by Patty Jansen
Nellie had dragged a little table into the room where she had lined up neatly folded towels and swaddling cloths, clean sheets, a jug of water, soap, and a little white gown.
The fire blazed in the hearth, even though it wasn’t particularly cold.
Helena came in, lugging the bare wooden birthing chair that Johanna had sometimes spotted her carting through town. She plonked it on the rug next to Greetje, who eyed it suspiciously. Bare and made of dark wood, and with no seat except a narrow ledge, it looked like a piece of torture apparatus.
“Sit there,” Helena said, after she put down her other things in the corner of the room. Johanna thought she spotted knitting needles and wool.
Greetje heaved herself up, wincing. “Do you want anything off?”
“Just the underthings. Leave the gown on.”
Greetje sat on the chair, moving gingerly. The only way to sit on it was with her legs spread and it was not very elegant. Helena knelt on the ground, feeling under Greetje’s gown.
Greetje gasped. She let her head hang forward, breathing deeply. She let out a soft moan.
Helena sat back and waited for the pain to pass.
Johanna involuntarily placed her hand on her own swollen stomach. It had tightened into a hard ball.
Greetje met her eyes. “I’m sorry. It really hurts.”
“No need to apologise,” Johanna said. She sat down in the single chair in the room. Her stomach had relaxed, but now she badly needed to use the outroom.
Helena asked a bit about when Greetje’s pains had started and how often they came.
Greetje had to stop talking a few times, but it seemed a quiet affair, not the frantic screaming that Johanna had heard other women talk about. If it was like this, she could handle it.
Helena climbed to her feet. “It’s early days. This will take a good while. I don’t know that it’s necessary for you to sit in the room. Maybe ask a maid to check in with me every now and then. Have breakfast, do your normal things. I will call when there is progress.”
Johanna nodded.
“Do you want me to bring some tea?” Nellie asked.
Helena said that she did, so Nellie left with Johanna. The cool breeze through the corridor made her shiver.
“Phew, it was really hot in that room,” Johanna said.
“It’s to keep out the bad air,” Nellie said. “We don’t want the little one to catch a cold.”
“Do you think you can still go out and get me those pieces of wood that we were talking about yesterday? The longer we leave it, the more irrelevant images the wood will store.”
“I’ll do that right after I’ve brought the tea.”
“Thank you, Nellie.”
“You go and have breakfast.”
Johanna didn’t feel like it was fair for her to eat while Greetje suffered, but on the other hand if she didn’t eat anything herself she would faint.
She found Father and Roald at the breakfast table talking about frogs. Or at least Roald was talking because Johanna had no doubt that Father had heard Roald’s story many times before.
She sat at the table and ate a few pieces of bread and jam while listening to Roald. He still wasn’t eating, so when there was a little pause in his story, she deposited half her bread on his plate.
“Eat it.”
He stared at her as if the fact that you were supposed to eat at the table was a new notion. “What about you? You have to eat.”
“I will eat later.” The few bites she’d taken of the bread sat uncomfortably in her stomach. Eating more was not going to help.
“I heard rumours that you didn’t go to church last night,” Father said.
“No, I was busy, forgot the time and was too late. I went to light a candle for Auguste LaFontaine.”
Father raised his eyebrows. “Different church?”
“It was the right thing to do. I’m not sure that I agree with how much influence the Church of the Triune wants to have over the royal family. I think we may need to step back a little.”
“That took you long enough to realise,” Father said.
Typical for Father, he kept changing his mind about why he disliked the church. It seemed he was determined to dislike them no matter what they did.
“The church did many good things for common people at a time that they needed it.” She thought of Greetje’s horrid story about murdered girls. “They’re still doing good things. They give people food.”
Father said, “They buy souls with every food package they hand out. They shouldn’t be feeding the people, the royal family should.”
“What with?” She spread her hands.
She was starting to feel really ill and excused herself from the table just in time. By the Triune, women had told her that this sickness was meant to let up once your stomach started growing. Her body clearly had different ideas.
After a quick rest, Johanna then had to go to the kitchen, where the cook gave her some cake and soup. Halfway through eating that, Nellie came in again.
The cook asked her, “Do you still want to boil the water? It’s been boiling for a long time now.”
“Put it aside. She’s going to be a fair while.”
“How long?” Johanna asked, feeling chilled.
“Helena says it’s very slow. No need to hurry to the guest room. I’m about to go out to run your errands, Mistress Johanna.”
Johanna sat at her desk but succeeded at nothing more than staring at the letters she had been writing before the King’s Council so clearly dismissed her. She thought of going to see the shepherd, but he could do nothing until the child had made its appearance. She went to have a look in the guest room. Greetje lay on her side in the bed, moaning, while Helena sat knitting. Nothing much happening there.
Johanna wandered to the guard station to ask how they were going with the investigation. Anton was on duty there and didn’t seem to have much to do.
He told her that Auguste LaFontaine’s body had been delivered to the family. The guards had spoken to the young man’s family and friends.
