by Lynn Cullen
The swans watched warily, strumming the water with their thick black feet, as the Queen arose and stood, wavering, on the closest stone to the shore, her balance hampered by her voluminous skirts. “So that is a country boyhood.”
“It was mine, at least.”
“It sounds heavenly.”
I smiled from my viewing point as she picked ahead carefully.
“Oh, it had its duller moments,” said Don Juan. “It could get very lonely at times. My foster father was always gone, serving the Emperor Charles—” He stopped, letting her work her way closer. “Serving my father, I mean. That still sounds impossible.”
He waited for the Queen to hop to the next stone. “Don’t misunderstand. I loved my foster mother—I still love her. She was good to me, but I could always feel a distance. I tried to bridge it by being the perfect son. What I would do to see her smile! When I got older, I realized she was sad because she thought I was don Luis’s Unacknowledged love child. How that shamed me, to know that my very existence hurt her.”
“You said once that you wanted to be don Luis’s son.”
“Yes. It would have been easier if I had been.” He swiped his arm over his face. I, too, was warm there behind my screen of rushes—sweat trickled down my back. “When I got older, don Luis made me wear well-cut clothes, too fine for a country boy. He gave me my own pony, a piebald with white stockings—I loved that horse! He also made the mistake of telling the teachers in my school to treat me with deference—without explaining why. The boys in my school just laughed. The teachers found new reasons to beat me. Who was I, a bastard not loved enough by don Luis for him to legally claim me, to put on such airs? I got tired of fighting every boy in the school who wished to knock me down a notch, so I was relieved at first when we moved to Cuacos de Yuste when I was eleven. Don Luis was to serve the Emperor in his retirement to the monastery there. But whenever I visited the Emperor at my foster father’s heels, the great man stared at me with a strange smile on his face. I was sure there was something horribly wrong with me.”
“Oh!” She slipped into the water with a splash. The swans scuttled off.
He came back to steady her. “Your gown,” he said.
She held Up her dripping skirts. The bottom ten inches were dark and sagging.
“Did you hurt yourself ?” he asked her, his hand Upon her arm.
They stood face-to-face in the muddy water, the poplar down twitching aimlessly around them as in a dream.
She sighed. “I wish—”
He put his finger on her lips. “No.”
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, he drew his finger slowly down her lips. “No.”
She stared at him through the meandering down. A breeze stirred the trees, setting the leaves whispering in silvery tongues.
“Just tell me that you feel this, too. That I am not going mad.”
He would not answer her.
“Tell me, Juan, please, then I shall go if you wish.”
I must have made some kind of sigh, for at that moment, they parted and turned in my direction. She saw me first.
“Sofi?”
Her chest rose, then fell in a sigh.
“Sofi,” she said loudly now. “Perhaps you overheard me.” She squared off before Don Juan. “I was asking the gentleman this: Monsieur, s’il vous plaît, would you be so good as to tell me”—she kicked at the river, showering his doublet—“do you like the water?”
He stood there, dripping.
“Can you not decide, monsieur? Here, perhaps you need just a soupçon more.” She splashed him again.
Sorrow and gratitude passed over his face like the shadows of clouds Upon the river. “Madame, please. Allow me to return the favor.”
He smacked the surface of the water.
“Oh!” Drops glittered in the Queen’s loose hair. “Oh, you did not just splash me!”
“Oh,” he said, “but it seems that I did.”
“Beast!”
A war of splashing erupted between them. Their insults and shrieks of laughter ringing in the air, I grabbed Up my skirts and turned . . . directly into the King.
I drew back from His Majesty’s grim visage as would a mouse trapped by a cat. All good sensations drained instantly from my person, leaving behind a shell of horror.
Cher-Ami wriggling in his arms, the King eyed my bulging jaw then my chest. I looked down. A green trail of coca juice led down my rumpled bodice.
“Doña Sofonisba,” he said, “would you be so kind as to explain what is happening?” Behind him, Francesca wrung her hands, her face ashen.
