by Carol Berg
“And woe to him who underestimates the Lady Seriana. I’ve come near it myself. Very near.”
“. . . but the decision, of course, rests with my sister-in-law. She may be able to see you tomorrow, but I won’t promise anything. Are you staying nearby?” I was not going to offer him a billet in the castle.
“I’m at the Vanguard in Graysteve and will return in the morning. The matter cannot wait. His Majesty expects the boy to be in residence by tomorrow night. But then . . . perhaps the game is changed now you’re here . . . yes, I think so. . . . Even the soundest strategy must respond to an unexpected play.”
“I’ll have the servants bring your horse.”
Without shifting his languid posture, he gave me a smirking nod. “As you wish, my lady. As you wish.”
Still puzzling over Darzid’s position in the scheme of things, I made my way upstairs to Philomena’s bedchamber. The room was dim, only a few candles sitting on the mantelpiece, casting a pale light on Philomena who slept soundly in the great bed, her cheeks and lips rosy and her golden hair tangled on the fluffy pillows. Lady Verally sat at attention in a straight chair beside the bed, but her chin had sagged upon her black satin bosom, and she snored in a prim and ladylike manner. One could find many faults in the dismal woman, but she was indeed a devoted companion.
I found Eleni, the midwife, in the nursery, crooning softly to a white bundle in her arms.
“How are they?” I asked quietly.
Eleni shook her head and pulled back the wrappings so I could see the child. Never had I seen features so small. My smallest fingertip would cover her nose, my thumb her eyes. Surely even the gentle forces that hold us to earth must crush such frailty. A golden down covered her head. She was beautiful.
“We had a wet nurse in, but the little one has no strength to suckle. We gave her a few drops of milk from a spoon, but it will not sustain her. You can already hear the trouble in her breathing.”
“And what of the duchess?”
“She’ll be quite well, ma’am. The babe gave her no trouble, though the older lady made her believe it so. It’s clear neither one of them ever carried a full-term child to birthing.”
“I don’t believe Lady Verally has any children, but the duchess has a son who is quite healthy.”
The woman looked puzzled. “If I didn’t hear it from your lips and profoundly respect your saying, I’d say you are mistaken, ma’am. The duchess’s womb is weak and will always give way beforetime. I’ve never seen such a womb bear a child strong enough to live.”
“Thankfully her son is a sturdy child,” I said. “I suppose he was from the beginning. It’s good you were here, Eleni. I thank you for your patience and skill.”
The woman opened her mouth as if to argue the point, but instead dipped her head politely. “We’ve sent to Graysteve for a more experienced wet nurse. Another hour should see her here. I’ve been told to wait for her here, though it’s past time I got back to my own brood.”
“Certainly, you should go home. Pick up your payment from Nellia and get some supper before you leave. Tell her to send up the nurse when she arrives. I’ll watch the child until then.”
The infant didn’t weigh anything. Her hand was no bigger than a kitten’s paw and her tiny fingers wrapped themselves about one of mine. I walked her around the room, whispering to her of Tomas, and I shed a few tears for lost lives and lost years and lost promise. Then the wet nurse arrived and took the child, settling into the plain chair that had been left for her in a dark corner of the room.
Despite the late hour I went in search of Gerick, willing to intrude upon his anger so that he might see his sister while she lived and perhaps give his mother some comfort when she woke. James, his underemployed manservant, said the young duke had stopped by his apartments earlier and picked up his cloak. No one had seen the boy since then. Unusual for him to retire so late.
I retrieved my cloak and a lamp from my bedchamber and set out for the northwest tower. As a girl, I had often sought refuge there when I was upset. All the way up the stairs and into the secret room, I was unable to rid myself of a vague and growing anxiety.
