The Creation Of Eve (14 page)

Like Spain, France sits Upon a religious powder keg. But Unlike the Spanish empire, where war threatens to break out only in its far-flung holdings, the Unrest between the Roman Catholics and the Protestant Huguenots seethes within the very heart of France. When alive, King Felipe's father, the Emperor Charles, made it clear to his son that he believed allowing dissenters to hold their services within his realms only spread their discontentment. The Emperor thought it kinder to squelch Protestant dissention before it got started than to fight a full-fledged civil war. Thus the dirty work of the Inquisition that commenced Under King Felipe's great-grandparents the Catholic monarchs Isabel and Fernando, to root out Moors and Jews, has now made its chief quarry Protestant heretics. Yet the French Queen Mother Catherine allows both the Inquisition to secretly prosecute Protestants
and
for Protestants to hold their services. The result is murder and mayhem and barely contained war. Thus Queen Catherine counted on her daughter's ability to pleasure the King into helping France should a full-fledged civil war erupt. And to date, My Lady has accomplished very little in this way.

The most recent of the French Queen Mother's missives to My Lady came two days ago. I was in my chambers, a small suite of rooms just below the Queen's on the second floor, boiling down rabbit skins to make glue for sizing the canvas for my self-portrait, when My Lady appeared at my door. The condesa, madame, and Her Majesty's other French and Spanish ladies were in tow.

Francesca dropped the sticks of wood she had been feeding into the fire and sank into a curtsey. "Don't," said the Queen, when I stopped stirring and hastened to join Francesca. "You are busy." She peered over my shoulder at the pot. "Is this part of preparing for a painting?"

"We could smell the stench Upstairs." The condesa's voice was muffled by her firmly applied pomander. "Her Majesty insisted Upon coming down to see what you were doing."

"I am making glue for sizing a canvas, Your Majesty." I glanced around at the pots scattered about the floor, at the canvas, stretched Upon the wood frame and flung Upon my bed, and at the stoppered flasks of cooked linseed oil on my toilet table. "I'm afraid it does smell most terrible."

"Most terrible indeed," said the condesa.

"You do right to make it," said the Queen. "I would like to know all the parts of the painting process, even the basest ones. That way I might appreciate a painting more. Go," she told the condesa. She waved at the other ladies. "All of you. You need not endure this stink."

"It is hardly right for a Queen--" the condesa began.

The sizing boiled Up, spilling over the sides of the cauldron and into the fire with malodorous effect.

Snapping out a few last admonishments, the condesa left, taking the other ladies with her. When they were gone, Her Majesty peeked into my cookpot, listening to my explanation of what was in the evil brew and why I was cooking it, then sank down Upon a bench with a handkerchief to her nose. She bade me to continue as she drew a letter from her bodice. She was poring over it, worrying the Great Pearl on its pendant as she read, as I took back the stirring stick I had given Francesca.

"Almost done,
signorina,
" Francesca murmured. She wiped her hands on her apron, which was spotless as usual.

I prodded the skins, immediately splashing some of the milky brew just below my apron onto my skirt. Already my overgown was spotted with food, though each night Francesca, clucking, brushes my clothes as if killing them. Through no fault of hers, both of my overgowns are irreparably stained.

With a loud sigh, the Queen dropped her letter in her lap. "How am I to catch the King's heart when he thinks I am just a child? My mother insists that I make more progress with him. As if I had a shred of control over anything he does!"

I stirred quietly, uncomfortable with being taken into her confidence. I did not need the condesa to tell me it was not appropriate for me to comment on my betters.

The Queen picked Up her letter and read on, her young face Unhappy. "She says that I must get him to turn away from his lovers. How does she know he has lovers? I do not know that he has lovers. Does he, dona Sofonisba?"

I recalled the warm gaze that bound him to his sister's lady at the running of the bulls. I glanced at Francesca. She had told me she had heard from the other serving women that dona Eufrasia de Guzman, Princess Juana's chief lady-in-waiting, was the King's lover before his marriage to the Queen, and that their affair still burned bright.

"I see your looks," cried the Queen. "I knew it--he does have a lover! Oh!"

