The Last Queen (54 page)

appeal.

My father looked at me. Then he kicked his stallion‟s ribs and galloped away. The

lords followed. A cloud of dust floated in the empty courtyard.

Behind me, I heard the guards and Villena move in.

――――――――――――――――――――――――

THIRTY-THREE

was locked in my rooms. There, I huddled on the floor in my cloak and gown,

My knees drawn to my chin. I pretended not to see or hear the odious woman

I who entered with a guard to deliver my meals, which I left untouched. I ignored

their acidic clucking that I cease my unseemly behavior. Only when I heard Joanna

among them did I rear up to throw myself at her like a woman possessed, grabbing

hold of the nearest platter and heaving it at her, sending its contents flying. She yelped and bolted from the room, never to return.

After that, they allowed Beatriz to come to me. In a whisper she told me Soraya

and Lopez had been dismissed. The house was surrounded, the gates bolted. Fresh

supplies of food were brought form the town and left outside the gates to be retrieved

by one of the guards.

“And my daughter?” I asked.

“She is here. They‟ve not harmed her. Doña Josefa was allowed to stay and attend

her. But Villena watches her closely, as he watches everything, though the infanta is

but a child.”

I gazed at her through burning eyes. Only then did I realize my hair hung about

my face in matted tangles and I smelled the rank odor of my own unwashed body.

“Let me send for warm water to bathe you,” Beatriz said. “Let me care for you.”

I submitted to her ministrations. Dressed in a clean gown, I even ate a little and

began to ponder what lay in store for me. Much as she tried, Beatriz could not get

anyone to tell her anything. She said Soraya had not left Arcos, however. She‟d taken

residence in town and came every day to the gates to beg admittance. No one let her

in. Only after Beatriz‟s repeated pleas for my health did Villena grant me a parchment,

wax, and ink, supposedly for letters― which of course he would review before

sending.

I did not expect mercy from my father and I did not write to him. But I did write

to my sister Catalina in England. I poured out my heart, begging her forgiveness that I

couldn‟t assist her in her trials, but it was inconceivable for me to abandon the throne

entrusted to me by our mother. Even as I gave my letter to Beatriz for dispatch, and

wondered if it would ever reach Catalina‟s hands, I replayed that terrible scene with

my father in my mind and again asked myself why I had sealed my own doom by not

accepting Henry Tudor‟s proposal. I even started to go to the door to call for Villena

to tell him I had changed my mind.

I stopped myself. I could never do it and my father would never let me go now.

Perhaps he had never intended to. Perhaps he had needed me to deny him so he

could do what he wanted to do ever since he learned of Philip‟s death.

Weeks passed. I sent other innocuous letters, to the Marquise de Moya in Segovia

and my son Charles in Flanders, but in truth I spent most of my days and nights

writing these words, recording the events that had led me to this hour.

And I waited. One evening Beatriz brought me my dinner and told me we‟d not

learned anything of importance because my father had been absent from Castile,

dealing with some revolt in the south. But he‟d returned now, after reaching accord

with the rebels.

Then she leaned to me, her eyes febrile in her weary face. “I overheard Villena tell

that vixen Joanna that the admiral has sent His Majesty a letter questioning your

imprisonment. He said Castile will never cease to fight for its rightful queen and His

Majesty should consider well his state of grace before he commits an act that neither

God nor Spain will ever forgive.”

I clasped her hand. My voice faltered. “Then all is not lost.

Beatriz put her arms around me. “No matter what, I will always be with you,
mi

princesa.
”

They came for me that night.

Looking up through my hair, I saw figures gathered about my bed― faceless

apparitions whose steel glimmered in the flicker of a handheld torch. At my side,

Beatriz awoke with a frightened gasp. My gaze went to the foot of my bed. Cisneros

stood there, regarding me with eyes like burning embers in his bone-white face.

“Time to rise, Your Highness.”

I rose from bed. I felt numb as Beatriz divested me of my nightclothes and

dressed me in a warm dark gown. As she tied the sleeves, I whispered, “Do you know

where we are going?”

“No,” she whispered back. I could feel her hands trembling. She searched my

face, her eyes filling with tears. I took her hand for a moment as I fought back a wave

of paralyzing fear.

A half-hour later, I entered the frigid
sala
with Beatriz at my side. In addition to Cisneros and Villena, the assembly included a full retinue of guards.

My heart quickened. I gazed past the men to the courtyard and saw Doña Josefa

on the threshold, with my daughter in a shawl in her arms. Catalina was crying, having

been awoken abruptly. I immediately moved to her.

Villena snapped his fingers. A guard seized Catalina from Doña Josefa and strode

off. Clutching a shawl to her face, Doña Josefa bowed her head and started to weep.

I whirled to Villena. “Where are you taking my daughter?

“The peasant and your ladies stay here,” he said. “You and the infanta will go with

us.”

“Stay here? But I‟ve need of my women. They must come with―”

“There‟ll be others to attend you.” He grasped me by the elbow, his fingers

digging into the bone. “Come now, without protest.”

“Get your hands off me, you traitor,” I breathed.

He met my stair. He released me, motioning with a sweep of his arm. “Your litter

awaits.”

I glanced over my shoulder. Beatriz stood surrounded by my guards. My half-

sister, Joanna, raised her chin. My breath froze in my throat when I say her execute a

mocking curtsy.

Not a star or wisp of moon relieved the darkness. The litter was closed, slung

between four dray horses. I faltered at the sight of it, looked back at the cavalcade.

When I saw the guards loading Philip‟s coffin onto a cart under the direction of the

constable, my knees threatened to buckle underneath me. Her turned to look over his

shoulder. Even from where I stood, that terrible scar and one searing eye riveted me.

His mouth curved within his black beard, a grimace of a smile. Like his wife, Joanna,

he had always served my father.

