by P K Adams
“It suffered extensive fire damage a few years ago,” Zaremba explained.
I could see that the work sought to imitate the classical style, with rows of marble columns supporting the entrance below a decorative triangular tympanum crowned with larger-than-life figures of saints and a round domed chapel.
“It’s like the old buildings in Rome, mamma!” Giulio’s dark eyes were wide and his voice reverently quiet, as if he were inside that church. I smiled as I ruffled his chestnut hair. Italy was still home for him.
We kept gazing at the cathedral until the carriage swerved, and we passed through the gate and entered the large four-sided courtyard of the ducal palace.
* * *
I had expected to visit the palace long enough to request an audience with the king, then be taken to some accommodations arranged by Bona in the city. But to my surprise, a set of rooms was ready for us. I doubted the queen had requested it directly, given her son’s refusal to receive her envoys. Rather, someone from the old king’s office must have arranged it.
The rooms, small but comfortable, consisted of a sitting chamber and two bedchambers. Their location in the northern wing on the third floor gave us a good view of the river Neris and the villages on the opposite bank, which I found charming. With our windows close to the corner of the building, I could also catch a glimpse of extensive gardens on the eastern side of the grounds. I wondered if they were the same gardens that the duke used to meet secretly with his mistress. As casually as I could, I asked the maid assigned to us, a girl named Rasa, if the gardens abutted the Radziwiłł estate. In response, she nodded with a knowing smile that all but confirmed my guess.
Rasa had just started to unpack our trunks when Maria arrived, bringing word of a banquet in honor of Barbara that night.
How she had learned about it so fast, I had no idea. It must have been the first thing she’d inquired about. Whatever the case—and despite my tiredness—the idea excited me. I was intrigued by the unlikely romance between Zygmunt and Barbara, but I also dreaded the mission entrusted to me. Given how moody and temperamental the young king was said to be, I feared he would be angered by my embassy, refuse to allow Doctor Nascimbene to see Giulio, and send us away. For that reason, I decided to present our case to him first and bring up the queen’s plea only after the medical consultation was over. That gave me some assurance, although I had yet to decide how best to approach Zygmunt. For that, I needed to get a better understanding of him and his court before I spoke to him. I had to observe.
I tasked Rasa with pressing my best gown for the evening and waited impatiently until the sun went down.
* * *
Maria wanted to accompany me, of course, but I was deliberately vague on when I planned to leave and told her I would meet her there. I wanted my first impressions of the palace and the king to be my own, without the filter of her commentary.
I followed Rasa’s directions to the banqueting hall on the second floor of the palace. I walked through a series of hallways and spacious chambers with whitewashed walls and wooden ceiling panels decorated with tiles, whose patterns I immediately identified as Eastern, even with my limited experience of such décor. Many were geometric, square or round, and some were painted in rosettas, like the stained glass in our cathedrals. The predominant hues were various shades of blue, with red, green, and yellow speckled among them.
In many chambers, there were shelves stacked with books and manuscripts. There must have been hundreds of them. Besides that, exquisite tapestries depicting royalty and other great lords with their families hung on almost every available wall, as well as scenes of battles, hunting, mythical beasts, and biblical themes. A martyr clutching a cross to his chest and lifting his soulful face to the heavens hung next to a group of nymphs bathing naked in a garden pool. I admired the varied and impressive collection and understood the reason for its growing fame throughout Europe.
The corridors were filled with art. I passed pedestals with ceramic vases and ancient-looking amphorae. I stared at marble figures positioned in niches and alcoves, some of them barely clad and holding lyres or bunches of grapes in their hands. Many of these could have graced any Italian palazzo.
By the time I arrived at the banqueting hall, I believed the story I had heard before my departure from Kraków: that a papal ambassador had once asserted in a letter to Rome that the Vilnius palace held more treasures than the Vatican itself.
