Icestorm

by Theresa Dahlheim

  All of them stared at her. She swallowed hard, and went on: “So I will not be seeing the ambassador again since I … since I will not be marrying the prince.”

  “Oh, Tabitha,” Marjorie whispered.

  “Did they say why?” Beatris asked, and it seemed like she was truly upset.

  “You must not think it was you,” Pamela said, taking hold of Tabitha’s hand and squeezing it. “Marriages are the hardest things to agree on, everyone says so.”

  Tabitha sighed. “I know. My father said it’s not over yet, and he will try again when I am older.” Talking about it was making her angry again, but she had to pretend to be sad instead. “Maybe they took one look at my portrait and—”

  “No!” Pamela protested. “It was not you.”

  “Negotiations like this break down all the time,” Beatris said, as if she was some sort of expert on it. “Your father is going to wait for the right moment, when the Telgards need something from us.”

  “Yes,” Tabitha agreed, but too sadly for anyone to think she meant it. She sensed Pamela and Beatris looking at each other, maybe wondering what to say next, and she wished they would be like Marjorie and Jenevive and say nothing. She did not want anyone to try to make her feel better. Her puppy was dead, and with it, her dreams of becoming a queen. She had every right to feel upset and rejected.

  Beatris hesitantly stood up. “I should … I will go tell Aime about … about the burial. Do you need anything? More tea, or those little vanilla cakes you like?”

  Tabitha shook her head. “No. Thank you.”

  Beatris took Pamela with her, and Jenevive trailed after them, but Marjorie stayed, and Tabitha was grateful. She did not want to be alone with her loss and her guilt. Marjorie refilled Tabitha’s teacup and sat with her in silence.

  Chapter 2

  Tabitha was annoyed with how quickly the others abandoned the tapestry as soon as Lise entered the sitting room with a bunch of letters. “Careful!” she wailed, smoothing out the fabric that had been caught up in Pamela’s foot. But Pamela did not apologize as she hurried to join Beatris, Marjorie, and Jenevive hovering around Lise. Tabitha pushed her braid over her shoulder and sat back on her heels to review their embroidery.

  Mistress Sabine had gotten up from the table and now paced the length of the tapestry laid out on the sitting room carpet. She tapped a finger against her nearly nonexistent chin. “It’s coming along very nicely, Tabitha.”

  “No, it’s not.” Tabitha pointed to Jenevive’s work, a row of yellow wheat stalks. “Look.”

  “Well ...”

  “She drew the pattern for them. She should be able to follow her own lines.”

  “Such repetitive stitching is not easy to do neatly.”

  “I did the trees, and those are repetitive, but my stitching is much finer. I should just do the whole thing myself.”

  Mistress Sabine was quiet for a moment, but then gave a sympathetic nod. “It can be difficult when you have an idea in your head, but you can’t make it come to life.”

  “I can. They can’t.”

  “Don’t be unkind.”

  “Mistress Sabine?” Lise lifted her voice as she took another step inside and curtseyed. “The castellan wants to speak with you about tonight’s entertainment.”

  “Of course, Lise. Ladies, I will be back soon.” The governess followed the maid out the door. As it closed behind them, the other girls sat on their cots and cracked the seals on their letters while Tabitha searched through the floss basket.

  “My aunt says the weather is better where she is,” Beatris reported ruefully. “Cold, but bright.”

  “That must be nice,” Pamela sighed, echoing what they were all thinking. Here in Betaul, they rarely saw the sun anymore. For the second year in a row, the summer had been wet and dreary and the autumn had been wetter and drearier. Now, only a month into winter, the endless rain and snow and sleet had become utterly maddening.

  “Are your letters from home, Pamela?” Beatris asked as Tabitha laid out two colors of floss on the floor to compare them.

  “Yes,” Pamela said, then looked at Marjorie. “Which means that Alain is back.”

  Tabitha bit her lip to cover the little jump in her breathing at this news. Alain, now Sir Alain since he had been knighted this past summer, was Lord Daniel’s aide and courier. He had first come to her notice in the spring, and he had been invading her thoughts ever since. Well over a month ago, he had left Betaul to spend the winter Solstice visiting Lord Daniel’s holdings, which adjoined Pamela’s father’s. It should have been more than enough time for Tabitha to completely forget about him, but he was not easy to forget.

