Whip Smart

by Kit Brennan

  Wait, we were not like that, silly me! That is exactly what we were.

  On the first morning, I sat in the schoolroom observing him from the corners of my eyes. How could such an uncouthly put together bundle of manhood be feared as a radical of the first degree? As if conscious of being the centre of my thought, his glance slid up and slithered over me, point by point. I felt contaminated. I had never gone to bed with a man who did not attract me, to put it mildly. More truthfully? Who viscerally repulsed me. However would I get through this ordeal? I schooled my lips to smile serenely. His voice droned on and on, spittle flew, and I felt ill.

  After the lesson, the infantas trailed off to their next engagement: Luisa Fernanda with enthusiastic glee and Isabel in plodding resignation. Shite and double merde.

  “It seems likely we shall be spending many hours in the same room, señor,” I ventured, fluttering my lashes.

  “Perhaps you will learn something,” he muttered in his unpleasant, nasal voice, gathering together his papers and books.

  “Oh, doubtless,” I trilled, and moved closer. Ye gads, he was repulsive. He had such a dank, sour smell. “I am always intrigued by a man with abundant knowledge.” I put my little hand upon his own.

  His eyes flew up and pierced mine before he snatched his furry paw away and shook it, as if ridding it of fleas. Oh good God. Did Grimaldi have any idea what he was asking me to accomplish?

  I tried again. “Señor Arguëlles, I would be most grateful if you would occasionally give me a small, intellectual chore. I am not wealthy . . .” I paused and looked down, becomingly, “but perhaps there are other ways in which I might—”

  His head reared back and he peered at me sternly. “What on earth are you talking about? And why are you here in the first place? I heard you are some sort of,” his voice became ironic and huffy, “thespian. Not at all the kind of person the future queen should have near her.”

  “You have very elegant legs and ankles,” I said foolishly, not being able to think of anything else in this world which might interest him so much.

  He paused, and he did look down for an instant, at himself, and I could see his ecumenical mind ticking away, acknowledging that I was indeed correct in this matter. Then he made a wet, snorting sound through his nose as if highly desirous of swallowing as much snot as was humanly possible. “Good day to you,” he said, and flung himself out of the room.

  After such a wretched beginning, I was more than ever concerned about the aftermath of this undertaking. I was in so deep. I had evaded a murderous demon in the theatre and nobody seemed to care, and now this? No one had convinced me that I would be safe, should I manage to seduce the brute. Arguëlles had friends in high places; why would they dismiss him, and not me? I would simply be considered some theatrical slut who had tried to get above herself, who’d tried to sleep her way into favour. Too cruel, too disgusting—I was going to fail. It was not possible. But then images of my darling Emma’s ears . . . Oh, my confidence had received a rough shake, indeed.

  Turmoil boiled through me as I sat in the schoolroom day after day, observing the tutor’s furtive narcissism. After my compliment about his legs, I could see he believed he was impressing me; his chest puffed out even further and he kept slicking the few hairs on his head back into place. Ugh. He was coming around to the idea, I thought morosely. Men almost always do, being such prisoners to their pricks. Days, then a week ticked by while I delayed my odious undertaking; Ventura was sending me angry notes, backstage, on a regular basis: “What is happening? Has he disgraced himself yet?” Meanwhile, Arguëlles ate raw onions as a kind of mid-morning tonic; we all turned our faces away, then spontaneously fled. Could he not tell? Did he not care?

  On a happier note, in the afternoons the girls and I spent hours with the croquet mallets outside the palace, cracking wooden balls through hoops, with fallen leaves rustling underfoot. Luisa Fernanda and I were both terrible cheats. Though at first we denied it, I could tell she thought it wonderful that I cheated in the same way she did: urging my ball ahead with an expert kick while Isabel wasn’t looking. After a while, Luisa Fernanda and I openly cheated, snickering at each other as we did so, then lounging on the grass while we watched and waited for the almost-queen to catch up.

