Sudden Death (2 page)

H
e felt the leather of the ball between the thumb, index, and middle fingers of his left hand. Once, twice, three times he bounced the ball on the pavement, spinning the racket handle in the grip of his right hand. For a moment he gauged the space of the court; his hangover made the midday sun seem unbearably bright. He took a deep breath: the tennis match that was about to begin was a contest of life and death.

Wiping the beads of sweat from his forehead, he rolled the ball again in the fingers of his left hand. It was a strange ball: very worn and much handled, a little smaller than usual, solid in a way that was recognizably French; it had a more hectic bounce than the balls filled with air that he was used to playing with in Spain. He glanced down and with his toe scraped the stripe of lime that marked the end of his side of the court. He would come down on his short leg just behind the line: this was the surprise factor that made him invincible with a sword, and perhaps—why not?—with a racket too.

He heard laughter from his opponent, who was waiting for the serve on the other side of the cord strung between them. One of the degenerates accompanying him had muttered
something in Italian. At least one of them was familiar: a man with a jutting nose, red beard, and sad eyes—the model for the tax-collector saint in
The Calling of Saint Matthew
, proud recent acquisition of the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Tossing the ball in the air, he shouted
Tenez!
and felt the catgut strings tighten as he lit into it with all his soul.

His opponent's eyes followed the ball as it flew toward the gallery roof. It struck at one of the corners. The Spaniard smiled: his first serve was lethal, untouchable. The Lombard had rested too easy, so sure was he that a lame man could be no match for him. In the quick, shrill voice with which Castilians pierce walls and minds, the poet remarked: Better a cripple than a bugger. On the other side of the court, no one laughed at his joke. But from his spot in the roofed gallery, the duke watched with the sly smile of a great rake.

In time, the duke, the poet's linesman, would become the Spanish statesman his title gave him the right to be, but by the autumn of 1599 he had done nothing but punish his body, sully the family name, worry his wife sick, and drive the king's counselors to distraction. He was a stout, brash man. He had a round face, an almost comically pointy nose, grapefruit-seed eyes that gave him a mocking aspect even when he was in earnest, short curly hair, and an unconvincing beard that made him look more of a fool than he was. He was watching the match in the same scornful, sardonic way he did everything, sitting in the arcade under the wooden roof on which the ball had to bounce for a serve to be considered good.

The Lombard took the center of the court behind the baseline. He waited in a crouch for the bounce of the Spaniard's
serve. The gang of layabouts with him preserved a respectful silence this time. The poet served again, and again he won the point. He had put the ball almost on his own side of the roof, so that it fell nearly dead for his opponent. The duke called out the score: Thirty–love, though what he said was “lof.” The Italians understood perfectly.

Gaining confidence, the Spaniard dried the palm of his right hand on his breeches. He turned the ball in his left. He was sweating enough to give it backspin without needing to spit on it. It wasn't the heat but the fever that afflicts those who have yet to recover from too much drink, landing them in a purgatory of shivers. He rolled his head from side to side, closed his eyes, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He squeezed the ball. It wasn't a normal ball; there was something irregular about it, as if it were more talisman than ball. This, it occurred to him, was why his serves were unstoppable. When he took his turn on the receiving side and the ball returned to the hands of its owner, he would have to take heed.

He gripped the racket and tossed the ball into the air.
Tenez!
He hit it so hard that for the fraction of a second before his lame leg came down again, the earth seemed to turn more slowly. The ball bounced capriciously on the roof of the gallery. The Lombard stretched for it. The Spaniard tried to kill the return dead but didn't manage it. The point continued: luckily for him, the ball struck one of the posts, and he was able to snag it on the bounce, driving it to the back of the court. It was a good save, but the maneuver took too long, and surprise was the only option he had for countering his opponent's experience on the
court. The Lombard found it simple to fling himself backward and hit a drive that the poet had no chance of returning.

Thirty–fifteen, cried the duke. The only responsible member of the Lombard's entourage was his linesman—a silent and prematurely aged professor of mathematics. He walked onto the court to mark a chalk cross on the spot where the ball had bounced. Before he made the mark he turned to look at the Spaniard's second. The duke shrugged in a show of indifference, agreeing that the cross was well-placed.

The poet didn't return immediately to position. While the professor took his time with the marking, he went over to the gallery. He's good, the duke said when the poet was near; you couldn't hit a ball like that on your best day. The poet filled his cheeks with air and blew it out with a snort. I can't lose, he said. You can't lose, confirmed the duke.

The next point was long and hard-fought. The Spaniard had his back to the wall, returning balls as if besieged by an army. Move in, move in, the duke cried every so often, but each time the poet managed to advance a little, his attacker pushed him back. At a desperate moment, he had to curb a drive by turning his back on his opponent—a showy play, but not very practical. The Lombard got to the ball close in and drilled the wall again. The ball struck very near the dedans—if it had gone in, the artist would automatically have won the game. Thirty all, cried the duke.
Parità,
the professor confirmed. The poet hit a serve that struck the edge of the gallery. Inside and unreachable. Forty–thirty, cried the duke. The mathematician nodded serenely.

The next point was contested with more cunning than strength: the poet didn't let himself be trapped, and he was finally able to force the artist to play a corner. On the first short ball he eliminated him. Game, called the duke.
Caccia per Spagna,
called the professor.