“There is something going on with those people that he’s friends with,” he said. “We’ll have to ask further when they’re more amenable to speaking to us, after the funeral.”
“Do you think they know more than they’re telling you?”
“Certainly, but they’re pretty protective of each other now. Their versions of events line up far too perfectly. We can loosen them up later. They have weaknesses we can explore. They’re a bunch of raucous young men with none too good a reputation, if you get what I mean.”
Johanna had to think of Nellie and her “these men don’t say what they mean” speech. She guessed that “none too good a reputation” meant that the young men frequented whorehouses.
“Is Octavio Nieland one of those friends?” she asked.
“Octavio wouldn’t call himself a friend of a bunch of young louts like that. They’re more like his lackeys.”
He didn’t have much other news, so Johanna went to her office. The pile of draft letters mocked her from the corner of the desk.
It said to her Look at you, little queen. You had notions that you could escape the fate of so many women before you. You thought the men would listen to your ideas. You thought that they would give you power. But whatever you do, you’ll always still be a woman and they will never, ever take you seriously.
She picked up the pile and leafed through the names.
Everything she did was pointless. Baron Uti, King Leo and King William wouldn’t even know who she was. They’d say “The consort of WHO?” And they’d laugh and laugh.
She might as well throw the whole lot in the fire. Let the men do whatever they wanted. Learn to knit and sew and make pretty newborn outfits. Hold tea parties for the noble women. Admire their dressed-up brats. And grow roses.
After all, that was all Queen Cygna had done. No doubt she’d been a fighting spirit once, too, in her youth in the northern country where she had grown up.
Maybe she’d dreamt of having her own fishing boats. One day, her father would have told her she was to marry a prince in another country. She would have cried, but she would have done as her father ordered, because that was what good girls did. After all, he was a prince.
Tears came to Johanna’s eyes when she thought about it like this. In all the talk about the tragic circumstances of the royal family, Queen Cygna was rarely mentioned.
Nellie came to her room later in the morning. To Johanna’s question about Greetje, she said that there was not much progress.
She carried a basket from which she dug a couple of items made from wood: a wooden spoon from the kitchen in the armoury and a twig from a broom in one of the quayside warehouses that belonged to one of the noble families of interest.
“It’s quite hard to find things made out of wood that are small enough for me to carry,” she said. “I don’t know if these are any good. There are also a lot of people around, and I have to be careful.”
Johanna had to smile when she imagined Nellie snooping around and stealing a wooden spoon from the armoury kitchen.
The spoon showed her a good view of the cook going off at a kitchen hand while soldiers lined up with their plates. The language was . . . interesting.
The broom twig was the most informative, except the broom had been in the broom cupboard and the images included a glorious view of the inside of the cupboard, while two male voices spoke in the main room. They spoke about nothing interesting—warehouse space—but the way in which they referred to her as “the little queen”, as if she were a child, disturbed her.
“I’m sorry if they’re not very good,” Nellie said.
“It’s all right. I didn’t expect any of these pieces of wood to tell us precisely what we want to know. That would have been crazy coincidence. We’ll probably have to go a few times while he guards are doing the formal questioning.”
Nellie looked in her basket. “I swear there was something else. There were some wood chips from the saw mill.” She rummaged in the basket and found the wood chip: a chunk of willow wood that looked to have been separated from the block with an axe.
In fact, the blow of the axe was exactly what Johanna saw when she put the splinter on her hand.
She winced.
Nellie said, “Oh, mistress Johanna, are you all right?”
Johanna saw a group of young men fighting on the sawdust-covered floor in the sawmill. No, they were play-fighting, laughing and being silly. They were probably drunk.
One young man had taken off his shoes and he carried another over his shoulder through the warehouse. That young man was yelling at him and pummelling his friend’s back with his fists.
The one carrying his mate was Auguste LaFontaine. He flung the other man off his shoulder into the sawdust. His friends pounced on him with a slate sponge, covering his face in chalk. There was much laughter and silliness.
By the Triune, how drunk were these men? It was embarrassing to watch.
“Mistress Johanna?” Nellie asked.
“Yes, this is a good one.” Johanna put the wood chip on the table. “Get me more from there and perhaps the quay outside.”
Nellie nodded and left the room. She looked happy, and Johanna couldn’t bear to tell her how pointless it all was.
Chapter 16
* * *
JOHANNA SPENT MOST of the afternoon on the couch in the living room. She felt tired and ill, and her feeble efforts to do some embroidery didn’t come to much. Even Nellie was surprised about it when she came in to bring tea.
She nodded at the work on Johanna’s lap. “That’s an unusual sight, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mistress Johanna.”
“I thought, since it’s my child, I better start taking an interest in the things that an expectant mother is supposed to do.”
“Oh, but myself and the other girls can do all that. Just you keep busy with important things.”
Johanna sighed. “They don’t want me, Nellie. They’re not going to listen to me. Roald is not going to turn up to meetings and help me. I’m tired of fighting these stupid, pompous noblemen.”
