Free The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine De Medici by Jeanne Kalogridis Page A

been torn down, and all sculptures and buildings bearing the same had been crudely edited with chisels.
    I asked about Aunt Clarice, of course, and tried not to cry when Tommasa told me she was still alive, though no one knew where she had gone. Ippolito’s and Alessandro’s whereabouts were also a mystery.
    When I commented on Tommasa’s kindness to me, she was taken aback.
    “Why should I treat you otherwise?” she asked. “They say your family has oppressed the people, but you are kind to me and the others. I can’t punish you for something others have done.”
    I loved her for the same reason I had loved Piero, because she was too good to glimpse the blackness hidden in my heart.
    I spent a dismal summer fearing execution and hoping for news. Neither came, and by the time autumn arrived, I dwelled in a haze of hunger and grief. I lost will and weight and stopped asking questions of Tommasa as she relayed the latest gossip.
    Winter came and brought an icy chill. Our room had no hearth and was freezing; I never stopped shivering. The water froze in the tiny basin we five shared, but we were too cold to bathe anyway. The fleas guaranteed that, if I slept at all, it was poorly. The cold never eased but grew more bitter.
    One morning in late December, I headed with the other girls to the refectory. As we passed by a cell, a pair of nuns were carrying out a third. The last was completely rigid, and her sisters had lifted only her head and feet, as if she were a plank of wood. The two nuns glanced up at us, their forbidding gazes intended to silence all questions.
    As they passed, Tommasa quickly crossed herself, and rest of us followed suit. We held our tongues and our places until they had disappeared down the corridor.
    “Did you see that?” Lionarda, the oldest girl, hissed.
    “Dead,” one of the others said.
    “Frozen,” I said. But at the refectory, as we were waiting to have our bowls filled, one of the novices in front of us fainted and was taken away. I thought little of it: I swept floors and patched worn habits, unflinching when I pricked my chill-numbed fingers with the needle. I didn’t worry until that evening at vespers, when I noticed that the chapel was only half full.
    I whispered to Tommasa, “Where are the other sisters?”
    “Taken sick,” she answered. “Some sort of fever.”
    That night, I counted five separate times that the nuns hurried up and down the corridor. In the morning, four of us rose from the mattress. Lionarda did not.
    Her breath hung as white vapor in the frigid air above her face; despite the cold, her forehead shone with sweat. One of the other girls tried to wake her, but neither shouting nor shaking could make her open her eyes. We called for the nuns, but no one came; the cells near ours were empty.
    Tommasa and I stayed with Lionarda and sent the other two girls to get help. Half an hour later, a novice came in her white veil and black apron. Silently—for it was during an hour the nuns did not speak—she slipped her hands beneath Lionarda’s nightgown and ran them swiftly over her neck, collarbone, armpits. She then reached under the gown to feel the area around Lionarda’s groin and drew back with a spasm of fear.
    She lifted up a corner of the nightgown to reveal a lump the size of agoose egg at the top of the girl’s thigh, encircled by a dark purple ring, like a perfectly concentric bruise.
    “What is it?” Tommasa breathed.
    The novice mouthed an answer. I looked up too late to see it, but Tommasa gasped and lifted her hand to her throat.
    “What is it?” I echoed, directing the question at Tommasa.
    She turned toward me, her eyes and nose streaming from the cold, and whispered:
    “Plague.”
     
    After they carried Lionarda away, Tommasa and I went to the refectory for the morning meal, then headed to the common room. Sister Violetta normally assigned us our chores there at that time. But the room had become a hospital, with a score of women lying on