by Susann Cokal
Of course, Isabel is not young or sweet, and the pangs she feels are not the happy ones in the song. But she is brave; she allows her women to remove her robe.
Somehow Isabel and Christian are put to bed. Somehow the heavy door swings behind their grooms and ladies-in-waiting, and the tapestry panel swishes shut over it. Isabel stares at her own hands, chapped with the work of the nursery, that blue ring from Grand-mère their only ornament. Now is her time to act. She licks her lips and scratches at her palms, getting ready to do as Christian likes.
But as soon as the latch’s tongue clicks into place, Christian is out of bed. He fills his goblet, swilling the wine as if it is the medicine that Isabel spoons down their children’s throats. He refills the goblet and drinks again, and a third time. Only then, wobbling on his thin legs, with his long face softened and sillier than usual — she’s heard it said that he looks like a sheep, and this is not inaccurate — does he grab a thick handful of counterpane to pull himself back up the mountain of mattresses and lie next to his wife. He does not kiss her. He burps.
She remembers her youth along the Loire, when King François went on progress and stayed at the Château des Rayaux for a fortnight of hunting, feasting, and dancing that nearly put her father in the poorhouse. Beautiful days of splendid frocks, fresh rushes on the floors, ribbons flying as courtiers rowed the girls in pleasure boats among the swans upon the river. Isabelle, she still was then, thirteen years old. And she had her first kiss. It was with a member of the King’s privy council, out behind the ancient tithe barn that had been the very beginning of the family’s château.
After that, young Isabelle became unbiddable, longing uncontrollably for the gay life of a court so that pleasure might continue forever . . . and pleasure led her here.
There is a billow of cool air as the counterpane settles around her husband, and the smell of fowl from feathered pillows.
Christian sighs. He is still wearing his favorite pearl earring, given him last Christmas by Georg Oline. “Ma chair,” he says, and she knows just how it is spelled; he’s calling to his flesh, not his dear. And then, obediently, her hand is on his flesh, rubbing him, with his long thin eyes shut and his lips pressed together in concentration.
She knows that at such a time Christian has to focus his thoughts very sharply, and the worst thing she can do is make a sound or change her rhythm before he is ready. So Isabel tries to keep her mind blank, while she is aware that Christian is doing just the opposite. He is filling it with images that come from someplace far from this bedchamber.
Isabel counts to 117. Not ready yet. She slows for just a moment, and Christian loses ground. She changes hands.
She tries to enter his mind and see where he has taken his thoughts. She knows he is not thinking about her great loose childbirthing canal. Rather, he must be imagining (a cruel cousin hinted this long ago, and somehow Isabel knew it to be true) much tighter spaces and bodies not so soft as hers. Dirty places, dirty bodies, she thinks; this is what excites Christian and allows him to manage his few minutes’ firmness of purpose with her. She imagines him touching someone — she cannot imagine who, or won’t imagine it — in that place which she knows to be expressly forbidden to persons of virtue.
For some reason, this thought of unholy places has begun to excite Isabel as well as (she imagines) Christian. She feels herself growing moist from her palms to her toes. Her hand moves more quickly, more confidently, on him. This is when Christian does achieve that firmness, and she flings herself down with her chemise up, so he can take the position sanctioned by the Church.
What Christian does now, too, is a mystery. Isabel can’t quite picture the transaction, though she knows some of her ladies — perhaps even Elinor — have trained their hand mirrors on that spot or have stood open-legged over still water. (The baroness at Uncle Henri’s castle, leaning over the quicksilver pond?) Isabel has seen what her husband carries between his legs, and she knows that what’s inside her is a mirror image of his hot, dry generative equipment, only kept inside because of a woman’s cold and moist nature. When they converse, they must fit together like links in a chain. But that is not pretty to contemplate.
Isabel thinks instead of the Annunciation painting, hanging somewhere beyond Christian’s bobbing form and the bed curtains. She would like to consider it a reflection of a life more real than the one she is living. On the wooden panel, Mary’s head bends gently, tickled by the ray of gilded light that bears Gabriel’s words. The blue robe pools around her feet, the halo wisps around her as-yet-uncrowned head; the potted lily blooms, the white dove hovers. Mary’s lips part gently. Surprised. Pleased, certainly, but also surprised. She is going to birth a Savior.