"Is not the King in retreat for Lent, Your Majesty?" I asked cautiously. "In a monastery in Madrid?" I hoped Her Majesty had not heard tales like the ones Francesca told me about the secret improprieties carried on within the monasteries around that city, how men had assignations with women and even nuns in them. The King, it is said, indulges in these forbidden pleasures as much as anybody.

The Queen crossed her arms, the emeralds and rubies on her yellow sleeves rattling against each other. "I am not so easily fooled. Growing Up in my father's court, I always knew who ruled my father's heart, and it was not my mother."

Francesca cut me a look.

"I can face the truth, you know," the Queen said. "My mother was wed to my father just as I was married to the King, to seal an alliance--in Mother's case, between the Medici pope Clement and my grandfather Francois I. She was only fourteen, just like me, though my father was her age, not an old man like my husband."

"Your Majesty," I said, "forgive me for saying so, but His Majesty is hardly old."

She waved her letter in dismissal. "Father was fourteen, and he already had a mistress--Diane de Poitiers. Why would my husband not have one, with all his years to do so?"

"Your Majesty, excuse me, but you do not know this for certain."

"How well I know the signs from my parents' own arrangement. My father's polite treatment of my mother in public and his cold tolerance of her in private--it is happening to me now." She bit her nail, then snatched her hand away from her mouth. "Why won't the King touch me at night? He lies next to me Until he thinks I am asleep, then watches me as I pretend to slumber. Am I that wretched?"

I gazed at her heart-shaped face, illuminated by the shining yellow of her satin bodice. She looked so fresh and bright with the bloom of youth, yet so full of heartrending doubt. "Your Majesty," I said, my voice thick with conviction, "you are nothing but beautiful."

A girl's grin warmed her worried countenance. "I am?"

"Yes, Your Majesty. You are indeed."

Her smile fell. "Have you seen that diamond dona Eufrasia wears? Do you think I do not know what it means when jewels only a king could afford appear on one of the court ladies?"

I kept stirring the pot.

She lifted the Great Pearl from her bodice front. "See this? It is La Peregrina, the pearl they call the Wanderer--the biggest oval pearl in the world. It may be worn only by the Queen of Spain, not that the King's black-haired wench will care. But I care. I know who is Queen. And I hope each time the King sees this, he recalls who his Queen is, too."

I could feel Francesca's dark gaze boring into me. I had told her the story associated with the Pearl and Bloody Mary, and of the King's lack of regard for both.

"This sizing can cook on its own." I laid the stirring stick, still dripping, across the top of the pot. "Your Majesty, would you like to practice sketching? We need to work on hands. I must show you a copy of a drawing the great German maestro Durer did of hands clasped in prayer."

The Queen shuddered with a sigh. "Not that my mother's being Queen mattered one
soupcon
to my father. Against Mother's wishes, he made his mistress head of the Royal Nursery." She grimly noted my look of surprise. "That is correct--he had his mistress take care of the children he so coldly got Upon my mother. Could he have wounded my mother any more deeply?"

"Oh, My Lady."

"And I, without knowing it, served perfectly as an instrument of his torture. For I loved Diane de Poitiers. I admit it--I loved her deeply. I love her still. How can I help it? She was kind to me when no one else was, even though I was but a pale shadow of my cousin Mary Stuart. Madame Diane paid attention to me in spite of my own father's insistence that Mary be put above me, as Mary was to wed my brother when she grew older and become the Queen of France. To Father, I was nothing, but to madame Diane--she believed in me. It was she who insisted that I learn Latin, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. Oh, I may act silly before the King--he flusters me so!--but because of madame Diane, I know philosophy, literature, mathematics, and history. I suppose I am the only woman for a thousand miles who can quote Ovid:
'Hic ego qui iaceo tenerorum lusor amorum / Ingenio perii, Naso poeta, meo . . .'"

I picked at the glue on my skirt. " 'Here I lie, Naso the poet, playful writer of tender loves, perished by my own talent.' A very doleful self-epitaph, that."

The Queen looked at me in sUrprise. ". . . or am the only woman who knows which beasts of burden Hannibal took over the Alps in winter to win a surprise victory over Rome . . ."

