by Lynn Cullen
“You stay in the carriage, then.”
“You need not worry. When am I not a perfect lady?”
She clapped her hand to her jaw and scowled.
“Did you want to say something?”
She shook her head.
I tried to laugh it off. “You are just sad that you’re not going.”
“Bah!”
I did not believe her. The Queen’s Spanish ladies are all astir about the festival. They say that everyone—from grand ladies and gentlemen in their mule-drawn carriages, to shopkeepers and their wives walking with their little ones gamboling between them, to servant boys, released for the day and loping along in freedom—wishes to go to the banks of the Manzanares for El Sotillo, so named for its location in a shaded grove near the Toledo bridge. The Queen, who has been too ill in past years to attend, is especially eager to see the crowd and to witness the custom unique to this festival: be they old or young, rich or poor, infirm or well, every last subject turns away when Royalty first passes by.
“I am sorry there ’s no room in the carriage,” I said.
“With the King and Madonna Elisabetta? With the Prince and Signore Juan? Bah! You not get me in that wagon.” She spat. “Fratelli, flagelli.”
“Francesca! The wrath of brothers is not the wrath of devils. Not these brothers. The eyes of the world are Upon them.”
She shook her stubby finger. “You mark my words.”
Hours later, joggling to and fro on the seat next to the Queen, I could still see Francesca’s sour face as our carriage trundled along the stony road to Madrid. I tried to get her dire warning out of my mind as Don Carlos chattered merrily to the Queen.
Happiness lit the translucent flesh of his face, illuminating the webbing of thin blue veins within. “It is the most curious cUstom, My Lady,” he said in an animated tone. “As soon as we arrive, the people will turn away from Us. If they are in carriages, they will close their curtains. If on foot, they will turn their backs. Even their horses are turned away. We can see our people but they must not see us.”
“Truly?” The plume in the Queen’s turban wafted as we joggled along. She glanced at Don Juan, staring out the window next to Don Carlos. “It makes no sense. Why do they do this?”
Don Carlos shrugged cheerfully. “Tradition.”
“And here I wore my best gown—for nothing.”
“Oh, not for nothing,” Don Carlos said reverently.
I glanced at the King, sitting on the other side of Don Carlos. The sunlight beaming through the carriage window caught the clear curvature of his eye as he studied the barren landscape. I wondered how I might catch that transparency in paint.
“Your Majesty,” the Queen asked him, “how did this custom come about?”
The King rolled his gaze across the carriage interior. Dust motes danced in the shaft of light between Us as he considered the question.
“It has always been,” he said.
“Did they do it in Grandfather’s time?” Don Carlos asked.
“Yes. They did. My father and I went together, once, when I was twelve.”
“Once!” cried Don Carlos. “Why just once?”
“My father was in Spain for only two years altogether during the time he ruled,” said the King. “And when he was here, he had too much business to conduct to go to little parties. Our lands were not won by attending fiestas.”
I stole a glance at Don Juan. He woUld not have been born if the Emperor had not spent so much time outside Spain. I wondered if he was thinking this, too.
“What good is being King if you cannot enjoy it?” Don Carlos exclaimed.
“When my father turned his kingdoms over to me,” said the King, “he was a tired old man, far older than his fifty-six years. Believe me, my son, you should enjoy this time when you do not feel the weight of the crown Upon your head.”
“I will not mind being King when my time comes. I will be a good one. But I have to have some practice, Father. How am I to know how to rule without experience?” He looked away, exposing the side of his head where the hole had been cut to save his life. Though it had been nearly six months, the scar in his temple was still an angry shade of red. He turned back to the King. “I don’t Understand why you won’t send me to the Netherlands as your representative.”
The King drew a breath as if bracing himself for a familiar battle. “Carlos, you are too young.”
“Too young! I am almost eighteen—you were sixteen when your father sent you to see our kingdoms.”