  She looked at Marjorie to see if she was blushing. But Marjorie was sitting on her own cot on the other side of the room with her head bent so far over her letter that it was impossible to see her cheeks past her veil.

  “It’s hopeless, Pamela,” Beatris said from her cot where she was breaking the seal on another letter. “He will never work up the nerve to talk to her. Has he ever spoken to you, Marjorie?”

  Marjorie did not answer, and Tabitha made a scoffing noise. “He is much too far beneath her.” She dropped the blue-green floss back into the basket and started to unwind the green-blue floss instead.

  Beatris lifted her eyebrows suggestively in Marjorie’s direction. “Well, a face like his would make even a queen take notice.”

  Marjorie still said nothing. Tabitha was about to call her name, just to get her to look up, when Jenevive made a very strange noise. Her hand was covering her mouth, and she was wincing as if she was about to cry. Beatris hurried to Jenevive’s cot and put her arm around her. “Did something happen? Who is it from?”

  Jenevive gave the letter to Beatris and pressed her clutched hands against her mouth. Beatris’s eyes tracked over the letter, and Tabitha waited patiently. “What does it say?” she finally asked, slowly and clearly, to make sure Beatris could not ignore her.

  “It’s from Catherine,” Beatris murmured, still reading. They had all met Jenevive’s cousin when she had visited Betaul on her way to court last autumn. “The wedding night … he … he hurt her. A lot.”

  Weddings were uppermost in their minds these days, since Beatris and Marjorie had turned fifteen this past year and Tabitha’s own fifteenth birthday was in one more month. They had discussed the gowns, the feasts, and the dances, but Tabitha had not let them talk about husbands. The only husband worth having was the Telgard prince, but he was all but lost to her.

  “He hurt her?” Pamela was asking, her eyes huge. “How? I mean …” She trailed off. Even she knew how. Tabitha, too, had heard the whispers, rumors, and snatches of bawdy songs, and Jenevive’s and Beatris’s faces seemed to confirm the worst of them.

  “She says here,” Beatris read, “that she wants Jenevive to know the truth that no one would tell her. She says that all of us should read this.” Beatris looked around, but no one protested. She looked back at Jenevive, and Jenevive nodded. She had blinked her tears away, but still held her hands against her mouth, and Beatris sat looking at her for a long time

  Tabitha started to get up so she could take the letter from Beatris and read it herself, but then Beatris turned back to it. “It says: ‘My mother said that I had to …’” She stopped. “Jen, her spelling is bad, what …” After Jenevive murmured something, Beatris nodded. “‘My mother said that I had to endure the bedding like a good wife even if I got no …’ What’s this … oh. ‘Even if I got no pleasure. She did not tell me that it would hurt worse than anything. It felt like he was …’” Beatris stopped again, but Tabitha did not think she was having trouble with the poor spelling this time, because she swallowed hard before continuing: “‘It felt like he was splitting me in half with an axe. I cried but he said I would get used to it and it would not hurt then. I was bleeding but he said the blood makes it …’ Something ‘better.’ Slide better?” Beatris glanced at Jenevive, but Jenevive did not react, staring ahead at nothing. Beatris look
ed back at the letter. “‘It was a very long time before he stopped and fell asleep. There was more blood on the bedsheets than any moon blood I have ever had. I went to the … the privy closet, and it hurt so much to make water that it made me cry again. I stayed in the privy closet until morning when he left. I told my mother how much it hurt but she said the same thing he said, that I would get used to it. Right now it is a whole day later and it still hurts like …’” Beatris blinked several times and took a deep breath. “‘It still hurts like fire. If he does it again tonight I think I might die. I am writing letters to all the girls I know so that you all know the truth that no one told me. All girls need to know what really happens.’”

  No one said anything for a long time. Tabitha kept coiling and uncoiling the green-blue floss between her fingers and wished she had not let Beatris speak those awful words aloud. Splitting me in half with an axe. A nobly-born girl would only say such a terrible thing if it was the absolute truth.

