by John Healey
‘Julian,’ she said, attempting to inject a tone of kindness into her voice, which only made him more desperate, ‘let us end on a better note.’
She knocked upon the carriage wall to signal for the driver to proceed.
‘Who is it?’ he said to her in a fury.
‘No one,’ she said. ‘And in any case, it is no longer your concern.’
As the carriage pulled away, he filled with rage, the rage of humiliation, self-abasement, and pain. He drew his dagger and threw it at the rear of the carriage. He hoped to at least hear the stinging thud of its impalement into the fragile wood, hoped that she too would hear it and see it upon her arrival. But it missed its mark and disappeared into a rut of mud and grass. Julian swung up into the saddle and crudely spurred his horse, turning it around to return to Sanlúcar, where he had no intention of spending another night in all his life.
Once the aristocrats had gone, the goatherd boy descended the hill and made his way onto the road that had been traced by Roman legions centuries earlier. He found the dagger easily and marveled at its quality. He stuck it in his belt as a trophy and proof for the tale he would tell that evening to his father and brothers.
– XVIII –
In which anger rises and a secret is revealed
Guada was assigned a new handmaiden, a plain-looking girl, somewhat plump, overly servile, of meager education, and destined for the convent. Guada found in her an ideal companion with whom to spend long hours praying for guidance within the Duke’s chapel, or to stroll beside in his well-tended gardens, gardens turned romantically somber by the autumn damp and the fallen quinces that rotted uncollected upon the mossy earth. These latter excursions only took place when she knew that Shiro and the Duke were off hunting in the mountains.
Days later, her mother arrived, and as soon as it was possible to attain some privacy, Guada proceeded to share all that had happened during the journey to the sea and back, all save for the first evening’s walk with the foreigner. The horror and shock that registered on the visage of Doña Inmaculada when she heard of the Duke’s plan to wed a married commoner from the village was only equaled by the giddy thrill that passed back and forth between mother and daughter, a thrill kept barely at bay by repeated declarations of ‘Madre mia,’ ‘Qué vergüenza,’ and ‘No me lo puedo creer.’
On the very day they returned from the sea, the Duke installed Rosario at the finca in a private suite of rooms and summoned her husband for a face-to-face meeting. After obligatory spasms of protest, Antonio, as hirsute and slight of stature as Rosario had described, accepted the Duke’s terms with avaricious speed. Letters were dispatched to the Holy See, to Cardinal Bernardo de Rojas y Sandoval, and to the King. And a letter was waiting for the Duke, written by the mayor of Sanlúcar, expressing doubts about the efficacy of the young emissaries the Duke had sent to engage with the foreign delegation from Japan. As the Duke read, and recalled what Shiro had said on the first day they met, he could only imagine how grievous the behavior of Julian and his nephews had been. He sent the mayor a note of thanks and reassurance, along with a message for the mayor to hand-deliver to Hasekura Tsunenaga in which he apologized while making a point of not mentioning his own deepening friendship with the young Samurai.
Offering one excuse and then another, Guada had been able to avoid taking meals with the Duke, Shiro, and Rosario since their return, trying the Duke’s patience. His initial sympathy and weakness for the girl had altered. Part of him still hoped that behind her religiosity, reserve, and shyness there hid a creature of passion, but another part of him now wondered if she might be just as limited and dull as she often chose to appear. She finally showed her face at the dinner table on the evening of Doña Inmaculada’s arrival.
The Duke and Rosario sat at opposite ends of the table. At one side, Guada and her mother sat next to each other facing Shiro, who had the other side to himself. This seating arrangement proposed a significant challenge to mother and daughter. Distraught with discomfort, neither of them wished to look at Rosario. When obliged to listen or respond to her, they cast their eyes down at their plates or looked past her with unconvincing smiles. But neither did they wish to stare across at the young Japanese man who wore white that evening with a black sash. Doña Inmaculada’s breeding did not permit her to ogle the novel foreigner who, she had learned in gory detail, had decapitated a Christian soldier with such bravura. Guada refused to look at him out of shame. The end result of all this ruffled femininity driven by codes of conduct common to the upper echelons of Sevilla society was that the two women spent an inordinate amount of time directing their dark-blue and hazel-green eyes at the Duke, who, with each passing minute, regarded them with expressions of mounting anger.
