Reign of Madness

by Lynn Cullen

  “I see the way you look at her.”

  “How is that? Like a man with eyes? My God, woman, am I not to look at people when they speak to me? Would you have my lids sewn shut like Delilah’s?”

  I frowned at the gyrfalcon, marbling the mantel of the fireplace with her excrement. “No.”

  “Whatever relationship you have dreamed up between us is completely in your head.” He had taken my face between his hands. “Am I to shake it out of you?”

  That time, as many others, he had defused my jealousy with a lingering kiss. And truly, I had never caught them in any real indiscretion, any more than I had discerned him cozying overmuch to the other ladies at court. He thought it harmless to pat a pretty girl on the rear, to nuzzle upon a girl’s ears. I supposed it was Burgundian custom, though when I asked Katrien about this, she frowned.

  “A duke can do what he wants,” was all she would say.

  At least he always came to my bed at night, unless he was on a trip with his men, and then I would insist that Aliénor and all the others he had patted or nuzzled stay with me. Their company would be proof of my chastity—as well as enforcing his.

  The Dowager yanked on the velvet loop of her hennin to pull it lower on her forehead. “Too windy out here,” she grumbled. “I don’t know why you would want to come this way, Philippe. All I can think of when I walk these woods is the day your mother fell from her horse. It was right here,” she told me. “Heiress to more lands than anyone, wife of a man who was determined to buy them crowns, and she threw it all away, chasing after a duck. She was so young and pretty. Sweet as a rose, too. It was a crying shame.”

  After that, the mood grew dull, though we did picnic by a pond fringed with willows. We returned to Bruges as convent bells struck None. Philippe then went with his gentlemen to play tennis, while I went into town to do good works, as was expected of the Archduke’s wife. I chose Beatriz to accompany me, and armed with linens, bread, and a small bag of gold, we rode by closed litter to the Hospital of Saint John. There, joined by the prioress of the hospital foundation, the briskly efficient eldest daughter of a wealthy local family, we walked through the sickwards built between the massive pillars of the halls. We stopped here and there to give cheer to those wasting away from disease or age, to pray, or for me to give my blessing, as if a not-quiteeighteen-year-old Archduchess had the power to relieve even the suffering of a gnat. The true work of the hospital was being done by the sisters who rushed along the rows of wooden beds with clysters and potions, or who sat at bedsides spooning gruel into slack mouths, or who directed dimming gazes to the many painted images of Heaven hung upon the walls, reminding those knocking at Death’s portal of what glory waited on the other side.

  The prioress paused to remind one of the sisters about the proper application of leeches, a procedure that seemed to fascinate Beatriz. She had studied medicine at Salerno, besides Latin, rhetoric, and philosophy, and soon she was engaging the prioress in a discussion on how to best balance the four humors of the body. I myself had to step away from the beds, dismayed at the suffering around me. I leaned against one of the stone pillars near the chapel to catch my breath. I was contemplating the vivid altarpiece, a triptych in glowing reds, whites, and greens, when the prioress spoke up.

  “It is a splendid painting, yes? Saint Catherine receiving a wedding ring from the infant Christ. Master Hans did it.”

  “It is quite fine.” I pushed away from the pillar, embarrassed to be caught resting in this beehive of mercy.

  “Memling was Master Hans’s family name, in case you didn’t know.” She nodded to Beatriz as she bustled over to join us. Instinctively, she switched her address to my governess when it came to imparting knowledge. “I remember him walking the streets of Bruges when I was young,” she told Beatriz. “His head was always down, as if he was hunting for dropped stuivers. When he looked up to cross the street, his face was pinched with startling intensity. He frightened me, but I was only a girl. Now I know it was not coins he sought but visions from God.”

  “The Saint Catherine is beautiful,” Beatriz said.

  “It is good that you think so.” The prioress turned to me, drawing her long upper lip into a smile. “It is the Archduke Philippe’s mother, the Duchess Mary. It’s a true likeness.”

