The Kingdom of Little Wounds

by Susann Cokal

  And when she say Elinor, she smile some creases to her face and call me to her side.

  “You have been so good to me in this illness,” she say, while hold my hand in hers that wear Nicolas’ ruby. “From now forward, you must share my bed.”

  This be a great honor in the court, even the real Elinor did not sleep beside the Queen.

  The ladies bob they knees and murmur Countess. This be the maddest thing of all, but I play the part of madness too. When I hear the word, I hoist my bosom to my chin like Countess did. I be Elinor reborn from pain.

  I wonder could I be mad too, if I have caught delusion like a Morbus from the Queen. I am treated different. Differently from different, I am Elinor. Strange even to my self.

  I get new clothes. They use to be the Queen her self’s and she has the ware house to open so they can be found. This is much more than one red silk skirt, finer and so many of it. Her seamstresses remake seams for I am short, and the dyers dye the garments black as most every other noble’s at this court. The clothing make my skin more dark. A shiny skirt, a bodice tight upon my belly that still carry a visitor inside. No apron. A hat like ladies wear, with black wings and a white veil that float behind. Slippers and pattens that clack-clack on the floor and make me tip.

  When I wear so much, Nicolas who visit every day looks so as if he do not remember the time he were in me. He acts that I am the lady who should wear these clothes. I ask inside what this can mean, he all ways have some meaning.

  May be he mad him self, I have all ways thought since he first come see the Countess in her chamber, for who could lie with such a woman and be sane? He come each day or two to discuss governing, and she lets him have his way in matters. While I fetch her pudding and a spoon to feed her with, she explain she must take care for her self, that she have wore out from seeing to others.

  Nicolas bend to her hand and say that she is wise. He turn and say to me the Queen must have what ever she want to swallow or to touch. “For she knows best in what’s regarding her.”

  I wonder what I know. I wonder if the lump in me will know its father. I wonder who that father be.

  When Nicolas is here, the lump do not move, even though it have reached the age of start to shimmer. It stay just a lump. He were only in behind any way, but I have heard of babies made as such. My aunties told me, my father did it.

  Poison-auntie say a baby made with love be impossible to chase away. Out of all the men, I did love Arthur, so I might quicken for him and not the others.

  But the lump do not move for Arthur, either. It just sit inside while all the rest of me sinks low and try not to be seen.

  Yes, Arthur once my lover follow the Count Nicolas every where. He will not look at me; he will not bow or greet me. I wonder will history write that Elinor Parfis did return from prison as a dark nursey with a big belly.

  History! By Arthur Rantzen Grammaticus.

  Now I write receipts, now I have ideas. I too have paper and some goosey pens, and all the ink I wish for. So some times I write these pages when the others sleep, and I hide them in my skirts. And another day I write commands for Isabel’s pudding, with clove to make blood strong.

  That same time I write a draught I will not give her. A recipe from poison-auntie, some thing to end the matter up of who be father to the lump in me and when will it quicken. I think this must be reason for my mad change in to a pretend Countess, it is the one power ever granted me.

  Here is what I need:

  tansy

  pennyroyal

  catnip

  rue

  worm fern

  hellebore

  savory

  sage

  There would be more if I could know the names that they wear here. And if I found some ants that be not dead with winter, I would crush and mix them too, with the whiskers of a large cat. Instead I grind these plants in oils and waters as they require.

  The air around goes bitter, I blow it at the fire.

  “What are you doing, my dear?” ask the Queen in her bed. “I’d like for you to read to me.”

  I hoist my bosom. I bring her wine and she ask no more for reading. She sleep like a chicken full of egg, she cluck but will not open eyes. She does not wish to wake now if not for her physicians.

  I write for beakers and a brazier, and they come to me.

  Finally I steep my pastes in water from a clean well, make it simmer to a sauce that clings to spoons and knifes I dip in it. I fear the portions, worry that the leaves be too dry for strength, that I should add more or less of some things. I make my best deductions.

