by Susann Cokal
“But — why? Why does Isabel have to be poisoned?”
Gudrun shifts; if it were possible the night could get darker, I’d say she’s pulling it around her like a cloak. “We serve the Crown,” she repeats.
I want to throw the vial away, dash it against the stones of the yard, but Gudrun keeps me still as if she can read me through my fist. “Remember,” she says, and once again it’s as if she’s repeating some speech heard elsewhere, “we are working for the good of the Crown. For the land under the Crown. And your family — so they can stay part of that land.”
This takes me a moment to puzzle out.
“Are you saying my father will go free if I do this?”
Far off, the courtiers flit through smoky torchlight.
Despite the cold, Gudrun’s hand is sweating. “That isn’t in my power to offer. But I do have something you’ve long desired —”
Briefly I see Jacob’s face in the eyes of my mind, before I interrupt Gudrun to accuse her: “You’re part of the angel army. Count Nicolas’s spy. And that’s why you brought me back to the sewing room — he told you to.”
Again she says neither yes nor no, simply applies pressure to my hand.
“You used to be a good girl, Ava,” Gudrun says. “You sewed the most beautiful seams and white-work. Wouldn’t you like to be in the Queen’s — the new Queen’s — needle room forever? Someday you might be Mistress of the Needle yourself. I could put in a word when I am ready to leave.”
At one time in my palace life, this was all I could have dreamed of. I still want it, more than I first imagined — when something is within my grasp, I have always found I always want it all the more, right until the moment that I touch it. So if the prison guard hadn’t just called me a good girl an hour ago, I might be more easily swayed. Instead I answer resolutely, “If I could have one reward, I would choose my father’s freedom.”
“I told you, that isn’t in my power.” Gudrun seems truly sorrowful; or else being part of that special army has trained her to be an actor too. “We, none of us, hardly get to choose.”
CONTRACTING
THE cannons at the palace speak to cannons at Saint Peter’s: Grum! Grum! Grum! The contracts have been signed and witnessed, Christina-Beatte is dressed in her finest, and the betrothal — it is now. Long may they prosper! cry the guns. Long may they rule!
It seems the city has forgotten about the Dowager’s belly and its potential to change history. Christina-Beatte spares it not a single thought as she walks — yes, walks! — slowly up the aisle of the glowing cathedral, past the Stations of the Cross worked in amber, over the sunken tomb of Saint Ruta. Hundreds of eyes upon her, and the light of thousands of jewels. Clouds of incense, and so much beauty. It weighs her down.
Churchly formality is usually reserved for a wedding. A betrothal, Christina-Beatte knows, might take place in some room at the palace, and she herself would not normally need to be present. She is only ten and cannot marry till she has her woman’s courses. But. There is Count Nicolas, his sharp face smiling at her, his clever eyes alight at the very sight of her — oh, yes, she feels a tingle that might well mean she’s to be womaned soon. She is wearing the ornamental dagger that he gave her at her belt, and she likes its gentle weight bouncing lightly on her blue-padded loins.
If only it weren’t so exhausting, walking this far. She has Lady Drin to support her on one side, but Duchess Margrethe is no help tottering on the other. The Duchess smells dreadfully of urine but must be there as Christina-Beatte’s closest relative besides Maman.
Thinking of this, Christina-Beatte stumbles, and in a moment her mood changes, for feeling weak makes her feel cross. She blames Margrethe. The Queen Apparent wants to stick a pin in the old witch. And her starchy ruff has begun to itch unbearably; she would love to take out all its pins and drive them into the leaky cushion of her father’s cousin’s flesh.
But. Again. There is her husband-to-be, her betrothed, stepping down to take her hand and all but lift her up to a place beside him; whereupon he immediately drops to his knees, so he is her height, and kisses her hand as if it’s a holy relic. He emanates warmth; he beams. He whispers, “Remember what is to come next, Your Highness — our heart’s desire.”
So Christina-Beatte, ten years old and bred to be sick, allows herself to sink into that warmth and think, This is love, this is love.
