by Lynn Cullen
Francesca regarded the woman, her peasant’s face cautious. “You say like you know her.”
“Francesca! I am leaving.”
“I was the playmate of her daughter. We were the best of friends Until Catalina was sent to marry. She was more useful to her brother as a bride than as her mother’s only companion.”
I caught Francesca’s sleeve. Most people are well versed in who was who in the Royal Family—this knowledge was not exceptional. The woman had delusions, claiming to be the friend of Queen Juana’s daughter.
Francesca pulled away from me. “Why are you here in Madrid?”
“Thank you for listening, señora. When Queen Juana died, my mother and I were let go, too Unimportant to be thought a threat to the King. I married a guard who had served the King in the Indies. He joined a regiment and went to France, where he died fighting at Metz. But he did not widow me before giving me something he got in Mexico.” She came out of the shadows.
I drew back with a gasp. Above her twisted lips was a gaping hole that had been her nose.
“See what the conquistadors brought back from the New World besides silver and gold.”
“Leprosy,” Francesca whispered.
“No,” said the woman. “The French Disease. And my wounds are not the worst of it.” She shrank back into the shadows with a sigh. “I passed the curse to my child at birth. Poor weakened thing, given to fevers and rashes. She did not live to see her eighteenth birthday.”
“Give her another maravedí.” I turned away, gagging into my glove.
A coin clanked Upon the woman’s metal bowl. “God be with you,” said Francesca.
I hurried off, though not before the woman’s ghastly image had been engraved Upon my mind.
ITEM: In seeking an answer to a quandary, one must consider the Law of Parsimony, proposed by the English monk William of Ockham. Translated from the Latin: “All things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.”
29 JANUARY 1567
The Palace, Aranjuez
I write this as fast as I can while everyone sleeps. Even Francesca has fallen into a restless slumber, thinking I am asleep. I am not. Too many thoughts rumble Unchecked through my head.
Five days ago, just after the Infanta’s nurse had brought the baby to the Queen’s chamber after Mass, the King surprised Us all by announcing that we were to travel to Aranjuez. I could see the Queen’s blank stare at the King as she rested Upon the divan.
The King nestled the Infanta in the crook of his arm, then looked Up. “Do you not wish to go, darling? We do not have to.”
“We can truly leave Madrid?”
“Of course we can. If you are Up to it. I know it is not the season, but perhaps it is warmer there than—”
She sat Up. “How soon?”
He let the baby wrap her fist aroUnd his finger and pull it to her wet mouth. “Not so very long. Tomorrow, if you wish.”
The Queen paused, eyes alert. “Who else goes?”
The Infanta latched on to a lock of the King’s hair as he pretended to nibble on her pudgy fingers. He looked Up, making her chortle as she hung on. “Those in the family who always go with Us to Aranjuez. Is there someone specific you had in mind?”
The Queen shook her head.
The condesa swept in with madame de Clermont. The little Infanta stared at them, bright-eyed, maintaining her grip on her father’s hair as the ladies made their greetings and the King announced mildly that the Queen wished to go to Aranjuez on the morrow. Would it be possible to make ready her things?
In moments, servants were running to and fro, flinching as the condesa shouted a stream of orders from behind her pomander. Her whip-cracking produced the desired results. By morning the next day, I was swaying in a carriage beside the nurse with the baby Princess; the King and Queen were seated on the tufted velvet bench across from Us.
“Tired, darling?” the King said.
The Queen lay back in his arms, her head against his shoulder. “Not so very much.”
“You can rest when you get there.”
She nodded, then sipped from the goblet he held to her lips.
At that moment, little Isabel Clara reached forward from her nurse’s lap and grasped the leather curtain at the carriage window. With a baby’s spastic movement, she jerked a corner of the stiff leather sheet toward her mouth, eager to gum it.
The late morning sunlight poured through the uncovered opening. My Lady turned her head, shielding her face with her hand, but not before I noticed her eyes. Only the thinnest rim of light brown ringed her pupils. Her eyes were as dilated as a cat ’s.