‘Enough!’ he finally blurted, banging a fork-filled fist upon the table.
All three female hearts stood still. Then it was Rosario’s turn to look away. Shiro, not insensitive to the tensions prevailing in the house since the incident with the soldier, looked at all four of the barbarians with keen interest. What he most noticed, and it would stay with him long after the Duke’s terrible tirade had passed, was how Guada’s face blushed and lit up with fear, a combination that made her even more beautiful.
‘I’ve had my fill,’ the Duke continued. ‘Could two women be more provincial?’
‘I beg your pardon,’ an offended Doña Inmaculada replied.
‘It’s too late for that,’ he said, with biting sarcasm. ‘I will not have my fiancée insulted any further.’
‘I assure you,’ Inmaculada said, her own anger awakening, ‘we have no such intention.’
‘You can’t even look at her,’ he said. ‘You can’t pronounce her name. It seems you feel some God-given superiority. It seems you’ve been living within the stifling confines of Sevilla for too long. Look at my ancestors, my father’s mother, Ana de Aragón y Gurrea was a bastard child of the Archbishop of Zaragoza, who in turn was the bastard son of King Ferdinand the Second. And it seems you’ve forgotten who your own ancestors are, peering back just a few generations, one a sheep herder, one a blacksmith, one a thief incarcerated for life, one a tanner of animal hides.’
‘I refuse to listen to such nonsense,’ Inmaculada said. ‘And besides, it’s not that, or that only. For God’s sake man, the girl is married. The girl’s an adulterer and lives in mortal sin.’
These words affected the Duke in a manner Shiro found surprising. Rather than provoke an escalation of his cholera, it was as if the Duke felt a weight alighting from his soul.
‘I imagine you both speak with your husbands from time to time,’ he said in a much calmer tone.
‘What, pray, might that have to do with anything?’ Inmaculada asked.
‘I suppose you even feel some affection for them,’ he continued. ‘I’m told that you, Guada, seem to think you are madly in love with Don Julian.’
She prayed the ground might open beneath her chair and swallow her, drag her into a dark abyss, anything to halt this hellish meal.
‘Surely,’ the Duke continued, ‘you both know that Rodrigo, your husband Inma, your beloved father Guada consorts regularly with other women, which, unless he has received some special dispensation from the Pope that I have yet to learn of, makes him an adulterer, a man living as you say in mortal sin.’
Rosario bit at the insides of her mouth, doing all she could to suppress a most inopportune grin. Shiro made himself a promise to study further this barbarian concept of sin that seemed to trip from their lips with such frequency. Clearly the catechism he’d been made to study had not done it justice. The Duke closed in for the kill.
‘But something that neither of you is aware of perhaps, something I myself have known for some time and could not care less about because it only relates to the sort of natural animal behavior I very much doubt our Lord in heaven notices at all, is that both of your husbands have been ‘sinning’ with the same woman, the rather nasty but undeniably attractive Marta Vélez.’
As
blood rose reddening her cheeks, Doña Inmaculada rose from the table. Guada, beginning to cry, remained seated.
‘What a sinister side of yourself you’ve shown me,’ Inmaculada spat at the Duke. ‘Now I understand how you might seek the favors of a village wench to flatter you in your fast-approaching senility.’
Before the battling aristocrats could further vitiate their venom, both were silenced when Guada finally spoke through her tears.
‘I know about this woman, with respect to Julian. But I can assure you they no longer see each other, that since we celebrated the Holy Sacrament of Matrimony he has been free of sin in that regard.’