When the cannons boom their deep-bellied message, Isabel feels it in her belly too. A vibration, a pain. She can ignore that sensation for a time, as everybody knows the cannons have disturbed her stomach in the past and nothing much happened from it then.
Reventlow, the chinless ugly baroness, sleeps on a bench in the window, hips wiggling to each thrum of the guns. She took a draught of something Krolik recommended for a minor female complaint, and she hasn’t risen since. Elinor, too, is asleep: beside Isabel, recovering from her own illness.
The cannons are nothing to those two, so they should be nothing to Isabel, either. She dares to reach among the pillows for the dear white baby that dark Elinor has explained must be hidden when any but the two of them are present. The poor little thing must be hungry.
But as she reaches, her belly ripples. Isabel observes it: a wave moves through the fatty flesh after each cannon fire; and after fifteen years and around thirteen births (some live, some not), Isabel recognizes certain signs. Even if they vary a little bit from the usual. (What is “usual”?) Even if she already has a baby in bed beside her.
Of course. She remembers Candenzius’s fingers and the three physicians’ talk of cells in the womb. It is possible she’s held more than one child within, that the wheel of her womb has spun and another cell is opening. It’s time to see what sits inside, beyond the undulations of pain.
Isabel reaches for her easy baby, the one she and her dark Elinor birthed together. Poor little boy born of bones and fingernails.
“I am ready to die,” she announces bravely into the firm pink lips. Or she thinks she says it; words are hard to form amid the subtle tearings and bruisings inside.
Elinor has heard her; she wakes. Brown eyes blinking, then wide and frightened in her deep brown face. She reaches for the baby and plucks him from Isabel’s arms.
I am ready to die. How could Isabel have said that? She is not ready; no one is ever ready. She grasps for her baby again, and Elinor holds him out of reach.
Grum. Grum. Grum.
Somewhere, amid the booming cannons and the pain, while Elinor hides the sorrow-child, Isabel’s daughter is being contracted to a man whom Isabel dislikes. She thinks of this as the tearing pains ebb into squeezing ones.
“It is better that I die,” she says. Pain is making her mind remarkably clear. “Better than to let this baby die. A boy must rule instead of Beatte. Beatte is . . .” Clamping for a pain. “Beatte — isn’t —”
But what Beatte is or isn’t will have to wait until after Isabel vents a groan, giving in to her pain, letting it engulf her and drive away thoughts of anything but it, the pain.
Elinor, stronger than she’s seemed for days, clamps a black hand over Isabel’s mouth, helping her be silent.
Reventlow sleeps on, tumbled into slumber by her drug.
Isabel thinks: What is Beatte? A girl, a child. What isn’t she? Kind or clever. Queen or adult. Of course, she has been ill, and illness warps the mind as well as bodies. All bodies.
It’s certain now, another body’s moving within Isabel — or her body is moving around it, as this one seems at heart as still as his brother, that sweet waxen thing that Isabel fears is being crushed as she struggles against her pain. Strains against it. The pain is too great, too insistent, to allow her to protect any fragile being in its way.
Her eyes promise quiet, and Elinor leaves her for a moment, to tie one end of the sheet to a bedpost and put the other in Isabel’s hand, so she has something to pull against and squeeze. Isabel would prefer to squeeze the warm, living, fragile flesh of her dear dark Elinor’s hand, but Elino
r is doing other things. She is shaking Reventlow awake and giving her a note describing some errand that will take her away and grant the Queen her privacy.
Both of them know, instinctively, that they must be alone to face what comes next. There is nothing but danger in the next hours.
Dear Elinor. If Isabel dies, Elinor should be regent. She who so recently escaped death herself.
The pain surges and Isabel pulls her sheet, like a sailor tugging his oar against the ocean. She allows herself to groan again. Elinor stuffs a clean handkerchief into her mouth; Isabel nods her gratitude.