“Times are different now. Then, the monk Luther was but a thorn in the side of the Church. Now bands of his followers wish to overturn our rule. The Low Countries in particular require an experienced person’s statesmanship, influenced as they have been by rioters. Any false move could tip the balance and we could lose our grip.”
“Why do we need to grip? Why can we not hold on gently?”
“If only it were that simple.”
“It is that simple! The Dutch deserve someone young and full of ideas, a new way of going about things. They don’t want boring old men like Cardinal de Granvelle, and they certainly don’t want Don Alessandro’s mother, an old meddler with a mustache on her lip. Why don’t you give me a chance to show you?”
“His mother proved her loyalty to me, doing what I had asked of her when her husband had fought my rule in Parma. Her sacrifice was long ago—Alessandro was only seven—but I do not forget.”
“That was then—this is now!”
The King sighed deeply. He glanced at me, then sat Up as if glad to find a diversion from their argument. “Doña Sofonisba, my sister has asked that you might do her portrait. She insists that don Alonso will not do.”
I was so startled I am afraid I simply stared.
“You will be able to spare her?” he asked the Queen.
“It’s not fair!” Don Carlos blurted. “I am almost as old as you were when your father abdicated and gave you the world. All I ask for is the Netherlands!”
We swayed in Uncomfortable silence, I in shock from hearing that Doña Juana admired my painting, the others on edge from the discord in the air. The carriage rolled along, its traces jangling and its wooden body creaking.
Don Juan leaned forward. “I think I see the city walls.”
He pulled back so the rest of Us could peer out the window, though the King, I noticed, only closed his eyes.
Don Carlos clapped with eagerness, forgetting his fury as quickly as a child. “Look, My Lady! See the riverbanks? There ’s a line of carriages.”
“Oh! Now I do.” The Queen pulled me by the arm. “Sofi—look very hard, you can see the people. Will they turn their backs on Us the whole day, Don Carlos?”
“Only when we first pass by.” He crossed his arms, causing the ermine-trimmed sleeves of his cape to pool on his puffed velvet breeches. “I don’t know if the rule applies to you, Uncle, since you are not full-blooded.”
“Don Carlos!” the Queen exclaimed.
“I can’t help that he is a bastard.”
“Don Carlos!”
He shrugged. “Don Juan knows I mean nothing. Don Alessandro’s mother is a bastard, too, and I don’t think the people would have to turn away from him, either, if he were here. He ’s not purest Royalty, since she is not.” He saw my poorly concealed look of surprise. “What? Did you not know? Doña Margarita’s mother was—I don’t know, some nobody—but Grandfather was her father, just like he was Don Juan’s. I thought everyone knew. That is why Grandfather married her so highly to the Duke of Parma, who turned out to be a crook. But she did what Father asked of her, and for that alone he lets her rule the Netherlands.” He cut the King a pointed look. “Even though I would be much better at it.”
But the King did not pick Up his challenge, and the excitement of arriving at El Sotillo dissolved any remaining ill feeling in the air. The mules’ hooves rang out sharply against stone as our carriage rattled over the Toledo bridge. The heralds riding before Us announced our
presence with their trumpets; the coachmen shouted; the carriage wheels ground into the dust. Even as I drew back the curtain, the people processing on foot began to turn away. One by one, they rotated on the crowded path along the river Until, to a person, they stood with their backs toward Us, the plumes in the men’s hats and the tasseled edges of the women’s shawls fluttering in the wind. Only the cry of an infant broke the odd hush.
“It is a marvel!” the Queen whispered. “Just as you say, Don Carlos.”
“These people know who their master is.” He leaned over Don Juan and banged on the door. “Open Up!”
“Carlos, let them be.” The King spoke quietly so as to keep his words from the wall of humanity just outside our window. “The people turn away as a show of their respect.”
Sunlight poured into our carriage as the door opened, framing in the doorway the coachman in his crested helmet. “Yes, Your Majesty?”
Don Carlos clambered over Don Juan, pushed past the coachman, and spilled outside. Before anyone could react, he picked himself Up and rushed to an ancient caballero garbed in the long robes of the previous century.