  I looked closer at the group of figures surrounding the Christ Child, who was sitting on the Virgin Mary’s lap. The Saint Catherine, kneeling beside her martyr’s wheel as she received Christ’s ring, had perfect, sweet features, a soft brow, and contented lips. There was a serene intelligence on her face. This was modeled after the woman who cast aside care for her unborn child to hunt ducks?

  “Do you like the Christ Child?” The prioress wore a trickster’s grin.

  “Yes,” I said uncertainly.

  “You should. It is none other than your husband, Philippe. He was born in Bruges, you know.”

  Even surrounded by a grim chorus of scraping gruel spoons, spattering fluids, and feet tapping urgently against the tile, I warmed. In the infant’s bright eyes and long cheeks pouching by his rosebud mouth, I could see the man into whom the baby would grow. The child put the ring on his mother’s finger with the amiable air so characteristic of Philippe.

  “And do you recognize the model for Saint Barbara?”

  Reluctantly, I shifted my gaze from the infant Philippe and peered at the woman seated to his left. Under her diadem set with precious stones, she scowled slightly at a book, as though perturbed that the tender interaction between the Christ Child and Saint Catherine had interrupted her reading.

  “It is Madame la Grande, the Dowager Duchess,” said the prioress. “She made Master Hans recast her likeness six times before she would donate a guilder to the foundation. It was her idea to show Saint Barbara concentrating on her reading. She would not be another vacantly smiling saint, is how she put it.”

  Not knowing what to say, I gave a breathy laugh and moved on to the next row of beds. I quickly came to understand that I had ventured into the area that housed those whose deaths were most imminent. Encouraged by the prioress, I prayed with a sobbing grown man and his broad-hipped elder sister over their aged mother, whose wasted face resembled more a wood carving than a living person. I had my hand gripped by a staring toothless man until the prioress painstakingly pried away each finger. After standing back to allow a man to be taken from a carrying chair and poured into his bed like a sack of wheat, I was relieved to join a young family sitting with their mother.

  At first I did not know why they should be on this row. Was there not room enough elsewhere? The children—a toddling boy and thumb-sucking baby, bossed over by their imperious pigtailed sprite of a sister—gamboled at the woman’s bedside, while her youthful husband, thin, balding, and as full of unsprung energy as a grasshopper, spoke with her cheerfully. I wondered why this mother had need for the hospital at all, happy as this family appeared.

  The husband, after bowing repeatedly upon our introduction, asked me if I had met Colón.

  “Colón?” I said, surprised.

  He explained that he was a cartographer and most interested in the Admiral’s findings. He took his wife’s hand. “Paulien wishes to go to the islands that Colón has found in the Indies. She wishes to see the Indians.”

  “Your Highness.” The woman’s smile was weak but perhaps not so much so that a good rest might not remedy her. “Are the Indians so very fierce?”

  “Moeder is not afraid of them,” piped up the pigtailed miss. “Even though they eat people.”

  I bent down to talk to the little girl. “I have met one.”

  “A real Indian?”

  I nodded. “Yes. And I can assure you, he did not wish to eat a soul. He was very kind. Do you know what he loves?”

  The girl shook her head, pigtails swishing.

  “Dogs.”

  “I like dogs.”

  “Me, too.” I straightened to address the mother. “Perhaps you shall see some Indios for yourself, madame.
It is the Admiral’s desire to bring back as many as he can.” I did not add how, in doing so, he made Mother furious, according to my sisters’ letters. The Indios were not his to enslave and transport, Mother said, being her subjects, yet Colón continued shipments. “Human gold,” my sisters said he called them, much to Mother’s displeasure.

  “Yes, Mevrouw,” said the little girl. “Moeder’s going to go there. Aren’t you, Moeder, as soon as you are well?”

  “Marie-Paule.” The mother put out her hand from under her blankets. As she reached for her daughter, an odor radiated forth, a stench that spoke of rotting flesh and decay. I stepped back, as much from shock as from the revolting smell.

  The father took his wife’s bony hand. “Yes, yes, Marie-Paule, of course Moeder is going.”

  The young mother’s eyes sank into her head when she closed them.