Though part of him felt for her and took pity on her, most of him disdained her then, and he marveled at the magnitude of their delusions and hypocrisy. ‘I can assure you, sweet Guada, you for whom I had the dearest affection before you chose to disparage the woman I love, a woman who has done you no harm, you, whose grace I hope to see one day regained, I can assure you that your Julian is having his way with his aunt, the Señora Vélez, this very moment. Why do you think he left your side so easily and has stayed in Sanlúcar so much longer than called for?’
She looked at him in anger, as if struck.
‘That is a lie!’
The Duke gestured with his chin toward Shiro.
‘You saw them together, did you not?’
‘I did, sir,’ the Samurai replied.
Her faced transformed into a marsh of tears. She stood and clung to her mother, who was still reeling from the shock of these revelations.
‘And as for the regrettable and erroneous marriage Rosario entered into and about which I care not a wit, that is being seen to,’ said the Duke. ‘As soon as I have it annulled, and annulled it shall be, we will marry, not to please the eyes of God or to silence the wicked tongues of the villagers and of your own rancid class in Sevilla—my own people whom I shrink from more and more with each passing day—but as a gift to her so that, upon my demise, she shall be well provided for.’
Though mother and daughter heard all that he said, for the dining hall though large was rife with hard surfaces including large slabs of black-and-white Carrera marble covering the floor, they had almost exited the room by the time he was finished. The Duke then proceeded to apologize to Rosario and to Shiro, and all agreed that family relations were among the most difficult to manage regardless of where one breathed upon the Earth.
Later in the evening, Shiro attempted to see Guada in the hope he might cheer her, might explain himself and express regret at the Duke’s revelation about something he assumed would remain in confidence. In truth, he simply wished to see her. But she would not see him. The new handmaiden, forced to confront the foreigner at close range and incapable of believing he dominated the Castilian language, delivered her lady’s refusal repeatedly, in loud tones, assuming that increased volume was more efficacious than clear diction.
Turning away, Shiro realized how weary he was of his Christians. Ignoring the lateness of the hour, he left the finca and set out upon a narrow path up into the hills. The silence of the countryside was cleansing. The earth was damp. The air was cold and clear and tinged with the smell of chimney smoke. And he was comforted to note that the constellations shining above were the same ones he’d often gazed upon from the balconies of the Sendai Castle.
– XIX –
In which a gift is given
Three days later, the Duke, Shiro, Doña Inmaculada, and Guada, along with an impressive complement of guards, cooks, and servants, set out for Sevilla. Rosario, without the slightest regret, stayed behind. Unbeknownst to all, she had conceived a child in Baelo Claudia. Now that their relationship was out in the open, the Duke was distraught to leave her, but he was eager as well to greet the Japanese Delegation and to see a dear friend. Shiro was not averse to rejoining his fellow Samurais. Inmaculada and her daughter were perhaps the most desirous to return to their respective homes, though their eagerness was strongly tempered by the prospect of confronting their husbands.
A certain degree of peace had been regained. Inmaculada and Guada had comforted each other, prayed together, and grown closer. They found a common bond in the shared pain of betrayal. It had been one thing for Doña Inmaculada to know that Rodrigo had dalliances with other women, but quite something else to have a particular woman singled out and identified who was not a common prostitute, but a known member of her own society. Guada was bereft and furious with herself for having maintained the naive illusion that once Julian was able to enter her bed, he would forget the wiles of his vile aunt. Inmaculada had even mustered enough tact to approach Rosario and apologize for her and her daughter’s behavior, blaming entrenched and perhaps outdated social mores as the culprit.
But she was unable to convince her daughter to do the same. In all the time Guada and Rosario had spent together, the latter had never taken the former into her confidence, and it was clear to Guada that she had been used as a conduit through which her handmaiden had been able to sin without raising suspicion. And the betrayal went deeper. Guada’s exposure to the attentions of Shiro at the beach combined with the flagrant licentiousness going on within the neighboring tent at night had deeply unsettled her.
But by the time the group left for Sevilla, most of everyone’s jagged nerves had calmed considerably. On the second day of the journey, Doña Inmaculada mounted sidesaddle and joined the Duke at the head of the column. Shiro took advantage and tied his horse to the carriage where Guada rode and successfully got himself invited to sit within.
