Reign of Madness (12 page)

12.

20 October anno Domini 1497

W
e had been wed a year. On this sunlit fall morning, our party had dismounted in a stand of beech outside Bruges, and our horses—in the Dowager’s case, the horses drawing her litter—were being led behind us. Yellow-dappled leaves hissed soothingly in the damp breeze. A nearby stream gurgled between reed-covered banks, mingling its muddy scent with the woody breath of the trees. Where the trees gave way in the distance to marshland, swaths of brown grass shimmered in the sun.

And yet, as we strolled along the weedy trail, my senses strained elsewhere. Specifically, they were latched upon the strip of skin between my husband’s glove and the cuff of his sleeve, the sinuous, veined flesh revealed as he held up Delilah. I stared at this column of flesh while he told a story to Hendrik, who was trudging good-naturedly at his side. How did I keep walking and not groan aloud? Did others play lascivious pictures in their mind as they exclaimed about the color of the leaves—for the glimpse of Philippe’s strong wrist put me in mind of something similarly blue-veined and upright, something for which I longed both day and night. Or was I simply going mad for love?

The Dowager, leaning on the arm of the lushly beautiful Viscountess of Furnes as they strolled, spoke up behind me. “How is your sister?”

I started guiltily, as though my thoughts could be heard. If anyone could divine the thoughts of another, it would be the Dowager Duchess.

I hastily composed my face. The velvet hood of my headdress swished against my neck as I turned. “Which one, Madame?”

“The youngest one. Catalina.”

“She is well, Madame. She and María send me letters. They are quite fond of Marguerite.”

The Dowager swatted at her sheer veil, blown into her face from the tip of her hennin. “Who wouldn’t be? Spain has never seen anything like that girl. Your brother was lucky to get her.”

I swung forward. Lucky indeed. My sisters were full of news about how smitten Juan was with Philippe’s sister. María, in particular, breathlessly reported that his doctors begged him to use moderation in bedding his wife, for in overindulging himself, he compromised his health. Juan would not listen, María said. He would spend every moment dallying with Marguerite, giving up hunting, jousting, and riding just to be with her—how that sounded like my impetuous brother. Mother was asked by the doctors to intervene, but she would not. What God had joined together, she said, she would not put asunder. How wondrous that Mother was not trying to control the situation, as indeed she tried to control me through her barrage of demanding letters, which I still had not answered since my wedding. It seems that what had started as my fear of being able to account for myself had turned into defiance, though I knew in my heart that it was merely a weak person’s pitiful attempt at showing her strength. How easy it was, with the buffer of the sea between us, for me to insist that I would not be bullied.

“Will she be going to England soon?” the Dowager asked.

Still chuckling from the story he was telling, Philippe turned away from Hendrik. “Who, Grand-mère?”

“Juana’s sister, Catalina. She’s to marry the Tudor impostor’s boy, Arthur.”

“She is not yet twelve,” I said. “Mother says she does not have to go until she is sixteen.”

“Is there something wrong with her that she cannot be sent?” said the Dowager. “Our dear Marguerite was sent to France as a three-year-old. It was Charles’s loss that he didn’t keep her. Now he’s chained to that brat Anne of Brittany, when he could have had our sweet girl. I bet he cries salty tears into his crown. Well. Regardless. Perhaps your mother will have a change of heart. Her daughter would be better spent elsewhere than on a Tudor.”

“Grand-mère,” Philippe said, “can we not just enjoy the leaves and for once not worry about the Tudors?”

“You should care!” the Dowager cried. “You were cheated from any chance at the crown for yourself when that dirty Welshman stole it!”

Aliénor patted the Dowager’s hand on her arm and smiled in amusement at Philippe, as would an old friend at a long-standing familial argument. Would I always be the outsider?

“Was it ever within my reach, Grand-mère? Juana has a far better chance of getting her mother’s crowns than I ever did to inherit the English crown through your side of the family. A good dozen folk would have to die before it got to me. Although I suppose there are ways to speed the process.” Philippe gave the Viscountess a wink. “Grand-mère, did your brother King Richard ever say what happened to his two nephews? Did they ever show up after their visit to the Tower of London?”

The Viscountess widened her eyes in scandalized mirth. The Dowager’s eyes bulged, too, but not with any sort of glee.

“If you think my dear brother would murder his own nephews just to keep his crown—”

“Philippe jests, Madame.” Aliénor stroked the Dowager’s hand. “You must not let him peeve you this way. He has needled you thus hundreds of times and still you take his bait.”

The Dowager batted the air with a growl. Aliénor and Philippe exchanged smiles.

A familiar ache hollowed my gut. How easy my husband was with the Viscountess. But though I had been keenly watching the discourse between them over the past year, I had not yet caught them in any real improprieties. Yes, Philippe did choose to dance with her on many occasions. Yes, he did often race with her at hunts. Yes, when we went out for strolls, he often dropped back to walk with her, their falcons on their arms, to chat amiably. Once she sent him a gift of gloves. On that occasion, I had not been able to hold my tongue.

“What do you expect?” Philippe had said when I questioned him. I had found the gloves in his chambers, bound by a silvered-blue ribbon. “Was I not to accept them? She ruined my pair at hunt when she threw that bloodied duck at me—you saw her. She was only replacing them.”

“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.