The kings pleasure, p.1
The King's Pleasure, page 1
Also by Norah Lofts
The Concubine
Here Was a Man
Touchstone
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1969 by Norah Lofts
Copyright renewed © 1997 by C. Lofts
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-5024-5
ISBN-10: 1-4391-5024-9
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For Juliet O’Hea who shares Katharine’s
faith, kindliness and determination
A BALLAD FOR KATHARINE OF ARAGON
(From Union Street by Charles Causley)
The Queen of Castile has a daughter
Who won’t come home again
She lies in the grey cathedral
Under the arms of Spain
O the Queen of Castile has a daughter
Torn out by the roots
Her lovely breast in a cold stone chest
Under the farmers’ boots
Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Touchstone Reading Group Guide
I
Mules, everybody agreed, were more sure-footed, so Isabella of Spain rode on a mule, her heavily pregnant body wrapped in a rain-repellent leather cloak, on her head a hood of the same material, her feet encased in a pair of boots similar to those worn by foot soldiers. The winter rains had set in and the roads which through the long hot summer had been ankle-deep in dust were now over hoof deep in mud, sticky as glue. Every time the mule put foot down there was a squelching sound, every time it lifted one there was a plop. Sometimes, under the smooth shining surface of the mud, there was a dip; then the mule stumbled, recovered itself with a jerk and a heave and plodded on: sometimes, under a mere skim of mud there was a boulder, thrown in to fill a hole visible last summer; striking one of these the mule stumbled again; recovered and plodded on. Each time this happened Isabella felt like a woman holding a basketful of eggs riding on a seesaw; after each jolt the question, All right? All well? Yes, thanks be to God, no harm done. The child, so soon to be born, would be her tenth; four were alive, thank God; few mothers had been so blessed; but every stumble and jolt she knew a small fear—not here, please God, not in the open, in the rain. Alcalá de Henares is not so far away; the road is bad, the going slow, but please, I beseech thee, let me arrive, settle into the place prepared for me and there let the child be born.
She was Queen; she could have ridden comfortably in a litter slung between two mules, or carried on the shoulders of willing men, but to do so would have been a concession to female weakness, and she scorned it. God had called her to take a man’s place in the world, and handicapped as she had been by her female body, she had taken that place, filled it adequately, done as much as, or more than, any man could have done—all by the help of God. She must not weaken now.
In everything Isabella could see the hand of God, working slowly, sometimes obscurely but to a sure end. Because there was no male heir she had become Queen of Castile, and she had married Ferdinand of Aragon, thus uniting the two kingdoms and making them strong enough to attempt to drive out the Moors who had occupied the south of the Iberian peninsula for six hundred years. She did not deceive herself; Ferdinand might look upon the campaign, now in its fifth year, as a means to increase his own power; for her it was a Crusade, Christian against infidel, as urgent and important as any Crusade waged centuries earlier to free the Holy Land. For Isabella, Spain was holy land and to wage the war of freedom she had ridden, slept, eaten, suffered and endured alongside her army, showing fortitude in the face of hardship and in defeat a certain grim cheerfulness which communicated itself to the men.
The army, with one of its hardest and most successful campaigns behind it, was moving into winter quarters, making on this drear day for the bleak upland town of Alcalá de Henares, where there was a palace of a sort. It was a comfortless place, ancient, ill-heated and in poor repair; its owner, the Bishop of Toledo, used it only once a year when he made his visitation, and he took good care that this should be neither in winter nor in summer, but in late spring or early autumn when, for a brief period the weather was tolerable. He was always preceded by a baggage train, laden with hangings and cushions and soft, feather bedding, silverware and little luxuries in the way of food. The Queen of Castile could have taken similar precautions, but she never did. The horses, mules and donkeys in her train were laden enough without carting a lot of useless gear from place to place. Even her personal luggage was kept to the minimum; with her always were her suit of armor, her riding clothes, three changes of linen and two dresses, one plain and simple made of Flemish cloth, the other very fine, a rich reddish purple silk, so boned and padded and embroidered that it was almost as stiff as armor. Both were old; she had other things to do with her money than to buy fripperies. Yet she was an elegant woman, with narrow feet and delicate hands, white and well kept; her hair, once golden, now silver-gilt, was washed every other Monday, even when, as often happened, Monday had seen fighting renewed. She had a fastidious nose and in her youth had used and liked a perfume distilled from roses; but the trick of making it was a secret, brought to Spain by the Moors when they came out of the east and as soon as she knew her destiny she had abandoned its use, making do with the simpler preparation made from crushed lavender, native to Spain.