  Poor Isabel. I say poor, but of course that’s not remotely the right word. Rich as stink the girl was, and about to rule one of the world’s powers (though all that marrying of first cousins couldn’t be good for it). Her mind had room in it for only three things, I discovered: food, her impending sovereignty, and sex. But the biggest undoubted handicap to Isabel’s wanton desires (after all, a Spanish aristocrat in search of safe haven will marry anything) was the state of her epidermis. The package she came wrapped in was that of a lizard. Apparently, mamá Cristina had spent a fortune on cures, but nothing ever helped on a permanent basis. Isabel had a disease called ichthyosis, causing her head, face, and entire body to be covered with a dry, scaly skin. Thermal baths, spas, sea baths: All gave only temporary alleviation. A day or two later it was back with a vengeance. When the girl wasn’t eating, she was scratching. The raw redness of her face was made odder by the redness of her eyes, which protruded. Hence, poor girl. I really meant it.

  “Baby Luisa,” Isabel called, as she stood swinging her mallet, looking about with a halfhearted squint, “have you seen my ball?”

  “Right behind you,” Luisa Fernanda trilled, leaping up with a skip and a hop, “but Rosana and I are winning again.”

  “Bother. This is a dumb game.”

  Isabel was always alone, even when surrounded by people. It was like an inherited flaw; as her father had apparently done, the scalyskinned infanta repelled sympathy without noticing that she was doing so. Watching her totter around on her court shoes, I thanked my stars that I was not born into such an elevated station. The littlest one had a much luckier life ahead, as far as I could tell.

  When it was time for siesta, Luisa Fernanda would invite me into her bedchamber to lie down with her and play. The royal rooms were gorgeously outfitted, of course, but also strewn with toys and other small girl objects, I was glad to see. At least she was allowed to be herself in her own private space. Her women were upset about being turned out, but Nanda was determined. “Rosana’s fun, and I want to talk with her. Now go.” People who are not Spanish (especially the English) have a strange revulsion towards the noble tradition of siesta: They can’t believe that the population of entire countries lays down their work in the middle of the day in order to eat, sleep, and indulge themselves with a lover for hours at a time in the afternoon sunshine. I can’t think of anything nicer. Of course, the latter was not happening at this juncture. I was being very good, playing innocently with children.

  The youngest infanta’s favourite way to play during siesta was to tell stories. She loved hearing mine (I grew quite skilled at making them up or remembering Celtic and Indian tales I’d been told), and she loved to tell them herself. The subject of her stories was her own family history. In fact, except for my first lesson (also in bed) from the earl of Malmesbury, and some brief but vivid sketches from Grimaldi, most of what I know about Spanish royalty and vengeance came from the fair-faced princess—no doubt distorted and embellished through a ten-year-old’s perspective.

  The facts I eventually distilled go something like this: At Isabel’s birth, the high dignitaries of the Catholic church, the apostolics, rejoiced that King Ferdinand had fathered a girl. They hated him, for he’d leeched away all of their lands and riches. Although his new wife Cristina and her termagant sister Carlota had convinced the king to sanction the baby’s reign, whatever sex it might be, the apostolics believed that eventually the old rule of male successor to the throne must be upheld—which meant Ferdinand’s brother, Don Carlos. The apostolics were also angry at Ferdinand’s lack of enthusiasm for the Holy Inquisition, which pious Don Carlos had sworn to bring back. The country’s loose morals and religious and political backsliding needed cleaning up, according
to the churchmen, who vowed to place Carlos on the throne by force of arms if necessary. But then the unthinkable happened: Ferdinand died, the Pragmatic Sanction somehow passed into law, the queen regent and her now two female children ascended, and the people rejoiced. An apostolic call went out for “Religion, King, Inquisition” and madmen of all stripes leapt on to it with conviction. This had been followed by full-fledged war.

