by Susann Cokal
But these are the thoughts of a child, Sophia tells herself. She will not always be a child. She has left the nursery for good and is standing in a bedroom, her bedroom for this week, and her husband’s. She is to sleep (if she sleeps) far from her one brother’s and five sisters’ chaste sickbeds, where they doze or moan according to their dispositions, dreaming doses of antimony and ground gold, prayers to thank God for the affliction that tests their souls and refines them in holy fire as He refined His son on the holy Cross. Dear, sweet siblings, all still children who listen to nurses’ stories and imagine themselves merely enchanted by the curse of some fairy jealous of their mother’s beauty.
Maman is not beautiful, and her teeth are gray. She is fat and split her dress while dancing with a lord; it has been mended clumsily and is tearing further. But in this moment, Sophia loves her fiercely.
It is Sophia’s last week at her parents’ court, and she must spend it with the stranger she just married, in a palace that skates on the thin skin of land between bay and canals. From this night forward, she is a Swede and a Protestant. And a duchess. What little girl has not dreamed of being a duchess? Or someday (if Magnus’s two older brothers die childless) a queen?
Candle flames shudder in the puddles of her jewels; the great diamond on what will someday be her bosom reflects the bed’s draping of red damask.
Maman (Mother, Sophia must call her now) unties the lacing at the neck of the girl’s stiff rose-and-gold gown. “Dear child,” she whispers, “you must be brave.”
Within this very hour, there will be blood again. The Princess already tastes it, there in the back of her throat, where her heart is trying to choke her.
Hands scrape Sophia like pincers, removing her jewelry, the pins in her scratchy ruff, the false curls in her thin hair. The ladies are ants, fat busy ants, seizing her sleeves and collar and overskirt. They strip her down to a frame of reedy limbs and hips.
“Begging pardon, Highness.” One of her borrowed ladies, Countess Ditlevnavn, tugs a wad of fabric down over Sophia’s head. Sophia pulls her shoulders in to make this easier. Lunedie princesses go to bed in long white linen gowns; this one whistles down her body and pools at her feet with a spill of lace. It is too hot, and the starch prickles. Sophia wants to scratch herself, but of course she cannot. There is a bony white callus on her leg that itches hard, and it will make her howl with pain if she touches it.
Maman gestures at a maid who has been waiting with a tray (there are so many of these girls, all invisible till they move close).
“Spiced wine,” says the Queen, picking up a glass goblet that glows with the heat of the drink, “for fertility and for restful sleep. Doctor Candenzius and I devised the recipe.”
She holds the cup while Sophia swallows. Drinks in one long gulp, holding her breath, staring at the tapestries that weave the history of her homeland into wavering tableaux. Black-clad witches cast out of Norway in rowboats, green mermaids towing them to their new home. Priests in long robes, an astrologer in blue, under a great white burst of a moon that looks like a headache. A shipwrecked man living in the carcass of a whale, discovering the oils that make lamps and perfumes. The battle in which the first Count Lunedie of France, lured by access to whale oil and valuable amber, claimed the kingdom’s throne. The marriage of Maman and Papa, by the golden altar of the cathedral where the bones of Saint Ruta — patron of fishers and fishnet knotters, rope twisters and lace makers — had miraculously manifested and then been interred. The drab, narrow panel depicting the signing of the Treaty of Stettin, the document that ended seven years of war with no benefit to anyone, except those who make their living by selling provisions and arranging marriages to smooth over hostility. Sophia and Magnus were part of that treaty. They will reconcile mighty Sweden to the rest of Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Poland, and Papa’s land), all represented by her twiggish body.
As of tonight, Sophia is part of history. She will be woven into a tapestry herself. In Sweden.
This has been one of Sophia’s good days, but she feels the curseful Morbus Lunediernus crouching in her anyway, like a wild cat that waits to pounce. There’s the burn in her stomach and a rash around her mouth and on her palms that no unguent and powder cosmetic can conceal. Every one of her limbs aches, and patches of her skin itch. The wine helps, makes things duller. Her throat goes numb, and she can no longer feel her heart.
