by Susann Cokal
My palms scrub at my skirt, trying to wipe all trace of him onto my clothes.
Lord Nicolas grabs both of my hands.
“Don’t be a goose,” he says. “There’s nothing for you to fear there.” When I shudder, he unlaces his codpiece, pushes himself into the light, and makes me watch while he counts off: “Emerald,” flicking one of those lumps. “Turquoise. Ruby.” Flick, flick. “Pearl, and another turquoise, and another . . .” Under his own fingers, naming jewels, he grows harder than my touch managed to make him.
Am I to believe that Lord Nicolas uses his manhood as a purse? The nobility are always doing mysterious things, but this defies any kind of sense. “Sir — why?”
He takes his hands away, gazes down as if he can see jewels on the outside, as if they adorn a gorgeous golden scepter. He thinks himself very fine, indeed. “A courtier should carry wealth on his person as a sign of his position. And in case called upon to, say, ransom a captured king or save a fair lady from ravishment.”
He sounds so pleased that I think he might be telling the truth, that this is his logic and these are the contents of his manhood. Why not believe?
I put my fingers there again. I am a practical girl, after all, and a curious one; my father is a scholar in his way. I feel what I think must be the scars of stitches, tiny darts in skin that had to stretch to accommodate these foreign lumps. I bend close and think I see them, these scars.
It’s dizzying to contemplate. A king’s ransom in jewels, hidden in the same organ with which he piddles out an evening’s worth of water and wine. And I am holding all that wealth in my hand.
Nicolas nudges himself into my fist. I have a task to complete, and I begin again.
As I give Lord Nicolas this dutiful caress, I think of my impossible task, to coax a transformation out of this reluctant little bird stuffed with precious eggs, to give the best pleasure if I am to save myself. Even if these lumps were the buboes of disease, I would have to do what I am doing now. And I’d have to do it better — Lord Nicolas grunts to signal that I’ve caused him pain.
Pleasure, I think, trying to inspire myself (and him) by mulling the word. Pleasure. I make my mind blank of anything else.
In a few minutes, it is finished. Lord Nicolas has grunted again and sighed, and what he pours into my palms is not jeweled, just a pungent soup of what any man might produce.
He lets me sit up and passes me a handkerchief to wipe with, then takes it back — as if afraid I will play some trick with his juices if he leaves them with me.
“So, Ava Bingen,” he says in a pleasant-enough tone, lacing his breeches together as if this is any ordinary discussion (as perhaps it is for him), “now we must face the question of atonement.”
There’s more? I think.
Lord Nicolas tosses the soiled handkerchief into the fire. I take off my cap and wipe my tongue and teeth with it, scrubbing away his kiss, then rub at hands that are already dry but will probably feel dirty forever.
I think again of Jacob Lille. I’m grateful that there is no possibility of pregnancy coming from tonight.
Lord Nicolas is watching me, almost as if he can read my thoughts. I push Jacob out of my mind — he doesn’t belong here with us.
Lord Nicolas says, with a surprising sort of gentleness, “Ava Mariasdatter, I trusted you for a moment, just now. I trusted your hand and your discretion, to prove you aren’t some mad woman running around with needles out and the intent to do harm. You must compensate one trust with another.” When my confusion is obvious, he explains: “You must make yourself into someone I trust forever.”
Not gentleness, then — wiliness, setting a trap.
“Certainly, my lord.” It is the only answer I can make. I smell his breath on mine as the vow leaves my lips. I wonder for a wild moment if he plans to keep me as a mistress, and if a mutual trust and dependence might somehow develop between us. If I am to succeed at court, I shall need not only hard work and good luck but also a sponsor. A lord with influence and wealth.
And if some of that wealth were distributed to me, I would in time buy passage and a companion to look for Jacob abroad. Copenhagen, Stockholm, Aarhus . . .
Lord Nicolas acts as if he does not notice my thinking, only my assent. He tugs at his shirt, then his doublet, arranging himself to perfection. He lays out some terms of our agreement. “First,” he says, “you must keep my secrets.”