For some time in her youth, Isabel had thought she would conceive a child through the ear, just where the light of Gabriel’s words slides into the Virgin; perhaps this was the purpose of each new couple’s prayers for fertility, that the words, not the bodies, would produce a child. After the wedding night, she realized it was not a beam but a staff that would impregnate her — still, given all the actions, all the places, that Christian attempted that night in his effort to please his country with a full consummation, she imagined it might be better accomplished if he put himself into her ear.
She does not know when this thought, too, became exciting to her. Her ears are sensitive, and there are holes in the lobes that her mother made with a hot steel needle; from these holes she can hang golden hoops or glowing sapphires or drops of clarified amber that hold tiny insects inside. All those things adorned her in the frivolous days before motherhood, when her ears were considered things of beauty and a poet composed a villanelle to praise them. (He is dead now, gone in the Great Sickness of 1561.) A baby will snatch at any object that dangles, and might pull the bauble straight out with some pain to the mother. So ear bobs became something for ceremonial occasions only, and Isabel’s ears have gone neglected.
She remembers the day her mother pricked her lobes — the pain of it, but also the satisfaction when the tiny point made full puncture. There is excitement in that too, in the memory of pain — all pain of being with Christian long gone now, only to return in childbed — and before she is well aware, Isabel is imagining the King as a needle piercing her (as a needle pierced her recently — didn’t it?). It brings small doses of pain as it opens one tiny wound after another in her.
It is thus, unexpectedly, that Isabel is surprised by an enormous, soul-shaking joy. Even down in the courtyard, people seem to feel her pleasure and cry out for it.
I do not like to hold a pen. Too thin for hands to cramp around, and delicate, as if I hold a grasshopper and try to make it walk like a cat. It feel a silly thing to me, to tell a story through the fingers.
But he say I must learn to put every thing on to paper. To be one more keeper of histories as if he do not keep enough, with histories both for king and for him self. He says this will be my secrets, but what secrets can I keep while he be reading each word as it come from the pen?
His room be hot, or hot for this place, and all those books and pages sweat smells of leather, ink, and dust that be worse to me than nursery smells. Those are just from people, but these be animal skins soaked full of poisons to make they last. My nose hurt more now than my hand.
He say keep writing and when I will be done, he shows how to fix the words for correct time and number and all the rest. Future, past, present time. He say I hear speech said right all day, why can I not use it right my self through the pen? But I choose not.
I write my own way, I write my language. Others speak so as they will.
Now he say I wasting time by writing nothingnesses, when I should express my thoughts. About what I see at court. About the Princess. About my life. And the hole that open in the great courtyard and frighten all the lords and ladies so.
How much more must be write about Sophia? She is dead and we all know she have the family complaint. Some believe a poison tale, but there be no poison we know to make
a girl scream so, and lie straight, and raise through the curtain of her bed. This be not the land to invent new poisons.
Where I were small, in a land much more hot, I have one aunt who know all poisons well. She grow flowers and leaves; some smell of perfume, some of rotted meat. Some the size my thumb with thorns all over, so if you take one in the hand, your skin were full of needles to hurt for a week.
She were the favorite for most other aunts, who like to make each other sick, or make they husband slow or fast to love them. This poison-auntie live away from others, in a little house back of a garden, where the rain rise from the floor instead of through the roof, and even the guards afraid to go.
Why did your father allow this woman on his grounds? ask the history-keeper. He have interest now for my own story.
For this question there be no answer, only she was there and the others fear and love and hate her. At last some one kill her with her own plants, a stew of thorn and leaf and flower that may be she swallow be cause she were grown tired of so careful tending of the garden and no man to visit her.
It was from her funeral that I run away, between the horses’ hooves when they pass the gate, and so in to the town. To walk just a little in the market and chase a spotted cat and then be caught and sold and shipped to this land.