The same breeze that poured over my burning face ruffled the plume in the King’s hat as he stepped past me to the riverbank.
Don Juan was bending down to paddle water at My Lady when he saw the King. He received a faceful before the Queen saw the object of his stare.
Immediately, she slogged through the water to her husband, the ropes of her hair catching on her sodden sleeves and back. Her shocked smile spoke more of her guilt than would have a gale of tears.
She gained the King’s side. “My Lord,” she said, breathless, “it is nothing.”
The King cast a cold look at Don Juan, still standing in the river, and then Upon the Queen, now pressing his Royal hand to her wet lips.
He pulled away his hand. “My Lady, I assure you, it is not.”
ITEM: Don Pedro, the two-year-old son of the Spanish King Pedro the Cruel, fell to his death from the north tower of the castle at Segovia, where he was playing with his brothers and sisters. Understanding her fate, the nurse in whose charge he had been threw herself immediately from the place where he had fallen.
20 MAY 1562
The Palace, Aranjuez
I have heard the English Queen, Kathryn Howard, had been feeding her dogs bits of boiled chicken when King Henry’s men came and took her screaming down the halls of Hampton Court. Within days, her young head parted ways with her neck, leaving the dogs without a mistress and England without a Queen. It seems she had been carrying on a flirtation with her cousin, and her aging husband could not abide his young wife’s taste for a virile kinsman. Not a soul in Europe had felt sorry for her. She should have known better. For when a King wishes to punish his wife for an indiscretion, it is not called murder.
This was the dark thought on my mind at supper in the Queen’s chambers last night, when Cher-Ami suddenly sprang Up barking from his basket and caused My Lady to burst into tears. The page whose entrance had set off the dog was bewildered to find My Lady crying when he offered her some pears.
The condesa lowered her spoon and knife. “Are you well, Your Majesty?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” The blue-black rings etched into the tender skin Under her eyes said otherwise. She took a pear from the tray, then put it down, forgotten, before the page had bowed and backed away.
My poor Lady. It is my fault that she has suffered in purgatory these past fourteen days. If I had been in my right mind, I would never have let her wander off with Don Juan. Why, oh why, did I take the coca from doctor Debruyne? Me and my pride, pretending to be a scholar! I thought I could partake in the experiment of a learned man—ha! I am no scientist.
The condesa frowned at the Queen. “You have not a new rash, have you? Does your throat hurt?”
My Lady shook her head.
The condesa blinked in thought. “Well, your courses are due next week.”
The Queen’s forlorn expression lifted into one of hope. “I could be with child, couldn’t I?”
The condesa knows nothing about the incident at the river. No one does. After Francesca and I had braided Her Majesty’s hair and straightened her wet attire, the King had made our guilty trio return to the palace without him. Don Juan had been ordered to depart on the spot. The Queen and I had slipped in through the kitchen. No one saw Us enter, not the condesa, nor madame, nor even doctor Debruyne, since we had left before he could return with the extractors. He had to do the job on Franc
esca’s tooth later that night, after the effects of the coca had worn off. Poor Francesca had to pay for my misjudgment, too.
Now I grasped at the hope that the Queen could be pregnant. If she was carrying the King’s child, her splashing game with Don Juan might well be forgiven. These past fourteen days would be soon forgotten, fourteen terrible days in which I would be sorting through My Lady’s combs or kneeling in Mass or spooning in a mouthful of soup, and be gripped by a sudden chill, knowing that at any moment one of His Majesty’s fierce German bodyguards could storm in and drag my little Queen—and me—away.
For even though I know the Queen and Don Juan did nothing more than play in the water like children, it must have looked bad to the King. What must he think of his wife, bare-headed and wet, frolicking Unattended with his brother? An unfaithful wife was never tolerated, and now, during these tumultuous times, especially when many in the Low Countries wished to throw off the yoke of his rule, the King could not afford to meekly don the shameful horns of a cuckold. If his seventeen-year-old wife could Undo him, others would be encouraged to do so, too. If implicated in her misdeed, I could be taken with her. What would become of Us? The Spanish do not behead their queens, that is not the Spanish way. No, the Spanish lock their errant queens in towers and lose the key, as they did to Queen Juana the Mad, the King’s grandmother and rightful heir to the crown, whose only crime was to be so deranged that she kept the body of her dead husband with her. If a son could lock Up his mother, as the King’s father, the Emperor Charles, had done to Queen Juana, what would a husband do to a wife who had dishonored him?