“Just have a good rest. Your body is working very hard. No wonder you feel listless.”
But Johanna felt it was more than that. She just thought that by giving up her freedom and marrying the prince no one wanted to marry, she expected at least some people to be grateful for saving the royal family. But in truth no one cared, at least no one who had any power in Saardam.
So instead she found herself in this gilded cage without real supporters beyond Father and Master Deim, and without friends.
Later in the afternoon, a courtier came into the room. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Your Majesty, but this arrived for you.” He carried a roll of parchment held by a white ribbon.
A silk ribbon, tied in a neat bow. The stamp in the sealing wax depicted a tiny dragon.
Johanna sat up and took it from him, her heart thudding. She broke the seal, pulled the ribbon and unrolled the parchment.
At the top was another dragon, this one hand-drawn in exquisite detail, by Li Fai’s mother, Johanna guessed.
Underneath, it said,
To Johanna, esteemed Queen of Saarland.
She had to laugh at that.
The letter continued,
I appreciated your previous correspondence. The palace guards have been to our ship, and I am confident that they have seen the truth that we had no involvement in the poor man’s death.
I have also noted your interest in the arts. I have asked my mother what can be done for a person who has grown up without a box. She has shown me some things I would like to try. If you’re amenable, we could arrange a meeting in a mutually agreed place.
It was signed Li Fai.
Johanna held the letter to her chest, breathing its unfamiliar perfume. The eastern people didn’t seem to have any customs that resulted in women being disregarded. They even wore trousers. Maybe she should hide on board the ship when it, inevitably, left Saardam for Anglia.
It was a silly thought. Of course she would never leave Father, but just the thought that no one on Li Han’s ship raised any objections about Li Han’s wife travelling with them made her own situation sting even more.
She cast her feeble attempt at sewing aside and went to the office.
In reply to Li Fai’s letter, she wrote,
I would very much like to have a meeting. Magic is not taught to children in Saardam, since only few have it. In my limited travels, I have searched for people who could teach, and have never found anyone willing to do so. It is perhaps unwise for you to come to the palace in the current climate, and inappropriate for me to visit your ship, but we could meet at my father’s office at the quay. Let me know if tomorrow two hours after midday would suit you.
Surely Greetje would have had the child by then.
She rolled up the letter, sealed it and went to the guard station to have it delivered.
Next, it was time for the evening meal. Nellie didn’t show herself and neither did Helena, so Johanna ate quickly and went to the guest room to check on the progress there.
Greetje lay with her eyes closed on the bed. Her shoulders went up and down with deep breaths. She looked asleep, but probably wasn’t. Helena was asleep in the chair, leaning back with her mouth open. Johanna didn’t want to disturb either of them, so she left the room quietly. She’d best go to bed early. Most likely, she’d probably be called in the middle of the night.
But when Johanna woke up with a shock, it was to light streaming in through a crack in the curtains. She jumped out of bed, flung on a dress and went to the guest room.
Even before she entered, it was obvious that the birth had not yet happened. Johanna had quietly hoped so, but she could hear Greetje’s distressed cries in the hallway.
By the Triune, this was the part that women spoke about. Her voice barely even sounded human anymore.
Suddenly scared, she hesitated with her hand on the door handle
. Her stomach was tight like a rock. Her breasts tingled so much that it almost hurt. But she knew: this one thing was inevitable and she would have to go through it herself. She should face it.
The guest room was dark and hot. The curtains were drawn, the windows closed so that no evil spirits could come into the room.
It took Johanna’s eyes a while to get used to the darkness despite the candles on the table and the mantelpiece.
Greetje sat on the birthing chair, stark naked and panting noisily. As Johanna shut the door behind her, she started crying again, an inhuman kind of uuhh—uuhhh—uuhhhh that made Johanna want to clamp her hands over her ears. It lasted a good while, then Greetje leaned back, her swollen breasts heaving with her deep breaths.
Johanna sat down next to Nellie on the corner of the bed.
Helena wiped Greetje’s face, which shone with sweat. Her hair hung in sweat-soaked strands along the sides of her face.
In the moment of relative silence, Johanna whispered to Nellie if she wanted her to do anything, but Nellie said, “When the little one is out yes, but not right now. I’ve got the water on the stove. To be honest, it’s been there all night. Helena says that it will be a while yet.”
Did that mean she was going to scream worse?
So Johanna sat on a chair in the corner, while Greetje started crying again, and Johanna’s stomach tightened and her breasts tingled.
It was as if the child inside her reacted to another mother’s agony. As if it wanted to play, too. Johanna put her hand on her stomach. It even felt hard. She broke out in sweat.
A maid came to bring tea, but Johanna let hers sit on the table next to her, afraid that anything she drank would come straight back out.
Helena took a quiet moment to gulp some tea and eat a piece of cake.
“Is she still all right?” Johanna asked. She had to distract herself from her panic. Her child was not ready to be born yet.
“First one is always very hard,” Helena said.
