The Queen's Vow: A Novel of Isabella of Castile (44 page)

His smile widened. “I assume by ‘everyone’ you also mean women?”

“Of course. Why not? In Italy, women are permitted to attend universities and receive degrees. Do you object to women having the freedom to learn something other than domestic arts?”

“Me? Object?” He spread his hands wide, in mock surrender. “God forbid!”

I eyed him. “Are you indulging me because the midwives told you to? Because I am well aware that many men share the widespread
belief—spread, by the way, by those who are barely literate themselves—that education weakens a woman’s inherently frail moral fiber.”

“I’ve never heard that,” he replied, “though I suppose it bears some merit.”

I hissed in a breath, controlled myself just in time as I caught the gleam in his eyes. He was doing his best to keep from breaking into laughter.

“Good.” I settled against the cushions of my big padded chair, unreasonably annoyed that he was treating this important issue with a carefree air. “Because I intend to issue a mandate that will permit women to both study
and
instruct at our universities. In fact, I’m planning to hire a woman to tutor me in Latin.”

“I wonder if such a miracle exists?” quipped Fernando.

“She will,” I retorted, “if I have any say in it!”

He could not curb himself anymore; with a gush of delighted laughter that brought a begrudging smile to my lips, he got up and came to kiss me. “Then, by all means,” he murmured, “issue your mandate, though I’ve no doubt not a few men in Castile will soon wish that Gutenberg had never invented his machine.”

“You’re impossible,” I groused. But after he left, I retrieved my little book from the side table, caressing its gilded cover.

It was high time I showed the realm that women could serve a higher purpose through education. My own Isabel must wed one day and act as our representative in a foreign court. How much better might she fare if she possessed the advantages of the education I had lacked? She and Castile must reap the marvels of this new era; I wanted female scholarship, and the impulse to learn, to be a commonplace occurrence in this realm.

But my resolution was cut short by the end of my pregnancy. The moment of my confinement came—weeks later than scheduled, as I’d resisted being sequestered—and after only a few days of enclosure with my women, my water broke. Within hours, I found myself in full agonizing labor.

Sweltering under the sweat-soaked veil, I clenched my jaw and pushed with all my ebbing strength. The pain was enormous, tearing at
my insides; I thought, in that moment of utter exhaustion, surely I would not survive, that this child, whom I had longed for, cared for so assiduously during the nine long months, would be my doom.

“Push, Isabella,” murmured Beatriz at my ear, her hand cool as a blessing through the dripping veil. “The midwife says the head is visible. Just a little more …”

“Sweet Mother of Christ,” I whispered as I rallied my muscles for one more push. “Let it be a son. Please, let it be a prince.”

Everything I knew, everything I aspired to, was reduced in that moment to a single shuddering breath; a painful gasp and agonizing contraction of flesh, and then the welcome gush of hot blood.

“It’s here!” I heard the midwife cry. “The child is born!”

Through the flurry of skirts, I gazed up desperately from my stool and watched as the hunched midwife sliced and tied off the cord, swabbed the tiny white body clean of gore, turned and dripped honey in its open mouth. I waited, my body throbbing as if on fire, until I heard the first bewildered wail and the midwife lifted her triumphant face to me.

“Castile,” she declared, as if she’d personally orchestrated the event, “has a prince.”

WE NAMED HIM
Juan, for both his grandfathers and our patron saint, the Baptist.

I heard later that Fernando presented him to the court with tears in his eyes. Recovering in my apartments, I would make my official appearance after the Baptism and my churching. But Beatriz kept me apprised of every development, from the pride in my husband’s stance as he held our little infante aloft to the court’s acclaim (prompting Juan to burst into tears) to the cacophonous revelry that seized the entire realm. In Segovia, people danced around bonfires and a hundred bulls were slaughtered in Salamanca—a horrid spectacle I was furious to hear about and refused to sanction. From Aragón, old King Juan sent us an enormous gold baptismal font; it took six men to carry it into the Church of Santa María. He also sent a private note asking us to grant Carrillo a pardon for his past offenses and restore his income, both as a gesture of compassion for our son’s birth and out of respect for the
archbishop who’d fought so hard to gain us the throne and was now “a sad and ruined man.”