At first it feel like some dream brought on by poison-auntie’s tea. For a long time I be sick in the bottom of the boat, heaving up and down and fevered. Then my body come back to me, when the ship cut through a puzzle of ice and fish that spit ocean in to air, and I see my breath in clouds around me and frosting over the sail-captain who churn above and drip sweat in to my face. And then the man who buy me in a different market, in a great house with candles made of brass, where men come round to see they first Negresse and hear the sailors’ tales of countries sleeping under sand.
Afric, China, Lebanon, Persia: all lands of sand and sun and dusky skin, might so well call them Greece, which be the farthest place from what the usual people here have imagine. I can ’t say which land would be mine, which language I would speak if I had my tongue. Just that my tongue be not my own.
When that man give me to his Countess wife, I feel I come home to poison-auntie again. Her cold hand, her white eye, her skinny smile all new to me, but the bitter air around her make me feel like in the house at garden’s end. I become her maid and learn the new clothes of this place and the way of keeping long white hair. Her husband like our differents, call her the moon and me the night. He like to sleep under us both, though this she pretend not to know.
Bad things happen in that place. I will not write them now.
It were the middle of the war. The man go away with a sword and the riches from his trip, and the wife keep me close. We live in they castle on a green island; we visit the palace in the royal city, for the Countess make friend to the Queen. We go back to the castle, we are called to the palace, and here we stay, even when the Count return from war. His arm be gone and also his leg, may be his mind as well. He cry and cry for Elinor, but the Queen cry harder.
Elinor give me to her at war’s end as gift and as promise, all naked but for sugar-sparks and holding a plum in my mouth that I were not allowed to eat. All the court clap when I step front to represent Peace and kiss the plum over to one lord who represent Justice, though I have heard Elinor tease him private that he be among the least just in her acquainting.
I do not like the taste of sweet. The men lick and lick and lick to get they sweetness off of me. The dwarfs make fun and the ladies clamor.
Today there been clamors, too, in the innerst courtyard, by where all they nobles sleep. A hole have opened right where ladies like to walk from they grand door to the portal where boats row them to the flower islands.
When we look in to this hole, we see the earth’s inside. It is warm and wet and turning mud, and it suck at bricks and any thing we throw, swallow them and pull in to it stomach. Some apron tell a story and call this a witch’s bed; such places be where the Devil lay his wives. One other girl say it be called a hollow and in no way part of Satan. Some say it is a new grave, that Princess Sophia be not resting on Saint Peter Isle but come to lie here, so she can call the man who gave her death and pull him down to Earth’s hot heart. If she do n’t find him, she will take her brother and her sisters so she have a playmate in the swampy land of souls.
These be stories, just as poison be one story for the Lunedies and a plum be one for me.
The historian say this is just a hole where earth give way to sand and water. It happen all the time be cause this city were built on islands made of trees and clay and not on land it self. Some time houses fall, or bridges, or once the market place for fish. Then a canal rush in to feed the bay, so the waves go silver from the scales and dead fish float away to feed bigger fish at sea. Now there is just a dock at that place, for little boats to use.
Here what Countess Elinor say about the witch’s bed: There will always be a clever man to invent a story, and a pack of silly women to repeat it. She say this to the Queen by way of comfort. The Queen do not like that a smelly ditch be open by her window.
The Countess never tell a story her self, just explain and store up ideas of others.
The scholar tell me that some time in this place there be dark people (from Greece, China, Afric, Persia) who live by they selves, or dark people who have coins enough to sail away back to the sunshine. These sound like pretty stories to make a Greek work the harder.
Now I finish. Fix time and numbers if you like, Arthur Grammar. Be fore you kiss me.
Every half year, Christmas and Midsummer, I earn four silver shield coins and a new set of clothes. My wages have not diminished with my new position, so this June I have a fresh russet serge dress and a linen shirt that I plan to embroider to display my skill, plus five shields to count (having spent two on necessities as the months have gone by, then one on sweet cakes and wine to wash away the feel that Nicolas Bullen left on me).