  Do the ladies shush that I ’m a witch? No, they think I follow Isabel’s command. Or may be they hope I do some evil, may be it ’s why I be here.

  On the eve before the King is tombed, Candenzius come to see the Queen again. Count Nicolas have sent him, to check the progress of the heir inside. She yields to his big fingers, she holds my hand and that of Reventlow, squeeze till pain in us is dull and constant. She seem content.

  “It will be a fine boy,” she says, though not suppose to speak. She mad enough think she is physician in full now and ready to judge her own condition. “He’ll save the Lunedie succession and the realm. You must assure the Count of this.”

  On they side of sheets, Venslov and Candenzius wipe their hands. Young Dé do a wiggle. As if they did not hear, they confer about her urine and taste it for the salts and sweets.

  The ladies of the corners sing the high headache songs the Queen likes at these times.

  Before those three wise men go, Candenzius lead me to a corner where he bow, call me Countess, and slip in to my hand a jar of dull red paste he say I am to rub upon the Queen each night from this one forward. On her belly and her privacy.

  “While the others sleep,” he say, and look as if he wish they be sleeping now. The ladies fuss on Isabel, they pretend they do not see us. “In secrecy. For the good of us all.”

  I push hands together as in church, hide the red jar between. What more can I do? For I know there be no good with in this jar. It is not guaiac, it is not theriac, it is poison.

  Candenzius is Nicolas’ creature now and have turn against Queen Isabel. He mean for me to kill the heir inside Isabel if not in fact her self. For I think this must be why Nicolas have allowed me to live these days as Elinor — if I refuse to do as this man say, I will be punish worse than the real Countess. More pain, more pain, more pain than ever I have thought.

  And then that history will be writ done.

  Death crawling through the womb, a terrible path. But terrible for me instead if I do n’t shove Isabel down it.

  So that night, while all the others sleep, I gulp the drink that I have made and also fill my cleft with what the doctor gave to me. I take care that Isabel do not taste the brews or even smell them, what happen to her belly will be no done thing of mine. I will not poison her, though what I do now most like to mean death for me as well as the lump.

  I drop the jars in to the jakes, they will fall in to canals and wash they selves from harm.

  As I walk back full at both my ends and in between, I hope for death, to both my lump and my person. For there be no purpose in to stay alive if I am told to kill a Lunedie, and no purpose if I keep the size in my own belly.

  So am I elevate to Countess just to die.

  ISABEL LUNEDIE

  WHEN Isabel first hears the cannons boom across the bay, her heart rattles like a clam in its shell.

  It is the morning of her husband’s funeral. The cannons mean that Christian’s barge has reached the isle of Saint Peter’s and he is about to be entombed among his ancestors. There to decay in lush velvet darkness.

  For as long as she can remember (fourteen days now), Isabel has been sitting in her white-draped bedchamber, La Reine Blanche by candlelight, lately trying to embroider something pretty for the baby. This is the sort of task she’s given in these days of confinement, a way to whittle off the few hours in which she doesn’t doze. She uses si
lver threads, couching them with silk on linen. But she has no talent for it, not anymore; her eyes are weak and her hands shake. She runs a needle through a bit of thick skin on a fingertip, and it sticks there without drawing blood.

  Despite the smoky heat of hearth and braziers, Isabel feels cold. She wonders if she’s wet her chair.

  Or perhaps she misses her husband. That could be possible. It is often sad when people die.

  The cannons fire again. The windowpanes rattle and a picture crashes to the floor behind the white linen draping.

  This time Isabel feels the rumble deep in her belly. Suddenly, for the first time in weeks, she is sick. It splatters the front of her white mourning gown and ruins the bit of nothing she was making for the heir.

  A few of the ladies stir sleepily. The room is stenchful, and Isabel knows that something must be wrong; this is not her usual vomitus.

  “Where is my Elinor?”

  Morning.

  I wake from pain. More pain than ever I could dream, though I were asleep for it.

  I thought that I would die by now, but my belly’s hard beneath my hand and though I soaked my skirts it were n’t with blood, just every else liquid that might soak a skirt instead. And I still breathe.