The Countess gropes the Queen, feels the storm within her belly. She lifts the sheets and Isabel’s nightdress and wrestles her massive legs up and apart to investigate. She does this with the soothing silence that made her an excellent Mistress of the Nurseries. She says only, “Shhh, shh, sh.” She touches around Isabel’s privacy in a way the Queen has not been touched before, even by Candenzius.
Isabel relaxes, just a little. Elinor touches one last spot.
And suddenly it’s done. Isabel’s flabby old womb is loose and practiced, the inside walls easily breached. She feels a slick shoot of early flesh barely pausing at any point, so eager does the thing feel to be out.
Isabel waits excitedly for the first cry. It does not come.
Elinor must not know she has to suck the mucus from the baby’s nose and throat. She has never had children of her own, Isabel remembers. With her own heart buzzing like a hive of bees, Isabel can’t hear if the baby breathes at all. She moans, trying to give instructions; twists and sees that Elinor is staring at something in her hands. Something red against dark fingers.
Isabel feels the usual fluids leaking out, feels her womb contract again to expel the mother-cake. Already. Gone.
Her tongue works the sodden gag from her mouth. “Show me!”
She has to say it several times before Elinor gathers up the sheet and shows her, nestled inside, this thing that is her own. Blood and a newborn’s yellow meal cling about its creases, though Elinor has given its face, if that is its face, a cursory swipe.
Isabel allows herself to faint.
So Isabel be not so mad as to think she can not be quiet. This were a good thing, for if she give voice to feeling we may both be dead all ready.
There were a time at my father’s house I did see another mad woman give a birth. She were a simple one not so much older than Beatte now, not right in the head, and not sure why she felt this wriggling inside her, no matter how many time the aunties try to explain. When her pains came she were a lost creature, senseless and screaming so to shake the palace walls; my father sent a man to order her to silence. But on she howled like some wild thing, and when the baby were presented, she screamed as at a stranger.
The baby were a simple one, too, and drowned in a pool meant for bathing. His mother never notice, for she never did recognize him her own.
No more will Isabel know this one. This thing that might kill us both if it is discover. This monster. That I should not look on less it turn my own Lump in to its likeness — in this land as well as mine, a woman with a belly is kept from animals and horrors, less they shape the baby.
Here it is, the first moment I think to protect the Lump. Such a moment!
When if the thing be seen, I will surely to be murder, for some one will swear I witched the Queen in to monstrous birth.
The drumming come now for executions. The first ones shall begin, this is all ways the sign. I know Arthur must be sharpen his stylus to write events upon his tablet of wax. With his apprentice-boys all around, repeating words so to endure beyond this night.
I want to endure. I want my Lump and I want my life.
Isabel sleeps, like any woman after childbed. Deep and still a-bleeding.
So I wrap the monster in a fur and put him in a chest, that way he will not be cold. I think this as if he be alive and dead at one time. (But he cannot be alive, no such thing could live.) I tuck the mother-cake beside him, it is so small as a sheep’s kidney.
May be I can hide every thing. For a time at least, a time I shall have with the Lump.
I clean the Queen as much I can. I wash and wash. I burn the linens wet with blood. It takes a long while, first they must dry behind the fire and then be pull to the front and I watch them go. Wispy smoke of blood, the stains and also the broideries upon the edge. All in flowers of ash, smell of meat.
Isabel wakes up. I think it be the drums, bumpbumpbumpbumpbump. “How much?”
I show seven fingers, I do n’t know what she meant exactly but this baby were inside her so many months.
“Too much,” she says, and, “I must not eat more fish.” She fade to sleep again.
That much be true, she were ever fond of fish and ate a dolphin entire at one meal. May be this explain the baby shape.
Now panic. I need water. I have used all in here, and all the wine, and every other wet thing I could find to make Isabel as she were this morning. Yet there is still blood between her legs, and in time Reventlow will return from watching deaths to report on real Elinor, and then she will inquire about this blood. She will summon Krolik to search the signs that Isabel have been a mother once again. And then I will be witched.
I open a shutter to gobble air. Down the yard, beneath the window, that muddy witch-bed bubble and beckon.
