Iacobus (27 page)

“It wasn’t me who gave birth that day!” she said passionately. Her voice was very high-pitched, a sign that she was terribly upset. “It was Doña Elvira, my lady in waiting, the one that made you laugh with her wit.”

“Stop lying, mistress!” I bellowed, stopping and staring at her. “The boy who was abandoned by Gonçalvo at Ponç de Riba was wearing a jet and silver Jewish amulet around his neck in the shape of a fish that I gave you that night, do you remember? I had always worn it under my clothes from the time my mother had put it on me on the day of my birth until you insisted on having it because it had dug into your skin while you were with me. And what name did you ask for him to be baptized with on the note left next to him? Garcia, the same name you secretly called me because you had fallen in love with it after hearing a poem whose hero was named as such.”

Isabel, who had been looking at me with sad, wet eyes, suddenly calmed down. It seemed as though a cold gush of air had passed through her body, calming her mood and leaving ice crystals in her eyes. Her lips curved into a sneer that was meant to be a smile and she looked at me with contempt.

“So what? What does it matter that I gave birth to a son? What does one bastard more or less in this world matter? I wasn’t the first and I won’t be the last to bear an illegitimate child. The High Lady also had a child with a count before professing and nobody comes to remind her about it or throw it in her face.”

“You haven’t understood anything,” I muttered sadly.

“What do I have to understand? That you have come here with our son to take me away from here, that you want to start an old age family? That’s it …!” she spat in my face. “You want a wedding between a monk and a nun, with our bastard as the boy-Bishop!”

“That’s enough!” I shouted. “Enough ….”

“I don’t know why you’ve come here but whatever the reason is, you won’t be successful.”

“You weren’t like this before, Isabel,” I said sadly. “What happened to you? Why have you become so mean?”

“Mean?” she said surprised. “I’ve spent fifteen years of my life, the age I was when I arrived, locked inside these walls because of you.”

“Because of me?” I asked astonished.

“At least you were sent overseas. You traveled, you got to see the world and you studied but what about me? I was confined to the force of this monastery, with my only entertainment being prayers and my only music the liturgical chants. Life isn’t easy in here, sir … My time is split between gossiping, chatting and back-stabbing. The thing that entertains me the most is creating alliances and enemies whom I take advantage of when it suits me. Everyone else does the same, and life passes us by with these empty tasks. With the exception of the High Lady and her closest sisters, and the forty lay sisters who run the house, the rest of us don’t have much to do. And that’s how it is, day after day, month after month, year after year.”

“What are you complaining about? Your life wouldn’t have been any different outside these walls, Isabel. If our lineages had been on par and we had married, or if you had married someone else, what would you be doing differently?”

“I would have brought the best minstrels in the kingdom to listen to next to the fire during the winter nights,” she began to list, “I would have ridden horses through our land, like I used to ride my father’s horses, and I would have had many children with you to occupy my time. I would have read all the books, and I would have convinced you to do pilgrimages to Santiago, to Rome, and even,” she said with a laugh, “to Jerusalem. I would have run your house, your farm and your servants with a firm hand, and I would have waited for you every night in bed ….”

She stopped abruptly, with a lost look on her face, leaving her sentence in midair.

“We could not have foreseen that Doña Misol would discover us,” I muttered.

“No, we couldn’t have but the fact is that she did, and she separated us, and you didn’t do anything to stop her, and nine months later I bore a child who they took from me, and then they brought me here and here I remain, and I will be here until the day I die.”

“I couldn’t have fought against your father and mine, Isabel.”

“Really?” she asked with contempt. “Well, if I had have been you, I would have.”

“And what would you have done?” I wanted to know.

“I would have taken you away!” she said, without a shadow of a doubt. How could I explain to her that her father had flogged me to near death, that he had locked me up in the castle’s prison-like tower and kept me there, without bread or water, until lifeless and deprived, he had handed me over to the men of the Hospital? At the end of the day, our lives were past repair but there was one life that could be saved and that was the reason I was there.