  The ladies finally now are wakened, for there come a crash of cannons on the bay that shake the room. They yawn and blink and sniff, it is disgusting what I ’ve done.

  “The fire’s gone out,” say Baroness Reventlow, she never were much clever.

  “How long were we asleep?” ask Lady Drin.

  The Queen say, “Where is my Elinor? Someone must wipe me clean.”

  I try to go, it be my instinct to obey. But I ’m a snail who can ’t escape his curl.

  We forgot Isabel in a chair, or may be she heave her self there over night. She has a needle and a scrap in her hand, a candle at her side. She may have sewed all night. I see that even from my nook I ’ve soiled her gown, that fleece that wrap the thing that she is brooding. But they all think she wear her own sickness and that I be merely so asleep as they have been.

  How can she be sick when I took her poison for myself?

  “Countess,” say Lady Drin to me, and in a way that make me real, “will you not help the Dowager Queen as she asks?”

  I curl the tighter, close my eyes. I am not Elinor, I am no nursey in this moment. I cannot stand. But Isabel calls again.

  “Here, Elinor, come to me.” She throw her embroidery to the floor, it fall plop at my shoulder. “And you others, leave us. Elinor will care for me.”

  My stomach clench and I try to not groan, but it escape me. No thing more do escape, though, be cause I am dry now inside. I try to rise, for if I am to live there be no other way to do so than in the service of the Queen and who command her.

  I cannot rise.

  So surprise, I do not tend to her, it is she who do for me. When all the rest have gone with sleep-blink eyes, she shove up from her chair, she have to twist to free of its arms, and come to pant above me.

  “Elinor,” she say, all tender as to her own children, “how you are suffering. Get into bed and I will make you a posset.”

  So suddenly, I feel the Lump inside me move. It turns as if it recognize at last the one who made it.

  QUEEN APPARENT CHRISTINA-BEATTE LUNEDIE

  IN her gleaming purple mourning gown, with a circlet of pearls and a brown wig over her patchy hair, Christina-Beatte sees only beauty as her attendants carry her into the palace’s great hall for her father’s grieving feast. She notes that every soul in the room is instantly on his or her feet — except her sister, Gorma, whose litter is just behind Christina-Beatte’s and who therefore cannot stand as others do.

  The musicians raise their trumpets and the courtiers bow; all in silence, of course. Still the air is alive: the whine of silk against silk, the shush of velvet, the creaks of knees and hips worn out with bowing. Count Nicolas, the friend of Christina-Beatte’s father, grips a gilded chair in which the Queen Apparent is to sit.

  Christina-Beatte claps as she would clap for actors performing a particularly charming play. After so many months in a sickbed, isolated from the court, she cannot believe this obeisance is for her. Then again, isn’t it what’s promised in every story told to children? A cure, acclaim, a feast. At least at first.

  Christina-Beatte likes being Queen Apparent. This means she must be glad her father is dead, which is a terrible thing but only what happens in the natural course of life. Resolutely, she shutters the memory of his dying from her mind; it must have been a dream, or a horrid tale told by a maid. She won’t think about tombs either, or Saint Peter’s, or any other ugliness such as a little brother about to be born to take her place.

  Such fun to have a new name, such pleasure to be someone else, someone not as sickly as Beatte Lunedie.

  Attendants hoist the Queen Apparent and her young sister into their chairs. The women pant, for the room is warm and the Lunedie daughters are gaining in substance. Hurrah for the health of the Queen Apparent and the First (last) Princess!

  But something is not right.

  Christina-Beatte considers the women who carried her. Their upper lips are moist, and one of them smells. Onions, sweat, a cheesy odor of unchanged linen.

  The Queen Apparent does not need to tolerate such an insult. “You are dismissed!” she cries, pointing one thin finger at the smelly bearer. “Off to the prisons!”

  The result is most gratifying. The girl goes away crying, and Gorma looks awestruck — enormous brown eyes in a pinched white face.

