Reign of Madness (23 page)

“Philippe is the one who should preside with her. He’s the one who wants to be King.”

The moon shone on the stones of the street, dimly illuminating the warren of passageways between the buildings of the quarter. Across the way, the tower of the church of Santo Tomé stood square and silent against a plush black sky spangled with stars. A cat yowled.

“Mevrouw, unhealthy air rises during the night. Please come to your bed.”

The clatter of metal on stone severed the quiet, followed by a burst of male laughter.

Katrien joined me at the window. An oath floated up from the darkness. It was in French.

Katrien inhaled sharply.

“You heard Philippe, too.”

“It is some of his men, that is all.”

“I have heard my ladies whispering. I know that he and his men roam the streets at night. They cannot keep their hose tied. There will be trouble. These Burgundian men don’t understand how the Spaniards value their women’s chastity.”

“Surely the Prince is not among them tonight.”

I glanced at her. “Tonight?”

She would not meet my eyes. “He is in bed, feeling the effects of his food and drink. You must go to bed, too. You will wish for this sleep in the morning.”

The voices returned.

“Mevrouw.”

“Shhh. That is Philippe. Listen.”

Into the gauzy night air floated a man’s teasing voice:
“Ronde ogen.”

I looked at Katrien. “Isn’t that what he called you?”

“He’s calling a cat. If that is him. Come, Mevrouw. You are so tired.”

I let her pull me across the cool tiles. She tucked me in linen that had been pressed with flowers—I sniffed—roses. I breathed in their scent and listened, but not for my drunken husband, calling for cats and God knows what else. No, I listened, with all the ridiculous romantic fervor of my poor dear María, for what? For someone who would never come?

I drifted into the forgiving bosom of slumber and, for a few unconscious hours, was at peace.

27.

18 June anno Domini 1502

I
t was a sight worth savoring during those months in Toledo: Philippe slumped glassy-eyed over the parchment that Mother’s secretary placed before him, while Mother, her heavy green reading lenses perched on her nose, explained to him the significance of the document.

He massaged his temples as if to soothe a massive headache. His exasperated voice echoed from the coffered timber ceiling. “Truly, does it matter how many
reales
are allowed each day for bread for the pilgrims in the hospital at Santiago de Compostela?”

Mother looked over black rims as thick as a finger. “Yes.”

He gazed over the document with a sigh. “Isn’t there someone else who can do this? Must you oversee every hospital giving alms to every grubby pilgrim in the middle of nowhere?”

“Yes. And you must, too, as King.”

“According to your Cortes, I am only to be consort.”

“And do you as consort not wish to know what is afoot in your lands?”

His look of despair dissolved into a smile when he saw me watching from the other side of the hall. “Puss, come in here. You think this is all nonsense, don’t you?”

I crossed the room and took the empty seat next to him at the table. “Sorry to be late, Mother. I was unwell.”

She took off her eyeglasses and studied me.

I scanned the document. “Where are we?” I had vomited after Mass and felt desperate for sleep—familiar symptoms whose implication sent a charge of terror through me. I would not be allowed to return to Flanders if I was with child. The journey would be too risky.

“Perhaps you could take over for me,” said Philippe.

“Do, Juana,” Mother said airily. “If he is going to content himself with a minor role in governing our lands, you had better be prepared to take the reins by yourself.”

“The King is not here,” he said, as if that were a reason that he himself should not be subjected to this torture.

“The King,” Mother said firmly, “is attending to other things.”

Philippe sat back and folded his arms over his chest, letting it be known that if he must be there, it was under protest.

Several charters, three dozen petitions, and at least five rounds of cathedral bells marking the quarter-hour later, we were released, and then only after Mother had received a letter from Fray Hernando de Talavera. He had been sent to Granada before I had gone to wed Philippe. Evidently, his absence was still keenly felt, for she dismissed us, then closeted herself in an inner chamber, leaving us to do whatever we wished. I followed Philippe as he strode through the pillared arcade of the palace.

“Cabinet meetings every Tuesday, conferences with the royal auditor on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays holed up signing petitions and documents, and Fridays listening to ministers drone on about financial matters—by Saint John, the woman takes no break. And on top of that, she prays the hours whenever she can and, God forbid, does not miss a daily Mass. What a miserable life!”

He turned around to let me catch up. “Your father, now, he has the right idea. You don’t find him sitting in the counting room, discussing how much should be allowed for alms for the poor in some dusty godforsaken town in León.”

“Oh, you can find him in his counting room when he is in Zaragoza. He is quite particular about how matters go in Aragón, as those are the lands he inherited from his father.”

