by Susann Cokal
Isabel take her hand away to wipe her nose and then she swing her self from bed.
“I have something to show you.”
She cross to the chest that is a cabinet, a small room of many drawers and doors. She have a tiny key for each one. She open several, fill her hand with little things that tick-tick against the others. She bring them back to me.
“You see,” she say, “these are my children. The pieces that remain.”
Then she shows. The finger of Sophia, that I remember be cause I crafted it my self though I cannot remember why unless to make some meanness — I drop it in the witch-bed one morn and pull it up by slender thread that noon. I did not know how to shout another way and to be seen. Queen Isabel be mighty fond this finger, she kiss it fore she put it in my palm. For one time I feel ashamed my self.
Isabel also have knuckles and a toe here-there, and some bones the dogs have left. Five teeth, I do not know of whom. Finger nails and bits of hair and an eye that dried to stone. It look like the eye of a sheep.
“Relics,” she explain, as if she have been trying to remember the word. “God and the Virgin sent them so I would never lose my children entirely.”
She make her gown to a pocket over where her lap would sit if she did have one, and she hold these scraps inside and drop tears as if to stitch them up again.
I think first that others must be right all along, the old Queen have lost her sense entire, to keen over slivers of bone and wax. But then I think how some times the women of my father’s house did fall in to a mind-mud from which they could not lift, just lie upon a couch or bed or floor and moan as they struggle with they selves. This happen most often when an auntie had no visit from the husband, or when dry months ended in a bloody rush, or if a child that was hers in special did die.
Poison-auntie had a cure for such a grief, and it were not so different from what Isabel have begun. She would gather bits of herb and candle-wax, and she sang as she stirred them all together in a brew with some hairs and other remainings. She would form the wax in to a manikin and made the suffering woman to attach the token of the child as best she could to make the wax a living form. If the woman could not manage, poison-auntie did it for her.
With this idea I fight my self to sit straight. I may vomit again, that sticky paste still gobs between my legs. But I have a candle near by, and I reach and pour its wax in to my palm, knead like bread with spit to keep supple. My fingers gain some strength this way. I ease back till I am close to crying Isabel.
“Shhh, shh, sh,” I whisper, and I hoist my bosoms to give her Elinor. She let me squeeze her hand and take a relic out, a round bone she says were missing from inside the dead Prince Christian’s right foot. “And thus he couldn’t find his way through life with us.”
It all makes sense to her.
I pick this up and some other shard of bone and dip them in the wax. Then Isabel moan as if I be killing children, not merely touch their remainings. She try to grab the morsel out my hand.
I put my finger to her lips. Then take her hand. I set that wax in to her palm, and I put the bones together and nest them in her palm as in a woman’s womb.
At last she under stands, give me the bones so she can heave up, and she wobble to her cabinet for more candles.
Together we fashion it, a sorrow-child.
We take the pieces Isabel have found, and we put them in a shape she like. That first finger of Sophia make the spine, and the dried eye which I think be of a sheep go to the belly. The tiny bits make arms, legs, ears. There is hair. Isabel prick her finger and paint wax red for lips. She pluck black buttons to make eyes, but they look too much and she pull them out again.
“The little fellow needs his sleep,” she say.
When we finish, it is big as Isabel’s hand and heavy. She hold it on her breast and sing:
Oh, God! For you are a sweet little thing . . .
Perhaps there be some sanity here.
Or could be I have let the madness win.
All day Isabel and Midi have refused to let the aprons in to clean or feed them, but now at last Isabel has shouted, “Come!”
When the door opens, she points to me and says, “Only her.”
I tremble. Perhaps she’s about to reward me for my service yesterday; perhaps Father will have his freedom within the hour. Or she could as easily have taken a whim to call me a cow and slap me down.
I walk into a room with a sweet-reeking rotten smell and an odor of something warm and even summery, though I cannot think what it is. Secrecy.