Tomorrow is the King’s thirty-fifth birthday. I cannot think how he will wish to celebrate.
ITEM: The King’s ancestor Alfonso XI was known as the Avenger, because of his taste for having his enemies’ backs to be broken, or having them hanged and dragged at horse’s tail, or causing them to be brought to the stake and burnt. Even his court whispered that his efforts to impose authority had strayed from justice to rigor.
21 MAY 1562
The Palace, Aranjuez
The King has had his revenge.
This morning, instead of ordering that his wife be seized and me along with her, the King ordered for his Royal barge to be fetched and for his wife and all the court to go picnicking downriver with him. A feast was promptly packed, and the court assembled after Mass; then we boarded the boats according to our rank while serenaded by Moorish guitarists. The King insisted that I ride with the Queen on his barge—a great honor. Why should he do so? How could he have forgiven me for letting his wife run wild? I could not forgive myself.
I entered the craft in the privileged company of the King and Queen. But I was too nervous to admire the barge’s wondrous prow, carved like a sea serpent, or its gleaming sides of wood. As the guitarists played a soothing melody, I left the King at the entrance and followed the Queen past the rowers sitting at their oars. We ducked Under the cloth-of-gold canopy emblazoned with the King’s and Queen’s intertwining letters to join the King’s sister Doña Juana, with her lady doña Eufrasia, sitting on a divan with their hands Upon their laps.
“There you are, sister,” said Doña Juana. She remained seated while exchanging kisses with the Queen. “I have not seen you this past fortnight. The condesa de Urueña reports that you have been ill. With child, I hope?” She smiled coldly as My Lady blushed.
“I pray so,” murmured the Queen.
“I suppose your care for your mistress accounts for why you have not come to paint me, Sofonisba—my brother did tell you that I wished for my portrait to be done?”
A murmur of delight rippled through the crowd on the landing. I looked around in time to see the King holding out his hand for Don Juan to kiss. The Queen and I exchanged miserable glances.
My Lady had not been unfaithful, not technically. What was the harm in splashing a little water? And even that small wrong was known by no one but the King.
The guitar players switched to a gay gypsy tune as Don Juan boarded the barge. The Queen and I settled on the couch beside Doña Juana and her lady. As I smoothed Her Majesty’s skirts, the King took his place on the divan across from Us.
“Brother,” he said to Don Juan. “Sit by me.”
He sat, stiffly. Doña Juana whispered something to doña Eufrasia as the oarsmen bent to their work.
“Go slowly,” the King told the captain standing just beyond the golden fringe of the canopy. “I wish to smell the flowers.”
We sailed by the rose garden with its velvety sweet scent, by the beds of exotic specimens arranged in formal knots, by fountains splashing in mossy scallop-shaped basins. On the other bank, wood doves cooed from their nests in the crooks of the elms planted in perfect rows by order of the King. I gazed down one of the rows, hoping, foolishly, to catch sight of doctor Debruyne.
“Felipe,” said Doña Juana, “do you like the painting I gave you for your birthday?” Her strident voice carried easily over the hushed splash of the rowers’ oars. The closest boat of celebrants to join Us was still at the landing—their speech and the gypsy music were but a distant pleasant hum.
The King leaned around to speak to his sister. “The new van Eyck? You were most generous.”
“I wish to turn your taste away from those odd paintings by that mad Fleming, El Bosco, which you insist Upon acquiring.” She lowered her formidable brow. “Your new one, The Garden of Earthly Delights, is the worst. All those naked bodies, committing sins. How can you think the painting isn’t heretical?”