Despite the palace’s smaller size, the hall was almost as large as its equivalent at Wawel. Here, too, richly colored and finely woven tapestries decorated the walls. A fire blazed in an iron hearth at one end of the room, and most of the windows were thrown open to mitigate the heat. The scents of late summer flowers drenched the air. From a far corner, strains of a soft melody of harp and lute floated above the buzz of conversation. The windows, I could not help noticing, gave onto the ducal gardens. And tonight, Barbara would be the guest of honor. How appropriate.
I saw right away that the ducal court was younger—as well as louder, more garish, and more casual. Clearly, Zygmunt did not cultivate the stately solemnity that accompanied many gatherings in Kraków. Watching him on the raised dais surrounded by young men of the highest rank—talking, laughing, slapping each other’s shoulders, and winking at women who pretended bashfulness while basking in their attentions—it seemed as if the court had been taken over by the members of the bibones et comedones society of my youth. I recalled Zygmunt’s demeanor only a few weeks earlier in Poland, seated at his mother’s table during the funeral reception, looking restless and bored.
He could not have appeared more different now. His beaming face, the color in his cheeks above his trimmed beard and moustache, and his easy movements all attested to his being where he belonged, at home. He was dressed splendidly in a black velvet doublet, its sleeves slashed with white satin. A small ruff of snow-white lace framed his neck, and similar lace embellished the cuffs at his wrists. An enormous swan feather rose from his cap, rimmed with diamonds the size of beans, and a large gold ducal ring glistened on his left hand. The amount of jewelry on the duke and the lords and ladies around him would put Wawel to shame. In addition to the earrings and necklaces, their clothes were sewn with precious stones in such abundance one had to squint when they moved, for the gems caught the light from the hearth and the dozens of candles blazing in the candelabras all around.
I checked to left and right, before and behind me, without discovering a woman who might be Barbara. Curious. A chair on Zygmunt’s right stood empty—was it reserved for her? On his left lounged a stout man of about thirty with a curly copper beard and equally copper hair, barely tamed by his cap. That beard was spread on a large ruff, like a platter, conveying the owner’s pride in its size and thickness. He could only be Mikołaj “Rudy” Radziwiłł. The Red.
Less boisterous than the other men at the top table, he surveyed the chamber with a gaze that appeared leisurely, a small smile playing on his lips, but I could see that he in fact missed nothing. His entire posture radiated confidence and satisfaction. His seating assignment indicated that he was Zygmunt’s closest advisor. Did he already see himself as the duke’s brother-in-law as well? From Zaremba, I knew that he had the ambition to follow his father to the post of hetman, the supreme commander, of the army. And as Zaremba had noted, becoming royal kin would greatly facilitate that.
I spotted Maria at a table in the middle of the hall and made my way there. I took the empty seat next to her, which I assumed she had saved for me. She did not notice my arrival, for she was busy talking to a lady wearing a traditional Lithuanian cloth headgear that covered her hair and looped under her chin like a wimple, intricately embroidered and sewn with seed pearls. Maria’s distraction suited me well as it allowed me to continue observing the assembly while we awaited Barbara’s arrival.
Or rather, I awaited her, because the other diners had long since begun their meal. Perhaps I had misunderstood, and she was not the guest of honor. All around m
e, I saw chunks cut from the stuffed swans that graced the center of each table and trays of roasted chickens containing nothing but bones. Platters of oranges were heaped with peels, and servants were already refilling bowls of olives, chestnuts, raisins, and almonds. I helped myself to a seasoned mix of figs and beans and a wing of roasted turkey sprinkled with rosemary. Somewhat to my surprise, I found the drink in my cup to be Malvazia, a sweet Greek wine, rather than Italian. Was that a subtle statement on the duke’s part, I wondered?