  Don Carlos, meanwhile, had continually refused to take an oath of allegiance to his niece—unlike the third brother, Don Francisco, who was married to Carlota. The rest of the world then stuck their oars in: England supported Cristina and the rights of a woman to rule (we’d had a remarkable queen once, after all, one the Spanish remembered well). France backed the women reluctantly, partly because they were all related by their Bourbon blood. Portugal was involved in its own civil war over the rights of a pretender, so they were not to be trusted. The old Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia, and Russia refused to recognize Isabel for the usual reason of her sex, and because they feared the rise of liberal principles which had begun to percolate all over Europe. Austria’s gouty old Metternich had described Isabel at age three as “revolution incarnate in its most dangerous form.” Luisa Fernanda told me this story with a wicked giggle, proud of her sister’s reputation.

  “Papí had three wives before Mamí, but hadn’t got any children from them, and he was getting old and sick. Tia Carlota says he’d been,” here the little girl put on a raspy, world-weary tone, “‘too busy with women other than the queens to have managed to officially replicate himself.”

  That made me laugh.

  “Mamí changed all that,” Nanda went on. “She made him get down to business, because she wanted to see us as soon as possible.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” I murmured sleepily. It was beginning to strike me that all this war, death, hate, and destruction had been caused by one thing: emphatic denunciation of the rights of a woman to rule.

  “We have lots of half brothers and sisters now, but we never see them. They live in France.” The girl’s voice was a little sad. “Mamí fell in love again too fast. But she’d never really been in love anyway. Not to Papí. He was too mean and grumpy. I understand that; do you?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Anyway, everyone knows she and Muñoz are married now. But they were married even when she was queen regent. They got married secretly, with the help of the Papal nuncio.”

  The pope had approved? But—? Oh never mind.

  Nanda had her white stocking-clad legs in the air at this point, admiring her feet as they twirled in one direction and then the other. “I don’t mind him, and I do like their babies. Though they’re dark like Muñoz and they’re only half royal, so they don’t really count.” I remembered Concepción’s whispered relieving of the big man’s itch and wondered how many others he might have been fathering on the side when circumstances lent themselves to full dalliance. “He’s rich now,” the cherubic princess added innocently, “because when they were living here, he got stock tips from different finance ministers. And I heard him tell some of his friends.” Interesting. Could that possibly have included the Grimaldis? Was that why Concepción had been so accommodating? I filed the Infanta’s gossip for future reference; you never know when you might need some scuttlebutt to save your own, I thought. Then we fell asleep in the afternoon sunshine.

  Back to Isabel. Her importance can’t be forgotten, though she herself often was. Isabel—and sex. It was on everyone’s mind, not only Isabel’s.

  The truth cannot be shirked: The chubby infanta was embarrassingly randy. When she sat at her desk, chewing her pencil and trying to conjugate French verbs, she would rhythmically rock back and forth on her chair. Under the table, she would rub at herself; Arguëlles, noticing, would make his violent snorty-snot sound. Nanda had told me that political as well as royal fingers had been crossed on Isabel’s birthday, hoping it would herald the arrival of her courses, too long delayed. But so far, nothing. What could be keeping the girl from becoming a woman?

  “What about him?” Isabel would whisper to her sister during their interminable courtly audiences. “Look, he smiled at me.”

  “Too far below you,” was the reply. “And he’s ancient.”

  “What do you think it will be like to fuck?”

  My ears burned! The fat girl was incorrigible.

  “Don’t call it that,” Nanda scolded. “That’s rude! Mamí would say you sound like Tia Lota.”

  I was beginning to understand Cristina’s anxiety for speed as far as selecting a potential suitor was concerned. One day I overheard the British ambassador telling a visiting English dignitary, “She must be married somehow and to someone immediately,” as they watched the princess licking a sweet on a stick with more than usual gusto. The ambassador went on, with a grimace, “As the Spanish would say, if we don’t make haste, at this rate the heir will arrive before the bridegroom.”

  Arguëlles himself seemed to be settling into a horrible charade of courtliness towards the chubby one. In the schoolroom, he’d pull out her chair and help arrange her skirts once she was in it. He started sharpening quills for her and other small gestures of devotion. He was filling the girl’s head with strange ideas.