“Elinor!” Isabel whine awake, a-drafty.“Elinor, come here!” She have her Queen ways again, the command in the voice and the anger if her thoughts be not anticipated. “The Prince and I grow cold.” Her waxen boy.
This is my choice, death below the window or a life above uncertain, with a great secret and madness but one step away. My choice which I have faced recently with what should have been death in the bottom of a salve jar — but even then I faced not real choice but fate, for the Lump would not depart.
“Elinor! Come, the Prince needs reswaddling. He mustn’t soil his overdress. Is it not pretty?”
That soft thing that Ava Bingen sewed quick as a shroud so she could depart our strangeness. It is pretty, yes, a little velvet sack for the sorrow-child I helped create.
“And close that shutter!” she finish. “You know moonlight’s dangerous for a newborn.”
I close it loose and I return. I slide in to the bed beside her as she like me to do. I hold my Lump and fuss with her lump’s dress. I am glad now for the Queen’s madness. She have accept the wax child for the real one and do not ask about her stillbirth.
“You are so warm,” she tell me happily. “Like a coal in a fire. Put your arms around us.”
I do this. I worry I may melt her sorrow-child, but for now I am content to clutch some flesh. I am afraid and even one mad woman be company for me.
“Ah, dear Elinor.” Happy at last, and she goes to sleep.
I lie while the Lump bubbles up my belly. He tickles my throat and say he is not going to leave. He want to make me speak for him now if not for my self.
He tell me, You are Elinor.
I jump from the bed and return to that burning.
I have noted before that while serving my time as a scrub maid, I discovered one important object, a magic talisman that renders the bearer invisible. A bucket. Whether it is made of wood or leather, whether it holds water, slops, or simply brushes, no one looks beyond the bucket to the person carrying it. To be truthful, no one really looks at the bucket, either; the mere fact of its presence works some enchantment to create an unseeable space, especially in the beautiful rooms where courtiers are playing their lutes and sniffing their pomanders, flirting in the window nooks and generally pretending that filth does not exist. The dwarfs notice only when a careless bucket is about to strike them in the head, and then they’re likely to upend its contents on the bearer’s skirt.
None of these people, of course, are present as I march grimly toward Queen Isabel’s chambers, gripping the bucket in which I have stowed her new nightdress. The gorgeous rooms are all but empty, as everyone from slave to dwarf to duche
ss has gone to witness first the betrothal ceremony, then the executions that are now following it. Only a few dozy guards remain, and they lounge on the otherwise forbidden benches. Their armored eyes barely blink as I pass.
But the tapestries sway lightly. The woodwork of the ceilings braids into a net waiting to drop; the gods painted among it point and chide. The palace is gathering itself against me.
I am doing a terrible thing.
Yes, I chose my father over Queen Isabel, even considering that many more might die as a result. I am about to kill the Queen. What other choice, really, does a daughter have?
I am a murderess. A regicide. But not a patricide.
The night cracks open my wishes.
I still hunger for the beautiful part of the story, the part with the wedding or the wealth or the lover un-beasted, the family restored, before the trials and sadness that follow into another story. I want the life of the princess just starting out on her adventures, the kind of tale I used to tell when it was my turn to speak at night in the seamstresses’ dorter, or while we were at work in the needle room. I want to save my father and then to be reunited with my vanished love . . . or at the very least to gain independence, with a shop and a house of my own. And I still, even now, I still think I might earn these things, if I complete a few more trials correctly.
Far off, I hear cheering, and I know a prisoner is being brought out. Then there is the slowing bump-bump-bump of drums; then silence, during which Nicolas might make a speech and a priest might take final confession. I imagine Grammaticus (once my suitor, later my lover) writing all this on a tablet. Then more cheering — I believe the ax has fallen.
As I have noted, persons of the highest status are executed by losing their heads. Those lower down are hanged. I wonder which will be my father, noble or humbled — that is, if he dies, which will happen if I don’t finish my task: to kill quickly and in the most royal way, with poison.