On this day her few clothes, her few toilet necessities were all contained in a brassbound hide box, which also held everything that a baby might need. The enforced parsimony was evident there, too. For the new baby nothing new. The baby clothes had served many times already; for Isabella, Juan, Joanna and Maria and babies who had died young; well washed and bleached by the summer sun in the south, they would serve again for the child who would, God willing, be born in the Bishop’s palace at Alcalá de Henares. Not in the rain and the mud, the birth precipitated by a fall. Isabella hoped for another son. The one she had already, Juan, had survived the danger period of infancy and first youth and was now seven years old, healthy, intelligent, charming, God be thanked; but he was only one life, only one heir; life was so full of threats; another boy would be a kind of security; and if this child were a boy, and if Juan lived, the younger one could become a cleric—perhaps even Pope.
Jerking along, in increasing discomfort, the leather cloak growing heavier and then porous so that finally the wetness seeped through to her skin, Isabella cheered herself with thoughts of the future. Juan King of a united Spain, with not a Moor left alive in it; Carlos—for so she would name this child, should it be a boy, on the Papal throne, and all her daughters married to kings, linking Spain, so long isolated, to Europe, carrying their Spanish piety and good manners with them.
To her second son, if God so favored her, she would say, “You were almost born in a saddle.” She would not say that if this child were a girl. She had learned from a long, hard experience what turns of speech appealed to men and what to women. She had been compelled to speak both languages and could switch from one to the other without conscious thought. When her husband, Ferdinand, who had been at the rear of the long train, urging on the laggards, brought his horse alongside her mule and asked how she did, she said: “Mules are somewhat overrated; but at least I am still in one piece.”
He laughed. A woman would have been more sympathetic, would have said things like “Poor lady!” or “How courageous you are, madam.” Weakening words. The sort that she had resisted for years.
Ferdinand said, “Not long now. That fellow who broke his ankle and was heaved up on top of one of the baggage wagons just told me that he could see the roofs. Then the road dipped and he lost sight of them again, but in less than an hour we should be there.”
They were there in less than an hour. The Bishop’s palace was as stark, as bare as she remembered it; but it was a suitable place for the birth of a child who, if a boy, would be obliged to subjugate the flesh, at least for a time, and if a girl would be the fourth daughter, with all the really advantageous marriages made before it was her turn, and might become a nun.
Freed of the mule’s movement and relieved of her sodden clothes and heavy boots, the Queen felt better and derided herself for her fears of a somewhat premature delivery. She proceeded in her usual, orderly way, moving slowly but purposely. First a visit to the little cha
The Bishop’s palace, like every other place where Isabella had stayed in the last four years, was virtually a barracks, only a few private rooms reserved for the Royal Family and its immediate entourage; but even so, and with every outbuilding brought into service, it was still necessary to find outside billets for a great number of soldiers, and a senior officer had been sent on ahead to make arrangements. The Queen knew how ordinary people felt about having soldiers thrust upon them, but it was a necessity in winter and it was the turn of the people up here in the northwest to assume their part of the burden; the towns and villages to the south, near the fighting front, had stripped themselves to keep the army fed during spring and summer; that was what made these long winter journeys an essential part of the year’s routine. Isabella had done her best to instill a crusading spirit into her army; men were forbidden to loot or to meddle with respectable females; they knew that their Queen disapproved of drunkenness and of the use of foul language. On the whole her rules and her wishes were regarded, but there were exceptions which distressed her less than might have been supposed; it was an army of men, not of monks that she had gathered and she was shrewd enough to realize that the men who sometimes broke rules were not necessarily the worst soldiers.
“Every man has a roof over his head?” she asked.
“Yes, your Grace.” The officer added—for unless the queen was in childbed tomorrow, she would be out and about, inspecting and criticizing, and he did not want his efforts underrated: “Of a sort. It was not easy. Since last year a dozen houses at least have become untenanted and have fallen into total disrepair; and at the lower end of the town there is a sickness.”
“Plague?” Isabella asked sharply, prepared to move on tomorrow if this were so. Of all diseases the plague was most to be dreaded; even the bodies of the dead emitted a fatal contagion.
“No, madam. I was not myself sure, but the surgeon-in-chief whom I consulted as soon as he arrived, assures me that it is not. The sick are fevered, restless and raving, but they show no sign of plague. I ordered the area to be cordoned off and placed out of bounds. It contains several wine shops and…other places.”