“Of course.”
“This hidden wealth is not for others to know about.”
I think of the ladies I have seen preening as he walks by, but I can keep a secret better than any lady, if I choose to. “Of course not.”
“It isn’t just wealth,” he says incidentally, “but a guard against disease. Recommended by Eastern doctors. So I don’t need to worry about contracting a poisonous Fire from you, nor you from me — each jewel has a special property that makes falling ill impossible.”
“I was never worried. We didn’t —”
He laughs. “Haven’t you heard? The Fire burns best in warm, moist places, but there are those who’ve got it on their hands, their ears, their noses. No spot is safe. Except on my person, thanks to these medical advances.”
“I’m not worried,” I repeat, lying this time. Having survived the Great Sickness, I am a worrier by nature; I will worry about this evening as I lie in bed, and it will give me many sleepless nights. What I have seen of medical practices does not inspire trust.
“Ah, bon.” His white teeth show. He returns to his table, with the ghostly papers — none of them written on, I see now in the increased light — ruffling as he stirs the air. “And so,” he says, thumbing from one blank page to the next, “on to our official contract. You are no longer a seamstress.”
He makes a few marks with a pen on a white sheet, and my heart sinks to my knees. I have no sense of what he’s writing; I can’t read.
“You are not leaving the palace,” he adds, as if presenting me with another treat. “From tomorrow onward, you will be an attendant in the royal nursery. You will be trusted with the King’s — and Queen’s — children; or rather, you will be trusted with waiting on their nurses, to begin with. And in your new position, you will have new duties. You will be eyes and ears, a trusted observer. For me.”
I struggle to stand, though he hasn’t told me to do so. My bones ache more deeply, even, than at any other time this past year. Shame has made me weak — first the pregnancy, then the miscarriage, now this: servicing a lord’s casual lust has turned me into both whore and spy.
Nicolas clarifies, as if I didn’t already understand, as if I’m as doltish as I feel: “You’ll join what I call an army of angels who work in the Queen’s household — to protect her and the children, of course.”
Nicolas smiles as if expecting some reverence. Commander of an angel army, master of me. “What do you think, Ava?”
This is what I think: Make one mistake and you find your life utterly changed. Your good graces gone, yourself in thrall to some dark lord. But there’s no sense lamenting it.
I curtsy on unsteady legs. “Thank you for your leniency.”
Lord Nicolas seats himself in a chair carved and painted impressively enough to rival the King’s throne. He reaches for a pen. “I assume you cannot write?”
I admit that it’s true, though I’ve learned letters enough to make monograms on noble linens and to spell my name if necessary. Unless the family is very rich, an artisan’s daughters do not learn the skill of making sense with ink.
“Then your promise will have to be enough.”
“I promise.”
“And your name.”
This I do show him I can write, though in somewhat shaky letters; I am better with the needle than the pen. AVA. That’s all I can spell of my name. I recall, with a new wave of revulsion, that it means “of the bird.”
He studies my signature and takes back the pen, apparently satisfied. “There will, of course, be penalties if you disobey. Swift and unpleasant one
s.” He bares his wolfish teeth. “So, then. I will see you when summoned.”
It seems I’m dismissed, and in a way that leaves me more shamed than ever. Done with, disposed of, sent away. Property. Still bowing, and backing up as I would do in the King’s or Queen’s presence, I reach the door and lift the damask flap over it.
“One more thing” — he stops me, scratching at the paper that will reorder my life; making my skin crawl with fear —“you will move to a new dorter, one for servants of lower rank, not the needlewomen. And I would prefer that in the nursery you be known as Ava Mariasdatter, not Ava Bingen.”
Of course. He wants me to use my peasant name, which emphasizes my relation to my mother, rather than following the merchants’ and artisans’ custom of maintaining a family surname through the father’s line.
