Silent Water
Page 24
Doctor Baldazzi returned to Italy the same year I did. I never understood the queen’s dislike of Baldazzi, for despite his oiliness and his many quirks, he was a competent physician, at least for those who were genuinely ill. And it is doubtful that she made a good bargain by replacing him with Giovanni Andrea Valentino, a medic from Modena, who later turned out to be a spy for the Dukes of Mantua and Ferrara.
Giovanna d’Aragona, Princess of Montefusco, went on to marry twice more (she had already been widowed by the time she joined the court in Kraków). She outlived those husbands, too, the last one having succumbed on their honeymoon. The last I heard of her, she had moved to Paris, but that was many years ago, and I have no knowledge of what happened to her after that.
Adam Latalski served briefly as the queen’s secretary, but whether because of the dullness of the state bureaucracy, the intrigues of the court, or Don Mantovano’s unquiet spirit that some claimed haunted the chamber where he had died, the poet left the position within a year to return to his literary pursuits and to teach rhetoric at the University of Kraków. To my knowledge, he never did translate Il Cortegiano.
What of Dantyszek, you will ask? Like a phoenix, he rose from the ashes—or as near to ashes as he had come on that fateful night—to become one of the queen’s most trusted envoys, advisors, and indeed friends. He penned a poem titled Epithalamium Reginae Bonae, in which he praised the attributes of his patroness’s mind and spirit. He also served on many diplomatic missions for her, including one that involved (unsuccessfully) securing her Milanese inheritance after her mother died. For seven years, Dantyszek was the Polish ambassador to the imperial court, where he staunchly advocated Bona’s anti-Teutonic policies. He traveled far and wide, from Spain to England to Arabia, and wrote extensively about those lands before embarking on a no less distinguished ecclesiastical career.
Yes, Jan Dantyszek became a priest in later life. Thus he laid to rest any suspicions that he may have abandoned his Roman allegiance. He reached the rank of the Bishop of Warmia, and in that capacity was even nominated as a papal legate to His Holiness Clement VII. From the news that has reached me over the years, I gather that he, too, underwent a deep transformation. With great dedication, he took to eradicating loose morals among his flock, and he was ever vigilant when it came to the celibacy of the clerics under his jurisdiction. The latter, I suspect, was a more challenging task.
Had the brush with death changed him? Was he remorseful? Or was it a natural consequence of aging, a time when many of us become more reflective and critical of the excesses of our youth? Who knows, but he turned out to be one of the few protagonists of this sad story to go on to rebuild his life and make it better than before, and that must be a good thing. He died in October of 1548.
Time proved Queen Bona to be a capable administrator of her crown possessions, which she expanded vastly over the subsequent years. Through a wise and fruitful management of those lands, she increased the Jagiellonian fortune and filled crown coffers with gold while helping to overhaul the outdated farming practices throughout the commonwealth and enabling the construction of new roads and bridges. But as her successes grew, so did the hostility of the aristocracy. Chief among them, Stempowski remained a thorn in her side until he died, some time in 1532. He and many other wealthy, greedy, and complacent landowners considered the queen’s economic activities unnatural for a woman, and her gains illegitimate for a foreigner. But she pressed on, never wavering, and she became richer than the lot of them. Nonetheless, for those achievements, she paid with an unjustly blackened reputation—and more.
When I returned to Bari in the autumn of 1520, I did not go alone. I was accompanied by Sebastian Konarski, whom I married in a small ceremony in the cathedral’s St. Mary’s Chapel that August. Except for his uncle the bishop of Kraków, who presided over our vows, there were only two other people in attendance, both as witnesses—the queen and Konstanty Konarski, my husband’s incorrigible cousin and a veteran of the last Teutonic war. Before he died in 1542, he had visited us several times in Bari, leaving, Sebastian often said, a trail of offspring in his wake. We laughed at that, but it is quite possibly true.
By remarrying, I lost my widow’s income from the Sanseverino estate. In recompense, the queen sent me off with a chest full of linen, shirts, and nightgowns of Flemish cotton embroidered with silk and gold thread; a Persian rug; a silver ewer and a matching bowl; a pair of silver candlesticks; and several rolls of cordovan leather wallpaper printed with artichoke and ostrich egg motifs, the latter from her own dowry that she had no use for at Wawel. With this trousseau of sorts, and a small pension Konarski received after King Zygmunt elevated him to the rank of eques auratus, Knight of the Golden Spur, we settled on my family’s much diminished land and became almond farmers.
I was glad to be back in the house in which I had spent my earliest years, before the convent and my first marriage, with expansive views of groves, vineyards, and white cliffs rising from the blue-green sea. But there is one thing I have not done since the day I returned: I have not gone down to the cellar. I tried a few times early on, but it was as if my body hit a wall, invisible but hard, at the threshold. No amount of willpower would quell the blind panic that rose inside me at the prospect of descending into that dark and chill space below ground. And so I never have.
