History's Great Queens 2-Book Bundle: The Last Queen and The Confessions of Catherine de Medici

by Gortner, C. W.

  My father chuckled again, only this time it was cold. “I’d not be so hasty if I were you. It could be that with some time and reflection, you’ll find his proposal has its merits.”

  All of a sudden, I pushed back my chair and stood, the envelope falling to the floor. “I will see to some food. You are no doubt hungry after your ride here.”

  I was about to walk away when he said, “It would be a dual marriage.”

  I froze.

  “Yes,” he added. “He says that if you consent to marry him, he will honor your sister’s betrothal to his heir, Prince Henry. Think of it. You shall be queen of England, and when your husband dies Catalina will take your place. Two infantas on the English throne; a lifelong alliance with Spain, not to mention his promise that you’ll dispose of a considerable income as his royal widow and a permanent place at his son’s court. Not a bad arrangement, if I do say so myself. Better than living here with your dead husband’s coffin moldering in that chapel.”

  I whirled about. “But not better than marrying France.”

  His eyes widened.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know about Germaine de Foix. You may do as you wish with your person, Papá, but not with mine. How dare you lay before me, the queen of Castile, this degrading proposal, using my own sister, your own daughter, as bait?”

  “I merely state the facts.” His voice turned hard. “Here are a few more for you to consider: I need foreign support and my French alliance will provide it. So will the English one. And the grandes will not suffer an unwed woman to rule over them. You are queen here in name alone, and only by my good grace. Had it not been for me, they’d have done away with you years ago.”

  There was not a hint of compassion in his voice, not a trace of empathy. He spoke as if I were a problem to be disposed of, an inconvenience he no longer had time or patience for. Even as I cried out in silence at the destruction of my childhood illusions, of my love for this man whom I had always made so important to my life, another part of me hardened, turned to stone.

  Nothing had changed as far as he was concerned. He expected me to do whatever suited him best. As he’d convinced me to leave Spain for Flanders, so would he now send me to England. Only this time, he wanted me gone so he could steal my throne.

  I did not take my eyes from him. “You cannot think I would ever agree to this monstrosity.”

  “You have nothing else. Cisneros and I believe it is time you assumed your rightful place.”

  “Castile is my rightful place. Henry Tudor denied Catalina the most basic comforts; he toyed with her even as Mamá lay dying. I would never marry him. The very thought insults me.”

  He regarded me impassively. Then he stepped forth and picked up the envelope from the floor. “I lied. Someone else desires this marriage. Indeed, they need it.” He extended it to me. “You should read this before you say anything else you’ll have cause to regret.”

  I took it from him. The seal was cracked, but I recognized the broken castles and lion of Spain. When I unfolded the paper, I saw desperate lines scrawled there that tore at me like talons.

  Mi querida hermana,

  I write because you said that if you could, you would do anything in your power to help me. I find myself at the mercy of this English king, who as you know has denied me all station and proper rank at his court and treats me as though I were a disease come to his shores. Yet now, after years of denial and humiliation, he has informed me he wishes for you to be his new wife and queen and will allow Prince Henry and me to renew our betrothal if you would honor his suit. I beg you, Juana, for the love you bear me, to consider my plight. Never has an infanta of Castile fallen so low as I. But you can save me. You can come here to England and we can live together again as sisters, as we did in our childhood. You will lack for nothing, I promise, even upon the king’s death. You are a widow now and Papá has conveyed you have no wish to take up the throne but would rather seek a place of respite. This you will find with me. I need you more than ever, Juana.

  With all my love,

  your sister, Catalina

  The silence stretched into eternity. I stood holding the paper and saw my beautiful sister, reduced to such misery that she’d demean herself by playing the scheming suppliant.

  And yet, I thought, I could go to England. I could say yes and this would all end. I could take my daughter, perhaps even my son, and never look back. I would wed a man who slowly drowned in his own decay, but when he died I would be a widowed queen with her life before her. I was still young; I had years ahead in which to make a new existence.

