Reign of Madness (8 page)

His men came, as promised, bearing a silver bowl of caudle, smoking torches, and fortifying bread. We received them in our bed, me up to my chin under the counterpane, he sitting up, uncovered to the waist. He grinned as they slapped his back and complimented his manhood while he drank from the steaming bowl. After he drank his share, he lifted my head so I might sip. The hot spicy wine still warmed my belly as they left.

The door shut. My husband sank under the covers to his chin. “Well done,
chérie
. That was a good and hearty shout, I must say. How did you know how to hoist such a yowl?”

“There are cats in the Spains, Monseigneur, as well as here.”

He glanced at me as if considering me anew, then broke into a laugh.

The glow of pride I felt for amusing him dimmed quickly. For while we had tricked his men by having me cry out at his count of three, he had not tried to bed me. Did he find me so undesirable? Was his urgency to wed me just a show to impress his men?

“What troubles you?” he asked.

“I am not troubled, Monseigneur.”

“Something does trouble you—you are as readable as a child’s book of beasts. Come now, you must always speak your mind to me. I shall do the same for you.”

I paused. “Do I not please you?”

He turned onto his side to look at me. “Please me?” He took my chin in his hand. I could smell his scent of musk and wine as he turned my face gently from side to side. Our gazes met in the flickering lamplight.

“I want to please you,” I whispered.

Outside the wavy glass of the windows, rain commenced, first pounding in a curtain of gray, then softening into a silvery hum. He leaned down and touched his lips to mine. Warmth spread through my body, the waves continuing as he pulled away.

“Then,” he whispered back, “you shall get your wish.”

Yes, it hurt, at first. And there was blood, but not much—the amount one would spill from a small cut. The next time he gave me more chance to understand. He showed himself to me, a dear jaunty fellow sheathed in dusky silk. I touched his turtle dove’s eggs nestled beneath. And then he got on his elbows and explored me, talking to me gently as does a master to its frightened horse. Soon, very soon, the sweetness much outweighed the pain.

We did not emerge from my chamber until the following afternoon, and only then to eat and drink. He bade me try the beer of which the Flemish people are so fond, and when I spat it out, he laughed as though I were the cleverest girl in the world. Then we retired again to my chamber, which still smelled strongly of sex, and held back our laughter while a page hurriedly remade the fire, dropping the wood out of nervousness as we watched him from our bed.

We made love again. After that, he rose from me, washed his face in the basin, then threw himself on the fur spread of the bed. He propped his chin on his hand and touched his finger to my lips. “My sweet yowling Puss.”

I kissed his finger, damp from his washing. “My Lord, I am reminded of a wedding custom in my country.”

“Yes, Puss?”

“There is no shouting, mind you.”

“No. Shouting is for silly Flemings—though you were quite good at it.”

“After a king takes his new-wed queen to his bed, they display their sheets to their subjects as proof of their consummation, and of his queen’s virginity.”

“Lovely custom. How do they display them?”

“From their bedchamber balcony, Monseigneur. It is hung there for all to see.”

He lifted the sheet below the fur on which we lay and peered at the sheet underneath. “If my people wished for proof of such, they should find much evidence here.” He put down the cover and extended his hands to me. “Up! Put on your robe. We are giving my people a taste for things Spanish.”

Our robes hanging loosely from our shoulders, we tore the sheets from the bed, then laughingly stumbled with them across the rush-covered floor. My husband threw open the shutters to the cold gray morn, and together we let down the proof of our happy union.

A stable boy leading a horse on the street below looked up.

“Behold!” called my husband. “The flag of Austria and Spain!”

The boy was still gaping when my husband drew me back into the room. He shut the window, and then tenderly gathered me into his arms, quieting my laughter with kisses.

7.

20 October anno Domini 1496

W
e had moved to the palace in Malines, a short ride from Lier. Shut within the hangings of the bed, I lay atop the sheets and with my toe kicked a tassel dangling from the bedpole. I was giving most serious attention to keeping the golden cord a-swing, for if I stopped moving my leg for the merest moment, the nauseating spinning would resume in my head.