That small inconvenience notwithstanding, I was luckier than the other ladies in the queen’s service, indeed most women I know, in that I was able to choose the man I married. Widows have somewhat more freedom in that regard, and I did not have a father to stand in my way, though I doubt he would have. My mother grumbled at first and looked upon my new foreign husband with a good deal of suspicion, but even she eventually took to him. He has a way of making people love him.
We had three children. Our eldest is a daughter, Aurora—a name I chose to pay a subtle tribute to Helena, who had died nearly two years to the day before she was born. She is named in the memory of that dawn when we had our last conversation. I choose to remember Helena not as she was at the execution block, pale and wide-eyed. In my mind, she is forever serene and unbroken, the way she had been on that morning I last visited her. I told Aurora the story only a few years ago. She is a widow herself now—her husband having been set upon and knifed by brigands on his way from doing business in Rome—and we cried together. Then I told her that I was proud she had shown the same dignity through her own ordeals as Helena had done all those years before.
Sebastian and I also had two boys. The first we lost in infancy; then, when I was almost forty and thought I would have no more children, Giulio arrived. Although he was christened with the Italian name, at home we call him Julian, the way his name would be said in Polish, for he was named after his paternal grandfather.
He was a healthy boy for the first few years of his life, then he began to suffer bouts of fevers that are common in our southern lands and to which some people appear to be more prone than others. He would recover from each bout, but within months he would inevitably become ill again. We brought many doctors to see him, but none of them knew how to prevent these recurrences, and the weakness was beginning to affect his growth. I was starting to despair at the prospect of losing another child, when a letter arrived from Lucrezia, with whom I had carried an intermittent correspondence over the years and to whom I had mentioned my son’s health troubles. She suggested that we bring him to Kraków, where the royal physicians might be more helpful, for King Zygmunt was old and ill by then and had surrounded himself with some of the best medical minds of Europe.
It was a big decision, and we worried about how we would be able to support ourselves in Poland, but we were desperate to save our son. We even considered writing to the king to ask if Sebastian could reenter the royal service, when news reached us that my husband’s last surviving brother had died without an heir and left his estate outside of Kraków to him. Within days, we packed up our household, left the farm in the caretaker’s hands, and made our way back north.
Thus my path was to cross that of Queen Bona once again, something I did not expect to happen when I left her court twenty-five years earlier. Not only that, it would send me on yet another journey with profound consequences for the queen, and—as it turned out—for the monarchy as well. Perhaps one of these nights I will write the story of that reunion, the mission with which she entrusted me, and the strange and dark events that occurred in Lithuania in the year 1545.
I am now back in Bari again, having returned permanently four years ago. For the past few weeks, sleep has often eluded me, and when I do sleep, I am tormented by nightmares. This anniversary of Helena’s death, like no other before it, has brought back the terrible memories from forty years ago in all their vivid, horrible detail.
Why are they haunting me again now? Maybe because I am old. For I am past my sixty-fifth year, and although I still feel well enough and my eyesight is surprisingly strong, I am slower than I used to be, and I tire more quickly. When I lie down and try to sleep, the images I had banished to the farthest corners of my mind assault me and keep me awake. Perhaps writing this will help me reclaim some of my lost peace.
I once saved a life, and there is a great deal of satisfaction in that. My only regret is that I was not able to help Helena, and this will not cease until I am no more. But what I will leave behind is this testimony, that it may serve as a warning. Those who heed it will be all the better for it; those who do not should expect that sooner or later their deeds will catch up to them.
Perhaps one day a world will dawn in which similar accounts will no longer need to be written.
Thank you for reading Silent Water. I hope you enjoyed it. Would you kindly take a few minutes to support independent publishing by leaving a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads? I will greatly appreciate it!
If you want to learn more about my Jagiellon mystery series and stay up to date as I work on the sequel to Silent Water, feel free to get in touch via my website’s Contact Me form at www.pkadams-author.com or my Facebook Author Page at www.facebook.com/PKAdamsAuthor.
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Historical Note
During the Christmas season of 1519, King Zygmunt Stary (the Old) was away from Kraków. He had decamped to Toruń (in Royal Prussia) to be closer to the theater of the expected military activities against the Teutonic Order. Queen Bona, pregnant for the second time, remained behind at Wawel. I took liberty with this historical fact by placing the king with his wife in the capital during the two-week period in which this story is set.
The group known in Latin as bibones et comedones did really exist at King Zygmunt’s court. I was a bit surprised when I stumbled upon it in my research, but it makes sense. The Renaissance was a period of repudiation of the medieval philosophy that glorified earthly suffering as preparatory to eternal happiness after death. As the arts and the sciences of the humanist era focused more on this world, its beauty and its inner workings, many people also began to consider the pleasures of the flesh as important. As a result, sexual behaviors and attitudes that had been condemned or marginalized in earlier periods became more widely accepted. In addition to drinking and lovemaking, the society’s members occupied themselves with producing poems and pamphlets that satirized life at the court.
