The Kingdom of Little Wounds (31 page)

When we bring girls back to nursery, we be carrying shadows. The bodies weigh no thing: it is only clothes that make a weight. In the room we must unpin, unwind those garments to find the white-twig bodies beneath. Then rub them back to what is like their life.

Beatte cry a little, but Gorma be not even a-fret. When we rub her out of the faint, she be so tired she is silent, and so afraid she dare not tremble less it bring up sick and she die like she seen her father do.

It is a terrible thing for a girl to watch her father die, but girls must grow accustom to terrible things, be cause there will be more of them.

Beatte now is all ready gone as Beatte. To us all she become Christina. “You must call her Majesty,” the ladies of the nursery teach us; then they teach her. “And, Your Majesty, you must respond as such.”

For me it be so wrong to think of that thin girl as Majesty that I almost smile for sadness. This I must not do, be cause we are to keep tears in our eyes till the sun expire, to mark the King’s death. So I bury my self among Gorma’s things.

We nurses return clothes to ladies who wore them first. Old Lady Drin, young Mistress Belskat, Baroness Reventlow, they take but do not put these things on. It is too strange, the sleeves and ruffs have sat on sick children’s bodies in a room where a King just die.

A pregnant wife remark that her cape, which Gorma had as skirt, now feel heavy “like it’s full of blood,” with shivers and a look round the room. “Or something worse.”

We inspect. That cape have no thing on it; Gorma left none her self behind. The lady give it to her maid to wear any way. I fetch a clean chemise and a wool robe from the press and fit them on to Gorma.

Beatte, ten years aged and now a queen (may be), sit her self on the floor and scream, “I won’t! I won’t!” Her voice be the screech of a wet finger on a glass. No body know what it is she refuse to do.

“I thought the children were recovering,” say Lady Drin, she seem to accuse us. She look through a spectacle at both princesses as if she see some breed of thing from the New World.

“They just need a rest,” say Bridget Belskat. She be proud that Gorma do what we tell her, let us move her like a doll of wax.

Lady Drin send a nurse to get a sleeping draught, though time be all most noon, and she tell two nurse they must get Beatte in her bed clothes. Beatte scream the whole all-time, but her arms and legs be too tired to fight, and her nurses bend her joints and fit her in her things.

I think,
To put a Lunedie princess in to bed be like to lay some other child in a grave.
But some how we must these girls keep a-live.

So I fix the blankets round Gorma and the wooden wings of swan where paint is chipping. My body move so stiff, I see Mistress Belskat consider may be she will slap me.

“Rock the Princess to sleep,” she order me instead. She like to watch other people doing things. It is often this way with ugly women.

Lady Drin stop the cradle. She give Gorma some draught. “Where is the Dowager Queen?” she ask, and some one say, “She sleeps.”

Still the Queen be sleeping! With her big belly and her embroidered night gown, she sleep like a princess in a happy story.

I lean in to that swan wing, I feel the bed shudder, but my belly stay the same. I push and my arms be hard. This is be cause to imagine my Gorma and a grave be also to consider what sits in my stomach, which belong in a grave as well.

The Lower Chambers, the palace prisons, lie in the deepest part of the casemates. Well beneath the grand halls and bedrooms where the nobles amuse themselves, below the guardrooms and the bins for storing food and wine, they are in the muddy, murky depths, where stinging eels are more common than rats. They are forbidden to anyone but the worst prisoners and the mildewy guards who keep them.

But I go, because I am a daughter who loves her father. I descend beneath the earth and knock boldly on the heavy oaken door. A little window opens, and an eye studies me; then, because I am a woman in the russet serge of palace apron wearers, the great door swings inward.

I am greeted by one of the moldy guards. He wears the Lunedies’ blue livery, but it’s somehow not as sharp as the garments of those who march aboveground, and he smells of damp wool and bad eggs. He has no weapon in hand, but he is far more menacing than even the pouchy-necked lackey who held me captive for Lord Nicolas.