I curtsy again, accepting this degradation too. Why not? Being Mariasdatter will bring less shame on the father and stepmother who have treated me well.
A struggle with the latch, during which Lord Nicolas rattles his papers, and I get the door open. There I find the thick-necked guard managing to doze while he stands. And the sudden sound of bells ringing, so loud it nearly knocks me to my knees.
“Sainted lice and blowflies” — Lord Nicolas leaps behind me, scattering papers all around —“whatever could have happened?”
And so another trial is complete.
THE SCHOLAR
ALONE in his chamber, the King’s archivist carefully transcribes his notes into an elegant account of the day’s many events. Big, bony fingers stain black, as if they are already in mourning. They match his black garments; he always dresses this way, so he will disappear into the shadows of a room and overhear the secrets whispered when there seems to be nothing said. In this way, he is able to write a second chronicle, one best kept to himself, that records the hidden lives of both courtiers and their servants.
He is tall and has to hunch, writing both public record and secret history. He has never thought to ask for a taller table.
When he has finished, he sands the last page to dry the ink, then blows the sand away. His whole chamber is covered in sand at the end of a day, but there is no shortage of sand in this city. He rolls up the official chronicle, ready for his apprentices to copy several times over tomorrow. The private history of overheard rumors and confessions he keeps flat, so he may slide it into its place inside the tester over his bed. Once the curtain is hanging over the slit cloth, his secret history is truly secret. No one cleans in here but he himself, and in that he is as tidy as a monk. He sweeps away dunes of sand every morning.
The night is still dark, the candlewicks sputtering in their pools of fish oil. His mind is restless. The wedding, the wee incidents of torn gowns, stolen kisses, a dwarf breaking an ankle; and then the terrible death of the Princess, a fragile girl in the arms of a beastly husband. His thoughts race. He decides to use the light as long as he has it. Light: to him it means knowledge, to others justice, to most simply itself — light by which to work a little longer.
Idly, he writes King Christian’s motto at the top of a page: In tenebris lumen meum metue. In the darkness, fear my light.
It is one of those royal mottoes that can mean anything — anything that inspires awe.
The scholar begins to play with the words, rearranging them in Latin and in the common tongue of this place. He is from one of the faraway green islands and grew up speaking the people’s language more often than courtly French, though life at university beat that out of him. Sometimes it amuses him to write or think or even speak in the common tongue. Privately.
Metue lumen meum in tenebris. Fear my light in the darkness.
Lumen meum in tenebris metue. My light in darkness you must fear.
Lumen meum metue in tenebris. My light you must fear in the dark.
No, none of these versions is right; all are awkward. Light, fear, darkness — they come jumbled together, they come all at once, but there is an order in which they work best.
In tenebris lumen meum metue. A beautiful package of a motto. But does it ever trouble anyone that King Christian’s words are about terror? He orders his people to fear — not trust, not savor — his power. That sad, sheeplike King.
The scholar twists this page into a stick and, wastefully, puts it to a dying candlewick. For a second it smokes, and then with a whoosh it is in flames. Burning so brightly and so fast in the darkness at the end of a spring night.
He uses the twist to light another candle and sits down to contemplate the court in a new way, using a tale from the green island where he spent his boyhood coddled by a mother who told stories to chase away his fear of the dark.
There was once a princess who agreed to be married, as her father wished, to a foreign king. She bade a brave farewell to her people, chiding her mother not to weep; for this was her fate, and a blessed one.
When she arrived at her new husband’s court, the princess was shocked to discover that her father had betrothed her to a monkey. The little thing danced around her gleefully, clapping his leathery monkey hands and chittering his yellow monkey teeth. The crown teetered on his narrow monkey pate, held in place by his long monkey tail. He was so excited to meet his bride that he soiled the floor of his own great hall.
The princess was disgusted, but the courtiers — all of them human men and women, handsome if silent — treated their king and his bride with the utmost deference. So she endured the ceremony, put on the ring the monkey gave her, and climbed dutifully into bed with him that night.