“That’s because he has power there. How do you expect me to take an interest in this place if I am second in power to you?”

“Neither of us truly has to worry about ruling. My mother has no plans of admitting her mortality soon.”

“Well, when she does, you should leave it all for me to handle. I am experienced in ruling my own realms. You could be free to do whatever you desire—care for the children, sew shirts, spin wool.”

“Whatever you wish, Monseigneur.” It was easy to agree to something that was never going to come to pass. I, too, could have a happy relationship with the word “yes.”

We neared the exit of the palace, where the guards awaited with raised halberds. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“Where are
we
going, you should ask.” He led me into the hot white sunshine.

I followed him onto the Street of the Angel, the surprise of his attention lifting me out of my malaise. Townsfolk peered, stunned to see the Prince Consort and Princess of Asturias walking the narrow streets like commoners; they hastily bowed as we passed. Carters nodded as they rumbled by on their wagons. A stonemason chiseling a gargoyle on the eaves of Mother’s almost finished monastery of San Juan de los Reyes stopped long enough to squint down from his ladder and salute.

We passed onto the road to the San Martín Bridge, in the shadow of the yellow stone city walls on which soldiers paced, their crested helmets shining in the sun. With a nod from the gatekeeper in his tower, we began our way across the bridge, whose soaring arches, first built by the Romans, spanned the gorge through which the Tajo flowed. Philippe led me into an embrasure overlooking the water and, like a child, leaned against the stone wall to gaze down on the river rushing far below. I joined him, the taffeta of my skirt rustling against the wall.

Philippe stretched out his arms to the sapphire sky. “Splendid! The perfect antidote to slaving away with your mother. Thank God she got that letter from her lover—we’d be there still.”

“What lover?”

“Fray Hernando.”

I laughed. “Fray Hernando is hardly her lover.” Shielding my eyes, I gazed at the hills rising from the far side of the bridge. Outcroppings of rocks, bearded with mustard-colored lichen, jutted from the slopes. Where there was crumbly saffron earth, gray scrub had sprung up, sometimes a gnarled tree. From childhood excursions to a hermitage in those hills with Mother, I knew that the brush, which looked so dead, was alive with birds and rabbits and darting lizards.

On the side of the bridge from which we had come, the gorge dropped almost straight down to the water from the city wall. The slopes were spiked with swords of aloe as tall as men. Swifts sprang from crevices in the face of the cliffs, to skim the water in twos and threes.

I followed Philippe’s smile to the shore at the bottom of the gorge, where naked boys swam and dived in the water with a flash of their skinny flanks.

“You must have swum a lot as a boy,” I said, “with all those rivers in Flanders.”

“Actually, I didn’t. Since the nobles and Father were fighting for my custody, I was under lock and key. I never so much as touched a puddle.”

“But you got out often to hunt.”

“With a gaggle of guards and nobles who posed as my friends. There was never anyone my age around. That is why I treasure Hendrik—he was the first person who was not gray in the beard to befriend me, though I didn’t meet him until the year you came to my lands.”

How lucky I had been to have my sisters and brother as companions. It was strange to think that all of them were gone now, to the realms of their foreign husbands or to Death, the effect of which was very much the same.

“I want my son to be able to enjoy these simple pleasures.”

I glanced at him in surprise. He rarely mentioned Charles. I was glad that he should do so, though it caused me a pang of grief to be reminded of our sweet boy, so far away.

“I want to be a better father than Maxi was.”

“He couldn’t help being away from you. The burghers of Bruges held you hostage.”

His glossy hair caught on his collar as he shook his head. “Even after he regained custody, he was always in his father’s lands in Austria, and I was always in my mother’s lands, with François.”

“Let’s go home, Philippe, to Charles and the girls. We can leave at once if you order it. Mother cannot stop us, if only you—”

“I remember my father getting me my first suit of armor. I was six, he had just regained control of me. He had bidden me to come before him in the armor, and asked me to save the helmet to be put on in his presence. I was already sick with fright from being screwed into a metal shell, so when his gentleman tied on my padded protective hat, then eased the helmet down over my head, I panicked. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. ‘Put up your visor,’ I heard him say, but my hands in my armored gloves couldn’t find the opening. I could hear him roaring with laughter.

“The next thing I knew, my visor opened. François was looking in. ‘I do believe it is King Arthur,’ he said. ‘Good sir, where might you keep your Holy Grail?’

“I cooled down enough to let him remove my offending lid. ‘Lancelot,’ I told him as soon as my head was free. ‘I don’t look like Arthur, I look like
Lancelot
.’”