  “Your Majesty, never mind recent history. Leave the skirmishes of the battlefield for the men who understand them.”

  “But I should take an interest, that was Mamà’s war,” Isabel said, scratching her cheek, then her wrist, then her torso.

  “The prime minister knows what is best. That’s why your mother left him in charge. In charge of Spain, our beloved country, and of you, Your Majesty, and your dear sister.” His voice slippery and persuasive. “What Spain requires now is more young people—more babies, in fact. You will make a supremely fit mother, Your Majesty. You will set the standard for mothers.”

  “Do you think so?” she asked. I nearly gagged at the tutor’s blatant foolishness, but he was much smarter than I could bear to think him. He played to her weaknesses.

  “Yes, Highness. A beautiful bride, and a tender young mother.”

  And tears actually came into her red, raw eyes at the image of herself, breast-feeding and enjoying the nightly rumpy-pumpy that she craved.

  Luisa Fernanda, at least, didn’t take the tutor’s fawning hypocrisy lying down. She could see clearly, her head not yet clouded by burgeoning lust and an unappeasable stomach.

  “I don’t like these lessons,” Nanda told him. “I don’t think Mamá wants us to be told such things. Right now we need to know about the Cortes and why the war happened.” She flung her pencil down and walked out.

  Arguëlles looked over to Isabel, who was digging out a sweet. As long as the soon-to-be-queen was still in the room, he was content. He was Espartero’s minion, the fat girl had no time for me, and there didn’t seem much that I could do about it.

  And still every night, coded, impatient notes from Ventura were being left for me at the theatre: “Time is wasting,” followed by “Do not fear, but do not wait,” and then the more forthright, “Soon it will be spring, so make winter come soon!” I was in an agony. I had to make my move!

  The moment finally came three days later. The lesson had been a particularly nasty one: Spanish history, spiced with gristly battles and descriptions of obedient royals who’d heard the word of God as delivered through His earthly messengers, the apostolics. Then, just as the three of us thought he was winding down, Arguëlles suddenly wound himself up again. The glories of the Holy Inquisition really made the spittle fly. I watched with horror as his enthusiasm rose, informing us of some of the more intricate forms and devices of torture devised to winkle out heretics. Isabel seemed quite taken with it, but poor Nanda placed her little hands over her ears. When I saw tears trickling from the corners of her eyes, I spoke up.

  “Please, señor, that is enough for today. Their Royal Highnesses are fatigued and must retire. It is past the usual time.”

  He dug into a poc
ket to retrieve a large, wrinkled handkerchief with which he wiped his perspiring face. Then he rose and bowed. The girls scurried away.

  The day had been as long as the lesson, and now the swift autumn dusk had fallen. Though servants had come to light the lamps, the room was still quite dimly lit—luckily, I thought. The less I could see of Arguëlles, the better. I summoned all my courage for an assault at the malodorous, arrogant carcass.

  “Dear señor,” I breathed, moving gracefully towards him, in the kind of S-curve motion that Fanny Kelly would have appreciated, “I cannot help myself any longer. I cannot bear to be in this room with you any longer—” Oh, what was I saying? Turn that around “—without delivering myself of my deepest emotions.”

  “What’s that?” he huffed, wrinkling his bulbous brow as if the sound of my voice caused him pain.

  “I am saying I must tell you, señor, that your, your—” (’Struth, I told myself, spit it out!) “—your ankles have driven me to distraction. They are beautiful. They are . . . manly!” The idiot actually looked down and pointed his toe so that he could glimpse the marvel to which I was referring! Are all Spanish men in love with their lower limbs? I stuttered onward, “I have fallen, Señor Arguëlles. I am . . . speechless.” I was running out of ammunition. My brain was starved for inspiration, and the man just stood there, one toe pointed, the rest of him looking for all the world like a great, hairy-bodied, bald-headed brown bear with constipation. What could I do? I threw myself at him. I clutched his coat and then plunged my hands inside and around his waistcoat as far as my arms could reach—which wasn’t far. I clung like a limpet.