In the narrow dorter that reeks of nurses, where I am meant to sleep through daylight, I stir my coins against each other and count one through five, again and again, as the Queen would pray half the rosary. The noise chinks off the whited bricks and fills my heart with gladness and yet with wanting, for five are not enough to pay a ship for passage and a friend for protection on the way to Copenhagen. I count again. I am angry with myself for spending on frivolities, when poverty just keeps me in Nicolas’s clutches.
The nurses’ dorter is long and narrow, crowded with cots and pallets where we sleep two or three to a mattress; our clothes hang from pegs on the walls, and the lone window has no glass. We all get our monthlies at once (except Midi Sorte, who never acts with any of us). I am not alone. Midi Sorte herself seems asleep on her cot — but she hears my sound. One brown eye opens wide and stares, not even wavering at the bright flash of silver.
I shape a brittle smile. Not quite daring Midi to covet my riches, but wanting to be recognized. Or even to win a friend — though I could never tell that split-tongued demon about my trials with Nicolas.
The brown eye closes again. I put the coins into the purse at my waist, settle back down for sleep.
In my imagination, I keep counting my coins, one through five.
Until the night I pricked the Queen, my palace friends were other needlewomen: Anna and Nidia, close to the age of blindness; Maria, Soria, Ente. Since that night, I have seen them only at meals in the kitchens or crossing the courtyards. They are either too embarrassed to address my change in fortune or too proud to acknowledge one who’s fallen.
Gudrun, Mistress of the Needle, must acknowledge me — so I tell myself. When my position changed, Gudrun bundled up my sewing things, my amber needle case (the gift from Jacob Lille) and a book of embroidery patterns I brought with me, and tied them with twine to wait on my new cot. Nonetheless, the day after Midsummer, I go to the seamstresses’ dorter to beg on my knees for her help.
“I stitch a good seam, you know that,” I plead,
even though the girls with whom I used to sew are looking on, either giggling or with pity. Some may giggle for pity itself. “And you’ve praised my embroidery — can’t you vouch for my return here?” For my escape from Nicolas Bullen.
Gudrun will not meet my eyes, uses an apron’s trick of staring at my earlobe. “Ava, I can’t,” she says abruptly. “It has been decided already. And I must ask you not to come again.”
“But you are my stepmother’s friend!” My eyes well up. “Don’t you want me to honor her? And the Queen?”
Gudrun stares beyond my ear, into the cracks in the wall. She says, “Even the lowliest turnspit boy or goose girl serves the Crown. Now stand up and go back to your place.”
What can I do but obey?
I try to plot for a better life. My new position comes with new connections, and I count them up. During the physicians’ nursery visits, I have smiled at short young Doctor Dé, and he at me; his position, too, must be a lonely one. I fetch basins and beakers for the great Candenzius and for the nurses who do most of the work there, and they speak kindly enough to me now. I fold linens sharply and starch the children’s laces just before the daily opening of the doors for the Queen’s visitations. I imagine myself like the miller’s daughter in the fairy tale, working hard until one night, quite by chance, spinning straw into gold. Not as a member of a dark angel army.
One-two-three-four-five silver shields so far.
In this time, I miss my father and his new wife; it’s been several months since I saw them. So on a Sunday I get permission to leave the palace and visit the house with the stone head.
After so much time, the city seems dull and ugly, but alive. Walkers clog the footpaths by Skön Kanal, the “beautiful water,” lined with fine houses where the mossy fundaments beckon with a promise of splendor and the kitchens push out smells of cinnamon and mace. Peasants sniff the air so the memory will make their brown bread richer at night. My feet clatter over wooden bridges and knock against stone ones under which trolls fight over animal bones; one of them has built himself a house of old fins and scales. My new russet skirts swing past canals and coppery churches, big houses with water gates that hiccup in the tide, humble ones that squat in between. Stray dogs, skinny cats, a furtive rat or two; children playing at some hop-dance among ropes stretched out to cure in the long yard that runs down Reb Kanal. In front of one magnificent house, a scattering of white petals curls along the water’s surface, the remnant of some courtship or funeral.