“¡Buenos días!”
The old man pointed his white beard as far away as he could, but the Prince thrust his face into the elderly gentleman’s view, forcing him to hobble in a circle.
“I said hello, old man!”
The Queen shrank back next to me. “What is he doing?”
Don Juan sprang from the carriage and to Don Carlos’s side. “Your Majesty,” he said, swinging his arm around Don Carlos, “look at how this gentleman turns away. How he must love and respect you.”
“He does, doesn’t he?” Don Carlos peered into the open carriage to see if the Queen was watching.
“Carlos.” The King’s jaw was rigid with mortification. “Come back here now!”
Don Carlos’s happy expression faded. He shrugged off Don Juan’s arm, then threw himself before a one-legged soldier. “You there!”
The soldier pivoted on his crutch, but Don Carlos would not let him escape. “¡Buenos días! It is your Prince! Speak to me!”
“He shames himself,” the Queen whispered to the King, her eyes full of tears. “You must do something!”
In a low voice, the King told the coachman, “Bring him here. Now.”
But before the coachman could move, Don Carlos sidled Up to a toddling girl whose mother could not tug her away fast enough. He stuck his face before the child, a girl so young as to have only a few pale wisps for hair. “Boo!”
The child pulled back.
He galumphed closer, his pasty face lit in a goblin’s grin. “I’m going to gobble you up!”
The child broke into tears.
Don Carlos stood Up, hands on hips. “Mother, get your child. She cries like a baby.”
“She is a baby, Carlos.” Don Juan got down on his knee to comfort the child.
The King nodded at the coachman and a herald. They snatched Don Carlos by the arms.
“What are you doing!” He writhed as they wrestled him toward the carriage. “Let go of me! Let go!”
The men pushed Don Carlos inside the carriage and slammed the door. The Queen flinched with each blow as he kicked the walls.
“To the palace,” the King told the driver. “Quickly.”
The carriage bounced as the driver swung onto his post at the front of the vehicle.
“You make a fool of me!” Don Carlos cried. “I was only playing!” With a whip-crack and a shout, we jerked to a hurried start.
“You shouldn’t have done this!” Don Carlos sobbed. “What will everybody think? I’ll never forgive you. Never!”
Rocking in the thundering carriage, I caught one last glimpse of the riverbank, where Don Juan still knelt next to the child as he spoke to her mother.
Except for the mother, whose shyness was evident in her posture even as she receded in the distance, the people surrounding Don Juan kept firmly turned away.
ITEM: To beautify your face: Soften white beans in white wine for nine days, then pound them and return to the wine. Take the milk of a goat, whole barley, and boil them until the barley is broken. Mix these things together and add six egg whites. Distill for two weeks, then use to wash the face.
ITEM: While extracting the tooth is the most efficacious cure for toothache, it has been suggested that one might hold a candle close to the offending tooth so that the smoke might flush out the worm causing the pain. A cure might also be found in touching a dead man’s tooth.
4 MAY 1562
The Palace, Aranjuez
I shall not mince words. The trip to Madrid was a disaster. The blow to Don Carlos’s head has altered him completely. While he is not the cruel beast of Don Alessandro’s jest, forcing cobblers to eat their boots, he is completely Unpredictable. It is as if his injury has robbed him of his self-control. At dinner that night in Madrid, he spit his soup all over his page when he deemed it too hot. The next day, he threw an apple (which hit the condesa) at a bullfight, after he had taken a bite and found a worm. He shouted something vulgar during a play. These were but a few of his eruptions. In the space of three days, there were too many, and it is too painful to recount them all here. The King deals with his son’s aberrant behavior by determinedly pretending the problem doesn’t exist; the Queen is tense and watchful. It tears my heart to pieces.
This is why I was particularly susceptible to Upset when I arrived back in Aranjuez this afternoon and Francesca wasn’t there to greet me. I searched the palace only to find her outside, pacing in the stable yard.
