The Mapmaker's Daughter (30 page)

“Look what we have here!” one of them says. He reaches up to stroke Eliana’s cheek. She struggles to pull away and hide her face, but the weather is warm and she is not wearing the hooded cloak that might have protected her.

“Get away from her!” I scream as the other one grabs me by both hands.

“What’s the matter?” he says. “You’re Jews, ain’t you? You’re the king’s property, and Enrique is always”—he leers—“most generous with what’s his.”

Bile rises in my throat at the foul smell of stale beer on his breath. His teeth press so hard against my mouth as he kisses me that I think my lips will split. He presses me against the wall, and I feel fingers grinding one of my breasts as he tries to loosen my bodice with his other hand.

“What are you fighting for, you Jewish cow?” he snarls. “I’ll just fuck you standing up while he’s busy with the little virgin.” He draws out this last word as a vicious taunt.

I hear Eliana cry out, and I twist my head to see that one of them has backed her against a wall and is covering her mouth with one hand while lifting her skirt with the other. “Come on,” he says. “Let me show you what a cock that’s not been cut off at the top feels like.”

I am screaming so loud I think my throat will rip, and finally a window opens above us. “You leave them alone!” I hear a woman’s voice say. “My boy’s gone to get help, and my husband’s coming downstairs to bash your heads in, you filthy swine!”

“Mierda!” one of them mutters under his breath. The one holding Eliana lets her go, but not before grabbing a breast in each hand and kneading it like dough. “Little Jew slut,” he says. “You know you like it!”

“Hey!” I hear a man’s voice and the sound of footsteps running down the cobbled street toward us. “You get away from them!”

“Mierda!” The man repeats, giving my hair one savage twist and smashing his mouth on mine before tossing me against the wall like an empty tankard of ale.

“Aw, come on now!” Eliana’s assailant gives our rescuers a cocky, cruel grin. He releases her with such force that she stumbles and falls to the ground, her chest heaving silently in terror as she cowers there. “We were just having a little fun with the ladies.”

“They’re from the palace, you fools,” the woman hisses down from her perch in the window. “Don’t you get enough from the whores in the taverns?”

“The palace, eh!” The man who had attacked me shrugs, knowing Enrique will exact no consequences. “In that case, my lady, thank you for the feel.” He bows with mock ceremony before joining his friend, who is ambling off down the street.

“Little Jew girl was pretty sweet,” I hear the other one say. “Want to smell?” He passes his finger under his friend’s nose as they disappear around the corner.

***

Back in our quarters, Eliana clutches me so hard I can barely breathe. “I don’t want to live here anymore, Mama,” she says. “Those men!” She buries her head in my chest.

“Eliana, did he—?”

“No.” I feel the heat of her exhalation. “But his hand touched me.” Her eyes well with tears. “Does that mean I’m spoiled?”

I smooth her hair against her back, murmuring reassurance and resisting the urge to ask if it hurt or to check for blood. “No, it doesn’t.”

I run my tongue between my teeth and the inside of my lips, examining with detachment the swelling from the man’s forced kisses. He touched my daughter. That’s all I care about. I want to rip the world to tatters for stealing Eliana’s innocence. I want to throw everything in this room against the walls, to wail at the top of my lungs to release my terrible guilt for having such bad judgment, but my child is so soft and vulnerable in my arms that I know I must be strong for her.

I venture what I hope will be a reassuring thought. “I’ve heard they’re leaving in a few days. We’ll be safe then.”

“I don’t care!” Eliana whimpers. “I’ll never be able to walk in this town without thinking about what happened. Can’t we leave, Mama?”

“But your friends are here!”

“I can’t face them. He—he put his hand there, Mama. I’m so ashamed.”

“No one has to know.”

I can’t believe what I am saying. I want to storm into Elizabeth’s quarters and tell her the injustice that has been done and then march to Enrique and demand the satisfaction of seeing his men horsewhipped.

“Promise we’ll leave?”

I continue stroking her hair. What can I tell her? The Queen Widow of Castile invited me to Arévalo, and it might not be easy to get away, especially when she’s desperate for one person she can trust.

It’s time.