  My prince would not hurt me. But on the heels of that wishful thought came the hard realization. Of course he would. This is what happens.

  “Do you think,” Pamela said, and they all looked at her. “I mean, do you think it was like, like moon cramps? Those hurt a lot.”

  “If it was like that, she would have said so,” Tabitha retorted. “She would not have said ‘splitting me in half with an axe’!”

  No one could answer that. Jenevive dropped her hands into her lap and murmured something. Beatris murmured back, and Jenevive said loudly, “No. I am not getting married. Ever.”

  “As if you have a choice,” Tabitha said.

  “I don’t care what my parents say. I don’t care what anyone says.”

  “And of course they will let you do whatever you want,” Tabitha said sarcastically, because Jenevive’s marriage was nearly as important to her family as Tabitha’s was to hers.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Beatris told Jenevive.

  “What do you know about it?” Tabitha snapped at her. “It’s different for you, for all the rest of you!” She turned to look at Pamela. “You are the youngest, and both your brothers and your sister made good marriages, so you don’t have to marry Lord Daniel if you don’t want to. If you make a big fuss about it, no one will force you. And Marjorie—” She turned to look over her shoulder. “Has your father arranged anything for you yet?”

  Marjorie looked like Tabitha had punched her in the stomach. “No,” she managed.

  “See? You are the youngest too, he will not make you get married. And you—” Tabitha looked at Beatris now. “Your family is nothing and your face is nothing, so if you stay quiet about it, no one will even ask you!”

  Beatris lowered her eyebrows, which met in the middle and made her look even more homely, as Pamela hotly defended her: “Beatris is pretty!”

  “She is not, and she knows it.”

  “Maybe I do,” Beatris said coldly. “But my family is not nothing, Lady Betaul.”

  No one answered that, but Tabitha’s point had been clearly made. She bent over the tapestry and started ripping the stitches out of Jenevive’s wheat stalks.

  Eventually Pamela broke the silence. “We can write back to Catherine,” she said softly. “She can tell us if …”

  “If what?” Tabitha said, not looking up. “If it still hurts to make water?”

  “Stop it,” Beatris muttered.

  “I was thinking,” Pamela went on hurriedly, “that maybe if you took some fennel before your wedding night, it would help it not to hurt. I mean, I take it for cramps and it helps sometimes.”

  “It is not like cramps,” Tabitha reminded her. “It is splitting you in half with an axe.”

  “We heard it the first time,” Beatris snapped.

  “Catherine should have gotten really drunk at the wedding feast,” Jenevive said. “Then she would have forgotten the whole thing.”

  Tabitha stuck the needle hard into the tapestry. What she really wanted to do was crumple it and throw it into the fire.

  “Don’t blame Catherine,” Beatris said. “Her husband did not need to be so cruel.”

  “Was it cruel?” Jenevive challenged. “Or is it just what happens?”

  Tabitha nodded in agreement, because there was no use hiding from the truth, but Beatris shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t think so,” Tabitha repeated in a high, babyish voice.

  “Obviously I don’t know,” Beatris said waspishly, “but men don’t kiss the same, so maybe they don’t bed the same.”

  That was unfair. Beatris was rubbing it in Tabitha’s face that she had gotten kissed before, that even she had sneaked into a corner or two, but Tabitha never had. Tabitha stared back at Beatris and tried to think of something vicious enough to say, but then Pamela spoke up. “Right! They don’t. Remember that song? The one with the line, ‘A secret light shone in her eyes, a secret smile curved up her lips’. It’s about a bride after her wedding night.”

  “It’s a song.” Jenevive heaped scorn on the word.

  “And kissing is just kissing,” Tabitha reminded them. “Catherine said she liked her husband, before. Remember her other letters? She said she liked kissing him.”

  “Her mother is right,” Jenevive said. “She just has to get used to it. We are all just supposed to get used to everything. Cramps with our moon blood. Beddings like rapes. Morning sickness with pregnancy. Then finally we die in childbirth.”

  “Jenevive!” Beatris dropped her arm from around Jenevive’s shoulders. “You know that Tabitha’s lady mother died in childbirth. It’s not a joke.”

