#sebastiandelorges

Este es un país empapado de sangre – this is a blood-soaked realm.  Clotted ink flew across the parchment, Maria’s sharpened quill scratching noisily against fresh vellum, consigned – in a secret, byzantine code – to the Queen of Spain, Mary Tudor. 

The King’s great houses, which he bankrupts in order to entertain his guests, are former monasteries, the nunneries and abbeys your Lady Mother promoted; the medicine gardens and old burials for nuns and abbots have been dug out for pretty flowers, and the farms which fed the poor in the hard of winter are leveled into parkland for His Majesty your brother’s voracious hunting.  England is now a superstitious realm, a country of devout Catholics who reject the Pope, and tear down shrines in the belief that it will yield them closer to God; a land of heathens who who crush marble statues and leave only the crumbling feet of saints and angels.  This realm is nothing as you left it, Reina, for there is nothing here but heresy and blood.  The King and the Boleyns go against the interest of their own country, against the interests of their own God, in their indomitable bids for power.  The stink of incense at court mingles, sickeningly, with the putrid rotting of traitors and martyrs spiked above the Thames.  

This, and more, Maria pens in a secret language known only to herself and the Queen: a flurry of strike-throughs and hieroglyphics and a cyrillic-like script, undecipherable to pale English eyes, passed to Mary by her mother, and to Catalina by the wily, cunning, implacable King Ferdinand of Aragon.

But at the sound of footfalls, Maria hastily, fluidly, snatches up her writings and folds them into the secret pleats in her gown, trimmed with lavish Spanish black-work; the schooled arrangement of her black eyes and mulberry-lips free of any traces of anxiety.  She rises to greet the guest at the threshold, clanking of metal and rich collars of estate, with practiced grace –– wreathing her face in a surprised, albeit charming grin, welcoming the Comte into Chelsea Place’s morning room with a swish and rustling sweep of her elaborate bell-sleeves.  ‘My lord Montgomery,’ Lady Medina announces, her voice thickly-accented.  ‘If you are not the most infamous man in Europe… Do you seek me out for respite from the English tongue, or have we more pressing matters to discuss and reacquaint over? I welcome either, but I will not stoop to the nonsensical language of our hosts.’