“Your mouth, Princess.” Countess Elinor Parfis, her mother’s chief lady, dabs at Sophia with a feathery puff. It leaves a bitter powder; Sophia’s new husband, Duke Magnus of Östergötland, with his earthworm lips in a nest of dark beard, will not want to kiss her. But he will do it anyway, because that’s his duty.
Maman makes a sound that is half sigh, half clearing of the throat. A signal to her ladies.
They sink to the floor to pray.
One last moment together, and it is on their knees before the man in the whale. Then it’s time for Sophia’s husband.
After Magnus’s men have deposited him — also in nightdress, boisterous with drink — in the bed where Sophia’s body is too slight to make either ridge or ravine; after they have all prayed together again; and after Magnus has ceremoniously touched Sophia’s naked white stick of a leg with his own scratchy one (scarred from the war against her countrymen, for which the two of them are making peace now), the last thing Sophia sees is her mother’s face. Drawn, yellow, its expression the same that Maman wears when visiting the nursery where the clutchy odor of Morbus fugs the air. This homely face peers around the edge of the dark oak door for a long, sad look, and Sophia blinks. She is very sleepy; it must be the spices in the wine. (Maman is so clever with medicines, quite as knowledgeable as the physicians she employs.) Sophia is grateful for the drowse that blunts her fear. Maybe she can sleep through what comes next . . . like the princess in the enslumbered castle . . . with thorns . . .
The tapestry priests fix her with a cold reproach. Of course she must be wakeful during what comes next; otherwise she cannot truly say she’s given herself to her husband. She must be as attentive as she is faithful. She will be like her own parents in this. Her father doesn’t even have a single bastard and has never been caught with a mistress; their marriage is the marvel of Europe.
The door closes, and the voices and shuffling feet retreat, to wait in the outer room until one of them (Sophia, Magnus) cries out. Then the lords and ladies and priests can look at each other with satisfaction, and the maids and in-waitings can try to guess if the new couple might need something or are simply expressing their pleasure in each other.
(Where is Östergötland? Someone once showed her on a map, but she can’t for the life of her think of it now.)
So here she lies, in bed, next to her husband. Magnus. Who is large and hot and shaggy, his breath whistling, wind breaking from both ends. The banquet was rich. Sugar cheese, sugar cakes, a smell of rot. He is gazing at the mermaid tapestry. Sophia has heard it said that he once spotted a mermaid swimming in his castle moat and jumped from a window to catch her. He had to be dragged out half drowned and was delirious with fever for days. It is the kind of love that every girl wishes to inspire in a man.
Sophia waits for Magnus to speak. To excuse himself, to address her. Instead he scratches his crotch. The mermaids on the tapestry waver, as if they really are swimming through green threads of ocean. She grabs at her nightdress, feeling it dampen and crumple. Her hands are uncommonly pink.
“I’d like a sip of that wine,” she says, trying to sound brave. Maman has left a jug by the bed, and Magnus heaves himself up to pour a whole cup of it for her. He has a belly and a wide behind; he makes the bed shake. As a wedding gift, he gave her an emerald parure cut in the new glittering style and closed in a glowy amber box. Now he just sits there while she drinks, scratching beneath his arms and yawning. She sips and sips, and soon the wine is gone.
“My lord,” she says, with lids so heavy that her future children might be sitting on them. “If you would like —
if I, mmm — I am yours to command,” she concludes, conscious that she is mumbling. “And I am in perfect health today.” She stifles an air bubble that ticks in her throat. She hears herself speak as if across an enormous room. “I am eager to please.” And she concludes with what is actually a greeting: “Health to your soul.”
He groans and takes the cup from her, strokes his beard, and sighs. He is clearly not so eager for any pleasure she might provide.
“Onward into the continent, then,” he says, and reaches for her.