My mother had a saying, If kindness truly had the power to kill, the Virgin would rule over Hell. By this I once thought she meant that I should be more sweet and giving to others, for she feared I had a selfish disposition. The extremity of her expression — the Virgin in Hell! — proved that she also believed I could learn only by acute example.
This is an acute situation. I cannot say just yet, but every hair on my body prickles with warning.
I did not fully understand the meaning of my mother’s phrase for myself until that day, long after she died, when I visited Holy Spirit Hospital to look for Jacob. As I passed my bits of cake to the madmen who insulted me for my troubles, then gagged on the good things I’d brought them, I realized this: Virtue is its own jail; kindness, a danger whether one displays or receives it; madness, a mere expression of a soul’s real thoughts and longings, its ravings perhaps neither true nor untrue.
“I’d like you to mix a new pitcher of wine,” Isabel says, more as if I’m a lady than the lowliest maid in her household. Well, she has been confusing identities and ranks for some time . . . and now no one disputes her madness.
I blame Count Nicolas (or else I should thank him). Amid the flurry of preparations for his gruesome betrothal, he has decided to leave these two to drive each other the rest of the way to distraction. And both appear as distracted as Nicolas would have wished. When I watch over them this afternoon, I see women who are in peril of being slain with crazy kindness — and I am not quite sure which will be the murderess and which her victim. Both have lost their senses, it seems; and there is no sight more strange than the two of them, one so slight and dark, the other as big and pale as the swelling moon, lying side by side in bed and passing cupfuls of potions to each other with the greatest air of solicitousness. Both, of course, growing babies inside, though at different stages in their breeding.
(Babies, babies, babies. My forlorn stepmother, too, is sitting on an egg, and Isabel recently dismissed an unwed in-waiting for getting herself with child while in service. Why such a plague of pregnancy in this kingdom? I count back to my own last monthlies and am uneasy. Others in the dorter have started washing their cloths already.)
The Dowager seems to have no sense of Midi’s body, even though yesterday it was her one concern. Instead, today there’s a mystery between them, an object that they slide about beneath the counterpane and tuck among the pillows. Now and then I catch a glimpse of something yellow-white and odd-shaped, a pale little frog with bristles on its back.
I want to see. I have to see. The room is dark; most of the candles have burned out. To do my duty to light the Dowager’s day (and satisfy my curiosity), I rummage in a chest until I find more candles, some so old they’ve bent and cracked.
“What are you doing?” asks the Queen.
Looking for a shame to save my father, I want to say, but I get no further than the first word before she interrupts: “Very well.”
I bite down on my tongue. Surely my moment will come.With light restored, I bundle away their dirty sheet — no vomitus this time, I see, and very little of anything else except streaks of a crunchy yellow-white that I recognize as wax. Isabel and Midi tuck their secret in their sleeves, then trade it back and forth when I undress them for their washing. I discover wax, too, under their fingernails, and spattered on the bed curtains and the small table near the bed that holds Isabel’s special pitcher of wine. I pick at the wax on the table, around the outli
ne of the jug that clearly stuck there till it was prized free. Something to do with their secret?
I crouch and reach about beneath the bed, which is usually the resting place of all secrets.
I come up with the stubs of a few candles, the bare black wicks of them crumbling over my fingers. A few harder pieces, splinters that catch in my skin and that seem to be, when I pull them out in the filmy light, thorns of some plant collected in the New World.
“Midi, what have you done?” I exclaim, forgetting that I must not speak before the Queen. I sense the presence of magic — witchcraft — forbidden by the Church. I drop to my knees as if to pray. “Begging pardon, Your Highness.”
To my surprise, Isabel takes no offense. “Where are you, my dear?” she asks sleepily from the shadows of the bed. “We need you.”
Slowly I rise.
The Queen’s little brown-prune eyes wink at me in the shadows. “You’re a seamstress, aren’t you?”
I could fall to the floor again, I’m so surprised she remembers. That bloom of blood beneath my needle . . . “Yes, Highness.”
