by Lynn Cullen
I followed him onto the Street of the Angel, the surprise of his attention lifting me out of my malaise. Townsfolk peered, stunned to see the Prince Consort and Princess of Asturias walking the narrow streets like commoners; they hastily bowed as we passed. Carters nodded as they rumbled by on their wagons. A stonemason chiseling a gargoyle on the eaves of Mother’s almost finished monastery of San Juan de los Reyes stopped long enough to squint down from his ladder and salute.
We passed onto the road to the San Martín Bridge, in the shadow of the yellow stone city walls on which soldiers paced, their crested helmets shining in the sun. With a nod from the gatekeeper in his tower, we began our way across the bridge, whose soaring arches, first built by the Romans, spanned the gorge through which the Tajo flowed. Philippe led me into an embrasure overlooking the water and, like a child, leaned against the stone wall to gaze down on the river rushing far below. I joined him, the taffeta of my skirt rustling against the wall.
Philippe stretched out his arms to the sapphire sky. “Splendid! The perfect antidote to slaving away with your mother. Thank God she got that letter from her lover—we’d be there still.”
“What lover?”
“Fray Hernando.”
I laughed. “Fray Hernando is hardly her lover.” Shielding my eyes, I gazed at the hills rising from the far side of the bridge. Outcroppings of rocks, bearded with mustard-colored lichen, jutted from the slopes. Where there was crumbly saffron earth, gray scrub had sprung up, sometimes a gnarled tree. From childhood excursions to a hermitage in those hills with Mother, I knew that the brush, which looked so dead, was alive with birds and rabbits and darting lizards.
On the side of the bridge from which we had come, the gorge dropped almost straight down to the water from the city wall. The slopes were spiked with swords of aloe as tall as men. Swifts sprang from crevices in the face of the cliffs, to skim the water in twos and threes.
I followed Philippe’s smile to the shore at the bottom of the gorge, where naked boys swam and dived in the water with a flash of their skinny flanks.
“You must have swum a lot as a boy,” I said, “with all those rivers in Flanders.”
“Actually, I didn’t. Since the nobles and Father were fighting for my custody, I was under lock and key. I never so much as touched a puddle.”
“But you got out often to hunt.”
“With a gaggle of guards and nobles who posed as my friends. There was never anyone my age around. That is why I treasure Hendrik—he was the first person who was not gray in the beard to befriend me, though I didn’t meet him until the year you came to my lands.”
How lucky I had been to have my sisters and brother as companions. It was strange to think that all of them were gone now, to the realms of their foreign husbands or to Death, the effect of which was very much the same.
“I want my son to be able to enjoy these simple pleasures.”
I glanced at him in surprise. He rarely mentioned Charles. I was glad that he should do so, though it caused me a pang of grief to be reminded of our sweet boy, so far away.
“I want to be a better father than Maxi was.”
“He couldn’t help being away from you. The burghers of Bruges held you hostage.”
His glossy hair caught on his collar as he shook his head. “Even after he regained custody, he was always in his father’s lands in Austria, and I was always in my mother’s lands, with François.”
“Let’s go home, Philippe, to Charles and the girls. We can leave at once if you order it. Mother cannot stop us, if only you—”
“I remember my father getting me my first suit of armor. I was six, he had just regained control of me. He had bidden me to come before him in the armor, and asked me to save the helmet to be put on in his presence. I was already sick with fright from being screwed into a metal shell, so when his gentleman tied on my padded protective hat, then eased the helmet down over my head, I panicked. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. ‘Put up your visor,’ I heard him say, but my hands in my armored gloves couldn’t find the opening. I could hear him roaring with laughter.
“The next thing I knew, my visor opened. François was looking in. ‘I do believe it is King Arthur,’ he said. ‘Good sir, where might you keep your Holy Grail?’
“I cooled down enough to let him remove my offending lid. ‘Lancelot,’ I told him as soon as my head was free. ‘I don’t look like Arthur, I look like Lancelot.’”
Philippe’s rueful smile charmingly puckered the pouches near his lips. In the handsome and confident man leaning against the stone wall of the bridge, I could see the lonely motherless boy.
“You didn’t wish to be Arthur?” I asked softly.
He recoiled at the pity he must have seen in my eyes.
“That woman? He let Lancelot take his wife.”
He pushed away from the wall, then stalked off, leaving me sitting.
I rose to make my way back to the palace. The guards looked down from the gatehouse; I would not meet their gaze. Once in the courtyard, I sank onto a bench in the shade of a fragrant orange tree to rest. I was thinking of my little Charles, wondering what kind of man he would become if he were to be separated too long from the love of his mother, when a shadow passed over the grass before me. I looked up to see a stork sailing to its nest on the rooftop of the neighboring church of Santo Tomé. No sooner had it landed on the jumbled sticks of its home than the white fuzzy head of a large chick appeared.
The father stepped forward awkwardly, then opened his great yellow beak. The chick reached in and gobbled until, satiated, it sank out of sight.
“You are interested in storks?”
I turned to find Diego Colón, standing in the arcade. He wore Mother’s livery; a sword in its scabbard balanced on his hip. My heart, foolish traitor, beat faster.