Chancellor Aleksander Stempowski, although a fictional character, is based on the real-life Crown Grand Chancellor Krzysztof Szydłowiecki. The latter was King Zygmunt’s childhood friend and trusted advisor who was also a Habsburg partisan, and a political (and possibly personal) enemy of Queen Bona’s.
The queen’s agricultural reforms did not begin until somewhat later in her tenure, but the nobility’s resistance and hostility (including that of the chancellor) to her deep involvement in a range of state and foreign affairs are a fact. The conflict came to a head in the mid-1530s and gave rise to a negative and largely undeserved reputation of the queen as a meddler, gold-digger, and even poisoner.
Most of the main characters in this story are fictional, with the following caveats and exceptions:
Kasper Zamborski is a composite character based on several historical figures known to have been members of the bibones et comedones society.
Jan Dantyszek was a real person, a distinguished courtier, diplomat, and later a high-ranking Church official who in his youth was a drinker, womanizer, and one of the most enthusiastic members of the bibones et comedones. The storyline involving his kidnapping is fictional, but everything else about him as presented in this novel is true.
In 1519, Antonio Carmignano was the treasurer of Bona’s court in Kraków. Piotr Gamrat did not join the queen’s circle until 1524, and, like Dantyszek, he later embarked on a Church career. He became the Archbishop of Gniezno and Primate of Poland, but was criticized by his contemporaries for leading a dissolute lifestyle. Bona, however, valued his loyalty (he was the only advisor who never betrayed her trust, she is said to have once claimed) and promoted his ecclesiastical career.
Of course, Queen Bona (1494-1557) and King Zygmunt (1467-1548) are historical figures, although the storylines involving them are fictionalized. That said, I tried to imbue the Bona of this story with as many traits of the real queen as possible. She is portrayed as highly intelligent, loyal to her friends and servants, a lover of music and art, but also a woman who was haughty, argumentative, and irascible. The latter traits often pitted her against the Polish nobility, which was more conservative in its attitudes toward women and their role within a family (even if it was a royal family) than was customary in Italy at the time.
Chancellor Szydłowiecki, as already suggested, was a major Habsburg supporter within the king’s circle of advisors. It was a misguided position given the almost invariably antagonistic attitude of the German Habsburgs toward Poland, not just during Szydłowiecki’s lifetime but for centuries afterwards. He seems to have been quite vain and greedy, and some historians believe he may have been a spy for Emperor Maximilian and perhaps even for the Teutonic Order’s Grand Master (and King Zygmunt’s own nephew) Albrecht von Hohenzollern.
Young Beata, who was raised alongside the king’s legitimate children, was indeed a daughter of his former mistress Katarzyna Telniczanka. The child’s “official” father, however, was Telniczanka’s husband, whom she married in 1510, after the end of her affair with the king. Nonetheless, contemporary rumors claimed that Beata was the king’s child. It is a testament to Bona’s generosity of spirit that she allowed the girl to be part of the royal household, and later took care of her and her young daughter after Beata became a widow after just a few months of marriage to Prince Illia Ostrogski in 1539.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jena Henry, C.P. Lesley, Quenby Solberg, and Jake Conner who read the full manuscript of Silent Water, as well as Elaine Buckley and Ann Marie Carmody who read extensive excerpts, for their very insightful comments. This novel would not be what it is without your honest and generous feedback, and you have my deepest gratitude.
I am also grateful to Jenny Quinlan for designing another excellent cover, and to Deborah Blume for making the map of Poland-Lithuania under the Jagiellon dynasty. I am in awe of your artistic skills!
About the Author
P.K. Adams is the pen name of Patrycja Podrazik. She has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a master’s degree in European Studies from Yale University. She is a blogger and historical fiction reviewer at www.pkadams-author.com. Her debut novel, The Greenest Branch, a Novel of Germany’s First Female Physician, was a semi-finalist for the 2018 Chaucer Book Awards for Pre-1750 Historical Fiction. She is a member of the Historical Novel Society and lives in New England.
Table of Contents
Title page
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Table of Contents
Cast of Characters
Prologue Bari, Kingdom of Naples March 1560
Chapter 1 Kraków, Kingdom of Poland April 1518
Chapter 2 Wawel Castle, Kraków Dec
ember 25th, 1519
Chapter 3 December 26th, 1519
Chapter 4 December 27th, 1519
Chapter 5 December 27th, 1519
Chapter 6 December 28th, 1519
Chapter 7 December 30th, 1519
Chapter 8 January 1st, 1520
Chapter 9 January 2nd, 1520
Chapter 10 January 4th, 1520
Chapter 11 January 5th, 1520
Chapter 12 January 6th, 1520, The Feast of Epiphany Morning
Chapter 13 January 6th, 1520, The Feast of Epiphany Evening
Chapter 14 January 6th, 1520, The Feast of Epiphany Night
Chapter 15 February 1520
Chapter 16 March 15th, 1520
Epilogue Bari, Kingdom of Naples March 1560
Historical Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author