The volume of conversations fueled by the servants’ diligent refilling of the cups was rising when I spotted Jakub Zaremba at a table ahead of us. He sat with his back to me, his attention focused on the main table. Only once in a while did he turn his head slightly toward the man seated next to him to exchange some words. I smiled, thinking how this reserve matched his soldierly persona, even if his outfit for the evening did not. He wore a red doublet, a frilly-collared shirt, and a velvet cap decorated with a gray feather. But for his sun-browned skin and the faint scar, a stranger would never guess he was a military man.
Wondering if he had his sword on him, I became aware that the voices floating from Zaremba’s table spoke German, although I could not be sure if he and his interlocutor did. I looked more closely and realized that the other men at the table had the look of the Habsburg envoys I had seen in Kraków. The chief difference between them and the Polish and Lithuanian courtiers was their austere dress: their caps remained undecorated, their doublets buttoned up to the necks with only a trace of lace visible, and they wore no jewelry. The elegant cut and the quality of the cloth, however, testified to good taste and wealth.
Their presence surprised me at first. I had already heard Russian spoken around the palace, which matched the court’s reputation for offering a refuge to boyars who ran afoul of Prince Ivan in Moscow. But I had not expected to find a tableful of Germans here. Then again, the Jagiellons had been related to the Habsburgs by blood and marriage for several generations; in fact, that most likely explained their diplomats’ presence in Vilnius. With Queen Elizabeth barely cold in her grave, they must have been trying to forge another marriage alliance already. If so, then, in a way, they were my allies.
The servants brought in desserts, large silver trays filled with sugared confections in the shape of winged eagles, lions, large-petaled flowers, and unicorns. For a lack of anything better to do—Maria was still talking to her neighbor, who, as far as I could tell, had not yet uttered a word—I strained my ear to catch the German conversations. In my youth, I had a passable knowledge of the language, although I always understood more than I could speak. Now I realized how much I had forgotten. Despite picking out a few words, including König and Fahrt, I was unable to make anything of it.
Increasingly bored, I was about to turn to Maria when the volume of conversation suddenly abated and heads turned toward one corner of the hall. A sense of anticipation filled the air, as if the gathering awaited the beginning of a performance by a troupe of players, lowering their voices but not stilling them, whispering to their neighbors, and pointing their chins toward the stage.
Except there was no stage. Instead, as I followed their gaze, I noticed an iron-bound door I had not seen before, tucked next to the hearth. It opened from the inside, and a woman—alone—stepped across the threshold and into the hall. Dressed in a gown of cream and rose silk, with wide sleeves edged in delicate white fur and a pearl-sewn bodice cinched around an impossibly small waist, she paused in the glow of the fire. The flames caught the brilliant shine of her dark hair, loose under a wine-colored velvet cap decorated with the same pearls as her belt. She stopped just long enough to focus the eyes of the assembly on herself before proceeding, in a movement that was both fluidly graceful and demure, toward the main table.
It was Barbara Radziwiłł.
And she knew how to make an entrance.
I could not tear my eyes away, wondering what was so mesmerizing about this woman. Her outfit, although rich, was modest in comparison to some of the other ladies in attendance. Nor was she the most beautiful. With a complexion that was almost white, like the surface of an alabaster vase, a melancholy look in her large dark eyes, small, bud-like lips, and a willowy frame, she could not have been more different from the ruddy, robust, wide-hipped ideal of femininity so popular in these parts. What was it in her that appealed to a man who had been surrounded by the most voluptuous women all his life? Then I realized it must have been that freshness, a certain exoticism, and a hint of fragility that attracted him.
“Isn’t she enchanting?” Maria’s voice in my ear jolted me back to the moment. When I turned to her, I saw an expression of naked admiration on her face. I would come to learn that Barbara had that effect on people: even if they believed the stories about her—and Maria certainly did—they could not help but be captivated by her.