“You did well,” she said. She knew what he meant by other places. Again regrettable, but what could one do? Take an ordinary man away from his family, deprive him of most of life’s comfort, expose him to the constant danger of death, and could you blame him for snatching at a passing pleasure? You could not. Nor were the women themselves, the rather pathetic camp followers or the homebound ones who welcomed an army’s arrival in their town, much to be blamed. They were so poor. The poverty of her people was a matter of great concern to Isabella; she could distinguish between poverty accepted as a way of life, for the glory of God, by certain religious orders, and poverty inflicted by circumstance. Over the greater part of Castile, and of Aragon, the soil was poor and the climate inclement, veering between too-cold winters and too-hot-and-dry summers. North of the Pyrénées was France, very fertile and rich, and farther north still England where green grass was plentiful all the year round and there were—it was said—more sheep than people. The wool of these sheep was shipped to Flanders where it was made into cloth, a saleable commodity. In this lucrative two-way trade Spain could take no part. It was a pity, but it was a situation which would not last forever. Next year, please God, the rich Moorish provinces would be restored to Spain; minerals, vineyards, orange and lemon groves…And at the very back of her mind there was another thought.
There was a Genoese sailor, a man called Christopher Columbus, wandering about the courts of Europe, searching for a patron who would fit out an expedition to enable him to prove his contention that the world was a globe, not a flat surface and that by travelling towards the west he could reach the rich, fabulous world of the Indies whence came by slow, expensive, overland route or by Portuguese caravel things like sugar and cloves and cinnamon and ginger and precious stones. It sounded a fantastic idea, but no more fantastic than that a woman should be Queen of Castile in her own right and called to wage the last Crusade. And win it. She meant to, if she lived. She visualized the last Moorish King driven out of Granada fleeing back to Africa, where the Moors belonged; she visualized herself just able to afford this westward voyage which might conceivably end in the East and bring the wealth of the Indies, where even kitchen utensils were—they said—made of silver and gold, under the control of Spain. To God nothing was impossible.
The matter of the soldiers’ comfort dealt with—not without reason they regarded her as The Mother, and so referred to her—she turned her attention to those to whom she was actually mother. They were, so far as the building and its amenities allowed, comfortably installed. There was the Infanta Isabella, fifteen years old, very solemn and, even Isabella admitted, pompous; an admirable girl in a way, but once she had so exasperated her mother that Isabella had said “You talk to me as though you were my mother-in-law!” The younger Isabella’s destiny was settled; she would be Queen of Portugal, and her solemnity, pomposity and complete lack of humor would make her a most excellent queen; she had been reared and educated for the position. Isabella the Queen of Castile had always been aware of her own faulty education—she had become Queen through the premature death of her stepbrother and been obliged to learn Latin, the language in which all legal and diplomatic matters were phrased, in a hurried three weeks. As a result she had paid particular attention to her children’s education.
Juan, as the heir, already had his own establishment, a separate little court for which Isabella had lain down the rules and which, even on journeys like this one, ran smoothly. All well, Isabella thought, and moved on to the more cramped quarters where her two younger daughters and their attendants were housed. Maria, the baby of the family until the new one came, was settling down to sleep, almost too drowsy to be aware of her mother’s presence; Joanna, who was six, was giving trouble; not for the first time. She had rejected her supper and now refused to go to bed.
Isabella endeavored to be an impartial mother and outwardly achieved this aim, but Joanna, so beautiful, so precocious and so strange, was her favorite daughter, almost as much loved as the only son. Deep concern and apprehension lay at the root of this preference. It was impossible for Isabella to look upon her second daughter and not remember that her own mother had been mad and had passed the last years of her life under restraint. But I am sane, she told herself whenever that memory struck; and then immediately she would think of things like left-handedness, stammering, a coloring of eyes or hair skipping one generation. To any of her other children, on this evening she would have administered a rebuke, an admonition; to Joanna she said:
“Come here and tell me what is the matter.”
She sat herself on a hard wooden stool and would have taken Joanna on to her lap—but she had no lap these days, instead she put her arm around the child and pulled her close, held her firmly, aware of vibrating tremor.
“We have all had a hard day,” she said in her calm, low voice. “It is unkind of you, Joanna, to make things more difficult.”
“I know. I am sorry.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“It is a bad place, Mother. Not a place to eat and sleep in. A place to go away from. Could we not go away? Now.”
“It is cold, and not very comfortable,” Isabella said. “But it is better than being out in the night and the rain. I think it is a good place, Joanna. I was very glad to arrive here. I shall eat my supper and go to my bed and be grateful to God for the food and the resting place. You should do the same. Come along now, eat just a little and then go to bed like my good, sensible little girl.”