The thought lances me with its absolute correctness. I couldn’t shield her today, but it’s not too late to protect her from what could never be enough of a life. The town is pleasant—or was before today—but there is no future for my daughter here, or for me either.

I see the faces of the Abravanel family smiling at me. “It’s time to come home,” I hear them say. Whatever I had been holding back has found its way to the surface, and its clarity gives me courage.

“I’ll talk to Elizabeth tomorrow,” I tell her. “We’ll see what she has to say.”

***

The following morning, we wake to find the servants in a frenzy. “The king is leaving,” my maid tells me, “and he’s taking the children with him.”

“Taking Isabella and Alfonso? Where?”

“They’re going to go live with him in Segovia. We were told just an hour ago.”

“What does the queen say?”

Her face falls. “I’m told she’s taken sick. She won’t let anyone see her.”

I rush to Elizabeth’s quarters. A maid and a manservant are huddled together outside. The maid is dabbing her tearstained face.

“You can’t go in,” the manservant says. “She’s locked the door.”

“Well, unlock it then!” I tell him. Shaking his head as if there is no explaining people who invite disaster, he produces a key and jiggles open the lock.

The door creaks loudly, and before I have gotten through the anteroom, an object sails by my head, narrowly missing me. “Get out!” I hear her scream.

“Elizabeth?” I pick out her silhouette in the bedroom, but she can’t see me because the torches are unlit where I am standing. “Elizabeth?” I repeat. “It’s me, Amalia.”

“Go away!” She lifts both hands to her face, and with a groan, she collapses to the floor. I rush to kneel next to her.

“I want to die,” she whispers. “Why can’t I just die?”

I call for the servants to help me get her into bed. The maid scurries off for a potion to calm her nerves, and the man goes back to guard the door. I sit on the edge of her bed. “Tell me what happened,” I say, holding her thin, cold hand in mine.

My touch seems to calm her. “Enrique says now that his wife is pregnant, there will be a family at court, and he wants Isabella and Alfonso to be part of it.” She dabs her cheeks with a soaked handkerchief, and silently I trade it for mine. “He says it’s too dreary for children here, but of course it’s still good enough for me.” Her jaw trembles. “And now he’s taking what little life there is in this godforsaken place.”

“But a baby won’t make a family for them. Your children are too old to be friends with someone born now.”

“It’s just another of his lies. He knows there are plots to put my son on the throne, and he wants him close by to control who can see him.”

My flesh crawls for the mild and uninteresting boy who has the misfortune to be perceived as a threat by an unscrupulous king. Elizabeth’s husband once told her it would be better to be born to a journeyman than to the King of Castile, and when I think of Alfonso going off to Segovia with someone as unscrupulous and repulsive as Enrique, I think that might be right.

“I don’t know if he’ll be safe,” Elizabeth says, “or Isabella either. If the baby’s a girl and Enrique tries to claim the throne for her, people might say that if we’re going to have a queen on the throne, why shouldn’t it be Isabella? Enrique might want to stop that however he can, especially since people wonder whether the baby is even his.”

Two children, unaware and without allies, among the jackals at court. We both know how often inconvenient royals have suspicious deaths, and tender age is no protection. I squeeze Elizabeth’s hand. “Enrique doesn’t inspire much confidence,” I say, “but I can’t picture him harming your children.”

My mind has pushed aside the terrible scene in the alley, but now it overwhelms me. A man who has such men around him—what wouldn’t he do? At least Elizabeth is calm now, and after she drinks the elixir the maid brings her, she falls into a light sleep. I leave her side only long enough to fetch Eliana, and together we sit quietly by my friend’s bed, so she won’t find herself alone when she wakes.

The following morning, a grim Isabella urges her brother not to cry as they mount the mules they will ride to Segovia. Eliana and I watch from a window as the procession disappears beyond the palace wall before we return to our rooms to begin packing.

I spoke with Elizabeth while she lay in bed yesterday, and she gave me permission to leave. I am wracked with guilt because I know she was not fully aware of what she was saying. She kept repeating that she wanted to be left alone to die. Of course I could go, she told me. She didn’t need anything—not food, not company, not even air.

It’s not how I would have preferred to end my time with her, but I know what I must do for myself and my daughter. We will leave for Queluz tomorrow before Elizabeth can change her mind.