I caught my breath. I had noticed that her eyes seemed darker of late, glittering, as eyes do, from fever, but in the gloom in which the King kept her rooms, I had not realized how great a part her enlarged pupils played in the changed appearance of her gaze. Altogether the effect was Unnerving.
His Majesty took away the cup; My Lady let her head fall back Upon his chest.
The King lifted his gaze and caught me staring. Although I looked away quickly, I could see him frown.
He pressed the Queen’s face to his heart. “Doña Elena,” he said coolly to the nurse, “do you think it good for Isabel Clara to put that curtain in her mouth?”
The morning after we arrived at Aranjuez, after Mass, when the Queen was settled in the King’s office and resting, I went to her mulberry grove, knowing that she would never cause her litter to go there. Although the King had ordered the mulberry trees be planted specially for My Lady, to encourage her in the pastime of tending silkworms, the thought of coddling a worm, let alone one that entombs itself in its own guts, repulses her. Even if she were well and capable of visiting the grounds with the King (for he no more lets her out of his sight than Francesca lets me out of hers), the mulberry grove is the last place in Spain one would ever find her.
Confident of my temporary solitude—save for Francesca muttering within her shawls—I paced among the young trees. The winter sun shone steadily through their naked limbs, creating a lacework of shadows Upon my skirt. I hardly marked their pattern. I was desperately trying to recall my lessons on the four humors. Which of them in imbalance is implicated by dilated pupils? Black bile? Phlegm? Blood?
I kicked at the dead, bent grass of the grove. Even if I could recall which imbalance had caused the Queen’s pupils to swell, I was not a physician. Indeed, even if I had the answer, who would listen to a mere lady of the court? Why was the King’s new physician not acting Upon this, bleeding her, cupping her, sampling her Urine? How could he—and the King himself, as learned as His Majesty is in medicine—stand idly by when My Lady exhibited this symptom? It seemed a clear clue to her Unshakable weakness. Something was wrong, I could feel it in my bones.
I was turning these thoughts over in my mind as I trod, Francesca’s heavy step crunching in the long grass behind me, when I heard a man’s voice.
“Juffrouw Sofonisba?”
I started.
Doctor Debruyne raised himself from a patch of tall grass by the trunk of a mulberry tree and dusted off his breeches. The cloud of his breath dissolved in the chill air before him. “I am sorry, juffrouw, I am afraid I have found none.”
Francesca cleared her throat loudly.
Doctor Debruyne smiled at her. “Oh, yes, mevrouw. Thank you for reminding me.” He gave me a quick bow. “Good afternoon, juffrouw.”
Having dispensed with court formalities in one swift move, he resumed his train of thought. “I have not found a one.”
“A one?” I was confused, flustered, and embarrassingly glad. I had given Up hope of ever seeing him again since he had been sent to Sevilla with doctor Hernández, though I hardly hoped doctor Debruyne would ever miss me.
“Cocoons,” he said.
“Cocoons?”
“For the Queen.” He tossed back the hank of shining brown hair that had fallen in his eyes. “Forgive me, juffrouw Sofonisba. It was foolish of me to presume that because I was sent here
to look for any cocoons that might have survived the winter, you had been sent here for the same purpose. There was a bit of logic to my thinking, though. The King said the Queen might wish to expand her industry amongst the silkworms, and you being the Queen’s favored lady, I thought she ’d sent—” His high forehead rumpled in a frown. “Perhaps my line of reasoning was not so logical after all.”
“Oh, I see the logic now,” I said qUickly, “but no, it has no bearing on why I am here. As a matter of fact, the Queen would never send me here on such a mission. She despises silkworms.” I closed my mouth. A simple ‘no’ would have done.
“She does? Why?”
“Well, they are worms.”
“I see. Perhaps it would ease the Queen’s mind to know they are not truly worms, but caterpillars—yoUng moths, that is. Who would ever think such a beautiful thing as silk would come from the efforts of a lowly caterpillar?”
