The Queen’s Witness

Chapter One: The Road to Burgos

I was seventeen the autumn the King of Castile died, and I did not weep for him, because I had never seen his face.

We heard the news at an inn outside Lerma, where my father and I had stopped to rest the mules. A carter came in shaking rain from his hat and announced it the way a man announces weather: the Archduke Felipe, King of Castile, husband of Queen Juana, dead at Burgos of a fever caught after playing at ball and drinking cold water. Six days sick, then gone. Twenty-eight years old.

The room went quiet, then loud. Men began arguing at once about what it meant, and none of them said anything about a young man dying badly in a strange country.

My father set down his cup and looked at me with an expression I had never seen on him before. Not grief. Calculation, quick and greedy, the way a farmer looks at a field after a flood, deciding what can still be sown.

"Blanca," he said, "God has been kinder to us than I dared ask."

"A king is dead, Father."

"A king is dead and a queen is alone." He leaned across the table. "A queen alone needs women about her. Women she chooses. Women she comes to lean upon. Do you understand what I am telling you?"

I understood. I had been understanding it for three weeks, since the letter came from Burgos with the seal of the Marquis of Denia's steward, confirming that a place had been found for Blanca Vergara among the ladies of the queen's chamber. My father had spent eleven months and most of what remained of our credit purchasing that letter — not with money, for we had almost none, but with the slow currency of old favours, cousins, and debts owed to a grandfather forty years dead.

We were the Vergaras of Villaseca, four leagues from Toledo. We had a house with a tower that no longer had a roof, an orchard of eighty-six trees, a walnut grove, six tenant families, a name in the second rank of the second rank, and debts to a wool merchant in Toledo that my father discussed only after wine. My mother had died when I was nine. My sister Luisa was twelve and clever and would need a dowry, and there was no dowry, and there would be none unless something changed.

"Make yourself necessary," my father said. He said it perhaps forty times on that journey. "Beauty is common at court. Wit is common. Blood is common. Necessity is rare. Find what she needs and be the one who brings it, every day, without being asked. Do that and in five years I will be writing to you for favours instead of the other way about."

I promised. I meant it. I was seventeen and I had read a great many books about court life, all of them wrong.

We came into Burgos on the second of October in rain that had not stopped in four days. I had expected — I am embarrassed now to write what I had expected. Trumpets, I suppose. Order. Rows of grave men in black velvet standing in the correct places. What I found was a city with too many people in it, and a road so churned by hooves and cart-wheels that the mud came to the mule's knees, and a smell of wet wool and dung and cold ash.

The court of Castile in those years was not a place. It was a procession that sometimes stopped. Wherever the queen slept, the court was; and around that room were arranged, like rings on water, the households and the chanceries and the muleteers and the cooks and the four hundred hangers-on who ate the kingdom's bread. The Archduke's death had struck the whole apparatus like a stone thrown into a wheel. Nobody knew who gave orders. Everyone gave orders.

In one courtyard, Flemish gentlemen of the dead king's household were loading chests onto carts, quarrelling in a language I did not know, their faces the colour of curd. Some of them meant to ride for Flanders before the roads closed; some had already gone, taking plate with them. In another courtyard, Castilian grandees stood under an arcade with their retainers at their backs, twenty and thirty armed men to each lord, and they watched one another the way dogs watch across a yard.

And everywhere, in every doorway, men were saying a name. Not the queen's. Her father's.

Ferdinand. Ferdinand of Aragon. Ferdinand who was in Naples, Ferdinand who was coming, Ferdinand who would set it all right, Ferdinand who had never in his life set anything right except to his own profit. He was the queen's father and he had ruled Castile for thirty years beside his wife, the great Queen Isabella; and when Isabella died two years before, Castile had passed to her daughter Juana, and Ferdinand had gone back over the border to Aragon like a man put out of his own house. Now Juana's husband was dead. Now she was six months with child, twenty-six years old, and alone in a kingdom of armed men.

My father delivered me to the steward's clerk, kissed my forehead, told me to write, and rode out again the next morning because he could not afford to be fed at court. I watched him go from a window. He looked smaller from above, and older, and I loved him in that moment more helplessly than I ever had face to face.

Then a hand closed on my elbow.

"You are Blanca. God's teeth, you are tall. Come away from that window, you look like a girl waiting to be rescued, and there is nothing here more dangerous than looking like that."

Mencía Robles was my cousin on my mother's side, four years my elder, and she had been at court since she was twenty. I had met her twice in my life, both times at funerals. She was not beautiful and she had made herself striking instead: her gown was grey wool of a very fine weave, plain to the point of severity, and against it her hands and throat looked like carved ivory. She had a way of standing perfectly still while her eyes moved.

"Have you eaten? No. Nobody eats here on the first day, they are too frightened. Come."

She took me to a small room off the kitchens where a cook gave her bread and cold mutton without being asked, which I noted, because it was the first evidence I saw of what my father meant by necessity.

"Now," said Mencía, sitting opposite me with her chin in her hand. "Listen, because I will only be kind for an hour and then I shall be busy. There are three things you must learn before you sleep tonight, and if you learn them you may live to be thirty at court."

"Three things."

"First: everything you say will be repeated. Everything. To the wrong person, in the wrong order, at the worst moment. Speak as though the archbishop stands behind your chair, because he generally does."

"Which archbishop?"

"Fonseca. You will know him. He smiles." She tore the bread. "Second: the queen is not what they tell you in Toledo. She is also not what you will want her to be by Christmas. Serve her hands and her hair and her linen. Do not serve her heart. That is not a place where a girl like you can afford to keep an account."

I said nothing. I remember that I felt a small stubborn heat rise in me, and that I was careful to keep it out of my face, and that Mencía saw it anyway.

"Third," she said, more quietly. "Power is about to move. It is here now, in this house, in a widow's bedchamber. In a year it will be somewhere else — in the hands of an old man in Aragon with gout and forty years of practice. Your business, my business, the business of every soul under this roof, is to be standing where the power will be, and not where it was. Nothing else is politics. Everything else is poetry."

She let me finish the mutton. Then she stood and smoothed her skirt.

"You'll be presented tomorrow, if she will see anyone. Wear black. Say little. Don't stare at her hair."

"Her hair?"

"She has stopped letting it be dressed," Mencía said. "Since the twenty-fifth of September. Don't stare at it."

That night I slept on a pallet with three other women in a room over a stable, and lay awake listening to the rain and to the sound of the Flemings' carts still loading in the dark, and to a man somewhere below singing a song in a language I did not know, and stopping halfway through.

Somewhere in that house, four rooms away, a coffin lay on a bier surrounded by candles, and a woman sat beside it who was Queen of Castile and León, of Granada, of Toledo, of Galicia, of Seville, and who could not, that night, have named one man in the building who would obey her without first considering his own advantage.

I was going to be that woman's servant. I thought it a step upward for my family.

It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.