The Kingdom of Little Wounds

by Susann Cokal

  In his grandly paneled Presence Chamber, King Christian charges the three physicians with finding an answer. “Dissection is not usual,” he bleats, sounding something like the sheep to which his subjects often compare him. He has a long, sad face and graying curls; a long body clumping in the middle. Princess Sophia was the treasure of his heart, and he hates to think of her nude body inspected, much less sliced open — but better this than his land sliced apart in another war. “It is not usual, but in this instance it is essential. Investigate . . . by the necessary means . . . and determine whether she’s my daughter or Magnus’s wife.”

  His principal advisers and favorites — the aged Duke of Marsvin, sly Willem Braj, Lord Rafael af Hvas, and the handsome Lord Nicolas Bullen (this one having wandered over from Queen Isabel’s household) — give nods of support. Their King is never alone in his decisions, never alone at all, in fact, even when he steps into his more private inner chamber and the cabinet of the stool. A few other favorites are draped about the room, toying with their jewels or snuffling pomanders to combat the stench of daily life and extraordinary death. Everyone’s head aches, and no one wants to touch the remains of last night’s feast.

  “And try to see if Sophia was poisoned,” says King Christian, deliberately but as if in afterthought. It is his secret hope that his darling has died from some such outside cause — that it was not her marriage that brought on death. He would have kept her at court years longer if she hadn’t been needed in this endless game of diplomacy. Of course, the poison might have resulted from the marriage act — or some unthinkable source close to home . . . He feels the usual pain in his belly, so familiar, flare into intense cramping. Also increasingly familiar. He can hardly bear to sit, and a tear hovers at his eyelid.

  Under their loose black hats, the three physicians dart looks at one another, seeing if any can guess the King’s preference in this matter. Does he want his daughter to have been murdered? The general if unspoken conclusion is that he does; poison must be more desirable than a fatal disease of the Lunedie bloodline, as it speaks less to the other children’s future. Those six children — five of them girls — are all that stand between an orderly succession and chaos. There isn’t even a well-trained by-blow, for example, to take inheritance if King Christian dies suddenly, only some distant cousins who will squabble over the crown. It is somewhat to be lamented that this king has never made a bastard; he is so faithful to his wife that the favorites have often speculated as to his conscience, as if a small virtue must conceal a great secret sin.

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” murmur Candenzius, Venslov, and Dé, and they give a practiced bow as one. Both King and Queen like to see them in unison.

  Perhaps there actually is a poison plot afoot. Perhaps the physicians really will detect it.

  Two tears now roll down Christian’s white-powdered face. “My poor pretty girl,” he laments, almost inaudibly.

  Nicolas Bullen appears at Christian’s side without seeming to move. He offers the King a pomander in the shape of a skull, and his dark fingers brush against Christian’s damp ones. When Nicolas touches a spring at the pomander’s top, the skull breaks apart into eight sections, each with a different-smelling spice inside.

  “Take solace,” says Nicolas. His light blue-green eyes are wide and kind. “Health to your soul.”

  Christian likes Lord Nicolas very much. The Bullens are a clever family; they have curried favor and married well, though Nicolas is the last of them. His father was a minor officer in Christian’s father’s household, his grandfather little more than a craftsman who had something to do with building the palace but who managed to wed a baroness. Christian considers having Nicolas (who is not yet married) leave the Queen’s household and take a position in his own. He could use a man like this, one who is quietly reliable.

  Thinking, the King lifts the pomander to his face. He sniffs each of the eight spices in turn, then wipes his nose and eyes with a handkerchief also provided by Lord Nicolas. A ruby ring winks on Nicolas’s forefinger and fills all Christian’s vision.

  Christian feels dizzy, dazed, light-headed. The figures in the room waver.

  Lord Nicolas takes back the soiled handkerchief and tucks it into his sleeve.

  “Very well,” Christian says to the doctors, around a bubble of nausea. He waves limply, overcome by a falling sensation caused, he thinks, by grief. “Very well, you may begin on Sophia.” His darling child, about to be sliced open as even a husband never would have done.