He was not there. A bitter wind gusted through the doorway leading to the outer steps, the roof, and the parapet. My lamp cast eerie, dancing shadows on the curved walls. Gathering my cloak about me, I climbed to the tower roof. Gerick wasn’t there, either, but someone had been there quite recently. An acrid odor wafted from the firepit. I held my lamp close to see what caused such a vile smell. The smooth stone pit was perfectly clean save for a large, shapeless gray mass still radiating heat. I saw no clue as to the nature of the stuff until I searched beyond the stone ring and found a tiny arm of blue-painted metal. The soldiers. Somehow Gerick had dragged wood up here and battled the wind to set a fire, all so he could melt every one of my father’s lead soldiers. I didn’t know whether to scream or to weep.
CHAPTER 8
I would leave the next morning. Neither screaming nor weeping would be of any use, but removing myself from Gerick’s life might. Even if I had to walk to Graysteve and hire a farm hack to carry me, I would not stay and watch a child destroy himself and his home on account of me. Nothing I had done in the past four months seemed at all important. Philomena’s baby would die. Gerick desperately needed a firm, kind hand to lead him away from his hatred and isolation. I could help none of them.
Rummaging about my room, I furiously stuffed my things into my traveling bag. What had happened to make the child so angry? For the last few weeks we had lived without warmth, but with tolerance at least. Our Long Night celebration had left me with great hopes. What had changed? I was filled with foreboding that no rational consideration could dispel. Nothing made sense.
I woke in the middle of the night, huddled on top of the coverlet, still in my Covenant Day garb. My lamp had long since burned out. I pulled the blankets around me, letting the darkness drag me back into wild and fearful dreams.
The furnishings of my room lay shrouded in gray when my frantic beating on the door of some dreamworld prison faded into an insistent hammering on the quite real door of my bedchamber. “My lady, please. Nellia says you must come right away.” The terrified whisper drew me instantly awake. “Please, my lady, answer me. It’s terrible. I’m sorry to wake you, but Nellia says to. Won’t you please open the door?”
“Nancy? I’m here. One moment.” The knocking continued as I fumbled at the latch.
The serving girl was white and trembling. “Nellia says please to come right away.”
“Is it the young duke? The duchess?”
Nancy shook her head until her white cap threatened to take off on its own. “No, my lady. Her ladyship is still asleep. A message has come that the physician will arrive this morning, but this other business . . . it’s too awful, and we don’t know what to do.” She crammed a reddened knuckle in her mouth and closed her eyes, forcing herself to patience while she waited for me.
No further enlightenment was going to come from Nancy. I slipped on my shoes and let her lead me through a maze of passages into the servants’ quarters, a hive of small, plain rooms on the upper floor of the south wing. We turned into a short passageway, lit by a single grimy window, and found a distraught Nellia wringing her hands in front of a door that stood slightly ajar.
“Oh, my Lady Seri. I didn’t know what to do. With the duchess so delicate and all . . . to take such terrible news . . . and the scandal of it as soon as word gets around . . . But it can’t be dismissed, and I don’t know what to do.” Ten years’ worth of new wrinkles crowded Nellia’s already weathered cheeks.
I wrapped my arms about her shaking shoulders and hushed her like a babe. “Nellia, take a breath and tell me. What is it? Why are we here?”
“It’s Mad Lucy. Nancy was bringing her breakfast as she does every day. . . .” Nellia’s words drowned in a sob.
“The feebleminded nurse? Is this her room?” I felt vaguely guilty at not having realized the woman yet lived at C
omigor.
Nellia nodded, burying her face in her hands.
I pushed the door open a little further. The room was unlike any servant’s room I’d ever seen. Straw was scattered about the floor, and tucked into every corner were crates and baskets. A small table was piled high with scraps of fabric and wood, papers, nails, and balls of colored yarn. On one wall were stacked rough plank shelves loaded with all manner of oddments. In one corner lay a pallet where a yellowed sheet covered a shape of ominous dimensions.
“Has the old woman died, then?” I asked. Without reason, my voice came out a whisper, though no one was nearby to overhear.
Nellia pressed a hand to her breast. “Not peacefully, though, my lady. Not as she should. She’s done for herself.”