Philippe’s rueful smile charmingly puckered the pouches near his lips. In the handsome and confident man leaning against the stone wall of the bridge, I could see the lonely motherless boy.

“You didn’t wish to be Arthur?” I asked softly.

He recoiled at the pity he must have seen in my eyes.

“That woman? He let Lancelot take his wife.”

He pushed away from the wall, then stalked off, leaving me sitting.

I rose to make my way back to the palace. The guards looked down from the gatehouse; I would not meet their gaze. Once in the courtyard, I sank onto a bench in the shade of a fragrant orange tree to rest. I was thinking of my little Charles, wondering what kind of man he would become if he were to be separated too long from the love of his mother, when a shadow passed over the grass before me. I looked up to see a stork sailing to its nest on the rooftop of the neighboring church of Santo Tomé. No sooner had it landed on the jumbled sticks of its home than the white fuzzy head of a large chick appeared.

The father stepped forward awkwardly, then opened his great yellow beak. The chick reached in and gobbled until, satiated, it sank out of sight.

“You are interested in storks?”

I turned to find Diego Colón, standing in the arcade. He wore Mother’s livery; a sword in its scabbard balanced on his hip. My heart, foolish traitor, beat faster.

“Yes,” I said. “There are few birds more gangling and clumsy on their feet, or with homelier faces, yet I admire them. They make good parents. Both the mother and the father work at tending their young.”

He came toward me, keeping his gaze on the nest. “It is said that they mate for life.”

“If only humans could be as faithful as humble storks.”

Our eyes met. “Some are,” he said.

I drank in his nearness with the gratitude of a parched prisoner given water. “We would do well to study them.”

Loud voices came from a distant part of the palace. We turned to see a physician striding through the arcade, his robes flapping, followed by two men in clanking armor. They were headed toward Philippe’s quarters.

“Is there trouble?” said Diego. “Perhaps you should go to your husband.”

“It is probably nothing. I suppose one of his men was cut while playing at swords, or perhaps someone fought over cards or was hurt in a wrestling competition. There is never a lack of sport among Philippe’s men. You would know it if Philippe himself were ill. He would call for every relic in Toledo with curative powers to be brought, and perhaps a magic charm or two. As bold as he hopes to act, he is most afraid of death.”

Diego put his foot against the well. “What else is there to be afraid of, if not death?”

“I should be more charitable,” I said hastily. “He never really had a firm foundation to grow upon. He lost his mother at an early age.”

“As did I.” He saw me wince. “I’m sorry. I did not wish to make you feel bad. I was just thinking that whatever faults I have, I would not want them blamed on her. It was not her fault that Father left her.”

I waited for him to explain.

“Tell me about your children,” he said. “Is your daughter like you?”

“My older daughter, Leonor?” I was easily led to safer ground. Just saying her name made me smile. “Not at all. She is a typical first child. She orders her nurses about—me, too, yet with such good sense that I happily obey. But she is most tenderhearted. She mothers her little brother like a hen. Though she was only a toddling child when he was born, she insisted on helping to swaddle him. And it was she who taught him to walk, coaxing him along with a ball.”

He nodded for me to continue. I was not used to being able to utter a thought about the children without being interrupted with an exclamation about how clever Delilah was or when Pedro might ever be ready to play.

“It is Charles that I worry about. Perhaps you have not heard—his jaw . . .”

“Yes.”

“It is a trial for him to eat, and hence he is of small stature and prone to fevers and illnesses. It made Leonor weep to see him lying listless in his crib.”

“I am sorry.”

“Oh, but he is so strong. I think he would have been dead long ago if he did not will his little body to live. In this way he is like my mother.”

“Perhaps like his own mother, too.”

I savored another of Diego’s smiles.

“It must be difficult for you to be away from him,” he said.

If only Charles’s own father understood this. “Yes.”

Diego reached inside his doublet, drew out a pouch, then shook something into his fist. He held it out.

“For you.”

“Me?”

He opened his hand. On his palm was a pearl the shape and size of a pigeon’s egg.

“It’s beautiful. I have never seen a pearl this large.” I looked up at him. “You must not give this to me.”

“It is from the new lands of my father. He gave it to me to remember why he must be away from me, why we have made so many sacrifices.”

“I cannot take this.”

“Wear it as I have done, to remember.”

“But how will you remember your father without it?”

His earnest expression softened. “I am not likely to forget him.”

Footsteps pounded in the arcade behind us. A page dashed out into the sunlight. “Your Highness, the Prince wishes you to come to his chambers at once.”

“Is there a problem?”

The page glanced at Diego.