  I excused myself and quickly left the hospital, followed by Beatriz, who protested that our work was not done. But I would not have my tears upset this brave family. I drew the hood of my cape over my head and stepped out onto the bustling Mariastraat in the direction of the palace. I had only just passed the yard of the church of Our Lady when I saw a man’s cloaked figure among the linden trees, heading toward the church door. Even in his voluminous hooded robe, I knew who it was, as must everyone in the city when he passed. Who did not recognize the rare white gyrfalcon riding upon his shoulder?

  “I wish to—to go to pray,” I told Beatriz. Before she could question me, I crossed the street. My husband had reached the side porch of the church and was opening the door.

  A knot twisted in my gut as I hurried through the linden trees of the churchyard. Why was Philippe here? He said he was to play tennis. And why did he disguise himself? Was this how he had escaped detection during his assignations with the women I had seen him pet and fondle—meeting them in a church? A Spaniard would never sink to this wickedness.

  “Stay,” I croaked to Beatriz at the door. I could not bear for her to see how I was being shamed. “Or go back to the hospital. I want to pray alone.”

  I entered the church and made my way through the chill darkness. I could hear footsteps not far ahead. Why had I let him bring me so low? I had let myself need his touch so badly. But the things he did to me, the things I so desperately craved, he also did to others.

  By the multicolored light filtering through the stained-glass windows of the nave, I could see the cloaked figure making his way to the front of the church. I held my hand over my mouth, as sickened as I had been when I realized that it was Papa who had been in Mother’s prayer booth in the palace in Barcelona.

  I was creeping down the side aisle when Philippe cried out: “Who dares follow me?”

  I stopped. I glanced at the statue of the Blessed Virgin in the side chapel before which I’d halted, as if she might aid me.

  Philippe craned forward, the bird mimicking his gesture. “Puss?”

  “Do not call me Puss.”

  “Puss, what are you doing here?”

  I edged forward, not ready to face what I was about to see. “I believe the question is, What are you doing here?”

  “Fair enough, though I do not know why you should take such a tone with me. I have come to pay a visit.”

  He turned around. I saw now that he was standing before a black marble sarcophagus. From visits on holy days and other occasions when we came here instead of attending Mass in the chapel in the Prinsenhof, I knew whose remains this monument held: Mary of Burgundy. Philippe’s mother.

  He ran his hand over the smooth top. “The artisans have nearly finished carving the effigy to place upon this. It’s of the finest quality—I’ve seen it in their workshop. It looks just like her.”

  Relief coursed through my body. “You’ve come to see your mother’s tomb.”

  “You act surprised.”

  “No! No. Of course you came. Our ride this morning in the woods of Wijnendaele must have made you think of her.” I almost laughed. How my mind had run away with me.

  He stroked the marble, unaware, it seemed, of my struggle to contain my giddiness. After a moment he said, “It’s amazing what you can remember from when you were not even four.”

  “You have a memory of her?”

  “I don’t know where we were—here in Bruges? Wherever it was, the canals had frozen over. I remember Mother insisting on going outside to skate with everyone else. Papa was shouting no, but the next thing I knew, she was chopping away on her blades and pulling me on a sled.”

  “You were on the ice?” I was gay with the delight of one whose execution has been stayed.

  He brightened with my encouragement. “Oh, yes. I remember exactly how it felt—my fingers, face, and toes burned with the cold. I was laughing like an idiot. All around us, girls were cutting figure eights. Old couples were chugging along. Boys raced from one dock to the next. And Mother and I were like everyone else, freezing, laughing, and shouting Hallo. Then Mother pulled me to a place where an old woman had set up a stove at the edge of the canal. The crone gave me a waffle. I have never since tasted anything so good in my life.”

  Filled with contrite tenderness, I slipped my hand into his. Is this what passion did to your mind? Made you see things that were not there? No wonder the doctors of my brother Juan pleaded for him to cool his lust. It breaks down the mind as well as the body.

  I smoothed the feathers on Delilah’s back, keeping well out of the way of her beak. As often as I had to handle falcons, I still had not become comfortable with them. “What else do you remember about her?”