I picked my way through the debris and knelt beside the pallet. Nellia remained by the door, her spine firmly aligned with the doorpost. With great misgivings, I pulled back the sheet.
She was a woman of some fifty years, not ancient as I had expected, tall and sturdily made, her skin unwrinkled and her gray hair combed and twisted into a knot on the top of her head. She was laid out neatly on her back, legs straight, skirt and apron smoothed, arms straight at her sides, but she could have had no blood in her. The wool blankets of the pallet were soaked with it, and the color and texture of her garments were indistinguishable beneath the stiff and rusty coating. Ugly slash marks marred her wrists.
But shocking and terrible as these things were, they were but a whisper beside the shouts of warning that filled my head when I saw her face. I knew her. For almost half a year she had brought me food I did not want, and she had urged me without words to eat it. She had brought me water, and when I was too listless to use it, she had silently washed my face and hands. She had brought me a brush in the pocket of her shift and shyly offered it as if it were a priceless treasure, and when, in my anger, I had thrown it against the door of my prison, she had picked it up and gently brushed my hair every day until it was cut off in the name of penitence. They had told me her name was Maddy, and I had ignored and despised her because I believed any servant chosen by my jailers must be a partner in their evil. But she had bathed my face and moistened my lips and held my hands while I labored to deliver my child who could not be allowed to live. She had wept for my son when I could not, and she had taken him from the room as soon as she had cut the cord that was my only contact with him. All these years I had believed they had killed her, too, the unspeaking witness to their unspeakable crimes. What was Maddy doing in my brother’s house? How could he have kept her—a constant reminder of the murder he had done?
“What are we to do?” Nellia’s quavering whisper intruded on my horrified astonishment. “Such a thing to happen on the day when the little one is born so frail. It’s too wicked a burden.”
“We must think of it just as if her heart had failed, Nellia.” I was surprised at my own calm voice. “The appearance is awful, but if she was mad, then there’s really not so much difference. Just a different part of her that has given out.”
“She was daft. Done nothing but rock in her chair and sit in all this clutter for all these years, but I never thought as she’d do this to herself. Such a gentle soul she was with the young master.”
“She was Gerick’s nurse? You told me that, but I didn’t realize . . .” I didn’t realize she was someone I knew.
“Aye. She cared for him from the day he was born.”
Nellia was crying again, and to calm her I set her to work. I sent Nancy for a clean blanket, and asked Nellia to find some rags and water so we could clean things up a bit.
“We’ll set her to rights, and then call the other servants to help us take her downstairs,” I said.
Nellia nodded, and we set to work replacing the bloodied blankets with fresh and putting a clean tunic and apron on the dead woman. While Nancy and Nellia scrubbed the floor, I wandered about the room, looking at the things on Maddy’s shelves. They were a child’s things: a ball, a writing slate with childish characters printed on it, a rag doll pieced together from scraps and stuffed with straw, a pile of blocks, a puzzle, and a small game board with dried beans set on it like game pieces. She must truly have been in a second childhood.
“How long ago did Madd . . . Lucy become feebleminded?” I asked Nellia, who seemed much more herself now she had something to do.
“It was when the young master was close on six years old, and mistress thought he was not so much in need of a nurse. I guess it took Lucy’s spirit right away when she wasn’t needed no more. She took herself to rocking and moaning on the day she had to leave the nursery, and no one was able to get her to do nothing else ever again. But when the physician said that her mind had left her, His Grace, your brother, wouldn’t let her be sent away, as she’d no place to go but an asylum, and the child loved her so.”
“Gerick loved her?”
“Aye, indeed he did. They was always happy together when he was a wee one, even though she couldn’t say no word to him. She talked with her eyes and her hands, I guess. They’d look at books together, and he’d tell her what was in them. She’d teach him games and take him for walks and was a blessing to the little mite.”
I was happy to hear that Gerick had known such care and affection and had been able to return it. I ran my fingers over the slate and the ball. “He came to see her here, didn’t he?”