  Head swimming, he looks up and there is Lord Nicolas again, nodding encouragement, lips parted and showing handsome white teeth inside.

  The dissection takes place in a room near the nursery, a room with a good window, a high table, and a plentiful supply of beakers and basins, plus candles for places the window doesn’t light.

  Candenzius has been trusted with a key; he turns it in the lock. He will be the main operator. The most modern of the physicians, a student of the revolutionary Paracelsus rather than the ancient Galen, he made his reputation in Dresden by curing a baron’s gout with a daring dose of caustic antimony. Any substance can be either cure or poison, he is fond of quoting. It is only a matter of determining the dose.

  There’s no question of curing Princess Sophia, unless it is to be in the manner of leather, preserving her long enough for the funeral. The cadaver has changed yet again since Candenzius last saw it. The skin is mottled yellow and blue where it is not marked with the dried crusts of Sophia’s ulcerous wounds. That skin is peeling away in thick flakes. Her eyes, not yet sewn shut, stare cloudily toward Heaven, and her blue hands sit clenched in knots by her ribs, where her arms contracted in her final throes. Excepting that detail, she has been arranged quite prettily on the table by her former nursemaids and by Countess Elinor Parfis, Mistress of the Nursery. Sunlight caresses Sophia lovingly. The fine linen shift in which she died is spread in a swoop, its delicate embroideries stiff with blood and other fluids.

  It falls to Doctor Candenzius to lift that skirt and pass judgment — first, on the state of what lies beneath it. The other two — hunched old Venslov and big-eared young Dé (whose youth makes him no less a believer in old Galen; he has yet to come down on one side or the other) — stand with basins and styluses at the ready, poised to collect viscera or take notes as needed.

  What Candenzius sees under Sophia’s skirt must interest him a great deal, for he spends some minutes staring at it, gathering an initial impression. Then, holding the shift in his left hand, he uses his right to nudge her legs farther apart. He asks for a candle and a sponge.

  The other physicians don’t dare gaze on the princess in this way. Venslov lights the candle and holds it at Sophia’s feet, but he doesn’t look. Dé averts his eyes, moistens a cloth in vinegar, and passes it to Candenzius, who seems satisfied, although this is not precisely what he asked for. He scrubs at the shadows on the Princess’s thighs and then orders Venslov (who was chief physician before Candenzius’s arrival last year) to hold the candle closer.

  “And closer still,” he barks, leading the other two to speculate that he is using this opportunity to remind Venslov once again of their relative positions in court hierarchy.

  The flame flickers in air currents stirred by the physicians’ robes. The space between Sophia’s legs is getting crowded; her nightdress blooms with light. Candenzius bends so deep, his face disappears beneath the tent of cloth.

  While her body is inspected, the departed Princess continues to stare upward. Her corneas have gone white as milk, so it is impossible to see that at one time her eyes were brown. Dé wonders if he should note this, as the other two are so intimately engaged. It may have some bearing on the cause of her death. He imagines the favors that King Christian would bestow on the man who could name the poison that felled her . . . Dé would very much like a room of his own in which to live and work, rather than sharing with Venslov, and perhaps one of the minor honorific orders that the King bestows on those who’ve pleased him.
An enameled giraffe on a gold chain would mean the world to Dé.

  Candenzius, still peering at the Princess’s secret, stops short of probing it with his finger. He mutters to himself, wondering how the land and his own reputation are best served in this situation. Again, a question: Is there advantage to declaring the Princess virgo intacta? Might that finding anger Sweden — perhaps enough to inspire a murderous plot against a lowly court physician? Or the King: Is he likely to punish Candenzius for breaking the treaty, or would he be relieved to be released from a contract that will now yield limited advantages, given that there shall be no grandchildren, no commingling of royal seed?

  He thinks of the Queen, his patroness and friend, who plucked him from Dresden on the basis of one long letter of application and an egg-size portrait enclosed with it. (Candenzius would not accuse himself of vanity, precisely, but he has been told he has fine eyes.) Isabel thought Sophia too young for marriage, too narrow for childbirth, her womanly courses a mere trickle. All this to be married off to Magnus’s madness. Don’t we have more than reason for delay? she asked Candenzius that winter, in one of the quiet conversations in which the two sat snug in the firelight of her chamber, attended only by a dozy lady-in-waiting whose ale Candenzius had treated with valerian. Can’t you convince my husband to wait?