  He thought a moment. “She wore a pointed headdress and veil like Grand-mère, and when she laughed, her veil would shake. She would draw it over my face, slowly, so that it tickled.” He sighed.

  “Your memories are so sweet. Tell me more.”

  “I don’t remember much after that. I got passed around a lot after my mother died.”

  “Where was your father?”

  “You know—I’ve told you before. Maxi was in Innsbruck. The burghers here in Bruges were holding me hostage until he agreed to give back the privileges Grandfather had taken from them. With my mother gone, they thought he should give up his rights to Flanders.”

  “But that didn’t last long.”

  “No, thank goodness. I remember the sour looks on the faces of the burghers’ wives into whose care I was given. When I was six, Father got me back and gave me to doctor de Busleyden. François was sort of the mother I didn’t have—don’t tell him that. I doubt if he sees himself as a mother figure.”

  Harsh doctor de Busleyden, with the jaw as sharp as a plowblade? Hardly not.

  “Anyway, I told you why I am here. But why are you here, Puss?”

  Candles flickered at the base of the Virgin’s robes in the side chapel. Glowing spots of red and blue lit the floor from the stained-glass window. “You were quite frightening when you asked who dared follow you.”

  “Was I? Good! Perhaps I should take that as a motto: ‘Who shall dare?’ I need to frighten people more. Just because I am an agreeable sort doesn’t mean I wish for people to doubt my authority.”

  “Monseigneur, people do not doubt the wisdom of Philippe the Good.”

  “Don’t they?”

  “Never.”

  He drew me to him.

  We heard a thunk from the narthex of the church—the closing of the great wooden door—then loud footsteps. Doctor François de Busleyden, Archbishop of Besançon, strode down the center aisle, followed by Beatriz, blinking with concern.

  He genuflected toward the tabernacle, in which the Host was stored, then bowed deeply to Philippe.

  “Speak of the Devil,” said Philippe. He peered around the Archbishop. “Bonjour, pretty little nun,” he said to Beatriz. She half smiled, then frowned at the floor.

  “She’s not a nun,” I said.

  Philippe winked.

  The Archbishop’s sharp features remained unmoved as he took us in. He cleared his throat. “Your High
ness, it is with terrible sorrow that I bring you this news.”

  “What, good doctor? What is so important that you would have me know it by bursting before my mother’s tomb in this way?”

  The Archbishop jerked his head in a cursory bow. “The news is for Madame la Duchesse.”

  “Me?”

  He trained his fierce gaze upon me. “Your brother, His Majesty Don Juan, Prince of Asturias, is dead.”

  13.

  27 October anno Domini 1497

  The Dowager was drumming her fingers on the arm of her canopied chair of fine green velvet when I entered her study. I kissed her hand and the hand of my husband, whom I was surprised and relieved to find there, then quickly dropped upon the cross-legged stool to which the Dowager had waved me. I had hardly the time to realize that she should have risen to receive me and kissed my hand, as I was the ranking lady, when she spoke.

  “We have been chatting.”

  Philippe glanced at me, then retreated behind the Dowager’s desk, where he idly pushed around some of her papers.

  A frown flashed across the Dowager’s face as she watched Philippe touch her writing things. “How are you faring, dear?” she asked me. Her voice was rich with uncharacteristic concern.

  I smoothed the black wool of my skirt. It had been a week since I’d received the news of my brother’s death. We had promptly left Bruges, traveling at night as is proper when in deep mourning, and had gotten as far as Malines. We planned to continue to Brussels, where I would retire for six weeks. Yet in spite of all the formal expression of sorrow, I had yet to truly grasp Juan’s passing. He was not still laughing with his pages at a supper? He was not crouched in a sea of wagging tails, patting his hounds? He was not leaning over his galloping horse, his blond hair flying? It could not be. A person so full of life could not simply … end. I adored Juan, worshipped him, everyone did. He deserved Mother’s obvious preference, as sweet and merry as he was. And if I, separated from the sting of his death by seas and marriage, was yet unable to eat, how was Mother bearing it?