Francesca shifted on her stocky legs, seemingly torn between cutting short an Unsanctioned private meeting between her mistress and a gentleman, and making allowances for the man who had removed her bad tooth.
I could not help it. My curiosity got the best of me: “I thought you were in Sevilla.”
A corner of his mouth lifted in a surprised smile, as if he had not expected me to have made note of where he had gone. “I was. Receiving shipments of herbs directly from the New World as they came into port there. Doctor Hernández and I have been able to keep a few more specimens alive that way, as opposed to waiting for them to reach Aranjuez or El Escorial. The King was quite right to suggest that we station ourselves there.”
“The King had sent you?”
He nodded. “I have just now come back to Aranjuez to transplant some of my Chile pepper specimens.” He smiled more fully. “Have you made any interesting discoveries since we last met?”
I frowned at the grass, ashamed of letting my studies, my art, my own self-worth, run to ruin over these past two years. I had blamed my situation, my worry about the Queen, even my hopes for Tiberio, for my inability to pursue my dream, but at that moment, as the lacy net of shadows danced Upon my skirts, it suddenly became apparent: However I reacted to what life dealt me was my own damnable choice.
Doctor Debruyne’s gaze wandered to the tall grass. “I apologize. I must keep searching, though why the King thinks I should be the one to look for cocoons, I do not know. I have much work to do before I leave.”
My heart sank most irrationally. “You are leaving?”
“Signorina,” said Francesca, “we must go now.”
“I believe you are being Ushered away, juffrouw.”
I looked away, composing myself. “Señor, may I inquire where you are going?”
His teeth shone white in his tanned Flemish face. “The King has agreed to send me to Peru.”
My breath stopped. Peru? It was on the other side of the world. I made myself smile. “Your dream. Congratulations.”
“My goal of gathering native specimens will finally be realized—how well you Understand me, juffrouw.” He held my gaze. “ I wish we had gotten to know each other better.”
I willed myself not to look away, even as I stored away his small compliment as a squirrel tucks away a nut. How long it had been since I had savored even the smallest bit of attention from a man.
He sighed. “I believe I am still getting over the shock of being sent. I don’t know what persuaded His Majesty to finally send Us—I have been a pest about it for years. Well, I shall not look a gift horse in the mouth. I jumped at it when he told me yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
“It is a marvel, isn’t it? My ship sails from Sevilla in nineteen days. That is hardly time to gather supplies for two years, let alone to get there.”
“You will be gone for two years?”
“Possibly longer. He said to take all the time there I needed.”
I fought to keep a pleasant countenance.
He ran his boot over a patch of weedy grass. “I shall think of you, juffrouw, when I locate the native coca.”
“Yes, please do think of me when you see green streams of saliva trickling down a chewer’s chin.”
“I will,” he said readily. He saw me cringe. “But only in the very best way.”
I fought back the smile that threatened to take over my face. “Good luck,” I said. “With your experiments.”
He paused as if reluctant to leave, unsure, I am certain, of what to make of such a strange person.
“You missed an interesting one,” he said after a moment. “Experiment, I mean. You would have laughed. I boiled down moonflower leaves into the weakest of teas, then drank it. The weakness and lethargy it produced kept me bed-bound for a week.”
I frowned as I nodded. “Why would you wish to try it, when it is known to be a poison? Did you not say it caused the deadly flux?”
“True. But in small doses, it is said to bring sweetest euphoria. I had to see for myself. I know, I know, I shall never try that again.” He laughed. “My pupils were as dilated as an owl’s.”
“Your pupils were dilated?”
He nodded. “Painfully. I could not bear light.”
I glanced at Francesca, who was frowning most fiercely.
“What is it?” he asked.
I shook my head. Mentioning the Queen’s ailment in the same breath as moonflower—I would sound delirious. Treasonous, as well.
Francesca touched my arm. “Signorina.”
“I think she means for you to go,” he said to me.
“Yes.”
“I shall miss you, juffrouw Sofonisba, you and your beautiful eyes.”