“They are allegories.” He flicked a glance toward the Queen. “We are to be reminded of our weaknesses and think what happens when we fall prey to them.”
“Just because El Bosco’s paintings are couched in religious themes,” said Doña Juana, “does not absolve them. I am reminded of something Inquisitor-General Valdés was telling doña Eufrasia and me about your Michelangelo, Sofonisba.”
Sweetest Holy Mary. Always she must refer to him as “my” Michelangelo. I composed myself. “My Lady?”
“Have you seen the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome?” she asked.
I stared at her warily, as in my mind’s eye a field of muscular bodies writhed overhead. In the center of this panoply of flesh, beautiful Adam reached forth to receive the touch of life. The work was a wonder, no, a miracle of painting, and on a ceiling, no less, but the Maestro has done many more paintings and many other famous statues. Why did she bring Up this work again? “Yes, Your Majesty. I have had that privilege.”
“I refer specifically to the twenty nude youths sitting above the cornices throughout the painting.” Her beige-lashed eyes were pleasant beneath her broad brow. “What are they called, doña Eufrasia?”
Doña Eufrasia lowered her gaze. “Ignudi, Your Majesty.”
“There are hundreds of figures in the fresco, Your Majesty,” I said. “I cannot remember them all.”
“You might remember these. Some are accompanied by acorns, either in sheaves Upon their backs or in great bunches Upon which they sit.”
“Acorns?” said the King.
“Yes, Felipe. A certain large-headed kind. They have a name.” Doña Juana grimaced as if sorry she had to speak of such.
I kept my silence, not rising to her bait.
“It is a coarse name, in Tuscan slang. Testa di cazzo.” She pressed her fingers to her puffy lips in innocence. “There, I said it. Could you translate it for Us, Sofonisba?”
She frowned when I said nothing. “Are you not Italian? Go on, tell Us what it means.”
“I cannot say.”
“Oh, please. Do not act as if you don’t know it.”
I saw that she would not rest Until I said it. I drew in a breath. “Prickhead.”
The King turned to look at me.
I sank into a curtsey. “I beg your pardon, Your Majesty, and the pardon of all who are here.”
Doña Juana shook her head. “There are bunches of these, these acorns, sheaves of them, in what is supposed
to be a holy painting. I cannot see the reason for them. Nor are the youths who carry them necessary to the painting. The naked louts are just there, with their . . . seed-heads.”
“Juana,” said the King. “Enough.”
“But I am not done. Inquisitor-General Valdés and I have discussed this matter and cannot come Up with a reason for their inclusion in the painting other than to please the artist’s own despicable tastes. Perhaps there is another reason for this. Perhaps you could explain his thinking for Us, Sofonisba, since you know him so well.”
“I was only his student.”
Doña Juana drew back. “Perhaps you should think about this. The mood in Rome is very serious these days about art. Protestant mobs protesting symbols of the Catholic faith have been tearing down religious works in churches across Northern Europe. Pious work. Holy work. Centuries-old pieces of great value. Our bishops will not stand for it. They have called for an examination of all paintings for any possible seductive charm, perversion, or lasciviousness, to destroy them before the wicked hordes have an excuse to wreak their wanton destruction on holy pieces. All work in the Church must be pure beyond doubt.” She smiled. “So you see, I am not just making indecorous conversation.”
The King stood. He waved away a bit of meandering poplar fluff as he cleared his throat. “I wish to make an announcement.”
Doña Juana lowered her brow in displeasure at being interrupted. The Queen’s hand sidled to mine.
“Don Juan,” said the King. “Please rise.”
Don Juan stood. He lifted his chin, revealing the hollows Under his eyes. These past two weeks must have been a nightmare for him, too.
The King slid his hand to the back of Don Juan’s neck. “I want to announce within the circle of family what will soon be made public.”
A breeze stirred, rippling the fringe of the canopy. “Do you love the Church, Brother?” asked the King.
The light Under the canopy turned green as we passed into a tunnel of trees. I glanced at the riverbank, then drew in a sharp breath. We had come to the place where the King had discovered Us.