The jail floor is a surprise, warm in a land heated by the waters underground. It aches at my ankles, feet, buttocks, the progress of that burn and the swelling of my fear being the only way to mark time in the bright dead of a spring night, when I sit cross-legged and lean against a wall, roll a pilfered sugar cherry between my fingers, and wait for Fate.
Fate refuses to stop at the pretty part of the tale; Fate insists on more tests of courage and wit, a terrible end, even if the heroine’s heart be pure and her crime accidental.
I remember to be grateful for small bounties. I have a window, in perhaps the last moments of my life. It seeps blue-gray light and the same jangle of far-off music, the faint savor of sweetness mixing with the tang of jail as I breathe in. The wedding banquet has continued, presumably with the Queen in fully restored turquoise stitched by someone else’s needle, as Princess Sophia meets her husband in bed and the nobles celebrate the fact that tonight more royal blood will spill.
I remember that red droplet leaking around the tip of my needle, flowering onto white linen. Even in my fear, I feel a thrill. To have pierced royal flesh! How many can say they’ve done that? Let alone lived for more than a heartbeat afterward. My father tells of a tournament at which a stray splinter from the former Duke of Marsvin’s lance accidentally rammed right through the old King’s nose; the Duke was missing his head before the King had a chance to breathe his last. And then we had a new King, and a new Duke.
Perhaps I must also resign myself to death — at barely seventeen, unmarried if not untried, with only my father and stepmother to mourn me. A story passed around by gossips and then forgotten.
It is in fact a rare soul that’s never felt the possibility of ready death — from falling mortar, hungry canals, waves of disease that sweep over the water and into city. When I faced mortality ten years ago, with the Great Sickness that took nearly half the souls in Skyggehavn, I shook it off — even though it claimed my mother and brothers. At the time, people called me lucky, as if I had visited the realm of trolls and fought my way back into the light, dragging their king by the beard.
“You alone have been saved,” my father told me, “in order to accomplish some great good in this world.” He mourned my mother and brothers very much and cursed himself for unluck.
“But you are lucky,” I insisted to him, patting at his tears with my skinny child hands. I couldn’t bear to see him weep, even though every other living soul around us wept. “God wants greatness from you too.”
I believe it was then that he began his experiments with lens grinding, shaping his bits of glass to see not five feet away or even ten, as with the spectacles he normally fashioned, framed, and sold, but thousands of miles into the heavens — to find God or the spirits of our family. And I know it was then that he recognized my talent for sewing and sent me to a special school for girls good with the needle, all in training to open their own shops or follow the courts of grand ladies, one of few honorable professions for women.
But here I am, underground and guilty. As afraid as if I were already facing a torturer, as hopeless as if I’d never had an education or a lover. As still as if already laid in the grave.
We are all on the brink of death anyway, all of us suffering some disease, though some may hide it better than others. The nobles have their Italian Fire, the King his constant stomach pains, which sometimes make him bleed into his breeches; the Queen is remote, as if a part of her is missing. And consider the royal children: all of them (except now Sophia) confined to their silver-paneled nursery, innocents suffering with Morbus Lunediernus, with boils and sores and rashes, aches in the bones, and fingernails eaten away. They have been deemed too ill to travel, even to one of the country castles where the Lunedies normally spend summer months gulping down clean air.
But it is far worse for us who are not noble. We cough and limp; we lose our hair, lose our teeth, catch fevers and chills; we grow cancers that split our bones and worms that gnaw through our bowels. We work till we drop dead from a sudden pain in the chest or side.
Illness makes us strangers in our own lives, and then it becomes our closest relation. Is it any wonder that we grab for what little bit of pleasure might come to us before death?
I mentioned I once had a lover. We loved each other fiercely; it might be said my life has already been full enough. But I thought to have him longer and to have more with him: a family, a shop, a life. Yes, I’ve wanted what everyone wants, from sovereign to scullery maid. Love and home, happiness; a sense that I am living my own life, not that I’ve fallen into some other, a confused changeling who can’t learn the rules before she’s doomed.
