The Kingdom of Little Wounds (12 page)

On Monday in the palace chapel, Christian is so lost in dreams of the heavens as to be taken aback when Isabel leans toward him, touches his ring finger with her own, and murmurs, “The time is propitious.”

Immediately Christian feels the prickles of sweat that precede a conjugal encounter. He makes a noncommittal murmur and crosses himself with particular ardor.

“I will take it under advisement,” he says, staring forward at the amber statue of Saint Ruta, patron of fishermen and ropemakers.

That afternoon, leaving his councillors in the Presence Chamber, he consults with the physicians and with Stellarius, his astrologer. Is the time in fact well chosen? Is it likely to result in a healthy, well-formed prince? Or would he be wiser to wait till grief no longer assails the Queen, when tranquillity — if such can be attained in these days — makes her womb fertile for the planting?

“The stars
are
in favor,” says Stellarius, who reads nuances of the heavens better than those of royal expression. He has spread out charts that Christian cannot understand. “It can happen this week, perhaps Thursday.”

“But we are still in mourning!” Christian cries petulantly.

Candenzius speaks up: “Her Highness is ripe this very day.” He says this on authority of regular study of her monthly cloths; he will also have Isabel disrobe and open her legs to his probing hand, if Christian wants this additional confirmation.

The King shudders at the thought. But it is even more upsetting to think he has only one son. Just one slender, puking princely life lies between him and the chaos of unclear succession.

“Then if it please the King,” Doctor Venslov suggests with an old man’s attempt at delicacy, “he might remember Galen’s advice about marital intercourse, that it take place when the body is in a medial state: not empty nor too full, neither very hot nor very cold, too dry nor too moist. That is, perhaps only a light meal and a moderate draught of wine, maybe some comic entertainment by the dwarfs to lighten the spirits . . .”

Christian holds his features regally stern. Outnumbered by earnest goodwillers, he agrees to visit the Queen.

Christian himself was a third son (the older two died of the smallpox), and he surrendered his own name, Ludvig, to take the throne. He tries out the old name now, to see if he can remember how he was in those days.
So, Ludvig my man, it’s time to prime your sword for the battle.

He feels no difference. Only the injustice of being the most powerful man in the land and yet the one man above all who must not act on his true desires — or antipathies.

The large state bed where Isabel will receive her husband is draped in cloth of gold, not unlike Sophia’s catafalque; but in this case the gold is woven with red, giving the effect of a shimmering curtain of blood. The color itself is a wish for fertility, that the blood of Isabel and Christian might congeal to form a new prince. Each great event in a woman’s life is marked by it, from her birth to her wedding, her own childbeds, most probably her death.

Blue, in contrast, is the color of comfort: the Virgin’s mantle, the sky, the ring that Isabel’s grandmother gave her when her parents signed her marriage contract. It would remind her, said Grand-mère, that the same sky arches over both lands.

Knobby arthritic fingers slipped the ring onto a young slender one. “Nothing has value,” said the old lady, “till it is given away or stolen.” The blue stone glowed with a deep serenity. In all her weight gains and losses, Isabel has never let it leave her hand. She wears it now on her right pinky, where the flesh bulges above and below the golden band and bezel.

Twisting the ring, urging herself to gain serenity, Isabel orders the state bed scattered with cushions of blue satin and velvet, and her seamstresses rush to sew them. There are other preparations, too: the spiced wine that Christian likes to drink, candles greased with roses and violets, a phalanx of maids and ladies-in-waiting to fetch whatever last things are needed. Her dear Elinor, Mistress of the Nursery, arrives as if already to care for the child Isabel hopes she is about to conceive.

Even sweet Countess Elinor cannot distract Isabel today, as the slender white hands plump up the cushions and straighten Isabel’s favorite painting of the Virgin Annunciate.

Isabel stands before the bed with hands clasped as if she is about to pray; but all she can think are the words to an old bawdy song from the Loire:

“Your Highness,” hints Elinor. She is speaking loudly into the hollow of Isabel’s ear.

Of course, Isabel is not young or sweet, and the pangs she feels are not the happy ones in the song. But she is brave; she allows her women to remove her robe.

Somehow Isabel and Christian are put to bed. Somehow the heavy door swings behind their grooms and ladies-in-waiting, and the tapestry panel swishes shut over it. Isabel stares at her own hands, chapped with the work of the nursery, that blue ring from Grand-mère their only ornament. Now is her time to act. She licks her lips and scratches at her palms, getting ready to do as Christian likes.

But as soon as the latch’s tongue clicks into place, Christian is out of bed. He fills his goblet, swilling the wine as if it is the medicine that Isabel spoons down their children’s throats. He refills the goblet and drinks again, and a third time. Only then, wobbling on his thin legs, with his long face softened and sillier than usual — she’s heard it said that he looks like a sheep, and this is not inaccurate — does he grab a thick handful of counterpane to pull himself back up the mountain of mattresses and lie next to his wife. He does not kiss her. He burps.

She remembers her youth along the Loire, when King François went on progress and stayed at the Château des Rayaux for a fortnight of hunting, feasting, and dancing that nearly put her father in the poorhouse. Beautiful days of splendid frocks, fresh rushes on the floors, ribbons flying as courtiers rowed the girls in pleasure boats among the swans upon the river. Isabelle, she still was then, thirteen years old. And she had her first kiss. It was with a member of the King’s privy council, out behind the ancient tithe barn that had been the very beginning of the family’s château.

After that, young Isabelle became unbiddable, longing uncontrollably for the gay life of a court so that pleasure might continue forever . . . and pleasure led her here.

There is a billow of cool air as the counterpane settles around her husband, and the smell of fowl from feathered pillows.

