. “Aren’t you the curious one?”
Petrus merely looks at him; to give in to his teasing will only prolong it.
Ludovico sighs. “Very well. She is young and lovely.” With his free hand, he makes a fluttering motion in the air. “Hair like gold, cheeks like roses. That sort of thing.” He raises both brows. “You are a very lucky husband. Luckier than I—Henriette is unpolished silver compared to this girl.”
Ludovico’s wife remains in Paris with their children while her husband travels with the king, keeping his place, his influence.
Petrus’s head shakes. “No—”
“No?” Ludovico laughs. “What ‘no’? No, she is not young, beautiful? Or no, you do not wish her to be so?” When Petrus is silent, his friend’s tone gentles. “Only you would complain of such a thing.” He peers into Petrus’s face. “The queen paid her dowry, did she not?”
“Yes.” Linen, a little gold. Amethysts, purple as fresh bruises, to adorn his wife’s ears, should he offer them to her; or to sell, should he not. All brought to him by a servant two days ago. “Her Majesty was most generous.” His eyes wander, restless. “But she must be poor, to have no dowry of her own. To think that—” But he cannot expel the words; they sit, like bile, at the base of his throat. It is a small, private sort of horror, the thought of this marriage between a man, hairy as a wolf, and a girl with little choice.
Ludovico releases a strange, low laugh. “She will live out her life at court, surrounded by luxury—such a hardship!” Still his hand remains curled over the ball of Petrus’s shoulder. “Do not . . . Do not demean yourself, old friend. You are not such an unworthy prize.”
His eyes linger upon Petrus’s face until it warms; he squeezes Petrus’s shoulder, thumb pressing hard into the muscle before letting go. “She is a lucky wife, Pierre. And women—they are used to doing as they are told, no?” He steps back. “And now—how shall we pass the time until the wedding? A little drink, hmm, to settle your stomach?”
One cup of wine becomes two, and would have become three, did Petrus not put his hand over the rim to stop Ludovico from pouring him more.
“I’ve had nothing to eat,” he says, laughing, the wine he has drunk already making him warm, his fingertips tingling. “I do not want to disgrace myself by vomiting on the priest’s shoes.”
Ludovico sits. “You always were more temperate than I.” A pause, his mouth curling above his beard. “Do you remember the night before my wedding? It is a wonder I was able to stand upright in church the next day.”
Petrus remembers well, though nine years have since passed. His friend insisted that Petrus join him and several other young men as they wove their way from tavern to tavern. For Petrus, it was a night spent clinging to what shadows he could find, his head ducked that his face might remain hidden by the wide brim of his hat. Furtively watching as Ludovico grew drunker and drunker, toasting his intended’s wealth, family, lands. Henriette was heiress to two duchies; it was a match that would benefit both, a political maneuvering that promised to push Ludovico into the waiting arms of power and influence.
“To my wife’s purse!” Ludovico cried at last. “May it prove more pleasing than her face.”
Petrus winced, but the other men laughed, a flock of merry blackbirds, at the lewd jest. Ludovico spoke this way only when he was with these men, courtiers all, jostling for better position near the king. Never when he and Petrus stood alone on the fringes of a room, waiting for the king to make an appearance; never when they spoke together, with no one else listening. That Ludovico, he believed, was the true Ludovico.
And yet—he remembers now, sitting alone with Ludovico in his room, wine warming his blood, how strong his pity was that night, the night before the marriage ceremony, for the woman Ludovico—his greatest friend, his only friend—was marrying.
But Henriette looked calm during the ceremony; Ludovico subdued. Petrus watched from his place among the lesser courtiers, subdued himself, even beyond his usual solemnity. A twist of guilt, for the gladness he should be feeling at his friend’s good fortune, which was entirely absent. A sharp twinge in his chest at the sight of his friend leading a wife back out of the church, past Petrus, to yet another place to which Petrus assumed he would never follow.
King Henri used to say he would someday find Petrus a wife. But that was long ago.
A woman of learning, he said. Someone who can equal you for wits, hmm?
He spoke not a word of beauty, nor even of finding a woman whose appearance matched Petrus’s hair for hair; only of matched interests, of minds as well suited to one another as a foot to a shoe made to fit it exactly.
He spoke as if his wild man was every bit as deserving of a bride as any other man, and Petrus allowed himself, on nights when he could not seem to move toward sleep, when the moon hung golden and suspended, edging, bright as sunlight, through the curtain gaps, to imagine that his king-found wife lay beside him, that her sleeping breaths were in his ears, that he could feel her heat, intimate, at his back. He and this woman would have been joined in one of the palace chapels, the king and his court watching.
But His Majesty died—borne hastily off the field after having his eye gored in a joust, and every warm and solid thing in Petrus’s life borne away with him—died before he ever found Petrus his match; and his eldest son died only a year after inheriting the throne. Charles, who became king after his brother’s death, has never shown any affection for his father’s hairy marvel, or any inclination to think about Petrus’s future. He is sickly, and often cross with it; and, too, he was made king when he was just a boy, practically womb-wet—Petrus has watched him grow from a peevish child into a peevish man. Born to privilege, on the one hand, in the most obvious of ways, and yet born, too, with lungs too weak for hunting, or fighting, or even, when he was a child, running with the other children as he so clearly longed to do.
King Henri and Queen Caterina tried for ten years to have children, but her womb remained empty; rumor had it, the king’s advisors urged His Majesty to set the queen aside in favor of some other wife, one who could give him a child, an heir, someone to rule when he was gone. The queen, daughter of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, had been chosen for her family’s wealth, though her dowry payments vanished as if by a sorcerer’s trick when her uncle, the pope, died, and a new pope—from a different wealthy family—took his place. Petrus has little enough love for the queen mother, but he cannot think of her as she was—young, seemingly barren, and suddenly impoverished, a queen whose throne was crumbling beneath her—without a lurch of pity. A person whose worth is tied so completely to a small, nicked-out part of themselves—be it dowry, or beauty, the lines of their blood or the fullness of their hair—must feel precariously perched, always in danger of wavering toward penury, obscurity, earth. Bound for those ditches at the sides of the road, rolled there by capricious fortune.