“We need a new gown.”
What could be the occasion? Does she intend to dance at her daughter’s betrothal?
Isabel fumbles about in the bed, and my spine shivers bone by bone.
She pulls out a sickly thing, that secret she and Midi have been keeping. As yellow-gray as the candles around it, lumpy with crustations I can only guess at, speckled with dried flowers and dust. A horrid little shape such as witches make to pass curses. Carefully the Queen puts it in my hands.
“He needs a dress,” she says. “Something warm — velvet, I think. And linen underthings.” Seeing the way I hold the . . . frog-manikin, she adds, “Remember to support his head — newborn necks are very fragile. But don’t worry too much, dear, he’s strong.”
I curtsy, speechless. Isabel is not too mad to read the horror on my face, even if she mistakes its cause. She thinks I simply fear of a lack of materials, for she adds, “You may use whatever you need from my rooms. Take the bed curtains, take the carpets. Whatever keeps him safe.”
I look to Midi, at the gleam of white between her shadowed lashes. She pretends to sleep, but I see her nod. And because I am a seamstress, with cracked fingers itching to take up the needle again, I obey them both.
“I can make a little dress,” I whisper, lest anyone outside hear me. “I’ll use the canopy over your bed. And I can make a cloak from the table carpet.”
The Dowager beams at me. “I knew you were the right one.”
After this, I think, I will certainly have the right to beg a favor. But will I want it from a woman who’s not just mad but witching?
QUEEN APPARENT CHRISTINA-BEATTE LUNEDIE, FUTURE BULLEN
AND so Christina-Beatte is to be a bride as well as a queen! Although she is not betrothed to an elf (as would still be her preference), the Queen Apparent claps her hands and dances about her inner chamber. Count Nicolas is handsome, by far the most elfin of all the court in appearance, and he pays her lovely compliments; she is his treasure, his heart’s desire. He has sent her a gift, a glittering little dagger with which, he says in a beautifully scripted note, “You may defend yourself against any who would try to harm your precious person.” And he is teaching her to use it.
Christina-Beatte is woman enough to love the bright jewels on the handle, queen enough to love the blade’s sharp edge. It is mostly ornamental, not so sharp as a sword or even a carving knife, and it bears her father’s famous motto (“In the darkness, fear my light”), and it is still capable of cutting quite a slit in a mattress when it is tested (which she is child enough to do). Count Nicolas has shown her how to pull it from her belt and make a threatening sweep to impress her enemies and protect her virtue, the meaning of which word he had Lady Drin explain to her.
She also loves the polished blade in which she can see herself reflected, eyes and lips gleaming, skin powdered so white that the ugly scars and blotches of Morbus Lunediernus are hidden.
“The rubies make a pattern of hearts and love knots,” that chinless, pock-freckled Reventlow points out, every time Christina-Beatte removes it from its sheath. Reventlow loves love.
Christina-Beatte waves the blade at the Baroness for daring to comment on this object that is hers and hers alone.
She remembers a time when she was so annoyed with her little sister, Gorma, that she seized Gorma’s wax doll and broke it to bits against the neck of her carved swan bed, even weak from Morbus as they both were. Elinor Parfis pinched Beatte hard in punishment but kept the secret, and Gorma was too afraid of another pinch to tell Maman.
Christina-Beatte studies her dagger again, sliding it in and out of its gilded leather sheath to taunt Reventlow, whose hips wiggle with the itch of fear. Christina-Beatte understands that a queen must not go about stabbing people, or even dogs, without cause. But she would like to test this blade on something more than her feathery bed.
She remembers there are dark places in the palace, rooms she has never visited but about which the legends fly like bats. Blood, chains, torture. This is where, she has heard, Elinor Parfis now resides.
“The Lower Chambers,” Christina-Beatte declares, so suddenly as to mystify anyone who cannot guess her private thoughts. “I want them opened. I want to see inside.”