How did these people drink so much wine? They drank vats of it at the suppers in the two days before our wedding ceremony of state, and then, at the feast after the nuptials, more wine flowed than does in all of Castile, León, and Aragón during the fiestas of Carnaval
.

And these people ate, too, as if they had never glimpsed food in their lives. Entire forests lay upon groaning tables at the wedding feast: pheasants, partridges, stags, rabbits, herons, boar. There were peacocks roasted and sewn back in their feathers; chickens minced and molded into a large castle for Castile; jellied calves’ feet formed into the shape of the Golden Fleece, symbol of Philippe’s House of Habsburg. All these foods were served upon great three-masted ships sailing among our tables, with smaller vessels filled with spices and fruit—a salute to the fleet that had brought me from the Spains. Course after course of this great bounty arrived, accompanied, to my ladies’ horrification, by naked women painted to look like mermaids. There were horses tricked up as sea monsters and boys riding white whales made of wood. Then a capacious pie was wheeled in, from which burst a choir singing about the glory of the union of the Houses of Habsburg and Burgundy with that of Trastámara. Or had I imagined all this in my drunkenness?

I tried not to think of my overfull belly, while in the chamber beyond the drawn bed-hangings my husband poured water into a basin. I could smell the rosewater as he splashed it onto his face. Outside our door, men laughed and shouted—his everpresent men. The number of ladies bidden to Mother’s chaste bedchamber when Father was abroad was paltry compared with the number of followers surrounding my husband. He was the handsome and vivacious lord of the land, and courtiers were attracted to him like moths to torchlight. Yet Philippe was anything but chaste. Far, far from it. My loins burned just to think of our coupling.

I heard the tinkling of little bells. Philippe’s gyrfalcon must have been shifting on her perch. My husband had brought his much-loved bird into our rooms this evening, reassuring me that she could never free herself of her tethers and do harm.

The hangings were yanked open. My naked husband stood with the candlelight behind him.

“Well, Puss.” He dropped onto the bed next to me, sending bits of down into the air. “What did you think of a real Burgundian wedding feast?”

“It was big.”

He leaned over and kissed my cheek. “The Houses of Burgundy and Habsburg like an excuse to show off. Was it better than in the Spains?”

I thought of when we celebrated my sister Isabel’s marriage to the King of Portugal. There was feasting and jousting all the way to the Portuguese border, but there was also much attendance of Mass. And there was no wine for the ladies. No delicious, fruity wine. “Your sister won’t have as magnificent a wedding feast as ours.”

He blew away a bit of down floating before his face. “A pity. Marguerite’s a splendid girl. As witty as a jester, and damn goodlooking. Does your brother deserve her?”

“Juan has a good heart. He’ll treat her kindly. She’ll fare especially well if she likes to hunt.”

“Likes to hunt! She has Burgundian blood in her—we would all rather commit murder than miss a good chase. My mother died hunting, you know.”

“I am sorry, Monseigneur.”

“Don’t be. From what I hear, that’s exactly how she would have liked to die. Come to think of it, me, too. At any rate, I didn’t know her. I was not quite four when she died. Tell me—what did my sister have to say about me?”

“That I had better like hunting.”

He laughed, then raised his voice. “Delilah!”

Through the open bed-hangings I could see his gyrfalcon, craning forward on her perch as if to listen to her master. She cocked her head to catch his voice, for she wore a leather hood and could not see.

He clucked at her. “Isn’t she beautiful? And I’m not just saying that because she’s one of the most expensive birds in the world.”

“Would not a male of her type be more valuable?”

“Not at all. Female gyrfalcons are bigger and stronger than the males—quite the reverse of mankind.”

I thought of Mother, dominating both council and home as Papa good-naturedly stood back. She loomed over him and everyone else like a single mighty oak over a grove of squatty olive trees. Perhaps I was wrong to have been disappointed in Papa. Perhaps it was Mother who was to blame. It was she, by her dominance, who had caused him to stray. I would do things differently. I would like the things my husband liked, do what he desired to do. We would be such kindred spirits that he would never be unfaithful.