  As if from very far away, I heard my father say, “You are her only hope. All you need do is sign a writ of voluntary abdication. I will rule Spain as regent until your son Charles comes of age. You can leave with a clear conscience.”

  Voluntary abdication.

  He lied. I would never have a clear conscience. If I signed away my rights, I would sign away the very succession of Castile. Not even the Cortes would be able to stop him. He would win everything for Aragón and the son he hoped to sire on his new French queen. My sons would be forever disbarred, my struggle to save Spain cast asunder.

  In my mind, I heard my mother as clearly as if she stood at my side: Good has a way of losing to ambition.

  I looked at him. I felt as if I had never seen him before, as if he were someone who looked and sounded like my father, but whose nature was frigid and ruthless.

  “Cisneros and I have spent many hours negotiating these marriages,” he added. “Like me, he is dedicated to this realm. With my marriage to Germaine and yours to the Tudor, I will stifle all those who dare say that I, Fernando of Aragón, am unworthy.”

  I let the parchment stained with my sister’s shame slip from my numb fingers. How could I have thought for a moment of turning away from my own blood?

  “This is my kingdom,” I said. “I weep for Catalina, for she has no other recourse, but I cannot help her. Not like this. I won’t hear another word about it.”

  He lunged. For a horrifying moment, I thought he might strike me as he grabbed my arm, his eyes gone black with rage. “How dare you speak to me as if I were your lackey?” he hissed. “I rule here now, not you! And from this day forth, you will do as I say!”

  His words fell on me like hailstones. But in that moment, I was no longer afraid. I understood now what I’d never seen before, the final terrible truth.

  My father did not fight against me. He fought against a ghost.

  All those years he had stood in my mother’s shadow, known derisively as the Aragonese under Isabel’s petticoats—he could not forget or forgive. He had bided his time, waited for the hour to claim what he believed was his, after years of bowing to my mother’s throne. He had waited and watched while Philip persecuted me and did not lift a finger to stop it, not because he couldn’t but because it had never been part of his plan.

  It has nothing to do with love. I doubted his ability to live in the shadow I cast over him.

  Now his hour had come. He would pulverize a lifetime, quench forever the invincible light that had eclipsed his own. I was but an obstacle in his path. It was my mother he sought to punish—her and everything she stood for. He had been ridiculed, insulted, humiliated. Never would he abide it again.

  He released me. Under my sleeve my arm burned. “For the last time,” he said in a dead-flat tone, “will you abdicate and do as I say?”

  I took a step back from him. “No. I will not abandon my realm. I will not disinherit my sons. If I abdicate, everything Mamá wanted will be lost. I will not betray her.”

  “Then you betray me!” he shouted. “You betray your father!”

  A roaring filled my ears. I could not feel my feet as I took another step back.

  “It seems you are unwell,” he said, and he spoke to wound, to maim, to kill. “You imagine things. These flights of fancy that have been yours since childhood have finally gotten the better of you. If you will not wed and resume a normal life, you mus
t be mad. You must be taken somewhere safe, far from this”—he waved derisively—“this cemetery you call a home.”

  My hands clenched. I started to tremble. “Do as you will,” I whispered. “But whatever you do to me will avail you nothing. I am still the queen. One day my son will be king. A prince of the Habsburg and Trastámara blood, he will build an empire greater than anything this world has seen. He will be everything I dreamed for Spain and more.”

  “You are a fool,” he spat. “He will build nothing but his Habsburg interests, and when he does, my blood, the blood of Aragón, will be here to stop him!”

  He turned heel and strode from the room.

  I heard him yell out orders. I spun about, staggering against my hem. In the doorway to the sala was an escort of guards. I looked past them to see the constable descending the staircase with a squirming bundle tossed over his shoulder like a sack of mead.

  I cried out. A slim man in scarlet stepped from among the guards. His eyes fixed on me with a raptor’s intensity: the Marquis of Villena, whom my father had called a traitor.