Baroness Reventlow blanches. Without asking permission, she runs to tell Count Nicolas that the Queen Apparent is making plans.
There was once a princess whose parents sent her to town with a coin and the instructions to bargain with it for bread. They thought in this way to build the sort of practical character in her that would attract a husband, for she was sadly lacking in beauty.
Along the way, she crossed paths with a hideous crone carrying a covered basket. The princess steeled herself for a test: Should she give the crone her coin, as she would surely be asked to do, and perhaps receive some magical reward? Or should she keep the coin and follow her parents’ orders strictly?
To her surprise, the old woman asked for nothing but gave her a piece of advice: “Whatever you do, my girl, you must not interpret a coincidence such as meeting me to be a sign of anything. It may in fact be one, but the meaning is not necessarily for you. So you’d best forget all about me.” She turned to the muddy road and hobbled on her way.
The princess was disappointed, for as the crone had guessed, she ever tried to find meaning in the small incidents of her life. She would have liked to feel she was participating in a grand plot of adventure, not simply trudging into town for bread that a servant could just as easily have brought back. Still, she went forth on her errand, bargaining well and heading home by a less muddy path with a brown loaf steaming under each arm.
She was just in time to see the crone knocking on the door of a hut all but hidden among the trees. She noticed that the old woman had uncovered her basket and that it was full of trinkets, ribbons, and apples, the last of which were perfectly formed and such a bright red that they might have been made of glass. But they were not glass, they were real apples, and the pretty dark-haired girl who opened the door grabbed one gleefully and took a big bite.
The smell of apple juice spread heavy and sweet through the air. The princess felt faint with longing, for her parents believed that fruit was an indulgence she would have to deny herself, since she would be unlikely to attract the sort of husband who would give her such things.
But then the pretty, dark-haired girl fell to the ground, the apple still between her lips; for it was poisoned. When the crone saw what she had done, she cackled and, suddenly spry, took off running with her rags flapping behind her.
The princess trembled in fear, but she guessed that this might be the test she was expecting: She must go to the fallen girl and see if she could help. Yet when she leaned over the motionless form, there was no breath; neither could she feel a pulse when she loosened the girl’s bodice.
As she worked, the princess noticed a pair of jeweled combs in the dark hair.
Surely these were too fine to adorn the head of a mere peasant!
Realizing that this coincidence must have meaning for her after all, the princess plucked the gleaming combs from the dead girl’s hair and slid them into her own mousy locks. The jewels’ reflected light made her braids much finer, and she walked with her head high and tossing to make them flash.
The bread was cold by the time she got home, but her parents were so pleased with her clever acquisition that they gave her an apple of her own. Much later, the combs became part of her bridal crown when she married a prince as crafty as herself.
In the morning, I wake to find that fortune’s wheel has spun again.
Gudrun, Mistress of the Needle, comes to fetch me from the dorter herself. She shakes me out of an hour’s sleep and informs me that I am to replace old Nidia Stinesdatter and work the under-linens again — for both Queens, she adds darkly, as if this double service is more onus than honor. “The Dowager and the Apparent. And little Princess Gorma, of course.”
“But why?” I blink, try not to yawn in her face. “Who ordered this?”
I’ve been a maid so long now that I can’t believe in good luck, even after hard work. And I am fearful, still, of my day with Isabel and Midi — of course I never asked a favor; I fled as soon as they released me from my task.
“It wasn’t me.” Gudrun waves her hands as if to dispel a bad odor, then leaves me to push off my pallet and make ready to keep seamstresses’ hours.
I stuff my hair into a nest beneath my cap, my face greasy but rubbed with a petticoat to dull the sheen. If I don’t make haste, I’ll lose my chance. Then I discover it’s my monthly time after all, as for most of the sleepers who follow the cycles of the moon. I lose precious minutes to grab a still-damp cloth from the drying racks and pin it to a little girdle beneath my clothes, and I’m out of the dorter before most of the other daytime aprons have stirred.