“Does your bird always wear the hood?” I knew nothing of falcons. I would have to learn.

“Indoors, yes. Or would you prefer that she mark your ladies’ little dogs as prey?”

I sighed, missing Estrella. My only comfort was in knowing she would hate it here—the cold, the wet, and now having to share a bedchamber with a falcon whose talons were as long as my fingers. She would have never come out of the bedclothes.

“What did my
grand-mère
have to say about me?”

I stopped pinging the tassel with my toe. A sense of discomfort penetrated my haze as I saw myself at the feast, with Madame la Duchesse perched immediately to my right. Margaret of York, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, the third wife of Philippe’s grandfather, held her receding chin aloft with the authority of a queen. Though the rest of her aging face was as bland as a skinned rabbit, a compelling, nay, intimidating, fire sparked from her eyes. Here was a woman used to going her own way. Indeed, my ladies have whispered that she once bore an English bastard. Surely that could not have been true. Charles the Bold, Philippe’s grandfather, and in his time the richest man in the world, earned his name by demanding nothing but the best. He would not have accepted a soiled woman as his wife, even if she was sister to the English king.

At the feast, as the ships had sailed by with their splendid fare, the Dowager Duchess had taken little of the exotic foods offered to her, even though it was her glittering palace in which we were dining. She said even less, noting with disapproval every bite or sip I put into my mouth and every word that dribbled out. Trying to make conversation, I had asked if she might offer me advice on how to please my new husband.

She speared the single stuffed quail’s egg marooned in the center of her golden plate. “My dear, my grandson always finds his pleasure. It is you who must find how to please yourself.”

I had blinked at my own plate, overflowing with peacock, prawns, and roast boar dripping in truffle gravy. Was she testing my desire to be a good wife to Philippe? Evidently, they were close, she having raised him in the absence of his mother, who was Charles the Bold’s daughter from his first marriage. “But Madame, I want to make him happy.”

“Make him happy! My dear child, he has no idea what unhappiness is.”

“That is admirable, Madame.”

She raised the quail’s egg on the tip of her knife. “Is it? All his life, ‘yes’ is the only word he has ever heard. It has made for a man whose appetite grows larger from eating.” She poked the white orb past her thin lips, then chewed, grimacing.

Now my husband stroked my arm. “Tell me what she said about me. She had to have said something. Grand-mère would not miss an opportunity to voice her opinion.”

I resumed my play with the tassel. “She said you were happy.”

“I am. Come now, surely she said more.”

“Truly she said little else—save that the only word you know is ‘yes.’ ”

The sweet pouches on either side of my husband’s lips slackened, as they did whenever he was serious. Then he rolled onto his back and laughed. “I do believe that she might be right. Of course she is right—Grand-mère is always right. Well, I take that as a compliment. Being agreeable is an admirable quality in a man.”

I had meant that he had heard only the word yes, not necessarily that he said it, but now was not the time to split hairs. “Indeed, Monseigneur. Being agreeable can never be bad.”

He stretched his arms above himself. “You know what my people call me?”

“Yes, Monseigneur—Philippe the Handsome.”

“Not that.” He slid his lower lip forward in a pout.

“But Monseigneur, you should be proud.”

He waved me off. “That is silly woman talk. My men call me ‘Philippe Believer in Counsel.’ I like it. I do try to say yes as much as possible—it’s a good policy. Someday I will be called simply what my great-grandfather was called.”

I kicked at the tassel. “What was that?”

“Philippe the Good.”

“I shall call you that now: my good Philippe. Philippe the Good.”

He grinned at me, his lids heavy with drink, then suddenly grabbed my leg. “And now, Madame, will you dare say yes?”

I rolled toward him, still caught in his grip.

“Yes, Monseigneur. Always yes.”

“Mm.” He kissed me hard. “You do learn fast.”