“Yes,” I said. “There are few birds more gangling and clumsy on their feet, or with homelier faces, yet I admire them. They make good parents. Both the mother and the father work at tending their young.”
He came toward me, keeping his gaze on the nest. “It is said that they mate for life.”
“If only humans could be as faithful as humble storks.”
Our eyes met. “Some are,” he said.
I drank in his nearness with the gratitude of a parched prisoner given water. “We would do well to study them.”
Loud voices came from a distant part of the palace. We turned to see a physician striding through the arcade, his robes flapping, followed by two men in clanking armor. They were headed toward Philippe’s quarters.
“Is there trouble?” said Diego. “Perhaps you should go to your husband.”
“It is probably nothing. I suppose one of his men was cut while playing at swords, or perhaps someone fought over cards or was hurt in a wrestling competition. There is never a lack of sport among Philippe’s men. You would know it if Philippe himself were ill. He would call for every relic in Toledo with curative powers to be brought, and perhaps a magic charm or two. As bold as he hopes to act, he is most afraid of death.”
Diego put his foot against the well. “What else is there to be afraid of, if not death?”
“I should be more charitable,” I said hastily. “He never really had a firm foundation to grow upon. He lost his mother at an early age.”
“As did I.” He saw me wince. “I’m sorry. I did not wish to make you feel bad. I was just thinking that whatever faults I have, I would not want them blamed on her. It was not her fault that Father left her.”
I waited for him to explain.
“Tell me about your children,” he said. “Is your daughter like you?”
“My older daughter, Leonor?” I was easily led to safer ground. Just saying her name made me smile. “Not at all. She is a typical first child. She orders her nurses about—me, too, yet with such good sense that I happily obey. But she is most tenderhearted. She mothers her little brother like a hen. Though she was only a toddling child when he was born, she insist
ed on helping to swaddle him. And it was she who taught him to walk, coaxing him along with a ball.”
He nodded for me to continue. I was not used to being able to utter a thought about the children without being interrupted with an exclamation about how clever Delilah was or when Pedro might ever be ready to play.
“It is Charles that I worry about. Perhaps you have not heard—his jaw …”
“Yes.”
“It is a trial for him to eat, and hence he is of small stature and prone to fevers and illnesses. It made Leonor weep to see him lying listless in his crib.”
“I am sorry.”
“Oh, but he is so strong. I think he would have been dead long ago if he did not will his little body to live. In this way he is like my mother.”
“Perhaps like his own mother, too.”
I savored another of Diego’s smiles.
“It must be difficult for you to be away from him,” he said.
If only Charles’s own father understood this. “Yes.”
Diego reached inside his doublet, drew out a pouch, then shook something into his fist. He held it out.
“For you.”
“Me?”
He opened his hand. On his palm was a pearl the shape and size of a pigeon’s egg.
“It’s beautiful. I have never seen a pearl this large.” I looked up at him. “You must not give this to me.”
“It is from the new lands of my father. He gave it to me to remember why he must be away from me, why we have made so many sacrifices.”
“I cannot take this.”
“Wear it as I have done, to remember.”
“But how will you remember your father without it?”
His earnest expression softened. “I am not likely to forget him.”
Footsteps pounded in the arcade behind us. A page dashed out into the sunlight. “Your Highness, the Prince wishes you to come to his chambers at once.”
“Is there a problem?”
The page glanced at Diego.
“What is it?”
“Your Majesty, he ate some bad fish and fears he must vomit, and now he wishes you to hold his hair.”
I lowered my face, ashamed that Diego should know my role as base servant to my boy husband. “I am coming,” I said, then left without looking back.
28.
14 July anno Domini 1502
I will kill him!”
Mother paced as I stood before her in her chamber. I glanced at Papa, sitting at her desk, running the trimmed feather end of her quill across his palm. He lifted his brows at me as she continued in her lather.
“I cajole my nobles into naming him my heir after you. I beg everyone to entertain him to the point of personal bankruptcy. I say nothing when he misses daily Mass to go hunting. I even lift the sumptuary laws so that people could dress gaily to make him feel like he is at home in his own hedonistic court. So what does he do? Goes behind my back with a scheme that will destroy your sister.”
Was Mother responsible for the changes in the behavior of her nobles that I had noticed since arriving in the Spains? Why would she go to this trouble for him?
“I do not know what you mean,” I said.
“It is hard enough on poor Catalina, becoming a widow at such a tender age. But to replace her interests in the English court with his own selfish ones, after all we have done for him—I can hardly fathom his gall.”
“What has he done?”
“Only to ask old Tudor to wed his young son Henry to his sister Marguerite, instead of to Catalina, that is all. Old Tudor offered to wed Catalina himself and let his boy wed Marguerite, but that is hardly any bargain. Our Catalina with that withered old schemer—”
“Withered ‘old’ Tudor is five years younger than I,” said Papa.
Mother blinked at him. “You know what I mean.”
“Withered in his soul, perhaps,” Papa said mildly.
“I find no humor in this. My poor child, to be sent home so ignobly.”
“But Mother,” I said, “won’t she be glad to return here?”
