Wake Unto Me (38 page)

Read Wake Unto Me Online

Authors: Lisa Cach

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Historical, #Europe, #Love & Romance, #Girls & Women

“Philippe’s true loyalties lay with Henry of Navarre, however. In a move meant to hurt Catherine and wreak revenge for what she’d done to innocent Beneto, he stole the girls from under Catherine’s nose and took them to Navarre.”
“Giulia and Elisabeta survived?” Raphael asked.
“Of course,” Madame Snowe said. “They both married. They had children. They lived to be old women.”
“How do you know this?” he asked.
Madame Snowe smiled. “Raphael, do you not recognize Bianca’s kin?”
He shook his head, as puzzled as Caitlyn.
“I am a descendant of Elisabeta.”
Caitlyn’s jaw dropped. “No way!”
Madame Snowe got to her feet and came over to Caitlyn. She touched the underside of Caitlyn’s chin with her fingertips, tilting up her face as if to see it better. “And Caitlyn, have you not recognized your kin in me, either?”
“Wh-what do you mean?”
“Your great-great-grandmother, many times removed, was Giulia. You and I, Madame Brouwer and Greta, Madame Pelletier and all the rest of the Sisterhood of Fortuna, are the lost daughters of Bianca de’ Medici. It is why you were chosen by the Sisterhood to come to the Fortune School. Two more lost daughters will join us next term.”
“B-but why?” Caitlyn stuttered.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
Caitlyn shook her head.
“Caitlyn, you have inherited Bianca’s psychic gifts. We all have, in one form or another. In you, though, we hoped that they might take a special form. We hoped that you might be the Dark One.”
Caitlyn’s eyes widened, and she exchanged a meaningful look with Raphael.
“What is it?” Madame Snowe said, catching their silent communication.
“Bianca called my future love my ‘Dark One,’ ” Raphael answered.
Madame Snowe’s lips parted in surprise, and she looked at Caitlyn with a renewed wonder. She smiled as if in disbelief and shook her head.
“But what did
you
mean by it?” Caitlyn asked her.
“My great-grandmother had visions, and often made predictions; unfortunately, they usually came in obscure rhyming form. She made one about the Dark One.” Madame recited in English, and then translated for Raphael:
“From the New World’s western shore
Comes a Dark One, young and poor,
Black of hair and pale of face,
Without bidding she will chase
The source of Sisters’ power real
In the heart of Fortune’s wheel.
Only when this Dark One’s found
Can our powers be unbound.”
 
They all turned to look again at the heart in its reliquary, at the center of the black and gold wheel of stones. “You expected me to find this, all along,” Caitlyn said, feeling strangely betrayed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because we weren’t sure you were the Dark One. When you first came to us, you seemed to show nascent signs of a gift trying to emerge through your dreams, but then they never seemed to amount to anything. Then you hit your head, and the dreams stopped altogether. For obvious reasons, the Sisterhood cannot have rumors spread about that we are a group of psychically gifted women. If you were not one of us in talent as well as bloodline, you could not be told our secrets.”
“So if I hadn’t found the wheel, and Bianca’s heart …”
“You already know the answer,” Madame Snowe said. “You would have been sent home. The Sisterhood is not a charity, Caitlyn, and you had failed all your classes. What more could you expect?”
Caitlyn shook her head, chilled by Snowe’s harsh practicality. As her mother had warned her, the Queen of Swords could help her with one hand, and as easily cut her down with the other. Expedience ruled. “The cheek swab you made me do for the DNA test; that was to see if I was a descendant of Bianca’s?”
Snowe nodded. “And while the test did confirm that you are of Bianca’s lineage, we have unfortunately not yet isolated the genetic markers that tell whether or not a lost daughter has psychic powers. We have found some descendants in whom abilities are weak, undeveloped, or, in some cases, all but nonexistent.”
“But not in me.”
“No. But even without the DNA test, I would now know you were one of the Sisters. You have brought us not only Bianca’s heart, but the stone circle of worship from whence the line of Eshael originally sprang!”
Madame Snowe gestured around her at the stones, her face glowing with a possessive awe. She turned back to Caitlyn. “We of the Sisterhood use our powers to make the world a better place, but many of us have discovered our powers too late in life to fully develop them. We now see bringing the young daughters of Bianca to the school, and training them to properly harness their potential, as crucial to our mission. And now that we have our mother’s heart,” she said, turning back to the reliquary and lifting it reverently in her hands, “there is no limit to what we can achieve.”
Raphael came to Caitlyn and put his arm around her shivering shoulders, and she leaned into his warmth. His strength and solidity comforted her and felt like a shield against the chill of Madame Snowe’s ambition.
“Is this what Bianca wanted? A coven of her descendants, worshipping her heart?” Caitlyn softly asked Raphael.
Raphael tightened his hold on her. “She wanted power, she wanted freedom, and she wanted her children to survive. Beyond that I could not say.”
Caitlyn watched the light sparkling in the cabochon atop the reliquary, still held high in Madame Snowe’s hands. Bianca de’ Medici, burned at the stake in 1572, had risen.
Author’s Note
 