He leans toward me. “We don’t get many girls asking to come in.”

“I . . . have a message to deliver.”

He looks me up and down again, takes me familiarly by the shoulders and makes me spin for him. I know he is enjoying me, or thinking of enjoyment.

He asks, “What message? Who would send one like you down here?”

I hazard, “Arthur Grammaticus. He wants me to speak with the prisoner Klaus Bingen.”

The guard laughs. He leans against the door frame with his elbow high, like an apprentice flirting with a milkmaid. “And what would he have you say?”

At this, I burst into tears.

Two other guards have approached by now, staring as if I may make good sport. The first one, though, is not unkind, and he holds the others back.

“I s’pose you’re his wife,” he says, “or some such thing. But you’re not allowed in to see the prisoners, no matter whether you know the Queen herself.”

I sob on, hating myself. I do know the Queen, after a fashion, but I can’t say anything about that.

The first man concludes on a note of both sympathy and dismissal, “Try the King’s Secretary or the Duke of Marsvin. They’re the only ones that can grant a visit now. Or a release. Or a stay of questioning.”

That is all. He waits for me to retreat far enough to keep my skirts free of the closing door; when I am slow to do this, he gives me a gentle shove and shoos me like a chicken.

In the final seconds, I think I hear the start of a sharp howl, like the howling of the madmen at Holy Spirit Hospital. I imagine my father writhing in irons — hot irons — his thumbs being crushed, his eyes plucked out. But I’m almost certain that this howling is not his. I believe I would recognize his voice, even if it were crying in a way I’d never heard before.

After my failure in the Lower Chambers, I labor up the twisted stairs to Nicolas’s new apartments.

I’ve never visited him here before; he was done with me as soon as I gave him Countess Elinor, though I’ve always puzzled over why. Perhaps I had simply fulfilled my function and no longer interested him . . . or perhaps he’s holding me in reserve for some task. Which terrifies but does not stop me now.

The room is plain but expensive, with a few chairs and chests of simple design, all with keyholes and locks. I wonder if this is Nicolas’s true taste or if it was imposed by the King. Nicolas had such an elaborate chair in the old casemates, so many gold objects about; I wonder what he’s done with them.

I stand myself in a corner. First I will observe; I will try to plan.

Other people drift in, drift out, wonder aloud where the Secretary is, and mop their eyes with handkerchiefs and sleeves in accordance with the tradition that makes citizens weep for the deceased sovereign all day. For me the tears require no effort, because my father is in prison. I sob into my apron until my eyes are sore with passing hot grains of salt.

Some people weep because we may have a queen instead, and that threatens the stability of our land. The lords, in particular, mutter about politics. They are interested in the regency, in who will rule until Beatte-Christina, or Christina-Beatte, or the swelling in Isabel’s stomach comes of age. They speculate quietly about possible rebellions, other lords who might try to seize the throne.

I cry a little bit over this too. I am deeply afraid. Anyone in power might decide to kill Klaus Bingen.

Gudrun Tovasdatter, Mistress of the Needle and my stepmother’s old companion, approaches. She tells me in that way of not speaking:
Your grief is excessive, Ava. You will be punished for overshowing.

She may mean it kindly, but I turn my back on her and plug my ears. She is twice my age and growing hard of sight; I think she will soon be gone. Maybe that’s why she wants to see Nicolas, to try to buy another year here.

Around midafternoon we begin to doubt Nicolas’s ability to grant any favors at all. We hear that he is not officially part of the new Queen’s (or unborn King’s) government. According to the terms of Christian’s will, the regent will be Dowager Queen Isabel.

Several of the courtiers leave at this news, heading for the Queen’s rooms.

I hear speculation that Nicolas has fled the court. Some say he’s raising an army to take Skyggehavn by storm; some say he won’t stop till he’s king himself.