I agreed. I had no room left in my heart for anger. I’d been vindicated; after eight years of marriage, I had safeguarded our dynasty with a prince who would inherit both Castile and Aragón upon our deaths. I had earned the admiration of our most unrepentant subjects, and within days of Juan’s birth, the last remaining criminals in Sevilla fled for refuge in the Moorish-held port city of Málaga. Bells tolling throughout the realm prompted priests to hide their concubines and bastards and clutch at their Bibles, fully aware that with the arrival of a male heir, I would soon be free to turn the full force of my attention to the reform of our Church.

On the Feast of Santa Marta, six weeks after the birth, Fernando and I appeared together to formally present our son to Sevilla. We rode into the congested streets, cordoned to allow us passage on our horses, under a sun so hot it bleached the sky. Sweat pooled underneath my pearl-encrusted
brial
and crown. My stalwart Canela, bedecked in equally excessive finery, pranced nervously, his hooves ringing sparks from the steaming cobblestones.

The crowd’s cheering scattered pigeons from the tile rooftops. Juan rode before us in a canopied carriage, cradled by his godmother, the duchess of Medina Sidonia. The marquis of Cádiz escorted the infante, basking in the acclaim with a handsome man’s insouciance; Medina Sidonia rode before us with our standard, a privileged position that denoted our high esteem.

Then, all of a sudden, the cheering faltered and faded to silence. As the people looked up in unison, a pall came over the day, tinting it opaque, lengthening our shadows. At my side, Fernando drew rein. He peered upward, his ruby-studded gold coronet tilting on his brow.

He froze.
“Dios mío,”
I heard him whisper.
“El sol se apaga.”

“What? The sun can’t go out,” I exclaimed, craning my face to follow his fearful gaze, though the weight of my headdress and crown hurt my neck.

In the scorched sky, I saw a shadow slicing across the edge of the sun like a black scythe.

Around us, I heard terrified gasps. People collapsed to their knees.
But I remained calm; during my scavenging in the library of Segovia as a princess, I’d come across several writings describing this phenomenon—eclipse, I believed it was called. I informed Fernando of it as he sat frozen on his horse.

“Eclipse?” he echoed, as if the very word were incomprehensible.

“Yes. Sometimes, the moon slips over the sun, eclipsing its light, but then it goes away and everything returns to normal,” I said in irritation. It was blistering hot. I was drenched in perspiration. I wanted to reach the dais in the main plaza, fulfill our obligations, and return to the shelter of the alcazar before we all broiled to death in our finery. I also was worried for my son, who’d surely break out in a rash in this infernal heat.

“But, it … it’s an omen,” stammered Fernando, to my disbelief. “On the very day our son is to be presented, this—this eclipse occurs? It cannot be a good sign.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. For all its far-flung territories and holdings, Aragón was still a land steeped in superstition, much like Andalucía.

“It’s not an omen,” I said, more tartly than I intended. “Our son has been christened already, blessed by God. This is just the moon forgetting her proper place.” I smiled, lowering my voice to a quip. “You, of all men, should know something about that.”

He tried to return my smile but I could tell he was truly frightened, as though he believed this insignificant celestial event presaged the future.

I gestured impatiently to Medina Sidonia, who appeared utterly contemptuous of the collective fear around us. “My lord duke, if you would …?”

He barked at the immobile retainers, arrayed like statues around us as they stared up at the half-covered sun. “Onward! Her Majesty commands it!”

Our horses’ passage made a disconcerting echo on the now silent streets. By the time we reached the plaza and the crowd had assembled there, the light had begun to return, the moon’s intrusive sliver already ebbing away.