Christian sighs. He is still wearing his favorite pearl earring, given him last Christmas by Georg Oline.
“Ma chair,”
he says, and she knows just how it is spelled; he’s calling to his flesh, not his dear. And then, obediently, her hand is on his flesh, rubbing him, with his long thin eyes shut and his lips pressed together in concentration.

She knows that at such a time Christian has to focus his thoughts very sharply, and the worst thing she can do is make a sound or change her rhythm before he is ready. So Isabel tries to keep her mind blank, while she is aware that Christian is doing just the opposite. He is filling it with images that come from someplace far from this bedchamber.

Isabel counts to 117. Not ready yet. She slows for just a moment, and Christian loses ground. She changes hands.

She tries to enter his mind and see where he has taken his thoughts. She knows he is not thinking about her great loose childbirthing canal. Rather, he must be imagining (a cruel cousin hinted this long ago, and somehow Isabel knew it to be true) much tighter spaces and bodies not so soft as hers.
Dirty places, dirty bodies,
she thinks; this is what excites Christian and allows him to manage his few minutes’ firmness of purpose with her. She imagines him touching someone — she cannot imagine who, or won’t imagine it — in that place which she knows to be expressly forbidden to persons of virtue.

For some reason, this thought of unholy places has begun to excite Isabel as well as (she imagines) Christian. She feels herself growing moist from her palms to her toes. Her hand moves more quickly, more confidently, on him. This is when Christian does achieve that firmness, and she flings herself down with her chemise up, so he can take the position sanctioned by the Church.

What Christian does now, too, is a mystery. Isabel can’t quite picture the transaction, though she knows some of her ladies — perhaps even Elinor — have trained their hand mirrors on that spot or have stood open-legged over still water. (The baroness at Uncle Henri’s castle, leaning over the quicksilver pond?) Isabel has seen what her husband carries between his legs, and she knows that what’s inside her is a mirror image of his hot, dry generative equipment, only kept inside because of a woman’s cold and moist nature. When they converse, they must fit together like links in a chain. But that is not pretty to contemplate.

Isabel thinks instead of the Annunciation painting, hanging somewhere beyond Christian’s bobbing form and the bed curtains. She would like to consider it a reflection of a life more real than the one she is living. On the wooden panel, Mary’s head bends gently, tickled by the ray of gilded light that bears Gabriel’s words. The blue robe pools around her feet, the halo wisps around her as-yet-uncrowned head; the potted lily blooms, the white dove hovers. Mary’s lips part gently. Surprised. Pleased, certainly, but also surprised. She is going to birth a Savior.

For some time in her youth, Isabel had thought she would conceive a child through the ear, just where the light of Gabriel’s words slides into the Virgin; perhaps this was the purpose of each new couple’s prayers for fertility, that the words, not the bodies, would produce a child. After the wedding night, she realized it was not a beam but a staff that would impregnate her — still, given all the actions, all the places, that Christian attempted that night in his effort to please his country with a full consummation, she imagined it might be better accomplished if he put himself into her ear.

She does not know when this thought, too, became exciting to her. Her ears are sensitive, and there are holes in the lobes that her mother made with a hot steel needle; from these holes she can hang golden hoops or glowing sapphires or drops of clarified amber that hold tiny insects inside. All those things adorned her in the frivolous days before motherhood, when her ears were considered things of beauty and a poet composed a villanelle to praise them. (He is dead now, gone in the Great Sickness of 1561.) A baby will snatch at any object that dangles, and might pull the bauble straight out with some pain to the mother. So ear bobs became something for ceremonial occasions only, and Isabel’s ears have gone neglected.

She remembers the day her mother pricked her lobes — the pain of it, but also the satisfaction when the tiny point made full puncture. There is excitement in that too, in the memory of pain — all pain of being with Christian long gone now, only to return in childbed — and before she is well aware, Isabel is imagining the King as a needle piercing her (as a needle pierced her recently — didn’t it?). It brings small doses of pain as it opens one tiny wound after another in her.

It is thus, unexpectedly, that Isabel is surprised by an enormous, soul-shaking joy. Even down in the courtyard, people seem to feel her pleasure and cry out for it.

I do not like to hold a pen. Too thin for hands to cramp around, and delicate, as if I hold a grasshopper and try to make it walk like a cat. It feel a silly thing to me, to tell a story through the fingers.

But he say I must learn to put every thing on to paper. To be one more keeper of histories as if he do not keep enough, with histories both for king and for him self. He says this will be
my
secrets, but what secrets can I keep while he be reading each word as it come from the pen?

His room be hot, or hot for this place, and all those books and pages sweat smells of leather, ink, and dust that be worse to me than nursery smells. Those are just from people, but these be animal skins soaked full of poisons to make they last. My nose hurt more now than my hand.

He say keep writing and when I will be done, he shows how to fix the words for correct time and number and all the rest. Future, past, present time. He say I hear speech said right all day, why can I not use it right my self through the pen? But I choose not.

I write my own way, I write
my
language. Others speak so as they will.

Now he say I wasting time by writing nothingnesses, when I should express my thoughts. About what I see at court. About the Princess. About my life. And the hole that open in the great courtyard and frighten all the lords and ladies so.

How much more must be write about Sophia? She is dead and we all know she have the family complaint. Some believe a poison tale, but there be no poison we know to make a girl scream so, and lie straight, and raise through the curtain of her bed. This be not the land to invent new poisons.

Where I were small, in a land much more hot, I have one aunt who know all poisons well. She grow flowers and leaves; some smell of perfume, some of rotted meat. Some the size my thumb with thorns all over, so if you take one in the hand, your skin were full of needles to hurt for a week.