“Well, I suspect as how he did—though the duchess forbade him to. She said Mad Lucy might harm him, but she’d never, no matter she had lost her mind or what.”
Did he still visit her, I wondered, and found the answer at hand quickly. On the shelf beside some broken knitting needles and a tin box of colored stones sat a small menagerie made of straw: a lion, a cow, a deer, a bear. I looked a little further and found a flute. Crude, but a reasonable replica of the reed flute I had shown him how to make.
So many things bothered me about all this, but I couldn’t name them, as if sunbeams were dancing through storm clouds, illuminating a roof here or a tree there, but just as you would turn to look at it, the gap would close, and gloom shroud everything once more.
Why would Maddy have taken her own life? The malady Nellia had described seemed no violent mania. Could those with failed reason feel the pangs of despair that precipitated self-murder? Had they enough calculation left to accomplish such a horrific deed?
When Nellia and Nancy were done, Maddy looked far less fearsome. Nellia wanted to know if we should send for some of the men to carry the body downstairs. Though I hated the thought of it, I knew Gerick should be told before we buried his friend.
“Nellia, when was it that the young duke took on his present . . . moodiness?”
“About the same time as Lucy took ill. I’ve oft said to myself as maybe he took her being dismissed from the nursery as hard as she did. Though, since she didn’t have to go away, and he came here to see her, you might not think it would come to that.”
“Then this will be difficult for him, her dying like this.”
“Aye. Poor child. Losing the two who ever loved him so close together—his papa and his Lucy.”
“Then someone will have to break the news to him before the word gets out. Keep it to yourself for now. I’ll let you know when you may tell everyone and have her taken care of. And when the time is right, the staff may have a wake for Lucy if they wish. I don’t think it would be seemly to do so until all is settled with the duchess and her daughter.”
“I understand, my lady,” said Nellia, and she wagged her finger at Nancy, who nodded, wide-eyed.
After a brief visit to my room to wash the sleep from my eyes, I hurried to Philomena’s bedchamber. Voices from the adjoining room were arguing, quietly but vehemently.
“. . . dragged me away from her like I was a piece of rubbish. I’ve never been so humiliated. I’ll have the witch arrested.” Lady Verally.
“But what she has done, madam, for which you would have her arrested, is save your niece’s life.” The rumbling bass
voice was Ren Wesley’s. “Her Grace’s labor was of such poor effectiveness that it could have lasted for many more hours. Having experienced hands to deliver the child was the difference between a tragedy and a double tragedy. If your authority had been allowed to prevail, your niece would be dead from it, and you would find yourself responsible for the death of a special friend of King Evard. In short, you should thank the Lady Seriana for saving you from a murder charge of your own.”
I walked in and greeted my defender. If Lady Verally had been possessed of a weapon, I might have ended up in the same condition as Mad Lucy.
The physician returned my greeting with robust gravity. “Good morning, my lady. It seems my timing was abysmal, and the very thing we hoped to prevent has occurred, but as I was just informing the good lady here, you’ve saved her ladyship’s life by your good judgment in summoning the midwife.”
“How are they?” I asked.
“You know it well, witch,” snarled Lady Verally. “You didn’t want my precious girl to die. It would have spoiled your evil fun, wouldn’t it? You want to watch her suffer.”
Ren Wesley turned his back on the seething lady. “Thanks to you and the most excellent midwife, the mother is resting comfortably and will soon be on her feet, none the worse save in her sorrow. It grieves me to say that the child has not survived the dawn. There was nothing to be done.”
“I feared as much,” I said, ignoring Lady Verally’s haughty departure.
“I’ve given the duchess a sleeping draught, and now I am on my way to find some breakfast.”
“I was hoping to speak with you for a moment,” I said. “I’ve a great boon to ask.”
“At your service.” The physician poked his head into Philomena’s room to let the maids know where he could be found. Then he took my arm, and we walked through the upper corridors to the galleries that overlooked the great hall.
