Catherine
It happens in the trembling time between night and day, long after the passing of midnight but well before the cock wakes to crow. The waiting hours. The witching hours. A fitting time for a man long assumed to be born of witchcraft to die.
Many years ago, Catherine spent these same hours with her newborn babes, all four of whom wakened without fail at the same gray and blurry time of morning-night, mouths opening and throats keening for the breast; and then, when their hunger was sated, their eyes opening too, looking around at the darkness. Though she is past sixty now, Catherine’s arms still remember the weight of each infant; the center of her back, the ache of rocking. Her ears and throat hold the memory of cradle songs passed down to her by her mother, which devolved into broken, tuneless humming as the hours passed, and still her children stayed awake and watchful, as if to keep their mother safe from monsters in the night. That frayed-string feeling of waiting for the sun to paint the horizon all the colors of peaches, when at last they consented to sleep again and she, too, could finally rest.
She does not want to rest now. She woke after a short sleep, as she has so often before, with a fragment of a dream ready on her lips, a fragment that unthreaded itself and slithered away when she saw how he exhaled, eyes closed, through his open mouth, and heard the great pauses between one breath and the next. And then she could not sleep at all, waiting with him through the hours for his final exhalation.
Her mind skims now from those early days of motherhood—days that lasted for years and years, when she sometimes hated the man beside her for the completeness of his sleep, his deep insensibility to the world while he dreamed—it skims from there to the early days of love, when they lay together and fought sleep just for joy of one another’s wakeful presence, and for irrational fear of the parting sleep would bring. Now it is only she who struggles to stay awake, though her body subtly shakes with weariness and her eyelids draw down and down, like those of a corpse being gently closed by loving fingers.
A little earlier, she pushed open the window curtains, and in the light of the moon Petrus lies stiller than he ever did in sleep, and ageless, the silver of moonbeams brightening the silver of all his hair. Catherine lies upon her side facing him, facing his stillness. Holds herself nearly as still.
Soon enough will come peach-tinted morning, and the necessity of announcing his leaving to their children and grandchildren. Madeleine and Henri, asleep now in their own homes, will wake and come to see their father, only to find instead the sealike sadness of his loss; and it will be Catherine who must comfort them. Then the washing of his body, and the wrapping. She will tuck bay leaves and rosemary sprigs between his body and his shroud to keep back the creeping scent of decay.
She is strangely aware of her fingers now, at their fleshy tips, a restless sensation. Instinctively, she reaches for Petrus to alleviate it, puts her hand over his where it rests at his side. Moves her whole hand lightly up and down the length of his, that she might feel the familiar whisper against her palm of the fine hairs that cover the backs of his hands and creep up the tops of his fingers. His nails have grown long and ragged, and guilt stuffs her throat with sand. She must trim them before anyone else sees.
Madeleine is predictably wet in her grief when she arrives to find her parents hand-clasped, her father’s fingers growing stiff. With a wail she clutches at Catherine’s legs like the child she has not been for decades, and Catherine pulls herself from the muck of the sleep that must have closed over her despite her best efforts. She sits, releasing Petrus’s hand without thinking, gathers her daughter into her arms and onto her lap, where Madeleine’s full-grown weight is both burden and delight. Catherine presses their cheeks together, furrowed flesh to long soft hair, and lets her daughter cry.
But after a moment, she turns her head to look back at Petrus. Her own grief rushes up very suddenly from her chest, catching in the slender opening of her throat, and she makes a terrible strangled sound, and would reach for him again, would apologize for letting him go at all; but no—there is no need. For she can see, in the bright of morning: he is more obviously gone than he was while they lay together in the in-between.
The rest of the day is predictable, and predictably exhausting. Catherine prepares Petrus’s body with help from Madeleine, along with Girolama, her son Henri’s wife. Girolama is silent in the face of the weeping of her sister by marriage, Madeleine’s facial hair flattening against her cheeks as if she has been standing in a pour of rain.
Catherine clips her husband’s fingernails and toenails, washes and combs his body, listens to her daughter’s mournful wails, and feels detached from all of it, her earlier grief stuffed back down deep among her dark insides. Never before, in all the times she prepared someone she loved at death, has she felt so far away from her task, her hands working entirely on their own. She thinks of Maman, over whose body she wept as helplessly as Madeleine weeps now for her father. Of Ercole, whom she cradled in his shroud, swaying and singing to him as she had every night of his brief life, raising her voice in spikes of fury to drown the voices of anyone who tried to take him from her. Of Henriand Girolama’s dear Giacomo, dead before his second birthday, how terrible, how unnatural, it seemed to stitch his shroud closed over his round-faced sweetness. The feet, which carried him running before he was twelve months old, stilled; the voice, which was so joyfully raucous, silenced.