Eliana is in tears all day, between grief over leaving her friends and the lingering horror of the attack in the alley. She doesn’t want to eat the meal the servants bring us at midday, and when she decides, uncharacteristically, to take a nap in the afternoon, she is not awake to hear the disturbance outside the entrance to our quarters.

Elizabeth is in the hallway wearing only a nightdress of silk so thin her nipples and the triangle of dark hair at her groin are visible underneath. Her hair is tangled, as if she had been thrashing about to escape a bad dream. Though the servants are trying to restrain her, they can’t. Some hidden force is powering her delicate body, which seems to be floating just above the floor.

“He’s here,” she says. “He’s come for his revenge.”

“Who?” I ask.

“Alvaro de Luna.” Her hysterical laughter echoes down the hallway. “I had him beheaded. Don’t you hear him laughing at me now?”

***

Eliana and I travel for weeks over the plains and rolling hills between Arévalo and Queluz. Elizabeth ordered a royal guard to accompany us, but Eliana was so fearful about being in the company of soldiers that to keep the men in line, we agreed to have a priest accompany us. He is an overweight man in his late thirties, who tipples with the guards by the campfire and tells bawdy stories as we ride along.

A jolly sort most of the time, he is grim only about the need to save Eliana’s and my souls. He lectures us about the Jews’ apostasy from God, and when that doesn’t work, he oozes honeyed words about the love of Christ. He tries threatening us with the flames of hell, until I point out to him that as Jews, we won’t be going there. Such a fate is reserved for misbehaving Christians, I remind him, arching my eyebrows to suggest that perhaps he should worry about his own fate a little more.

Finally we reach Lisbon, where we send word to Queluz that we have arrived. I dismiss the guard and the priest, and because it is Shabbat, we wait until the following day for Judah and Isaac to escort us the rest of the way.

It is Eliana’s fifteenth birthday—fifteen years to the day since I made that painful ride to Queluz along the same road and gave birth to her in the house to which I am finally returning.

20

QUELUZ 1461

The fragrance of mown hay wafts through the branches of this year’s sukkah as I sit with Simona, watching Eliana and Isaac perform the rituals of Sukkot.

I am getting used to a fifty-year-old Simona with gray hair and a sixty-year-old Judah with a beard gone almost completely white, but their children still astonish me. Isaac is twenty-four, taller than his father but still slender. His beard matches the light brown of his hair, and his dark eyes retain the solemnity of his boyhood. Chana, the oldest of Judah and Simona’s children, is now thirty-two and has grown stout and disheveled, with six children between age one and fifteen to deal with. Rahel, her younger sister, is thirty and as slender as her mother, with two children and several more lost in the womb.

Simona and Judah’s oldest grandchild, Chana’s boy Joseph, is fifteen, like Eliana. When we left Queluz, he was a small child, and I suppose his sparse beard and hoarse, adolescent voice are the same shock to me that Eliana’s womanly body is to others. I am thirty-five, and though I still have only a few gray hairs, the lines around my eyes and the furrows on my brow speak to the passage of a decade of my own life.

Eliana and Isaac are standing in front of us. “Do you remember how Eliana used to offer little gifts to the Ushpizim?” Isaac asks, his eyes crinkling with amusement.

“We decided it would be fun to do it again,” Eliana says to Simona. “Do you still have the box?”

Simona gets up. “I know exactly where it is.”

The covered woven basket is smaller than I remember. So many things in life are when we see them again, especially if once held in a child’s hand. She and Isaac go out of the courtyard, and Simona’s and my eyes follow them. We have the same thought at the same time as we turn to each other. From the day Isaac stood by my bed and touched Eliana’s newborn head, they were meant to be together.

I remember being under the covers with Eliana at Palacio de Mondragon in Ronda.

“Isaac’s not a boy.”

“Well, what is he then?”

“I don’t know!”

I remember wondering then whether it was possible for a six-year-old to be in love. She warmed to Sawwar in time, even had a bit of a crush on him, but seeing Eliana and Isaac go off to find treasures, I know that nobody has meant as much to my daughter as Isaac Abravanel.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Simona asks.

“About our children?”