“No. She wishes to stay. She is committed to making the best of our tie to England.”
“She is sixteen!” I exclaimed.
“At sixteen, I was thinking about the interests of the Spains.”
We are not, any of us, as heroic as you, Mother.
She shook her head. “Philippe is to be King of Spain someday—”
“King Consort, according to the Cortes,” Papa said. “Not quite the same, Isabel.”
“—King Consort of Spain someday and he still thinks like a duke.”
I saw in my mind the image of the Dowager Duchess, stubbornly perched under her hennin in her purple-clad chambers, surrounded by paintings collected for their value in gold, not their beauty. With her lust to take back what was hers in England, I could see her leaping at the chance to put her granddaughter on the English throne.
“Are you sure that Philippe is the one who is bargaining with King Henry?”
Mother went to her desk and snatched up the paper lying before Papa. “My ambassador acquired his letter. Your husband wrote it, from this very palace, though it is unbelievable, I know. You wouldn’t think he’d have a chance to put pen to paper with all the frisking about that he does. Did you hear what went on last night?”
I glanced at Papa. He shook his head.
“You didn’t hear?” Mother said. “Well, I shall tell you.”
A trumpet blared. A page stepped into the room to announce Philippe’s arrival.
“Come in, Don Philippe,” said Mother. “Come in and tell us where you were last night.”
He walked over to kiss Mother’s hand, then Papa’s, then my own. I gasped when he looked up at me. His right eye was purple and swollen shut.
“Monseigneur!”
He touched his eye. “I ran into a door.”
“Is that what they call the husbands of townswomen these days?” said Mother. “‘Doors’?”
Philippe looked to Papa, who lowered his gaze to the quill in his hands. Finding no support there, Philippe smiled at Mother.
Her mouth turned down with disgust. “Three men died last night in a skirmish near the San Martín Bridge. The night watchmen said the dying words of the men were in French.”
Fright darted through Philippe’s eyes. He blindly patted my arm. “Visitors to your city?” he asked Mother.
“Yes,” she said grimly. “Visitors.”
“A very sad tale, but for what reason did My Lady Mother summon me to her chambers? Though I am always honored to visit with you, I—”
“Why did you go to Henry Tudor and ask that he consider your sister’s hand in marriage for his son?”
Philippe started to say something, then stopped. He crossed his arms over his chest. “The boy Henry is not married. Nor is my sister. I thought to make her happy. She cannot grieve for your son the rest of her life.”
“Nor would I expect her to. You should have consulted me.”
“I was not aware that you ruled the Netherlands.”
Mother paused, then assessed him anew.
“Speaking of which, Your Majesties”—he bowed to Mother and Papa—“it is time that Juana and I return to my lands.”
He turned to me with a smile. “Aren’t you glad, Puss?” He pulled me toward him as if shielding himself from Mother. “My girl has been trying to go home since the moment we left. She does not like to leave her children.”
“You wish to rule Spain, the Netherlands, and England,” said Mother accusingly.
Philippe laughed. “I am not that ambitious. Ask my wife.” He kissed the side of my headdress.
Now it finally suited him to go home, though I had been pleading for months to hurry our visit. The events of the previous evening must have been especially damning.
“You cannot leave the Spains now,” said Mother. “If you are to rule here, you must get to know your people. As you might recall, it is one of the conditions of the Cortes. They insi
st that you learn to speak Castilian.”
“They cannot be serious. Everyone I need to know here speaks French. In fact, yours is quite good, Your Majesty. I must commend you.”
The pitch of Mother’s voice rose. “You have yet to go to Aragón to be named heir of that land.”
“I’ll send a representative. François would go. We are needed at home now.” He rubbed my arm. “Don’t you want to see the children, Puss?”
“Juana wants to stay here,” my mother replied. “She is to be Queen. We can send for your children, bring them here.”
“Juana loves my lands, and her people there love her in return.”
Mother threw the copy of his letter on the floor. “I have a notion to reconvene the Cortes and recall their confirmation of you as Juana’s consort and of Juana as my heir. Clearly your interests are in governing your own lands. If you prefer to be a duke rather than a king, so be it.”
Philippe glanced at the letter, then held up his chin. “You wish to keep your daughter from her birthright? Your grandchildren, too?”
“I have other daughters, unencumbered by traitorous husbands. Daughters who write to their mothers when separated from them.”
I found myself drawn into their argument. “I wrote to you, Mother. I was wrong to take so long to do so. But it is wrong for you to never forgive me, especially when, in letter after letter, I begged for you to do so.”
“What letters?”
“The ones I wrote to you from the Netherlands.”
“I never got any letters.”
Philippe looked between us. “Perhaps they were lost at sea.”
“I entrusted them to a courier.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps the couriers were lost at sea.”
“I would have heard of it,” said Mother. “I know if any of my ships or their crews are lost.”
I stared at Philippe. Had he waylaid my letters? Why would he do such a thing?
“What?” His undamaged eye grew larger. “You’re blaming me? I’m telling you, I don’t know what happened to them.”
Mother moved toward him threateningly. “I cannot believe a man would keep his wife from her mother. All the more reason for you to get on a ship and out of my sight.”