“I should have taken you away, yes …,” I agreed sadly. “But I beg you to think of the fact that you had no option and neither did I. But the future they robbed us of, Isabel, we can give to our son.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked bitterly.

“Let me tell Garcia where he really comes from. Give him legitimacy letters as a Mendoza and I will give him those of Born. I didn’t want to tell him the truth without your approval. My father could adopt him if I ask but your lineage is superior than mine and, as you can image, I would like him to have it. You won’t be losing much (you and your brother are the last Mendozas and neither of you have legitimate offspring) and he would get his birthright. When I go back to Rhodes I will leave him in the care of my family to be knighted when he turns twenty. He is a wonderful boy, Isabel. He is good and intelligent like you and ever so handsome. In Paris, someone who knew your brother, Manrique, quickly made the association with your family. He is perhaps too tall for his age; sometimes I fear that his bones will come out of joint because he is so tall. And he already has stubble on his face.”

I couldn’t stop talking. I wanted Isabel to feel affection towards her son. But unfortunately, I wasn’t successful. Maybe if I had used a ruse, a ploy, I would have managed to do it but the thought hadn’t even occurred to me. I am a liar and a perjurer, that’s true but there are some things that my conscience won’t allow.

“No, Don Galceran, I do not accept your proposal. I repeat, in case you didn’t hear me clearly the first time, that in addition to hereditary issues that are, at this time, resolved and that would be seriously altered, I do not have any children.”

“But that’s not true!”

“Yes, it is,” she replied firmly. “They locked me in here when I was fifteen and I am dead: The dead cannot do anything for the living. The first and last day that I crossed the threshold of this monastery, I knew that it was all over for me and the only thing left to do was await my eminent death. I no longer exist, I stopped existing when I professed, I am no more than a shadow, a ghost. You don’t exist to me either, neither does that child out there ….” She looked at me expressionless. “Do whatever you want, tell him who his mother is if it makes you happy but tell him he can never know her. And now, goodbye, Don Galceran. The ninth hour is approaching and I must go to church.”

And as Isabel of Mendoza disappeared forever under the stone leaves and flowers that adorned the archway, the bells of the monastery rang, summoning the mistresses to prayer. And there remained the woman who had marked my life forever, as much as I had marked hers. Neither of us would have been the people we were then if we hadn’t known each other and fallen in love. In some way, her destiny and mine would remain intertwined, although from afar, and our blood would pass through the centuries together in Jonas’ descendants.

Jonas …! I suddenly remembered. I had to get back to the inn right away.

I left the monastery and was back at the Hospital of the King in no time. It was getting dark quickly and the crickets were chirping in the thicket. I found the boy playing in the courtyard in front of the building with a large, unfriendly-looking cat.

“They’re serving dinner, sire!” he shouted when he saw me. “Hurry, I’m hungry!”

“No Jonas, you come here!” I shouted in turn.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing! Come here!”

He ran towards me with his long legs and was next to me in a flash.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to take a good look at the monastery of mistresses there in front of you.”

“Does it hold a Templar clue to uncover?”

“No, there is no Templar clue.”

How could I begin to tell him …?

“So?” he urged. “I’m really hungry.”

“Look, Jonas, what I’m about to tell you isn’t easy, so I want you to pay attention and not say a word until I’ve finished.”

I told him everything, without pausing for breath. I started at the beginning, and finished at the end, without leaving anything out or holding out on anything, without apologizing but apologizing for his mother, and when I had finished — by which time it was dark —, I gave a long sigh and said nothing, exhausted. There was a long silence. The boy didn’t speak or move. Everything around us was in suspense: the air, the stars, the high shadows of the trees …. Everything was still and quiet until, all of a sudden, Jonas unexpectedly jumped up, and before I had time to react, he ran like a wild deer towards the city.

“Jonas!” I cried, running after him. “Hey! Stop, come back!”

But I could no longer see him. The boy had been swallowed up by the night.