  The King could not be persuaded, declaring that sacrifices must be made for the good of the land; and, in fact, he gave Candenzius a gold coin in exchange for a prescription of lamb’s blood and coltsfoot that helped shake those courses free from Sophia’s womb. So the marriage went forth, with Isabel so distraught, she needed soothing tinctures of poppy.

  Out of sentiment for Isabel, and because some hunch tells him it is the desired answer, Candenzius makes a decision.

  “The Princess is a virgin,” he pronounces, withdrawing and dropping the nightdress over Sophia’s legs so quickly that it nearly catches the candle.

  Mercifully the gust of skirt wind blows the flame out. For good measure, Venslov licks his knobby fingertips and snuffs the wick. Fire in the palace would be a mortal calamity; his own books and papers, records of his private experiments, would surely burn.

  So the Princess is declared intact, a daughter rather than a wife. But there still remains the matter of the poison.

  “We must open her belly,” Candenzius decides.

  While Venslov helps push the girl’s legs back together, Dé finds a pair of scissors so that Candenzius can slit the nightdress where needed — shielding that pleat between her thighs from the other men’s gaze.

  So they make their cuts into yellowed flesh and jellied veins, till they reach the Princess’s entrails. Venslov fetches basins to accommodate her organs and the seventeen separate courses of last night’s feast. Taking turns, the physicians bend to the yawning wound and sniff, trying to sort rich viands from rank poison.

  As he dissects, Candenzius dictates observations, and Dé writes them down. A sharp odor, a sweet odor, a lesion in the belly; watery intestinal matter, a leathery texture to the liver.

  Dé imagines horrible, thrilling possibilities: mandrake, wolfsbane, death cap mushrooms, belladonna. When he was at his French university, he made a special study of toxicity. Paracelsus wrote that disease comes from poisons emitted by unfavorable stars, but there are just as many lethal substances here on earth as there are pricks of light in the heavens.

  Light pours thick through the window, angling down to fill the cavity in the center of Sophia. No candles are necessary here. The Princess is a split fig, with the claws of a dead bird, eyes gone to white marbles. She is animal, vegetable, mineral, and she reeks of an army’s worth of injury.

  “Shall you say it was murder?” old Venslov asks Candenzius, at last, as they run out of organs to unpack and have still failed to name a specific substance. “Shall you identify a cause?”

  Candenzius draws a last breath, savoring the complicated odors around the corpse. Weighing the advantages of a spectrum of answers. Folding his sticky hands together.

  “This is what I will tell the King,” he says: “Although the Princess died a virgin, her body has been violated. The man — or woman — who killed her is extremely cunning, as sophisticated in skill as in evil, for the means used is still indeterminate. We shall dedicate ourselves to breaking down the poison into its components. We must begin by a meticulous distillation of the fluids in her liver, which we will ask the King to save from burial.”

  The three physicians nod solemnly, relieved to have found a direction. Dé admires Candenzius’s artful turn of a speech, no less than his mastery of anatomy. He does not speak this admiration aloud, lest Candenzius’s fall from favor — which seems inevitable, given his very particular views — come quickly, and Venslov resume the chief position. Fawning is an art even subtler than medicine.

  “Well done, Doctor,” Venslov flatters first, and Dé is relieved at the chance to echo him. Candenzius smiles modestly, blinking those fine eyes, and thanks the other two for their assistance.

  Then the three of them look at the brimming basins, asking themselves how to put the Princess together again for her funeral, or if they should even try.

  QUICK

  LYING almost weightless in the simple bed of her inner chamber, Queen Isabel mourns her daughter. The first child to live after a series of miscarriages, the child who saved her from a shameful divorce, after which she would have returned to France forever disgraced and known for her inability to breed. Sophia, whose name means “wisdom” and whose character was forever pleasing, until the foul Morbus Lunediernus seized her and her siblings.