Every single time, a knife stab. But she was there in every instance. When it was Girolama who would not release her son, who stroked his softly furred back for hours as if he merely lay sleeping, it was Catherine who kept others from disturbing her. When it was her own child dead, she was present for every slicing wound. She honored them with her pain.
She pauses, palms pressed to the tall arches of Petrus’s feet, and breathes to anchor herself here, in these last moments with this well-known flesh, though already it begins to turn unfamiliar as death makes itself comfortable. She tries to feel, knowing that if she does not, she will wake in the night reaching for his toes with her own.
The last thing she does, once all the rest is finished, is to take up a sharp knife, the best of the kitchen knives, with its handle of bone and its blade whetted to a keen cutting edge. Petrus kept it so for her, knowing that it was her favorite knife, that it sliced through meat like a sword through an enemy. She takes the knife now, feels the familiar weight of it in her hand, and looks at him where he lies. Soon he will be stitched into a shroud, but now he is there for her to look at, and she takes her time choosing where to cut. His head, she decides at last; his head, as if he were any other man, as if it were the only possible place to do this. She moves to his head, looks not into his face but at the hair that grows so thickly from his scalp; takes a soft lock of it between her fingers; slices it off with the knife he sharpened for her when he sat there, just there beside the hearth, the grating sound of the whet stone, the calm concentration on his face. So many nights.
She puts the knife carefully away and ties the lock with a bit of ribbon, knotting it firmly, that not a single hair might escape.
Catherine lies easily to the priest when he comes to sit with them in their grief. How terribly unfortunate, he says, gently admonishing that she was too stricken by shock and sadness to send for him in time to administer the last rites.
Yes, Catherine hears herself say. I should have, Padre.
In this one thing, she honors her husband. If she cannot manage tears or wailing, she has at least kept the church’s hand from his brow, though it would have given her some comfort to know he was blessed before passing on to whatever awaits the dead. Heaven, she still likes to think, though Petrus had reason to think otherwise. Wherever he is now, she imagines his quick, conspiratorial smile at her complicity in keeping the priest from him, and something bittersweet fills her mouth.
The sun falls in a brilliant flare to sleep, and, together with Madeleine, Catherine sits beside her husband’s body. Untouched plates of white beans in herbs and oil sit congealing beside them both, left there by Girolama. Earlier, Henri came to sit beside his father, his face running with tears as easily as Madeleine’s. But he went away again to his own home, leaving the women alone with the body.
Her other daughter should be here, Catherine thinks. The thought is a little knife-stab of its own. Antoinette—
But she cannot think of her youngest girl just now. She will not.
Instead, she sings. Her voice is not what it once was, age stretching it thinner even than it was when she sang to their children, but Petrus would not mind. After a moment, Madeleine joins her, Madeleine who never sings, for embarrassment of how her voice cracks like plaster on both the highest and the lowest notes. The song is a ninnanannathat Catherine’s mother used to sing to her when she was small, an old, old tune that must have soothed thousands of babes to sleep. The firelight flickers lower and lower, and they sing in deepening shadow until their voices grow hoarse, heedless of the rasping, with no one but themselves and the dead to hear it. When at last they fall silent, the creases of Catherine’s face are filled, like the many branches of a river, with wet.
“Another,” Madeleine says, and then begins without awaiting a reply, her voice straining to reach like a child wavering on her toes, fingers stretching toward the sugar on a high shelf. Catherine pauses a moment, listening. From far away, she almost hears something, sweet and improbable as songbirds after dark—the echoing voices of their collective lost. Even Petrus, in that instant, seems about to stir.
There! There is Antoinette, who shouted even when she meant to whisper; Giacomo’s trill; Maman’s hum. Papa, too, who never sang, only spoke, long and often; but whose voice in music Catherine knows all the same. All of them a distant, joyous, discordant racket.
Madeleine trips a little on a note, as if perhaps she can hear them, too.