I didn’t hear of him until the following afternoon, when one of the servants of Don Samuel, Sara’s relative, came looking for me to take me to the aljama. I knew from the start that he had gone to see the witch.

Don Samuel’s house was the largest in the street and looked different from the rest, and although it was not apparent from the outside, its interior held luxuries typical of a Muslim palace. A multitude of servants were bustling in the halls I walked through before reaching the white patio where, sitting on a stone parapet of a well, Sara was waiting for me. Seeing her didn’t calm my nerves but at least it soothed my heart.

“I didn’t want you to worry about your son, sire Galceran. Jonas is fine and is sleeping at the moment. He spent the night here and has spent the whole day locked in the room that Don Samual has given him on the top floor,” Sara explained when she saw me. I was very aware of how pale (her moles were more evident than ever, I noticed) and how tired she looked, as if she hadn’t slept for several days. “Jonas told me what happened.”

“So there is nothing left for me to add. Now you know everything.”

“Come and sit next to me,” said the witch, patting the stone and forcing a faint smile.

“Your son is angry … But the truth is that he is only angry with you.”

“With me?”

“He says that you have been with him for two years without telling him the truth, treating him as a common squire.”

“And how does he want me to treat him?” I asked, unfortunately imagining the answer.

“In his words,” and Sara deepened her voice to imitate Jonas. “‘In line with the dignity that my lineage deserves’.”

“That son of mine is an idiot!”

“He’s just a child …,” said Sara. “Just a fourteen year-old boy.”

“He is a man and a fool at that!” I exclaimed. I was outraged and angry! “Neither a Born nor a Mendoza: He’s an ass, just an ass! Is that the only thing that concerned him?” I asked furiously. “Is that why he ran like a hare in the middle of the night to come and find you?”

“You don’t understand at all, sire Galceran. Of course it’s not that triviality that’s hurting him but since he doesn’t know how else to express himself, he says the first thing that comes into his head. I suppose that over the last fourteen years, he must have wondered about his background many times, about who he was, who his parents were, whether he had any siblings … You know, normal things. Now, all of a sudden, he finds out that his father is a knight with noble lineage and that his mother is no less than a woman with royal blood. Him, poor novicius Garcia, abandoned at birth, son of Galceran of Born and Isabel of Mendoza!” Sara’s eyes were lined by heavy, dark circles and I noticed that her eyelids were slightly red and swollen, and even though she spoke with the same finesse as always, it was obvious that it was a great effort for her to string her words and thoughts together. “Add to the mix,” she continued, “that you, his father, have spent two years at his side without saying a word, when it was obvious that you had plans for his life, given that you took him out of the monastery, you took him with you to travel the world and it seems that you told him important secrets. You did everything but tell him the truth which for him, would have been the most important thing of all.”

“Have you seen Manrique of Mendoza?” I asked abruptly.

Sara said nothing. She ran the palm of her hand over the stone of the well and then, looking up at me, brushed it on her skirt.

“No.”

“No?”

“No. The servants at his house informed me that he, his wife Eleanor of Ojeda and his newborn baby were resting in their palace in Bascones, about seventy miles north of here.

“He has wed and has a legitimate child?” I stammered.

“That’s right. What do you think about that?”

There was no end to my amazement. I already knew that, following the dissolution of the Order of the Temple, some Aragones and Castilian frieres had opted to stay close to their old commandries instead of fleeing to Portugal, either as monks in nearby monasteries or as knights without a penny to their name who lived off the money given to them by my Order, or, more commonly, as the people they were before they professed, being totally free of their religious vows when the Order disseminated. So it was logical that freire Manrique, having regained his secular position, had wed, although it still surprised me to a certain point since it was obvious that all those previous Templars who were working as gatekeepers — guardians, advocates and holders of property, treasures and secrets —, were, in fact, being faithful to their Rule. Nevertheless, it was now easier for me to understand Isabel’s decision to not recognize her son and I understood those ‘hereditary issues that are, at this time, resolved and would be seriously altered’. Manrique had a legitimate heir and would in no way allow his sister to bring a bastard into the family.