By now the Queen’s pinprick will have crusted over. I imagine her in a nightdress (one that I have sewn for her and embroidered with flowers I’ve never seen except in pictures and patterns). She rakes her nails over the spot, having forgotten why she itches, forgotten how that grain of scab arrived on her side. Perhaps there will be a scar — far smaller than the cherry between my fingers, even less than the bite of a louse . . .
I have an itch myself, on my neck, just beneath my left earlobe. When I scratch, a shred of skin comes away under my nail and a brittle black body no bigger than a pin’s head. When I squash it between my nails, the insides burst in a minuscule stain.
There were bugs in Jacob’s bed that first night, seething from the straw and through the mattress’s seams to bite into flesh raw with autumn cold. We didn’t care; we laughed and tossed handfuls of spiders at each other, plucked lice from each other’s hair and smashed them on the wall. We kissed and were happy, drunk on having made our choice.
I was fifteen and a half (young for an apron bride but not impossibly so) and Jacob Lille just eight years older. He was a journeyman in the amber trade, and he always smelled giddily of the stuff. He was finishing his masterpiece, a finely wrought puzzle-globe clarified and hardened and carved to elaborate perfection; a nested series of lacy golden spheres fashioned from a single piece, one inside the other, growing smaller and smaller in succession until the eye could no longer see. He was about to become not only a master but quite likely famous. He was halfway to the tiniest of the lace spheres, which was to be smaller even than the pinprick in the Queen, when we first laid eyes on each other.
It was in the glassworkers’ district, at Holy Spirit Church, which would site the beginning and the end of our story. His parish church had crumbled into a mud puddle, and his parents needed a new place for Mass. On the Feast of the Assumption, Jacob came with them to our Helligánds Kirke.
I saw him first as the ring of bronze bells marked a wooden Virgin’s ascension into Heaven and drowned out the howls of the madmen locked in the nearby hospital. His eyes were very blue — no bluer than the eyes of a typical Skyggehavner, it is true, but they caught the last light of summer and smiled into mine, which I knew in that moment were just as blue as his, and that I was as lovely as a man could ever imagine.
Our families took Communion that day. When it was my turn for the cup, I took care to place my lips where he’d put his. I saw him notice my boldness, and we both flushed so red that our fathers laid wrists to foreheads to check us for fever. We stared forward at the wooden Christ with his five wounds; in a strange way, I found the sculpture exciting.
I learned only later that Jacob was actually a Protestant. He believed in direct communication with the heavens; he belonged to a secret sect that met to pray and discuss the word of God, at least as much as was recog
nizable in our tongue, for the priests kept a stranglehold on Latinate verses and forbade translation. On that Assumption Day, he had brushed his lips on the cup only, refusing to take Communion through a priest.
Yes, the blue eyes burned for God as for me. But, in my presence, mostly for me. I was his jewel, his treasure, his heart, his heart’s desire. He said he loved me to madness, and he joked that one day he’d be confined to the Holy Spirit Hospital for love of me. I laughed away his compliments, but a secret part of me hoped they were real, not simply poetry.
And soon came October. Officially betrothed, with our wedding just a week away, we took my father’s little boat onto the canals to gaze at the green lights that blur the night sky in that season. We rowed bedazzled with light and love, ignoring the trash that struck the oars and the rats that paddled after us, toward the room he shared with another journeyman at his master’s studio. While everyone else was out marveling at the skies, we tied up our boat and went inside and marveled at each other, tossed the spiders, and made them part of our love nest.
“The wedding is only a week away,” I said in the teasing manner I had back then. His eyes sparkled and he grabbed at me.
By candlelight, Jacob unfastened my clothes and kissed every spot where I could dream of receiving a kiss. When I was dizzy with pleasure, he rubbed himself against me — rubbed only, for he declared he still wanted to marry a virgin; he owed me that much. “It would be disrespectful to treat my wife otherwise,” he said with a note of indignation, and I couldn’t help grinning with delicious anticipation. I had a new red dress waiting for our wedding, embroidered and trimmed with lace of my own needles.