  But Tabitha was not thinking about the mother she had never met. If Nan was still alive, would she tell me the truth? Nan had warned her about the dangers of ghosts, which were not real. Would she have warned Tabitha about the dangers of men, who were real?

  “You think I was making a joke?” Jenevive waved her arm to include them all. “How many of us here will die in childbirth? One of us, at least. You can count on it, that one of us sitting here will eventually die in childbirth. But don’t worry! We will get used to it.”

  Pamela was biting her lip, and Marjorie was staring at the floor. Beatris started to say something, but Tabitha interrupted her. “Stop it. Stop talking as if you know better. You don’t know anything.”

  “You don’t either,” Beatris shot back. “We hear all sorts of things, but how do we know if any of it is true?”

  Jenevive snatched up Catherine’s letter and shook it at Beatris. “Catherine knows. She wrote this to make sure we knew too. Are you calling her a liar?”

  “Of course not! But not all men are like her husband!”

  “I will not take that chance,” Jenevive declared. “I will not get married.”

  Tabitha could not keep back a snort of disgust. “I dare you to go downstairs right now and tell your uncle that.”

  “Cousin,” Jenevive insisted, as if that made any difference in his ability to decide her fate.

  “Then tell your cousin that you refuse to get married. I dare you.” This cousin, the younger brother of the Count of Maisenblere, had arrived only a few days ago to check on Jenevive. Really, to check on Tabitha’s father’s fostering of Jenevive. He was a fat, loud man, and Tabitha had not yet seen Jenevive meet his eyes when forced to talk to him.

  Jenevive’s voice dropped a little as she looked down at the crumpled letter. “I will join a cloister if I have to.”

  “They will never let you do that,” Tabitha said, at the same time Pamela said, “But what if you don’t have a true calling?”

  “A true calling?” Jenevive stared at Pamela in disbelief. “Who cares?”

  Pamela bit her lip at the rebuke. Beatris glanced at her, then held up her hands at all of them. “Please, no more arguing.” It was the voice she used when she was trying to sound mature. “We are all upset, and—”

  “Yes,” Jenevive hissed. “We are most certainly upset.” She stormed out of the sitting room and slamme
d the heavy door behind her.

  “They will never let her join a cloister,” Tabitha said. No one answered. She bent over the tapestry and ripped out more of Jenevive’s stitches. They were so loose and scraggly they were nearly falling out anyway.

  She did not get very far before the door opened and Mistress Sabine came in, with Jenevive trailing behind her, ruddy-faced and sullen. “I can’t leave you girls for a moment without you bickering and sniping! Jenevive will not tell me what happened, but someone will.” She looked at them each in turn, and when she came to Tabitha and the tapestry, she made an angry noise. “Tabitha! What a hateful thing to do! She worked very hard on those stitches!”

  Tabitha sat back from the tapestry and stabbed the needle into it, not looking at Mistress Sabine. Mistress Sabine thrust Jenevive forward. “Apologize to Jenevive. Now!”

  “Forgive me,” Tabitha murmured. Jenevive nodded and sat down on her cot.

  “Fold up the tapestry and put it away,” Mistress Sabine said with a stern frown. “That is enough for today, and maybe for a while. Everyone is to find something to do by herself until it’s time to get ready for tonight. Tabitha, go to your bedchamber. Pamela, come to the table. Mistress Evonne wants me to review your botany planner with you.”

  Tabitha left the tapestry on the floor. She wanted to slam her door, but it stuck itself in the frame with a squeak when she tried. She kicked at it, and it hurt her toe through her slipper.

  She did not want to find something to do by herself. She wanted to pick a fight with Beatris or yell at the servants. Or maybe go to Telgardia and ask the prince if he really would rape her like Catherine’s husband and maybe every other husband.

  Except it’s not rape if it’s my husband.

  She shivered. It was so cold in here. She threw two more sticks into her fireplace, sending sparks up the chimney, and then went to her wardrobe for a shawl. Instead, she pulled out the gown made from the fabric that the Telgard ambassador had given her. It was too small now, and the lazy seamstresses had not gotten around to altering it yet. But maybe that was good. Maybe she did not want it anymore.