She is veiled during the funeral Mass, pretending to watch and listen to the priest from behind a skim of gossamer black. This is to the good, for the film of it hides the wandering of her thoughts, which dart like startled sheep from one side of her mind to the other. Long ago, at the beginning of their marriage, she had clutched at the daily Mass, which all courtiers were expected to attend, as if it were a rope thrown as she slipped beneath a roiling sea. Those mornings the rituals and rhythms she had known since infanthood were soothing, as soothing as her mother’s songs when she was a child.
Now, she does not want to hear the priest’s intonations, does not want to think about the reason they are here; about Petrus’s death. She will dissolve if she does, all her bones turning liquid, her spine running in drips down the bench and making a murky pool on the floor.
She thinks instead of things that make her smile, safe, behind her veil, in the knowledge that no one can see her clearly. Petrus’s love of melon, eager as a little boy’s, though the juice ran sticky down his beard. How he taught her to read, long after their children were grown, in spite of her protests that there was no reason, no point; and how he kept his frustrations with her slowness at fifty tucked into his cheeks like a squirrel with a walnut, too big to be hidden, though he tried anyway. The way he slept, noisily, all rumbles—he made her think of a bear in its winter cave; though that was not a comparison he would have appreciated, and so she kept it safe inside herself. She liked his rumbles, once she knew him better, just as she learned to like, to treasure, the soft hairy bristle over his flesh and muscle and bone. Strange to think how two people can be such utter strangers to one another and then so intertwined, as threads of silk weave together to make cloth. The cloth of their life together has unraveled in the days since his death, and she’d have thought she would unravel, as well, all the fibrous parts of her pulling in opposite directions until there was nothing left. But here she still is.
Catherine looks down at her hands. They are still soft, though the skin now is lightly spotted, stretching thin as onionskins across the backs. She remembers when Petrus would not take her hands for fear of frightening her; remembers when she was frightened. It seems so long ago—another man, another woman. Another life entirely.
The funeral Mass goes on and on, the warmth of the day bringing out the odors in people’s clothing. Or perhaps Catherine’s mind is drifting, perhaps she is gone from this place, gone away to someplace where time moves differently, where hours stretch slow and aching in the space of ten breaths here in the church. Under the concealing fall of her veil, she holds a little pouch of fawn leather, unadorned, the throat of it pulled tight by a darker leather thong. The lock of Petrus’s hair is inside, and she cups the bag between both palms, a prayer.
Also in the bag is a folded bit of paper, creased, the ink faded. She has nothing left of her mother but the thimble from her sewing kit; even the hair powder she had once used, one of the few things that escaped being sold after the sinking of Papa’s ship, is long gone. Catherine had brought that powder, which smelled so like her mother that it made her weep, with her to Château de Fontainebleau, to her wedding; she wore it in her hair until none of it was left. And though she made more powder, doing her best to reproduce her mother’s recipe, it never smelled quite the same.
But she does have this one bit of her father—this letter, this paper, his words, his slanted hand, his love in ink. When she cups the bag, she can hear the paper rustle, just a little. She inhales, breathing in again the bodily odors of all the people around her, and oh, how she longs suddenly to be small again, to have known no sorrow, to have her father smiling into her face, palms full of rose petals that would one day be turned into scents for women’s wrists and throats, into powder, like Maman’s, for their hair. Smell, ma petite belle. Breathe them in. Would your mother like them?
She rises at the end of the interminable Mass, all the words and rhythms that have comforted her all her life, and which she clung to so desperately for their familiarity in the midst of so much overwhelming strangeness when she arrived at court as a bride, sounding hollow now as poorly cast bells. Henri reaches her first from his seat a little down the bench, and offers her his arm; his wife remained behind at their home, laying out the food.
Catherine finds herself faltering a little as they walk, round stones in the dirt street catching under her feet. She tightens her grip on her son’s arm, and feels really old for the first time in her life. Madeleine detaches herself from her husband and takes Catherine’s other arm in a firm grip; together, her two children steer her toward the funeral feast.
The other mourners straggle out behind them, mumbling to keep their voices at an appropriate, funereal level. There are more of them than Catherine expected. Most, she suspects, will have come because Petrus enjoyed the patronage of the Duke of Parma, under whose protection the whole village rests. Only a few have come because they knew and loved Petrus himself; but then, he made himself difficult to know.
She finds herself looking back, as if her other children might have joined them—Ercole floating alongside from wherever it is the dead do go, Antoinette, grown now and richly dressed, following at a sedater pace than she would have set in childhood. Come from wherever she is now.
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