“What are you doing here?” I asked tiredly. “I looked everywhere for you. I would have never found you if madame’s woman had not told me you’d gone out-of-doors.”
She kept walking, her head down. Next to the stable yard, horses cropped grass in the pasture. The place smelled of straw and manure.
“At least you could say hello.”
“Buongiorno.”
I trudged toward the palace. A horse nickered from the pasture.
I stopped and looked behind me. “Are you not coming?”
“Go. I catch Up.”
“What is the matter with you?”
“Tooth.”
I stopped to frown at her.
She touched her left jaw and winced.
“Francesca!” I rushed to her side. “Why did you not tell me? How long have you been suffering?”
“Six day. Today, yesterday—the worst.”
“Oh, dear Francesca! I am so sorry. What have you done for it?”
“I put the clove on the tooth, but it no good. Then I try holding the candle to it. The worms, they no fall out.”
Tenderly, I turned her sallow face by her chin. “Your left side is swollen. Why don’t you go back to bed?”
“No. Grazie. I want to walk.”
I had no choice but to leave her to stump along in the stable yard, a sturdy bowed figure with her hands knotted at her chest, her hair scraped into an iron-gray bun. The Queen expected my attendance as soon as I could manage, for I’d left her in the care of the condesa and madame de Clermont. The two fared worse than ever of late, with the condesa’s condescending pity only fueling madame ’s distaste for her rival. Indeed, their present hostile silence was even more discomfiting than their former bickering had been.
Later that afternoon, I was walking with the Queen and her other ladies in the King’s woods, scarcely listening to a silly argument between the condesa and madame about which is best, French wine or Spanish. (Neither—it is Italian.) The Queen herself was quiet, as she had been since our trip to Madrid, Upset, I assume, from her new awareness of the extent of the damage Don Carlos had suffered in his injury. My mind was shuttling like a startled hen between worrying about Francesca’s tooth and painting Doña Juana, when we came Upon a gardener in a countryman’s smock and boots, digging Under an elm tree. Cher-Ami scuttled over to greet him.
“Why, hello, little one,” he said, petting the dog. He stood as soon as h
e saw the Queen. I drew in my breath. It was doctor Debruyne.
He kissed the Queen’s hand, then that of the condesa. He waited, smiling, for madame de Clermont to gingerly offer Up her pox-scarred hand from the depths of her veils, then kissed it gently before taking mine. I must confess my heart pounded like a foolish child ’s as he released me.
“And how fares your grandmother?” the Queen said.
“How kind of you to ask of her,” he said with his warm smile. “She ’s fine, I assume. I believe her herbal teas will keep her going forever.”
I don’t know what possessed me. My lips did move of their own volition—
“Might she take the coca plant for her health?”
He turned his disconcerting smile Upon me. I meant to hold my ground, but its warmth Undid me. I dashed a frown to my feet.
“The coca plant,” he said. “You remembered. I wish that I could send her some. She would find all sorts of Uses for it.”
Though I kept my eyes downcast, I could feel the condesa’s appraising gaze Upon me. “Doctor Debruyne has been growing this plant from the New World,” I explained to the leaves in the path. “It is supposed to have great medicinal powers.” A curse on his beautiful teeth. I am thirty, not some silly girl.
“We hope to try it as a painkiller,” the doctor explained. “It is reported that the people of the New World have endless energy and feel little pain when they chew its leaves. They chew it before working in the silver mines in Peru.”
“If it is so good, why do you not Use it?” asked the condesa.
The doctor smiled with regret. “If only it were that easy.”
“My maid,” I stammered.
Doctor Debruyne raised his brows pleasantly at me as I looked Up. “Pardon?”
“She has a terrible toothache, and neither cloves nor smoke seem to help her. I wonder if this coca . . .” I felt myself blushing like a child. A wry smile crooked the corner of the condesa’s mouth.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “it is a foolish idea.”
He regarded me soberly. “Actually, juffrouw, that is a most intriguing application. But there is the problem of testing it first.”