A spectral figure stepped before me. Cisneros inclined his head. “This is not La

Mota. You‟ll find no escape here.”

“One day, you will pay for this,” I told him, my voice shuddering. “You will pay

for what you do. Were my mother still alive, she‟d see you beheaded for this. You spit

on her memory.”

He flinched. “The infanta Catalina will travel with you,” he said, and he turned

away, his cloak swinging behind him like a leathery wing.

I mounted the litter. Within, I found my child, her eyes wide. I clutched her close

to me as I heard the mean mounting her horses. We moved forward with a sickening

lurch.

Tar-soaked torches held by guards lit the road ahead. We clattered out of Arcos,

turning south. I peered through a crack in the curtains and saw the figures at the

roadside, the townspeople who had come to know me during my time here. They

stared sullenly. A woman raised her first. Others followed, in a silent united gesture of defiance.

I gazed at them, the anonymous and downtrodden, who toiled the land, wed,

reared and buried children, lived and died. Never had I felt closer to them than I did

at that moment. Never before had I understood how much they too had suffered.

And in their midst I suddenly heard a low keening, a lament in the lost tongue of

the Moors. I leaned out father, desperately searching the shadows. I saw Soraya on the

ground, at the foot of a group of women. She was on her knees, taking up handfuls of

dirt and pouring over her head. She raised her dirt-streaked face. We looked straight at

each other.

“A guard road up swiftly and yanked the curtains closed. But not before I heard

someone cry, “
Dios bendiga y cuide a Su Majestad!
God bless and succor Your Majesty!”

They knew. My people knew what was being done to me.

I had become one of them. One day, they would rise to avenge this treachery.

After that the guard rode by the litter at all times. It seemed as if we traveled for

years. Unable to look out, I cradled Catalina in my arms, singing lullabies to lull her to sleep. Her smell filled my senses, bringing me a calm I might otherwise have lost

forever. I still had my child; and I held her so close, a last comfort in my fractured

existence, that she awoke. Her sea-green eyes opened. She gazed at me with an

intensity that made me want to weep.

“Mamá, where are we going?”

I smiled through my tears. “Home,” I whispered. “We are going home,
hija mia.
”

Toward dawn, I reached out to ease back the curtains. The guard had not left but

he did not stop me this time. My eyes strained past him and the other mounted

sentries, past the rising, rocky escarpments I recognized immediately as the domain of

the Duero, in Castile.

In the hem of the dying night, owls hunted. I stared at their swooping shapes,

entranced for a moment by their grace. I
was
home, I thought suddenly. At long last, I had returned to the land of my birth, the place where my life started.

I did not look at the stark outline of the fortress looming ahead, its battlements

limned in blood by the sunrise. I did not see the portcullis hanging over me like a

maw of teeth, nor did I heed the creaking of its massive chains as it was lowered back

into place.

It clanged shut with a finality that echoed throughout Castile, over the

whitewashed villages and arid plans, past my desolate
casa
in Arcos and the haunted parapets of La Mota, through the streets of Toledo and walls of Burgos, until it

reached an empty hall where a king sat alone on his throne, his hands folded before

his pensive face?”

Here, it faded into silence.

――――――――――――――――――――――――

t has taken me a thousand midnights to reach this hour.

My hand aches now from writing, my heart from remembering. Yet I have done my

I duty as queen. I have not looked away from the truth; I have not embelished or lied
away the past in order to make my present less bitter. Rather, I have trod once more that
long, unexpected path that brought me to this place, reliving every mistake, every tear
and every delight; I have looked upon and touched, wept over and hated, al the faces of those I loved.

Strangers surround me now. No one is left to me― no one save him, whose body has turned to
dust in that battered old cof in., which rests in this castle’s chapel. Sometimes they take me there to
visit. I sit at his side and reach out with my gnarled hand to caress the scarred wood bier. I am not
ashamed to talk to him. I have long since forgiven him, and myself. It al seems so meaningless now.

We are al we have left, and we can do each other no further harm.

Like him, I will soon go to a place where thrones mean nothing.

But not yet. There is still one more place I must go. I need only close my eyes to see it: the horizon
dressed in violet and chased silver clouds, the wind’s keening fading into a jasmine-scented breeze. At
my feet, spring gardens of mosaic and lace. White quartz paths twine past fountains, and ripe
pomegranate saturates the air. I can feel droplets of water on my skin and speckles of mimosa, and
the chanting of slaves in the keep entices me dance. It is so close I can touch it, a vermilion sprawl on
the hil , where gilded gates open to welcome me.

And in the sky above, the bats have returned.

Following her imprisonment in Tordesillas in 1509, Juana‟s father, Fernando of

Aragón, ruled Spain until his death in 1516. His final years were plagued by paranoia

and the ceaseless intrigues of the
grandes
. He never sired a son on Germaine de Foix, though he resorted to many folk remedies believed to increase virility, including

drinking distilled bull‟s testicles. He became an unwelcome wanderer in the land he

once ruled in triumph with Isabel; he never expressed remorse for the enormity of the

wrong he had committed against his daughter.

Upon his death, Spain passed in its entirety to seventeen year-old Charles of

Habsburg, who‟d been groomed since childhood by his aunt the archduchess

Margaret to inherit his paternal grandfather‟s empire. Known as Charles V of Spain

and I of Germany, he entrusted the governance of Spain to his regent Cardinal

Cisneros, who oversaw the nation with an iron hand until his death at the venerable

age of eighty-one. Charles then traveled to Spain, where negotiations with the

Castilian Cortes proved difficult until he agreed to learn Castilian, appoint no

foreigners, and respect the rights of his mother, Queen Juana. The Cortes paid

homage to him in Valladolid in 1518. In 1519, he was crowned before the Cortes of