I have to blow my nose. I use my sleeve. Then Gudrun gives me a handkerchief and says aloud, “Tears are a young woman’s luxury. Those who need their eyes for delicate work cannot afford to sob so hard.”

I blow my nose and ignore her words. I’m glad I threw away my needle case — I’m glad that part of my life is over.

I wait. It is all I know to do.

O
N the dark waters of Skyggehavn Bay, Nicolas Bullen rows a boat stolen from a commoner’s dock. He is alone; he rows in circles, slapping the useless water with splintery oars, pulling up fleecy shadows of seaweed, scooping handfuls of salty water, and spitting into the indifferent depths. He is a paddle-beetle that’s lost a leg. He shouts and his voice is swallowed in the cacophony of the bells that proclaim the ugly death of Nicolas’s only friend.

Nicolas was greatly desired, greatly loved. He knows this; it makes him furious. He could have had anything once he’d whetted the King’s appetite. But he was overpatient and thus has failed. He must plan again.

He grinds willfully against the bumps in his groin until pain jolts through him like lightning. He howls, finding release in his pain.

He rows a bit farther, to feel the effort in his shoulders and wrists. He believes himself safe; he reacted well, he thinks, to the cataclysmic scene in the inner chamber — but now his steward’s brain is totting up accounts and dangers, the careful moves his nascent plan will require, the risks if it fails.

The winter sun begins to set, making the water gleam like a shard of the volcanic glass found on the green island where Nicolas was born. The surface ripples with the sound of bells; water seeps through cracks in the little boat and soaks his fine slippers.

He cannot bail and row at the same time. In fact, he has nothing with which to bail except his loose velvet hat. He chooses to row. He looks about for a destination. Island or palace? Monastery or city?

Nicolas is not a fanciful man, but when he looks toward the palace, he sees what the poets have described. As the building rises from the bay, it presents itself as a dragon crouching as it waits for tribute. The spires mark out elbows, spine, and head. Then come the scaly wings of towers and the long, low body of walls and outbuildings. The torch-lit tongue of a dock that could shake sailors loose from their ship and into the iron gates, there to swallow them whole.

For a moment, Nicolas floats. He broods.

Legend claims that the man who discovered the uses of whale oil did so after a snowstorm forced him to take refuge in a beached carcass. He burned the blubber and ate the meat, and in springtime he picked flowers to distill into perfume.

There are lessons in history, Nicolas’s onetime tutor used to say. Even when the history is legend.

Nicolas wipes salt water from his face with the back of his wrist.

The oars dip; the water moves; the palace grows larger.

A
ROUND three o’clock, as the pale sun sinks into a sapphire sky, Isabel opens her eyes to find she has been sleeping in a cloud. Her bed hangings are now white, her covers, her tapestries, even her paintings and statues of the Virgin whisper their colors behind a snowy haze. It has all been rehung and draped in linen while she slept.

“La Reine Blanche,”
she says. She recognizes the tradition; it is the same in France. The white queen is the queen in mourning, sequestered for forty days after the death of her husband. “Why did no one wake me?”

She realizes that all of her ladies are present, more than she thought she had. Some new ones she doesn’t recognize. Their black gowns make inky blotches against the white; hands folded, faces expectant.

A stout one says, “It happened very quickly, Your Highness. Everyone thought best to let you sleep.”

So it’s true. Christian is gone.

No more sweating moon-face above her, no more tedious sitting next to each other at feasts and competing for tasty bits of meat and sugar. No more babies after this one.

Isabel presses against her pillows and listens to the subtle shift of feathers. Her pulse beats:
No more. No more.
She should probably ask to see her husband’s body, but she is too heavy, too tired. Even the baby is asleep inside her. “Who is to rule?”

Duchess Margrethe says, with as much of a curtsy as her old knees can muster, “You are, Your Highness. You will be the regent for your daughter . . . the new Queen Apparent.”