‘That is so, Madame. But I believe in my work. I have tested this substance. Moreover, my wish is to serve your Majesty with my life if need be.’
Catherine smiled. ‘You shall not be forgotten, Monsieur René. Now, if this lady comes here to buy gloves, a ruff or a trinket, you could take what she selects and treat it while she is here . . and let her go away with it?’
‘I could, Madame.’
‘Gloves would be simplest. Now listen. She shall come to buy gloves. You will show her of your best and, when she has selected them, you will treat them. In order to ensure that she wears them immediately, let those she is wearing when she arrives be soiled in some way. You have no doubt means here of doing this. Let her leave them for you to repair, and let her go away wearing the new gloves that you have treated. I would not wish the gloves to fall into other hands.’
‘It shall be as you command, Madame.’
‘That is well. And I should like a little of that … substance … for my own closet.’
‘Madame, it would not be safe. It is not as yet in the perfect form for keeping. When I can trust it, all my stock is at your Majesty’s disposal.’
Catherine smiled faintly. She understood René. He was not prepared to lose his sole right to such a valuable discovery.
She came out into the streets, drawing her shawl about her. So far, so good.
The Queen of Navarre lay sick in her room. She could not understand the sudden faintness which had come over her. She had had a pleasant enough afternoon, choosing some clothes she would need for the ceremonies which would follow the wedding. She was not interested in fine clothes, but she did not wish to appear dowdy among the Parisians, who she knew would be gorgeously apparelled.
She had bought a new ruff and new gloves. Catherine had been helpful, telling her where to go, accompanying her to some of the places. And finally she had gone to the glove-maker and parfumeur on the quay opposite the Louvre, and there she had bought a pair of those exquisite gloves such as were now worn at court. She had put them on there and then and come back to the palace wearing them, because of some slight accident to her old pair.
And then had come this strange faintness, this nausea. It had been necessary to take to her bed, for there was a violent pain in her chest. She was unable to attend the banquet that day; and the night that followed was passed in a fever of restlessness; a terrible lassitude had taken possession of her limbs, and by morning she had lost the power of them. She could scarcely breathe, and the pain in her chest had become an agony.
Her apartments in the Hôtel de Condé were filled with anxious men and women of the Huguenot Faith. The greatest physicians in the country were at her bedside, but none could discover the strange nature of her illness. Catherine sent her doctors. ‘I beg of you,’ said Catherine, ‘spare no effort to save the life of the Queen of Navarre. It would be terrible if she were to die now that we have settled the arrangements for the marriage in such an amicable manner.’
Jeanne asked that Coligny might be brought to her. She felt, vague and hazy though she was, that there was much she should say to him. She knew that Coligny was in great danger; that the Huguenot cause was in danger; she remembered something of what her little son had overheard in the gallery of Bayonne; but her mind was failing her, and she could not clearly recall what it was.
She knew that she was dying. ‘Your prayers,’ she said, ‘will avail me nothing. I submit myself to the Holy Will of God, taking all evils from Him as inflicted by a loving Father. I have never feared death. My only grief is that I must leave my children, and that they, at their tender age, are exposed to so many dangers.’
She begged them to cease their weeping.
‘Ought you to weep for me?’ she asked. ‘You have all seen the misery of my last years. God has taken pity on me and is calling me to the enjoyment of a blessed existence.’
She longed for death now, longed to escape from the pain of her body. But she thought of her children: her son, Henry, who was in such need of guidance; her dearest little Catherine, who was so young. What would become of them?
Catherine must return to Béarn. She was insistent on that.
‘Oh, please, please,’ she cried in a moment of acute consciousness, ‘take my little daughter home … take her far away from the corruption of this court.’
Then she began to speak of her son’s coming marriage, and Catherine, who stood by her bed, said: ‘Rest, my dear sister of Navarre. Fret not for the sake of your children. I will be a mother to them. Your son is to be my son through marriage … and I am the godmother of your daughter.’
Catherine put her lips to the clammy brow of her enemy. This was the woman for whom she had always felt uneasy hatred. Now was the end of the woman. Jeanne had sought to pit herself against Catherine, so now here she lay, a poor weak woman, dying, stripped of all her earthly possessions, of all earthly desires.
The Queen Mother was triumphant.
The Princess Margot looked on at the scene – a humble scene, for the apartment did not look like the death chamber of a Queen. There were no tapers, no priests, none of the ritual which attended a Catholic death.
She looked at the faces of the people in the room; she looked from the dying Queen to the woman who stood by the bed, the woman with the full pale face and large expressionless eyes from which now and then the delicate white hand wiped a tear.
Margot shivered. Death was terrifying, but she was not so much afraid of death as of the woman in black who conducted herself with such calm and sorrowful decorum.
‘The Queen of Navarre is dead!’
They were whispering this in the streets.
‘They say she visited René … the Queen Mother’s glove-maker. People have visited René before … and they fall into a decline … their teeth break like glass on their bread … their skin shrivels … and then they die.’
‘The Queen of Navarre has been poisoned!’
The Parisians were mainly Catholic, and they must therefore regard the Queen of Navarre as an enemy; yet they did not care to think that she had been lured to their city to be poisoned.
‘It is that woman!’ was whispered in the market-place, in the streets, on the quays. ‘It is the Italian woman at her tricks again. Was it not her glove-maker to whom the Queen of Navarre went?’
The people of Paris shuddered; they turned horrified eyes towards the windows of the Louvre; they whispered; they spat in contempt; and there was one name which was mentioned more than any other – that of Catherine de’ Medici, the Italian woman. ‘Italian! Italian!’ they hissed. These Italians were past-masters with the poison cup, and the very word ‘Italian’ was almost synonymous with ‘Poisoner’.
The Guises came riding to court.
The Queen of Navarre was dead. Here was one enemy out of the way. It might be that the Queen Mother, in favouring the Huguenots, had been playing just another of her tortuous, cunning games.
Margot watched them as they rode into the courtyard of the palace, and looked for the figure at their head; Henry of Guise had grown more handsome during his absence.
She was tired of resisting. Soon they would throw her to that oaf of Navarre; and when she thought of his clumsy hands caressing her, her longing for Henry of Guise was more than she could endure.
She met him, as if by chance, in one of the ill-lighted passages near her apartments.
He stood looking at her. She tried then to turn away, but he came swiftly forward and caught her; then she remembered afresh all the enchantment of his kisses.