In all this time, the monkey said not one word to her. Nor did she expect him to speak, for she guessed that if he were to become human, it could happen only after love’s first kiss. And so she let him kiss her with his wet monkey lips, and she felt his coarse monkey body pressing against hers, and at every gesture she expected that he would transform into a husband as pleasing as his courtiers. In the morning, the king hung the bloodied sheets out the chamber window; a barbaric custom. And barbaric, too, was the transformation — for the princess discovered that while her husband had remained the same, all his courtiers had reverted into monkeys, which was their true shape.
Thenceforth she was the queen of a wild, speechless monkey-land. Her children had long hairy fingers and curling tails, with slobbering lips that the king insisted must suckle on no breasts but her own.
In time, the queen began to pray that she, too, would turn into a monkey, if only to make these circumstances easier to bear. But the angels of the monkey-land did not heed her prayers, for in all the years she lived among them, she never managed once to give her husband a loving kiss.
HISTORY
SO, writes the chronicler, it always is for royal brides; though Princess Sophia never had the chance to suffer among the apish Swedes. Perhaps this would be considered a sort of blessing. The chronicler has witnessed the sorrows of Queen Isabel and her gradual decline these past ten years; she might be glad to know her daughter has been spared those same trials.
But he is a historian, not a moralist. He does not interpret facts; nor does he make judgments. That is for others to do as time passes.
He slips this paper into his bed canopy to mingle with his other private observations.
ROYAL PASSING
THE Lunedie chapel, the great cathedral, the parish towers all over town: every church bell clucks its tongue over Sophia’s death. They scour away sleep.
In the midst of life, shout the bells, we are in death. The householders of Skyggehavn rouse themselves, blinking, and hang black cloths from their windows. The canals reflect wavering black; the bakers char the bread.
The story of Sophia’s death spreads with the waves of noise, till it is well established that the Devil himself (in the guise of a Swede) tried to pluck the girl from her bed, then fought an angel for her soul. The angel, it is said, carried the princess bodily to Heaven so that Satan couldn’t ravish her.
“Nonsense,” say the priests. “A fantasy,” say the scholars. But there
are many who believe, and who carve Sophia’s portrait into their walls with knives and nails, praying that she might protect them from Devil, trolls, and Protestants.
At the palace, Sophia Lunedie has left a very real and material corpse. Before the bells ring the sun overhead, that corpse has begun to rot. It fills the rooms with the reek of an overripe strawberry, an odor that makes mouths water and stomachs churn at the same time. The green flies of May buzz around it, and black ants nibble from below. Blood and serum from her necklace of wounds have hardened into dark jewels around which the princess’s flesh is starting to melt.
In the speed of its corruption, the girl’s body presents several questions. Perhaps least among these is the how of her death; whether from Morbus Lunediernus or some other cause, it almost doesn’t matter. More important: Is she Princess of the realm or Duchess of Östergötland — that is, did the Duke complete the union before his bride’s demise? An answer must be found immediately. So much blood streaks the sheets that no one can be sure; even the Duke himself might not know, given the uproar in their marriage bed. No one would dream of breaching etiquette by posing him the question directly, and no one would trust Mad Magnus with an honest reply. Yet everything depends on the answer. If the marriage was not consummated, the treaty with Sweden hasn’t been ratified, and the new peace may unravel. Then all of Scandinavia might very well be back at war.
To some of the nobles, Sophia’s death is good news: the marriage was not universally popular. Several lords favored a connection with Denmark; but Denmark’s Frederick chose a different Sophia, of the obscure Mecklenburg-Güstrow, whom he will marry this July. (And what a hurry to be sure that Magnus’s wedding took place before Frederick’s! There is no affair that does not become competition between Denmark and Sweden.) Others in the privy council loathe Protestants of any sort and insist that a Lunedie should marry only with Poland or France. Any of these men might have resolved to undo the treaty with a death, though without the greater offense of killing Duke Magnus himself.