  Princess (Duchess?) Sophia, twelve years old and now deceased.

  Crown Prince Christian, eleven.

  Princess Beatte, nearly ten.

  Princess Hendrika, nearly nine.

  Princess Amalia, seven.

  Princess Margrethe (named after Christian’s ancient cousin, the Duchess of Marsvin), six years old.

  Princess Gorma, at five years of age the likely last child of the Lunedies.

  Another series of miscarriages followed Gorma’s birth, and Isabel is now thirty-nine, an age at which the womb turns rotten and bears bad fruit if any at all.

  To distract herself from this grief and shame, Isabel remembers a journey she took as a child, before she’d even heard of this northern land and its capital city, when she was still young Isabelle des Rayaux, a daughter of the Loire Valley. As part of her education in the ways of the world, she traveled by barge to the palace of her extravagant Uncle Henri, Duke of Pau d’Impors, who was wealthier than any duke had the right to be and just a little bit (she heard her father say it) mad.

  For pleasure, Uncle Henri had filled a pool at his summer castle with quicksilver. It was a beautiful, trembling thing, reflecting each face with a giddy accuracy, but at such an angle that one had to lean over farther and farther to see beyond one’s chin and nose, to get a glimpse of one’s own eyes. Visiting ladies used to incline so far — Isabel did this herself — that their scarlet lips very nearly touched the surface that quivered under their breath. It made their faces ever more beautiful, their minds ever more dreamy. It was the marvel of the Loire.

  Until, that is, one dizzy baroness leaned so far that she tipped in and drowned. Her hat and hair tangled just under the fountain’s spray, her tawny dress floating on the surface.

  The spell, then, was broken. Uncle Henri’s advisers (fearing war with the baroness’s husband) forced him to pull the plug. A gardener waded in knee-deep and dug blindly through until he found the drain. With a deep shiver, all that beauty began to seep away.

  The child Isabelle watched as quicksilver slinked down the smooth rock walls; she listened to the drain as it slurped, guiding the precious mercury to the waters of the river. Saw the silver beads on the corpse of that silly baroness, glistening on her skin, puddling in the cups of her ears.

  Isabel mourns now as she did then.

  Exquisite memory, beauty lost.

  Sophia.

/>   Fear make the Earth’s worst odor, whether in bottom of a ship or some silvered palace room. The nursery smell sour and dark with sweat of one prince, five princess, all so afraid, though we wipe bodies with perfume and put them in new linen twice today all ready.

  Six children cough like a family of dogs, but they sit in bed-thrones of fancier animal shapes, one yellow lion, five white swan. Every hair, every feather painted in, and each bed have a crown of crescent moon. Six moons under a ceiling of golden tree branch and leaves of colored glass. This be a poem-place for children, a set of extra chores for nurses. It be not easy to reach over wings to feed the Princess Gorma, but this is my task.

  Countess Elinor have come for children’s supper, and she likes all order to be held. All faces to be clean, all spoons a-moving like hands that feed time to a clock. Gorma try to spit out gruel, I scrape back in her mouth. She be five year old all ready but some time act a baby. She know full well that every prince and princess must empty one bowl before sleep.

  That new maid with the face of a rat pass me linens to dab the Princess’ face. Gorma’s fever gone high since Sophia died, and she whimper, though she know words well enough. She say them some times, like Maman and thirsty and no. And Midi, be cause that be my name. Midi Midi Midi.

  Another task is keep her quiet, so I put my finger to her mouth, hiss, “Shhh, shh, sh,” hope she stop her noise before the Countess hear.

  Elinor sit now by Christian, the Crown Prince all most twelve. She feed him her self, for he favorite with her and she with him. He will be the King some day. He some time say he be much too old for feeding, but when she spoon the gruel, he relax. He is the most afraid just now, being all most so old as Sophia he think he must be next to die. Elinor murmur words to him, wave her sleeves, soothe his fears or try to. She act like a coquette who seek a husband, though she be married all ready to her wounded Count and also twelve years old times one-two-three.