"Elephants." I smiled. "
Pardon
, Your Majesty, I could not help myself. We were barely off the breast before my papa taught Us of Hannibal. He is Papa's ancestor--Papa is inordinately proud of it."

She raised her brows. ". . . or is familiar with all of Boccaccio's tales in
The Decameron . . ."

"All one hundred of them? Well done, My Lady. In Italian?"

" 'Umana cosa e aver compassione degli afflitti . . .' "

"'. . . and so compassion is especially demanded of those who have had need of comfort and have found it in others . . .' "

The Queen tucked in her chin and broke into laughter. "Dona Sofonisba, I had no idea! Wouldn't the condesa just burst to hear Us spouting our learning like men?"

"I have never Understood why women should not."

She clapped her hands in delight. "That is just what madame Diane Used to say! You do remind me of her, dona Sofonisba. Greatly. The King was right to give you to me."

I drew in a breath. Well, she was correct, wasn't she? No matter how well trained my brain, I will never be anything more than chattel to be owned--just as, now that I think on it, is she. Be a woman queen, lady, or servant, in this world of men, all women are the same--disposable, should we fall.

My Lady sighed. "You would have loved madame Diane. I wish that you could have met her. She called me her
petite chou-chou
and took me on visits to her palace of Chenonceau. We Used to float down the river Under Umbrellas, eating sugared almonds and reading Aesop's fables to each other in Latin."

"I am sorry, Your Majesty--has she left this world?"

She smiled ruefully. "Only Mother's. Mother chased her from court the moment Father was laid to rest. Mother owns Chenonceau now. She keeps her soothsayers there."

She got Up slowly. "How my love for madame Diane must have salted my mother's wounds. I Used to take madame's side against her, but why wouldn't I? My mother, so squat and harsh compared with the elegant madame, had little time for me, obsessed as she was with gaining my father's attention. So while Mother was scouring the world for soothsayers to portend Diane's downfall, and sorcerers to charm Father into her arms, her own daughter was running to the other woman. How I wished to be Diane, so calm, so beloved. And now here I am--as desperate as my mother."

I gazed at my glue-spattered apron. I wanted to help the Queen in her quest to win the King. But even if I had the slightest notion of how to succeed at love, who was I but a painting instructor, born of minor nobility?

The jewels on her yellow skirt clicked on the bench as she plopped down next to Francesca. "You two shall know the worst of it: I was terrible that first night when the King came to our wedding bed. I didn't know what to do with my hands. They lay at my side like two dead things Until he pushed inside me. Then I Used them to push him away." She covered her face. "He has left me alone since."

Gingerly, Francesca put her arm around the Queen. "Shhh. Shhh." She glared at me, demanding me to produce words of comfort.

"Show him that you want him," I blurted. "A man cannot resist a woman who wants him."

The Queen raised her head from Francesca's breast. "Do you think?"

The memory of Tiberio, of our night together, rushed into my mind, transporting me to the Maestro's Upper room, where the lamplight flickered in air thick with stone dust and desire. Carefully, tenderly, Tiberio was folding back my veil. He brought my mouth to his; our sweet kisses turned to fire. When I thought I should cry out with the agony of containment, he sat me on the edge of the table, where I watched, my lips throbbing from his kiss, as with shaking hands he lifted my skirt, pushed back my petticoats, then groaned, low and lost, at the sight of me.

Now I drew in a shuddering breath. "Let him feel you tremble, My Lady, and feel his trembling, too."

I felt Francesca's questioning gaze Upon my face. "
The Decameron,
" I said.

"Which tale?" said the Queen. "I remember nothing about trembling."

I would not look at Francesca. "My Lady, is not the shared vulnerability between husband and wife the essence that brings them together? At least--at least that is what I would guess."

The Queen sighed. "Felipe does not seem very vulnerable when he stares down at me in bed."

I stirred the thickening sizing. "Perhaps, then," I said quietly, "we can catch His Majesty's eye with your talent. Let Us work some more on drawing hands."

"Oh, what cares a man for talent!"

The Queen lolled back onto Francesca's breast. Francesca smoothed her hair, the murmur of her shushing in peasant Italian blending soothingly with the bubbling glue.