  “Your Highness,” he said and he bowed, swiping off his cap to reveal that wealth of dark hair, which the years had not thinned or grayed, as if he’d made an unholy pact to preserve his youth. This man who supposedly betrayed Spain for Philip’s service—he now served my father.

  “Get out of my way,” I said through my teeth. “Get out, by God. I command you!”

  He sneered. “Your Highness should obey before I’m compelled to use harsher measures.”

  I threw myself at him, raking my nails across his face. As he reeled away, clutching a hand to his lacerated cheek, I saw the guards hesitate. I leapt forth. None dared lay hands on me as I broke through them to race to the stairs, my wail tearing from my throat.

  Doña Josefa stood with my women at the top of the stairs, her weathered face running with tears. I whirled about to the open door. I reached it in time to see the constable and other lords mounting their steeds. My father was at the gates, his gauntleted hands yanking at his reins so that his stallion balked. Perched in front of him, clutching the saddle pommel, was my Fernandito.

  He saw me. “Mamá!” he cried out. “Don’t let them take me away from you!”

  I opened my mouth to yell, to shriek, but all I could do was reach out in mute appeal.

  My father looked at me. Then he kicked his stallion’s ribs and galloped away. The lords followed. A cloud of dust floated in the empty courtyard.

  Behind me, I heard the guards and Villena move in.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I was locked in my rooms. There, I huddled on the floor in my cloak and gown, my knees drawn to my chin. I pretended not to see or hear the odious women who entered with a guard to deliver my meals, which I left untouched. I ignored their acidic clucking that I cease my unseemly behavior. Only when I heard Joanna among them did I rear up to throw myself at her like a woman possessed, grabbing hold of the nearest platter and heaving it at her, sending its contents flying. She yelped and bolted from the room, never to return.

  After that, they allowed Beatriz to come to me. In a whisper she told me Soraya and Lopez had been dismissed. The house was surrounded, the gates bolted. Fresh supplies of food were brought from the town and left outside the gates to be retrieved by one of the guards.

  “And my daughter?” I asked.

  “She is here. They’ve not harmed her. Doña Josefa was allowed to stay and attend her. But Villena watches her closely, as he watches everything, though the infanta is but a child.”

  I gazed at her through burning eyes. Only then did I realize my hair hung about my face in matted tangles and I smelled the rank odor of my unwashed body.

  “Let me send for warm water to bathe you,” Beatriz said. “Let me care for you.”

  I submitted to her ministrations. Dressed in a clean gown, I even ate a little and began to ponder what lay in store for me. Much as she tried, Beatriz could not get anyone to tell her anything. She said Soraya had not left Arcos, however. She’d taken residence in town and came every day to the gates to beg admittance. No one let her in. Only after Beatriz’s repeated pleas for my health did Villena grant me parchment, wax, and ink, supposedly for letters—which of course he would review before sending.

  I did not expect mercy from my father and I did not write to him. But I did write to my sister Catalina in England. I poured out my heart, begging her forgiveness that I couldn’t assist her in her trials, but it was inconceivable for me to abandon the throne entrusted to me by our mother. Even as I gave my letter to Beatriz for dispatch, and wondered whether it would ever reach Catalina’s hands, I replayed that terrible scene with my father in my mind and again asked myself why I had sealed my own doom by not accepting Henry Tudor’s proposal. I even started to go to the door to call for Villena to tell him I had changed my mind.

  I stopped myself. I could never do it and my father would never let me go now. Perhaps he had never intended to. Perhaps he had needed me to deny him so he could do what he wanted to do ever since he learned of Philip’s death.

  Weeks passed. I sent other innocuous letters, to the Marquise de Moya in Segovia and my son Charles in Flanders, but in truth I spent most of my days and endless nights writing these words, recording the events that had led me to this hour.

  And I waited. One evening Beatriz brought me my dinner and told me we’d not learned anything of importance because my father had been absent from Castile, dealing with some revolt in the south. But he’d returned now, after reaching accord with the rebels.