  Count Nicolas, settling himself in between the two girls, touches his forehead and bows. He says to Christina-Beatte, “You are developing into a formidable woman.”

  She feels herself growing warm.

  Power, thinks little Gorma, with a surge of that old sickness. Pleasure.

  The feast itself is boring. The courtiers gaze at their plates rather than at Christina-Beatte, and she must sit between Count Nicolas and the doddering Duke Harald of Marsvin. She fidgets with her heavy rope of pearls. The courtiers think she doesn’t notice that they amuse themselves by counting the tears that flavor the sauces, betting on who can water a plate enough to make the herring swim across it again. Turning her father’s death into a joke. Her father, who always had a gentle word on his tours through the nursery.

  Christina-Beatte is sharing a silver charger and a glass goblet with the Duke while Gorma shares with Nicolas. This sharing is both an honor for Marsvin and his due as the current highest-ranking man in the land. But the Duke disgusts her, worse even than that dismissed attendant. His hands are bumpy with veins, and food has crusted around his ragged fingernails. The few teeth that do remain to him are orange, and he slurps his food; his lips are so greasy that Christina-Beatte cannot see the etching along the glass’s rim. Instead she sees a layer of lard.

  Politely, the Duke offers her some morsels. Christina-Beatte refuses to eat. She will be ill if she eats from those horrible hands. But she cannot send the Duke of Marsvin to the prisons; this much she understands about rank and court.

  Christina-Beatte glares at the Duke’s wife, seated down the dais. The Duchess should tidy up her husband, but Christina-Beatte knows the old woman will say nothing because she is snoring on a dampened chair. Those two have been married as long as Christina-Beatte remembers, longer even than Maman and Christina-Beatte’s father. They are both anciently hideous, but it has been said that the Duchess was scarcely more than Christina-Beatte’s age when they married.

  From somewhere comes a memory, a sentence from a story perhaps: A man might know all kinds of love for a woman, if he raises her up from a child to a wife. For some reason, this sentence makes her flush warm all over.

  The Queen Apparent makes a decision. “When I am twelve,” she says, very loudly, “I’m going to marry an elf. All my children will be changelings.”

  As if pulled tight by a cord, the diners all around the hall sit up tense and straight. The dwarfs hide their faces
in their hands, and the aprons stare forward expressionlessly. Too late, the Queen Apparent remembers this is to be a feast of silence, even for her.

  But Willem Braj, whose rank has him seated far down the table, leans daringly in to make a comment.

  “Perhaps Your Majesty Apparent would prefer a merman.” He waves at the tapestries of state history that have been hung on the walls. “In keeping with the history of your realm. One with a mighty tail, of course.”

  A few of the ladies titter at this.

  Christina-Beatte imagines what they are laughing at, herself next to a man with a long, flowing beard and a fat, scaly tail. Floundering in the bay.

  “I can’t swim!” she admits.

  She is confused when the table bursts into loud laughter and applause, as if they think this very funny.

  Christina-Beatte sobs in fury. The beauty of the occasion is lost.

  When I’m Queen in full, she vows, I’ll send them all to be tortured.

  ISABEL AND ELINOR

  THE poor thing, poor dear Elinor, has turned quite black with illness. Only now does Isabel see it: Her skin glistens; her eyes are glassy; she has an obvious fever that cannot be attributed to her position in the hearth nook, for the fire has all but gone out. And she has broken her vow to silence, for how she groans! Though she is steadfast enough (dear valiant Elinor) not to form the groans into words.

  “There, there,” says Isabel, as soothingly as she can. She bends awkwardly, off balance, tipping a cup in the direction of her friend’s lips and spilling a good bit down her own front as she does. The day’s rule of silence does not apply to Isabel. “Have a sip of this draught. It is exactly the same as what I take myself. And when you are stronger, you may have some blood pudding.”

  Elinor’s eyes are first round with wonder, then slitted in pain. After a single mouthful of Isabel’s good spiced wine, she vomits. The cup goes flying and clatters against a chest somewhere out of the candlelight.