Tennis.
Game of a likeness to handball. One player defends and the other attacks, then vice versa. If there is a tie, a chase will decide the defender and the attacker in the third round, which is called sudden death. On the serve, the ball must strike a slant roof along one side of the court, from which it drops and is returned. Tennis is also called
pala
, after the racket with which the game is played, which is made entirely of wood with a little net of tight-strung gut in the center. It is gripped by the handle and with it the ball is struck with violence and force. Tennis is scored by points, but he who hits the dedans wins a round and he who wins three straight rounds or four rounds divided wins the match.

Diccionario de autoridades
, Madrid, 1726

J
ean Rombaud had the worst of all possible tasks on the morning of May 19, 1536: severing with a single blow the head of Anne Boleyn, Marquess of Pembroke and Queen of England, a young woman so beautiful she had turned the Strait of Dover into a veritable Atlantic. The notorious Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII, had brought Rombaud over from France for this express purpose. In a curt missive, Cromwell asked that he bring his sword—a piece of miraculously fine craftsmanship, forged of Toledo steel—because he would be performing a delicate execution.

Rombaud was neither beloved nor indispensable. Beautiful and immoral, he drifted coldly in the tight circle of very specialized workers who thrived in the Renaissance courts under the blind eye of ambassadors, ministers, and secretaries. His reserve, striking looks, and lack of scruples made him a natural for certain kinds of tasks known to all and spoken of by none, the dark operations that have always been unavoidable in the conduct of politics. He dressed with surprising good taste for someone with the job of killer angel: he wore expensive rings, breeches lavishly trimmed with brocade, and royal-blue velvet
shirts unsuited to a bastard, which he was in every sense of the word. Cheap gemstones were braided with gypsy panache into his gold-streaked chestnut hair, the gems filched from mistresses conquered with the various weapons over which God had granted him mastery. There was no knowing whether he was silent because he was clever or because he was a fool: his deep blue eyes, which turned down a little at the corners, never expressed compassion, but they never expressed any kind of animosity either. Also, Rombaud was French: for him, killing a queen of England was less sin than duty. Cromwell had called him to London because he believed this last quality made him a particularly hygienic choice for the job.

It wasn't King Henry who had arranged for his wife's death by Toledo sword rather than by the lowly blow of the ax that separated her brother's head from his neck on the accusation he had slept with the queen, a sin that earned him the record sum of three death sentences: for lèse-majesté, for adultery, and for degeneracy. No one—not even the notorious Thomas Cromwell—could bear for such a neck as hers to be hacked by the coarse blade of an ax.

On the morning of May 19, 1536, Anne Boleyn attended mass and made her confession. Before she was turned over to the constable of the Tower so her body could be cleaved apart, she asked that her ladies-in-waiting alone be given the privilege of cropping her heavy red braids and shaving her head. Most of the surviving portraits, including the sole copy of the only one reportedly painted from life—now part of Hever Castle's Tudor portrait collection—depict her as the owner of crimped and significant locks.

It seems that the royal bedchamber had a dampening effect on King Henry's libido, such a champion was he in extramarital affairs—and such an underperformer in his royal reproductive duties. No one knew this better than the marquess of Pembroke, who had managed to conceive by him after a single day in the country, while he was still married to his previous queen. They'd had a daughter as lovely as the marquess herself, for whom the monarch professed the thunderous affection associated with homicidal types. So Anne Boleyn approached the scaffold conscious of the statistical odds that her daughter, Elizabeth, would reach the throne, as indeed she ultimately did. Boleyn delivered herself into martyrdom with a show of calculated cheer. Among her last words, pronounced before the witnesses to her death, were: “I pray God save the King, and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never.”

What is it about nudity, in theory the great equalizer, that excites us? In their naked state, only monsters should turn us on, and yet it's the very sameness of our nakedness that we find arousing. The ladies who accompanied Boleyn in her trials had pulled back the collar of her gown to reveal her neck before escorting her to the scaffold. They had also removed her necklaces. They didn't feel that the removal of her veil and tresses marred her beauty in the least: she was just as lovely with a shorn head as she was with hair.

The bluish gleam of her neck quivering in anticipation of the blow triggered an emotional response in Rombaud. According to one witness, the mercenary was kind enough to make an effort to surprise the lady lying there bare from her shoulder
blades to the crown of her head. With his sword raised high and ready to come down upon the queen's neck, he asked carelessly: Has anyone seen my sword? The woman twitched her shoulders, perhaps relieved that some chance occurrence might spare her. She closed her eyes. Vertebrae, cartilage, the spongy tissue of trachea and pharynx: the sound of their parting was like the elegant pop of a cork liberated from a bottle of wine.

Jean Rombaud refused the bag of silver coins that Thomas Cromwell offered him when the job was done. Addressing the whole gathering, but looking into the eyes of the man who had schemed until he unseated the queen, he said that he had agreed to do what he had done to spare a lady the vile fate of dying under an executioner's blade. He made a sideways bow to the ministers and clergymen who had witnessed the beheading, and he returned straight to Dover at full gallop. Earlier that morning, the lord high constable had packed the categorical braids of the queen of England in his saddlebags.

Rombaud was an avid tennis player, and this seemed sufficient payment: the hair of those executed on the scaffold had special properties that caused it to trade at stratospheric prices among ball makers in Paris. A woman's hair was worth more, red hair more still, and a reigning queen's would command an unimaginable price.

Anne Boleyn's braids produced a total of four balls, which were by far the most luxurious sporting equipment of the Renaissance.