“My lord, this is not right. It is breaking God’s covenant.”
The man swallowed nervously. Pedro was not known as a man to take criticism well, and no man in his right mind gainsays the word of a king without an attack of the nerves. But Felipe was a good son of the church and when he’d signed on to the Royal guard, he’d not envisaged standing in a graveyard in the middle of the night with his sleeves rolled up and hacking at the consecrated ground with a gleaming spade.
“Be silent and dig.”
Pedro’s gaze turned from the unhappy guard and rose above the nine other soldiers standing nearby holding the reins of their own horses, the four spares, and the beasts of burden harnessed to the cart. His gaze rose above them all to look at the evening star in all its twinkling glory.
***
She had been his evening star. That had been his first name for her when she had arrived at the court in Lisbon, glowing like the pinholes in the curtain of the night, with an otherworldly, alabaster perfectness. As she had alighted from the coach and her ribboned slipper had crunched onto the gravel of the courtyard, he had known instantly that he loved her and only her and would love her until the sun died and the world burned with God’s judgement.
His wife, Constance, had greeted her with a smile.
Ines.
Beautiful Ines.
Pedro had agreed, despite his father’s misgivings, to allow Constance to bring her own maids and followers from the court in Castile, despite the ever increasing Castilian influence in the Portuguese court. It had seemed the right thing to do, when bringing the poor woman to arranged matrimony in an unfamiliar country, to allow her at least to keep some of the trappings of her former life.
Like Ines.
It had been a good decision. Pedro, then prince and heir to the Portuguese throne, had married Constance as per the agreement, but her pock-marked, pale face and too-fat, turbot lips did nothing to entice him. Her hair had the lacklustre look of old straw. There was nothing unsightly about her, really, and even the things that he particularly disliked about her were trivialities, blown out of proportion by his lack of concern for her and his ever deepening fascination with the quiet, shining white maid she had brought to the court.
Ines.
***
“Sir?”
“What?” Pedro snapped angrily, drawn from his reverie with a wrench.
“Sir, I think one of the sisters has risen. See how someone approaches from the cloister gate?”
Pedro glanced across to where he pointed and saw a white shape shuffling toward them, her habit brushing the cold ground, the wimple hiding all but the pale moon of her face. With casual lack of care, he turned and gestured to the guards who stood waiting.
“Agostinho? Luiz? Divert the sister’s interest.”
Two guards handed their reins to their fellows and hurried off to intercept the approaching nun while Pedro’s mind wandered once more until it settled on a mental image of that face.
***
Constance had been a dutiful wife. He had to give her that. Despite the scarcity of his visits to her residence, they had managed to conceive children. Louis had died only a few weeks old, taking with him the immediate hope for a continuation of the dynasty. The priests had held their breaths, but not their tongues; the court and the superstitious were all aflutter with news of how God had cursed the union. It was madness, of course. It was hardly uncommon for a child to pass away so soon after birth, and Louis had clearly been sick from the start.
Constance had grieved, though she had kept that grief largely private, showing a brave, slightly plain, face to the world.
It had barely touched Pedro, of course. Even in those few months that they had been married, not yet a year, it had become clear that Ines reciprocated Pedro’s infatuation. They had exchanged coy glances and cautious smiles.
But when Louis died, it had all changed. Despite the fact that Pedro had taken the passing of his son with stoic calmness, Ines had come to comfort him, naturally assuming he would grieve. A single kiss of sympathy had soon exploded into a torrid affair of illicit lovemaking and hidden joy, stolen moments around the court.
Gradually their forbidden union had become bolder, fuelled by Constance’s apparent lack of concern over the growing distance between her husband and herself. Even the birth of their baby daughter, Maria, three years later did nothing to heal the rift. By that time, the union of the crown prince and his wife’s maid was common, if unspoken, knowledge around the court.
That was when the rift began to open between Pedro and his father, King Alfonso. The old man made no effort to disguise the level to which he despised the Castilian maid and her influence in the court. A father and son divided by a wife and a mistress.
***
“Sir? I think we’ve hit something.”
Pedro, once more irritated at having his reverie interrupted, turned and glanced down.
“Idiot. It’s a stone. You’ve not cleared three feet yet. Six feet it needs to be.”
***
The birth of Maria had weakened Constance. Everyone knew it, though they put on brave faces when speaking to the princess, telling her how radiant she looked and how she would soon be fit and hale once more.
Pedro had increased his conjugal visits to twice weekly in order to show willing though, while he sat with his wife, his thoughts never left the side of the beautiful Ines. His hunger grew with every season, but it had changed; had taken stronger form. It was no longer enough to carry on an illicit affair with Ines. She had to be acknowledged.
His mind had begun to swim with complex plans and dark ideas, all centring on the need to make Ines legitimate.
Even Pedro was surprised when Constance fell pregnant once more. It seemed a miracle, given how little time they spent in intimate embrace. But the fact remained that it happened and, despite her frailty, the boy, Ferdinand, was born with no visible sign of weakness.