I mounted the dais, taking Juan from the duchess and staring upon
the anonymous mass of people, compelling them to stop looking to the sky, to turn their eyes instead to me and the child in my arms.

I put no trust in auguries. I did not believe in any force stronger than God.

And God would never let any harm come to my son.

IN THE EARLY
spring of 1479, we left the gardens of Andalucía and returned to Castile.

We made the journey in slow stages because of little Juan, whom I kept with me at all times due to his alarming propensity for colic. I had changed his wet nurse twice in the last six months, to no avail; I was so concerned for his welfare that this time I allowed myself to be persuaded to not nurse him myself, though the change in nurses didn’t help. I also consulted a host of learned physicians, Jewish and Moorish alike, and donated a small fortune to Sevilla’s Virgin of Antiquity and her Christ Child, known for their curative gifts. Fernando tried to reassure me that many babies suffered colic and outgrew it, but I felt my son’s distress with every fiber of my being and could barely pay heed to anything else. Isabel rode with me, Beatriz, and Ines in our carriage, enduring the teeth-rattling jolts over pitted roads as she crooned and dangled silver rattles in front of Juan to keep him distracted from the pains in his stomach.

Shortly after our arrival in Segovia, I discovered I was once again pregnant. As I looked up from the pail where I’d just retched out my morning meal, Beatriz gave me a long compassionate look. Fernando had insisted on resuming his rights in our bed well before I felt ready to accept him; he’d not been rough, but neither had he been accommodating, and I’d complained to Beatriz in a rare fit of candor that he seemed unable to accept “later” as an answer. Now, her one look told me why; Fernando wasn’t as immune to Juan’s fragility as he feigned. Babies died every day, of colic and other maladies. Our succession was still vulnerable; we needed another son.

This need was reinforced when word reached us that, after years of failing health, Juan of Aragón had died. Fernando immediately departed for his realm to attend the obsequies for his father and to meet
with his Cortes, which remained separate from those of Castile by our prenuptial Capitulations. I wanted to go with him; with his father’s passing, our kingdoms were now truly united under one rule. But I couldn’t make the journey, not with a babe to care for and another on the way.

My third pregnancy proved troublesome from the start. I was constantly at odds with myself, missing Fernando from the moment he walked out the door yet too exhausted to even walk across my chamber, plagued by constant nausea that made me dread the months of restrictions ahead.

My temper hardly improved when I was informed of yet another uprising in Extremadura in Joanna la Beltraneja’s name, masterminded by that old goat King Afonso, whose defeat at our hands—and Rome’s subsequent refusal to issue him the dispensation he’d requested to wed Joanna—burned in him like brimstone. He’d bribed a pack of discontented minor nobles to spring their revolt the moment Fernando’s back was turned.

“What am I to do?” I exclaimed to Beatriz. I sat at my desk, reading the latest reports sent by the admiral, whom I’d dispatched at the head of an army to quell the revolt. “Don Fadrique writes that he’s arrested all the nobles involved. They’ll be deprived of their estates and executed, of course, but he had to set torch to the fields, round up villagers, and chase the Portuguese back across the border like wild dogs.” I waved the paper at her, my fatigue incinerated by my temper. “Those miscreants fled with sacks of treasure looted from our churches slung over their backs! They pillaged what we can ill afford to lose and wagged their fingers at our men from across the border!”

I flung the paper on my desk, making the candle flames dance erratically. “I cannot let Afonso get away with this. Clearly I’ve been too naïve to think that being exiled in Portugal would keep Joanna quiet. Fadrique says that, under questioning, most of the nobles admitted they rebelled against my rule because Joanna calls herself Enrique’s true daughter and Castile’s only queen! How dare she question my right to my throne, when everyone knows she is Beltrán de la Cueva’s love child?”

Beatriz paused by the bed, where she scented my linens with lavender
and anise before folding them into a coffer. “Maybe you should offer a peace treaty,” she suggested.