And those stories were not at all flattering. During our last overnight stop before Vilnius, Maria told me everything she had heard about Barbara’s past. We were staying at a cottage in a village on the river Merkys, and I suggested a walk along its picturesque bank to stretch our legs and admire the leaves that were beginning to turn. By the time we returned, refreshed and invigorated, I knew about the rumors that had been swirling around Barbara for years, even before she met Zygmunt. According to them, she was unfaithful to her late husband, who—to be fair, Maria emphasized with a great deal of sympathy—was old, short, and limping, for all his prominent positions as a wojewoda and a member of the Gastold family. Barbara’s alleged lovers represented most of the magnate families in the duchy, including Pac, Sakowicz, and Astikai. Her dissolute lifestyle was said to be the cause of her barrenness, for she’d had no children with Gastold, nor any of the others.
But now I found myself wondering how much of it was true. The image was utterly at odds with the understated elegance and refinement of the woman before me.
“She is indeed very charming,” I said as I watched Barbara reach the empty seat next to Zygmunt. He rose, took her delicate, long-fingered hand in his and bestowed a kiss on it, his eyes never leaving her face. In them, I saw a devotion and a deference I would never have expected from a man I had come to think of as proud and capricious. Barbara’s face softened in a sweet smile, and for a brief moment, which nevertheless seemed to stretch, they were alone in the hall, perhaps—as far as they were concerned—in the entire world. The gathering had fallen silent.
Finally, Zygmunt’s gaze turned, almost reluctantly, from his mistress, and with a gesture of his palm he motioned the assembly to continue their feast. Then, still holding Barbara’s hand, he helped her to her seat as the chatter resumed. Within moments, they were deep in private conversation, their attention solely on each other. I took a few bites from my plate, still studying Barbara, who did not touch her food; instead, she fastened her eyes adoringly on the king’s face as she smiled or offered replies to his words. Bona, I realized suddenly, had never looked that way at her husband. Only once or twice did Barbara’s eyes stray, briefly, to the room. But when they did, it was with a hint of challenge, her chin rising ever so slightly, and I sensed that the doll-like fragility was misleading.
It was impossible that she was unaware of the rumors surrounding her. Yet she embraced the role of the royal mistress without apology. I sensed a fierce ambition lurking underneath that pleasing surface. She wanted to be queen, perhaps in her mind she already was, and she wanted the men and women gathered around her—many of them higher-born than herself—to become used to the idea.
Each time Barbara’s eyes returned to Zygmunt’s face with a look that offered both promise and submission, she seduced him again. Now I could see that indefinable quality that went beyond the simple allure of an attractive woman. For burning inside her was a passionate, perhaps even reckless nature. And Zygmunt was completely in thrall to it.
At length, I forced myself to turn back to my table. Ahead of me, I could see the back of Zaremba’s head; he sat, still as a statue. I woul
d have given a lot to know what was going through his mind. Did he still think Barbara an opportunist at the service of her and her family’s ambitions, or was he convinced by the display of affection between her and the duke?
Then it occurred to me that both could be true at the same time. Barbara could have fallen in love with Zygmunt despite his status, and his status might appeal to her as much as it would to any other woman in her place. In a world in which royal affection offered riches and prestige beyond one’s wildest imaginings, and in which there were many who would snatch that affection for themselves if they could, perhaps she was simply protecting what destiny offered her along with love. If so, who could blame her?
My mind reeled back twenty-five years to that winter when I had fallen in love with Sebastian Konarski. Ours was a different story, without political stakes, but we did face obstacles of our own. I was a widow in diminished circumstances, and my failure as the Lady of the Queen’s Chamber had left me with few options but to return home. We could easily have missed our chance at happiness. We might no longer gaze into each other’s eyes the way the duke and Barbara did, but I still appreciated what we had once shared.
And so, having to plead with Zygmunt to heed his mother’s advice became more distasteful to me than ever. It also seemed futile, for one thing was certain: Barbara made an impression. Whether it was admiration or criticism—and I saw a fair amount of the latter on the faces around the hall—few people remained indifferent in her presence.
It was an enormous power, and Queen Bona was right to fear it.