The birth had been difficult for the mother, though, and it had come as a shock to no one when her body gave up on the struggle only weeks later. She was buried with all the pomp and honour of a princess of Portugal, their three-year-old daughter and infant son in attendance, their hands held by, of all people, Ines de Castro, lady-in-waiting to the former princess and forbidden fruit plucked all too often by the prince.
For all the sadness of the court, it had been a blessing in the eyes of the hungry Prince Pedro.
At last, he could seek legitimacy.
Or could have done if his father had not been the blinkered, stubborn, old goat that he was.
***
“That’s it, sir.”
Pedro’s mind whirled through the royal palace, swimming in time until it resolved in the dark cemetery with the hooting of owls and squeaking of bats.
The three men had dug deep in the hard earth while his mind had wandered.
There, a man’s full height down in the dark, rectangular recess, a wooden surface was now visible between the dirt and the shadows.
“Clear around it and clean it off before we lift.”
The diggers nodded, returning to their work, grumbling silently in the privacy of their heads about the prince’s use of the word ‘we’. It helped to focus on small irritations to take their minds off the simple horrible sin of what they were doing.
***
In the absence of a legal wife, Pedro had thrown all caution aside and brought Ines to his own rooms and chambers, settling her into his palace, despite his father’s demands to the contrary. The court divided, some murmuring their support for the prince and their approval of his great love for the girl, others spitting her name and throwing their weight behind the king’s denial to grant her any rights.
Pedro had not cared.
The two began to live as husband and wife despite the fact that King Alfonso was already seeking a suitable replacement for the barely-cold Constance.
A son had been born to Pedro and Ines the next year, though he had lived only weeks. On
ce more the superstitious of the court claimed the union cursed, while others rallied around the tearful mother, supporting her. People saw only what they needed to see.
But Pedro’s love for Ines only grew, and hers for him, also.
The following year, their daughter, Beatrice, had been born and two years after that a son, John.
Unable to find a suitable match, the old king instead began to make life as difficult as he could for Pedro and Ines. The prince countered the sour father’s moves by planting his love’s Castilian relations in key positions around the court.
He could have seen it coming, really. Should have done. The silent war between father and son continued to escalate over the ensuing years, even when young Denis was born, ever strengthening the hold of their dynasty on the throne – if only they could have been made legitimate. The legal heir, Constance’s son Ferdinand, was weak from birth and had developed a cough that seemed to haunt him all year round. He was pale and could not ride for it brought with it pains.
The signs of the trouble to come had all been there, but Pedro had not noticed them, his mind bound with a blanket of love and lust. Or perhaps he had seen but ignored them; refused to acknowledge their existence.
***
Pedro’s attention was wrenched back to the dark graveyard once more as a stone clattered off his boot. He blinked as he watched the heavy, wooden coffin being raised from the hole and lowered gently to the ground nearby.
Every other soul in that dark yard crossed himself as he looked down at the casket, dusty and pock-marked.
“Well?”
The men looked up at Pedro with wide eyes and unhappy faces.
“Open it, then!”
***
Pedro had been hunting in the forest east of Lisbon when a rider had brought him the tidings. His fury had known no bounds. He had skewered the poor messenger where he stood, punching the sword through the unfortunate man’s chest for nothing more than bringing word of Ines’ demise.
Somehow he had not noticed the pieces on the board moving into place:
How the king had managed to organise for all the carefully-placed Castilians in the court to be away on one business or another.
How the son and his guard and cronies had been enticed into hunting in the forest.
How this had all happened on the weekend when Ines had been visiting the monastery at Coimbra to pay her respects to the resting place of the former Portuguese Queen and canonised saint, Elizabeth.
The three ‘noble’ knights, who served his father closely, had fallen upon the monastery like the wrath of God, smashing open the door to the chamber where Ines had been teaching Beatrice the art of stumpwork, hacking and stabbing at her brutally to the aural barrage of the little girl’s wails and shrieks. And when they had tired of shredding and piercing her body, they had taken the head off with three swings of Toledo steel and left both head and decapitated body on the floor of the church.
A statement from the father to the son.
***
Even now, the fury boiled up in Pedro at the memory of the news. More than two years had passed since the only woman he had ever loved had been viciously murdered on his own father’s command.
Without waiting for the men to work any further, Pedro put his foot under the edge of the wooden lid from which they had only as yet removed half the silver nails. With an effort born of undying rage, he pushed the lid aside with his boot, the wood cracking and splintering around those nails that remained.
He had not seen Ines since the day he had left for his hunting trip and she had smiled at him as she boarded the carriage with their daughter.
The shrivelled face of Ines stared up at him, sightless; eyeless. Her two-year, dead skin was a thin parchment, pulled taut across her angular bones and torn in places. The three inch gap between her head and body had been filled with folds of white linen by the nuns of the order of Poor Clare at this monastery in Coimbra where the dreadful deed had been done and the body honourably, if quietly, laid to rest by the sisters afterwards. A crucifix had been enfolded in her skeletal hands. Her beautiful, blue and white dress had already rotted away in places.
