The Kingdom of Little Wounds
Read The Kingdom of Little Wounds Online
Authors: Susann Cokal
A
FTERWORD
T
HE
W
ISE
W
OMEN OF
H
VENBÆK
There was once a family of princesses who were locked in a castle. By all reckonings this was for their own good, and indeed they had so rarely been outside that they would not have known what to do if they had been granted their freedom. As a consequence of their confinement, they took much pleasure in tales of distant lands as told by their nurses, some of whom came from quite far away.
The more estranged the tales’ settings were from their own, the better the princesses liked them. Each night they demanded a new story, a longer one, with ever-greater invention on the part of the nurses and more of what the eldest girl (who by some law of the country was practically a queen) called Truth. By this she meant violence and heroic deeds and also details of how common people lived their lives from one day to the next. “To help me rule my subjects,” she explained.
In the darkness of the curtained bed, her sisters made faces at one another. It would have been unnatural for them not to feel envy at the good fortune of her birth.
“But it must have magic as well,” said the next-eldest princess.
“Magic is Truth,” insisted the next-next-eldest. She was a scholar, interested in art and alchemy. She especially liked recipes for complicated poisons. “Or Truth is Magic.”
“Never mind,” said the youngest, who was sucking her thumb behind a gently blowing drape. “Shut up and let it begin.”
The others pummeled her severely for her language. And then the story did begin.
It is while I stitch together the Queen’s gown, on the night her eldest daughter is to die, that I first sense an uneasy power.
The feeling begins as I stand with hands humbly folded beneath my apron, a seamstress watching a queen unravel.
“To think this is what comes of the years,” Queen Isabel laments as she picks at a rip in her blue-velvet bodice. “Such a night! Such calamities! We have been thoroughly cursed.”
Every thread at the royal waist and armpit is straining, even the linen under-chemise (my work) and the stays laced beneath. The tear snakes beneath the sag of her bosom, sideways across the belly that has thickened with so many births.
My hands itch to stop her. But she is in a fit, and I have no right but to let her continue.
Queen Isabel is our kingdom’s treasure, once a legendary beauty and now a devoted mother and dull background figure to the King’s glittering majesty. Even so commonplace a matter as a ripped gown requires a retreat to the red draped damask and candles of her formal apartments, where she is attended by a historian as well as a host of ladies and aprons and dwarfs whose task is to amuse. A simple accident becomes a
Once there was a queen whose gown burst as she danced for her daughter’s wedding . . .
I have always loved a fairy tale.
If I were a keeper of histories (scratching busily at a wax tablet, bony fingers covered in the sticky stuff), this is what I would record:
With backs held straight by their corsets, ladies clad in rainbows lounge before gilded fireplace and blood-curtained bed. They fidget with their jewelry and shuffle their slippers on the floor tiles as music climbs through the shutters, a jangly old tune that Isabelle des Rayaux, this Isabel, brought from the Loire when she came to marry King Christian Lunedie V. It is a wedding song for a dance of hops and kisses; musicians play it floating in flat-bottomed boats on Skyggehavn’s bay and canals. It hangs in the air with the sweetness of imported sugar out of which every possible morsel at the wedding feast has been made.
For this one night, there are sugar plates, sugar fruits, sugar goblets melting under spiced wine. And everyone has tasted it somehow, from King Christian on down to the little girl who sits in a nook and counts the dishes as they’re washed. Lords and ladies flit from treat to treat in the airy banquet houses built in the courtyards, clad in their finest satin and brocade and cloth of tinsel, glowing with jewels, rippling at slashed breeches and sleeves, trickling ribbons from swollen hats. They are tended by servants in yellow livery or in made-over versions of the nobles’ castoffs, and dwarfs run from spot to spot, enacting comic scenes of courtship. At every fragile little house, the gentles gorge themselves, and those who follow clean up after them, licking and nibbling what they can, blending that sweetness with the tang of sweat.
On such a fantastical evening, we aprons imagine that someday we, too, might wed, and it could be for love. Such is the privilege of servants; the nobles may have their money and their political alliances, but we have our feelings. I once did.
While the ladies think of dancing, my sister needlewomen and I stay tense and russet-gowned at the ready, anxious lest the work of so many hands and hours go flying to bits. To the nobility, we look like faded versions of humanity, being of the kingdom’s original stock rather than the French who conquered it a century ago. Yellow-haired and white-complected, without powder or paint. Anxious to satisfy our conquerors so we might spend a few days longer among our dreams.
Our dreams are our riches; our hopes are our wealth. Our fears keep us working and thus let us live.
I truly would like to think I’m in the middle of a fairy tale, facing the period of hardship that precedes a triumph. But I am not a likely heroine. To the courtiers, I’m just another native of the city; in my father’s home district, I’m the lovelorn object of gossip and shame. His neighbors among the glassmakers believe that, on a winter’s day in front of Holy Spirit Church, I lost my one chance at marriage and happiness, and I did it in a way that forced me to disappear.
They are not wrong.
But, nonetheless, I brood over a nest of hope. I am only seventeen, after all, and still given to daydreams. Some of which have included a scene such as this, myself honored to be included in the seamstresses on hand, so close to noble ladies that I might touch them by moving an elbow. And breathing the same sweet air as the Queen. But as a simple seamstress, I can do nothing until given permission. Except invent stories to soothe myself into patience.