‘I’ve been meaning to explain myself to you,’ he said, ‘for the discomfort I caused you by confirming the Duke’s assertion the other night.’
‘There’s no need for that,’ she said, not quite looking at him.
He sat facing her. The space was confined, the road uneven. Jostled to and fro, their knees grazed against each other with every rut and stone. The awareness of their physical proximity made it difficult to concentrate. She wore brown boots and a brown silk dress with white cuffs and collar that accentuated her blond hair and green eyes. About her neck hung a simple locket he admired, and he noticed a chipped nail on her left index finger. He kept his hands hidden whenever possible, ashamed in such close quarters by his extra digit. The lean strength he emanated, the simplicity of his robe, the directness of his open and, what she could not deny was a comely, gaze, combined with the memory of how he had responded to her silent plea days before, all contributed to an acceleration of her heart despite her effort to control it.
‘Nevertheless,’ he said.
She grabbed a leather strap affixed by the window and stared out at the forests of oak and eucalyptus and at newly plowed fields of dark soil that graced the outskirts of a village called Espera.
‘The greatest “discomfort,” as you call it, I felt that night and which I cannot shake free of, was the pain of humiliation—with myself.’ These last two words she uttered looking directly at him before looking away again. ‘I should have been more cynical and realistic. I’ve behaved like a child.’
The mixture of her strength and delicacy, her coloring, the reality of her body being so close disturbed him.
‘You are in love,’ he said.
‘I was,’ she answered, trying not to cry again, fixing her gaze upon a colorful pair of bee-eater birds alighting on a nearby tree.
He was stunned to hear it and provoked by it, but he attempted to diminish it.
‘It’s too soon to know that,’ he said.
She looked at him. ‘What is it with men?’
‘I do not understand,’ he said.
‘Your need to pounce upon women, the feverish pursuit, the unsightly slobbering.’
Though unable to take his eyes off of her, he felt unjustly accused.
‘Not all men are alike,’ he said.
She stared at her hands and began to pick at the damaged nail. She ignored his comment and went on. ‘I mean in the case of my father I find it more understandable. My
mother refuses him and has for a long time. This other woman is of his class and is his junior and, or so I have heard, is caught within a bad marriage. But Julian …’
Shiro would do nothing to aid the cause of the young noble who had insulted him back in Sanlúcar, and he remained silent.
‘You must think us all mad,’ she said, feeling self-conscious about her nail and pulling on the pair of yellow kid gloves folded upon her lap. ‘You’ve only recently arrived, and here you are thrust into the midst of so much soiled linen.’
This expression, a colloquialism she often used with friends and family, spoken to a man from so distant a culture, suddenly revealed its literal meaning to her, and once again she felt herself reddening, this time with embarrassment.
‘Soiled linen is not unique to your country,’ he said, smiling at her.
She prayed to God he was either familiar with or had grasped the metaphor.
‘I suspect it is so common,’ he added, ‘regardless of whether you might consider it sinful or not, that I would hesitate to introduce the word “soiled.” It seems to simply be part of human nature.’
The statement was promising, but still, she could not be sure. ‘How do you mean?’ she asked.
‘The Lord I serve where I come from is like a King. His blood flows through my veins, and he has told me that I am a Prince because of it. But my mother, his only sister, after losing her husband in battle, conceived me with another man, another Prince of sorts, who was already married and who had other sons. I might thus be considered an article of soiled linen.’
‘I had no idea,’ she said.
‘And yet, despite some rough treatment from cousins and half siblings, I have been well cared for. Though not ideal, my condition is not so uncommon, and the honor of my bloodlines are known to all. I would even go as far as to say my upbringing, my status as an outsider among the rest, has been more advantageous to my character than otherwise. It has given me more freedom with which to make my own life, untethered to the stricter rules and responsibilities that weigh upon my ‘cleaner relations.’