The men with Pedro stared in horror, crossing their selves and stepping back, putting their scarves to their mouths and noses, eyes wide as they took in the true nightmare of what they had just done.
Pedro smiled down at his love. They may see a skeleton with torn skin and eyeless sockets staring up at the night…
Pedro saw Ines.
She was as beautiful as she had ever been. Paler than ever, with bleached bone poking through in places, but she was still his Ines. The most beautiful woman who had ever lived and who had ever died.
His rage began to calm for the first time in two years.
Two years that had seen civil war rip Portugal apart as the son sought the head of the father. Two years of bloodbaths and vicious battles. Two years of hell, until last month, when things had finally come to an end.
Old Alfonso had come to Pedro to seek a resolution, and had found it in the form of a subtle poison introduced during their reconciliatory meal. News of the revolt’s end and the peace between father and son had come only days before further news of the old king’s sudden and unexpected death.
Pedro had been crowned before his father’s body had even been interred.
But that had only been the beginning.
He now had the names of the three knights who had brought their swords to this house of God to commit an unholy and despicable act.
And, as sole ruler of the country, he had freedom to make his children legitimate.
He smiled down at the hollow face and dead eyes.
Nervously, crossing themselves again and again, the men of the guard stepped back to allow their king room for his grief.
But grief was not fuelling Pedro now. Not grief. Not anger. Just love and a need to do right by his Ines.
With gentle, caressing hands and infinite care, Pedro stood, lifting the headless body, shuffling his grip every time there was a crack or a tear in the brittle bones and parchment skin. Slowly and carefully, he brought her to the wagon and arranged her in a seated position on the front bench, propping her upright with a sack of grain at each side.
As his soldiers stared and shook with fright, he returned for her head, carefully balancing the ghoulish vision atop the shrivelled shoulders, making a nest in the rotten, white linen. It took some time and a great deal of balance to return her to a semblance of wholeness.
He smiled. They just couldn’t understand.
Leaning forward, he brushed his lips against the cold ivory of her rictus grin, carefully lifting her brittle hand as he slipped a gold ring over the grey, bony finger.
Men looked elsewhere. What else could they do? They did not see him draw the coronet from his belt and place it atop her straggly head, arranging the white tufts to sit well within it.
“Bring the court.”
An order, on the other hand, they could hardly ignore. The soldiers of his retinue shuffled off to the dark trees behind the cart and began to bring out the nobles of Portugal, supporters of the old King Alfonso, so that they could kneel before their rightful Queen Ines and kiss her hand.
Pedro smiled as the grey, grinning head slipped, and he had to dash forward to set it right with a kiss to the crumbling forehead.
“There, there, my evening star. Your prince will look after you now.”
Angels' Choir
Tonight is the night, I can hardly believe that it’s here; time seems to have gone either terminally slowly or so fast that I’m almost not ready. It’s like the universe has been set on either making me screw this up or go insane from the waiting. I just need to hold on until midnight.
I have loved her for what seems so long, she is the perfect creature, so graceful, so elegant, like an angel come to earth.
I remember when I first saw her, across the room at a party; she was a vision of beauty. It was like her golden hair was lit by a fire,
it framed her perfect elfin features so well; a neck so graceful and achingly pale sloping down to just a hint of her high, perfect breasts, tapering to a waist so slender; I could fit both my hands around her and feel my fingers touch; legs so long and lithe. She was perfection fallen from heaven.
I suddenly knew that she was more than the rest of them, something greater. She must truly be the angel sent to earth to just be with me. I had to have her, to be with her, to possess her, mind, heart, body and soul. How do you approach someone like that, someone so far above the rest of the mere mortals in the room, a person so beautiful it makes the words dry in your throat?
Our first meeting was so fleeting and yet memorable. As she passed nearby, she turned and caught her ankle on a protruding foot and tumbled to the floor. I was there in a flash helping her to her feet. Words didn’t come at first; it was enough to be the one to help her to a chair so she could recover. I muttered something to her about getting a compress for her ankle, whilst she griped and winced, turning it from side to side.
When I returned she was gone. I felt a little foolish standing there with a dripping cold compress, but I knew deep down that I would see her again. Something or someone had helped her from the party; there was no malice in it. Her gratitude, and dare I say her feelings, had started that same day. I could see it in her eyes before I had departed for the compress. I spent the rest of the party slowly learning who she was and where she worked, what she liked, who she knew, and if she was with anyone.
I discovered she was owner and manager at one of the local up-market restaurants. She was a little younger than I expected, her features being so perfect and timeless it was hard to tell. She didn’t have a boyfriend which made things so much easier; there would be no hindrance to us being together. I was certain that my natural charm and personality would be enough to make her reciprocate the love I felt for her. She would be mine, forever. We would be together until the end of time. Of that I had no doubt; in the way that as kids, we are sure that all love is eternal and are certain that nothing can get in the way.
Tortured Hearts - Twisted Tales of Love - Volume 3 Page 2