  Then she leaned to me, her eyes febrile in her weary face. “I overheard Villena tell that vixen Joanna that the admiral has sent His Majesty a letter questioning your imprisonment. He said Castile will never cease to fight for its rightful queen and His Majesty should consider well his state of grace before he commits an act that neither God nor Spain will ever forgive.”

  I clasped her hand. My voice faltered. “Then all is not lost.”

  Beatriz put her arms around me. “No matter what, I will always be with you, mi princesa.”

  They came for me that night.

  Looking up through my hair, I saw figures gathered about my bed—faceless apparitions whose steel glimmered in the flicker of a handheld torch. At my side, Beatriz awoke with a frightened gasp. My gaze went to the foot of my bed. Cisneros stood there, regarding me with eyes like burning embers in his bone-white face.

  “Time to rise, Your Highness.”

  I rose from bed. I felt numb as Beatriz divested me of my nightclothes and dressed me in a warm dark gown. As she tied the sleeves, I whispered, “Do you know where we are going?”

  “No,” she whispered back. I could feel her hands trembling. She searched my face, her eyes filling with tears. I took her hand for a moment as I fought back a wave of paralyzing fear.

  A half hour later, I entered the frigid sala with Beatriz at my side. In addition to Cisneros and Villena, the assembly included a full retinue of guards.

  My heart quickened. I gazed past the men to the courtyard and saw Doña Josefa on the threshold, with my daughter in a shawl in her arms. Catalina was crying, having been awoken abruptly. I immediately moved to her.

  Villena snapped his fingers. A guard seized Catalina from Doña Josefa and strode off. Clutching her shawl to her face, Doña Josefa bowed her head and started to weep.

  I whirled to Villena. “Where are you taking my daughter?”

  “The peasant and your ladies stay here,” he said. “You and the infanta will go with us.”

  “Stay here? But I’ve need of my women. They must come with—”

  “There’ll be others to attend you.” He grasped me by the elbow, his fingers digging into the bone. “Come now, without protest.”

  “Get your hands off me, you traitor,” I breathed.

  He met my stare. He released me, motioning with a sweep of his arm. “Your litter awaits.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Beatriz stood surrounded by gua
rds. My half sister, Joanna, raised her chin. My breath froze in my throat when I saw her execute a mocking curtsy.

  Not a star or wisp of moon relieved the darkness. The litter was closed, slung between four dray horses. I faltered at the sight of it, looked back at the cavalcade. When I saw guards loading Philip’s coffin onto a cart under the direction of the constable, my knees threatened to buckle underneath me. He turned to look over his shoulder. Even from where I stood, that terrible scar and one searing eye riveted me. His mouth curved within his thick beard, a grimace of a smile. Like his wife, Joanna, he had always served my father.

  A spectral figure stepped before me. Cisneros inclined his head. “This is not La Mota. You’ll find no escape here.”

  “One day, you will pay for this,” I told him, my voice shuddering. “You will pay for what you do. Were my mother still alive, she’d see you beheaded for this. You spit on her memory.”

  He flinched. “The infanta Catalina will travel with you,” he said, and he turned away, his cloak swinging behind him like a leathery wing.

  I mounted the litter. Within, I found my child, her eyes wide. I clutched her close to me as I heard the men mounting their horses. We moved forward with a sickening lurch.

  Tar-soaked torches held by guards lit the road ahead. We clattered out of Arcos, turning south. I peered through a crack in the curtains and saw figures at the roadside, the townspeople who had come to know me during my time here. They stared sullenly. A woman raised her fist. Others followed, in a silent united gesture of defiance.

  I gazed at them, the anonymous and downtrodden, who toiled the land, wed, reared and buried children, lived and died. Never had I felt closer to them than I did at that moment. Never before had I understood how much they too had suffered.

  And in their midst I suddenly heard a low keening, a lament in the lost tongue of the Moors. I leaned out farther, desperately searching the shadows. I saw Soraya on the ground, at the foot of a group of women. She was on her knees, taking up handfuls of dirt and pouring it over her head. She raised her dirt-streaked face. We looked straight at each other.