The roots of
Wake Unto Me
stretch more than a decade into the past, to when I first saw the portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi by Bronzino, at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. I came around a corner and saw her, sitting cold and still with her knowing eyes. This portrait, and one other by Bronzino, were the inspiration for Bianca de’ Medici. The novelist Henry James describes the Lucrezia portrait in
The Wings of the Dove
:
“The lady… (with) her eyes of other days,
her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels,
her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great
personage—only unaccompanied by a joy.
And she was dead, dead, dead.”
 
The second Bronzino portrait that served as inspiration was a death portrait of the real Bia de’ Medici. The real Bia (possibly short for Bianca) was the illegitimate daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Cosimo fathered her when he was sixteen; the identity of her mother was a secret, never revealed. Bia died of a fever at age six, and Bronzino most likely painted her after that, at the request of her heartbroken father. In the painting, Bia is pale and dressed in white, denoting death. This whiteness gave me the idea to nickname the fictional Bianca
La Perla
, The Pearl.
The de’ Medici name, and the dates of the portraits, brought me to the idea of incorporating Catherine de’ Medici, queen of France, into the plot. Her husband Henry’s affair with Diane de Poitiers is the stuff of legend: it was Diane de Poitiers who built the arched bridge addition to Chenonceau, the famously beautiful castle that spans the river Cher in the Loire Valley. Henry died in a gruesome jousting accident, his eye socket and brain pierced by splinters from a shattered lance. After his death, Catherine de’ Medici evicted Diane from spectacular Chenonceau and took it for herself; in trade she gave Diane the inferior Château de Chaumont, a few miles away. Catherine’s royal residence was at Château de Blois, however, where she was kept busy fighting to keep her sons on the throne of France.
As for Château de la Fortune, it does not exist. It is instead a compilation of all the castles I visited in France a couple of summers ago. The location and the exterior are from Château de Beynac, on the Dordogne. The interior spaces share much with both Chaumont and Blois, however, which are a couple of hundred miles north, on the Loire. The secret cupboards in Madame Snowe’s office are taken from Catherine de’ Medici’s secret cupboards at Blois, and the dining hall description also comes from there. The
Fiat Lux
window was inspired by similar painted glass windows at Chaumont; Madame Snowe’s office and Philippe’s bedroom and blue drapery-hung bed are loosely based on Diane de Poitiers’s bedroom; and the floor tiles that are painted into pilgrimage routes in the fictional Grand Salon are an echo of the elaborate tile floors of that same castle.
The Knights Templar element and the caves were inspired by a visit to Domme, a walled village on a cliff high above the Dordogne River. A system of caves runs underneath the town, and legend has it that villagers hid in them during the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of Religion, although other sources say the caves were not discovered until the mid-twentieth century. Several Knights Templar were imprisoned in the towers at the gates to Domme, where they left graffiti carved into the walls—mostly of religious symbols. This was in 1307, when all Knights Templar were ordered arrested by the French king, who wished to seize their wealth for himself.
The Grande Randonnée trail system that runs throughout France makes it possible to explore the country on foot, walking from village to village. I spent two weeks doing just that, passing through walnut orchards, shaded woodlands, and grain fields sprinkled with crimson poppies. Ancient fortresses and castles dot the hills to either side of the valley, still watching over the Dordogne River that once served as the border between France and English Aquitaine. Pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela in Spain have treaded portions of these same trails for over a thousand years.
Travel is important to my writing. The Internet and books give me facts, but it is the unexpected discoveries of travel that give me inspiration.
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