I knew not how to remain there gracefully. He would miss me? He would miss these eyes? With a sudden rush of disbelief mixed with joy, I curtseyed and hastened away.
“Good-bye,” he called after me and my tottering black shadow. “Mevrouw , I hope your teeth stay strong. And juffrouw, if I do not see you for a while—do keep painting!”
I rushed over the long, dry grass, my skirts catching on sticks and brambles. Within sight of the palace, I stopped. Tears flooded my eyes when I leaned over to catch my breath.
Francesca caught Up, panting. “Signorina, I see what is in your face. No! You can no fall in the love with this one! You hear him, he go across the sea. You never see him again.”
“I am not in love, Francesca!”
Fool. Fool! How could I grieve for the loss of this man when I never really had him? Yet my heart was being wrenched from my chest. I could not bear Francesca’s probing me about it. “It is not doctor Debruyne who troubles me. It is—It is—” I wiped my face with my arm. “It just strikes me as odd, that is all, that the King should send him away now, after he had requested leave for so many years. Is it purely coincidental that the one man who knows the poisonous properties of the plants from the New World is now being sent to the far side of the sea?”
“What?”
“Who else but him would notice that the symptoms the Queen now displays are the same he himself experienced after drinking moonflower tea? Does anyone else know that the moonflower specimens had once gone missing?”
Francesca’s upturned chin quivered. “Signorina, do you say—do you say that the King, he poison Madonna Elisabetta?”
I regretted my careless words the moment I heard her accusation. The idea, confined within my imagination these months and years, grew terrifyingly real when voiced aloud. “Never speak of such again! Do you know what a dangerous thing you say?”
“You say it first, signorina.”
“Yes, and I am sorry. Terribly sorry! Just because the King grows moonflower does not mean he would dream of feeding it to the Queen. Why would he ever do such a thing? He loves her.”
Francesca drew her shawl closer, shaking her head.
“Stop it,” I said. “If she ’d been receiving moonflower tea, surely she ’d have the flux by now. A fatal dose of the herb brings death by flux.”
I paused. I did not like
the look on her face. “What is it?”
“You remember how the Prince of Ascoli die?”
We stared at each other.
“Coincidence,” I breathed.
Francesca wagged her head in remorse. “I say it ignorant for the other servants to say the King, he poison Signore Ascoli. I tell them, ‘Hush your mouths!’ when they say he angry that Signore Ascoli made a child Upon signora Eufrasia, when Ascoli supposed to be the husband in name only. ‘I know the King myself,’ I say. ‘I know he never do such thing.’ ”
“He wouldn’t. We must not think this.”
“You saw Signore Ascoli at the palace reception before he die—Signore Ascoli, he strong as the bull.”
“This is absurd. A king poisoning his kin, let alone his wife.”
“Signorina, name a duke of Milan who has live to be the old age. How many Italian gentlemen die before their beards have turn white, killed by their sons or nephews? Poisoned, all of them.”
“That is Italy. They are poison-mad there.”
“They poison-mad everywhere.”
“Even if the King poisoned Ascoli—and I’m not saying he did!—why would he poison the Queen? He loves her.”
We stared at each other. My heart beat faster, as before me flashed the King’s face when he observed the Queen and Don Juan playing in the river, and when he watched the Queen stealing Don Juan’s clothes in the woods of Valsaín. And how many times had the King seen the Queen gazing longingly at his brother? More times, many more times, than he’d seen her looking longingly at himself.
I gazed at the palace, rising Up from the river, its scarlet and gold pennants snapping in the wind. I choked down the knot of fear swelling in my throat. “What do I do?”
“Do? Do? You do nothing, signorina! I not raise you from the baby to have you burn on the fire of the Inquisitor-General! You do nothing but go back to My Lady and work on the embroidery. Paint if you want! Draw the dogs from life! Chisel the statues out of the bUtter! But for you to do one thing about this”—she spat—“I forbid you.”
“My poor little Lady . . .”
“You do not hear me, signorina?”
