The Kingdom of Little Wounds (5 page)

Under Queen Isabel, who is so modest that she won’t wear garments a man’s hand has touched, Skyggehavn has been a city of churchly virtue, the glassmakers’ district particularly so. When a community develops aspirations toward gentility, suddenly the bastards disappear and all the women must be virgins.

I’m sure that among these
good people
there were women who had drunk bryony wine or chewed an oniony autumn crocus, thrust rocks or sticks inside themselves to expel unwanted occupants — I’ve heard of a glass master who specializes in a bauble that will do this — but at the whisper that I had done it too, they turned against me. I took on the guilt of every woman who had broken the law this way, and no one thought to make sure I had sinned in fact as well as in rumor.

And how can I be certain it was
not
my own wishes that caused my miscarriage? Sometimes wishes are granted, and I am not the first to observe that this is rarely for the best.

Father and Sabine worried that at any moment the city guardsmen might appear and haul me off to prison. But to their credit, they did not (so far as I know) consider tossing me out among the streets and canals; they kept me upstairs, kept nursing me, kept hoping for some fix to the situation. And I, who had been so impatient to push forward with my life — now I could not move, couldn’t sleep or eat, paralyzed with shame and terror. I thereby made the speculation worse, for some say a natural miscarriage heals within a day, while a poisonous one takes weeks.

They also say a child conceived in love holds firm, no matter how a woman tries to dislodge it. This rumor I now know to be false.

It is true that the pain of that child did something to my bones, which have not been right since. They ache with the cold and throb with the heat; they no longer bend in the right places. I still have my maidenhead, but it is an awkward thing, especially here on the floor of the palace prison, as I listen to the last sounds of celebration and know I never had the pleasure of a full
couchement
myself.

But Father and his new wife saved me. They told me I had a different destiny, that I hadn’t survived so long in order to languish in a bed of shame. They hauled me out and propped me up. Sabine laced me into a corset from the days when she had a waist, and the two of them took me to church.

The Latin gave me a headache. The incense made me sick. The statues and paintings were a dizzying array of figures that swam before me. But I stood for all three hours and managed not to vomit or fall down, and this slowed the wagging tongues, even if I could never dismiss suspicion completely.

I was ruined for the glassmakers’ guild, certainly, and for the amber-handlers’. I might as well have died, for all they thought of me for marriage afterward. Even if it were just Eve’s curse, no man wants a woman with such a violent cycle.

This was my life. Already I was a changeling in it.

Luckily, or else dreadfully — as I believe in this moment sitting in the doomful casemates — Sabine had a friend among the palace housekeepers, and she passed my name along with the chief astrologer’s endorsement (he was very pleased with the hat I’d made him) to the needle mistress for the Queen. Mistress Gudrun was impressed with my closed seams and cut lace; she offered a wage that might win me honor. A dowry someday. Or — sometimes I thought it, though I told myself sternly not to — a passage to Denmark, where I might find Jacob Lille among the Luther-loving amber handlers and take my rightful place beside him, saddened about our first baby but glad again for the poetry he would spill into our lives.

At other times, of course, I thought to slap his face, for sailing into such an easy life and leaving me a hard one. Nonetheless, I found I had to believe his life was easy; to think otherwise was to give up all hope.

So, in the house with the stone head, we convinced ourselves: Here was a triumph for the Bingens! A father with a commission for a splendid perspective glass, a daughter employed in the Queen’s own household! Father and Sabine kissed me soundly on both cheeks, gave me their blessings, and, I suspect, leaned on the door with a sigh of relief when I left.

When I first stepped through the palace gates with my spare clothes bundled into a sack, I felt a sort of fizzy excitement, a hope that my life and heart were making themselves over. Now, I resolved, my tale would best end in becoming Mistress of the Needle myself, with a dozen women stitching my commands, the royal family developing a personal fondness for me; an independence that would not keep me bound to a man’s affections. I would be queen of my own life and take pride in my loneliness.

So endings change. I fashioned a new fortune from the rags of the old, and I smiled at all within the gates, in a bubble of good intentions that led to the honor of needle waiting at the banquet tonight.

And to prison after all.

I smash beetle after beetle, wondering if I should enjoy my sugar cherry now or wait to bite down and let it be the last taste in my mortal life.

The cell floor shakes with the force of the life beneath it . . . or, no, with a jailer’s footsteps. The bugs go scuttling deep down for cover. I drop the sugar cherry back into my bosom, to be some comfort as I’m sent off to execution.

My prison master is a ruddy man in blue livery. His neck pouches like a hog seller’s purse on market day, for he has grown fat from swallowed terror. Keys tinkle cheerfully from his belt.

“There you are, then,” he says, holding the door open.

I feel foolish when I realize that he didn’t have to unlock it. Though of course I never needed to be locked up; if the Queen’s guard says to stay in a place, there is certain death for leaving it. Eleven months at the palace have taught me that much, and to spring to my feet when I’m summoned.

Blood rushes back to my ankles, and I wobble, smoothing my apron by reflex.
I am,
I think,
as cold as a star in the sky.
I rub my hands together and adjust my cap.

“God’s wounds,
fröken,
you look well enough for where you’re going,” says the guard.

First she were a baby, then a girl, then a sick girl, then come her throes.

The first scream not so bad, just any woman’s scream; the ladies and the maids look down their laps and nod, to say we all have this pain before and that some time it lead to pleasure.

For me, that pleasure came just recent, though I am in this cold land full seven years. The first man of this place who buy me from the boat take me in such a way as to savor me, though it not seem so nice at age eleven and tired from a long sail with many other men. He were the one who name me Black Midday, to make wit for his wife when he bring me home as her gift.

We do n’t look to the men, though they sit here for listening too.

The girl scream again, and this time her nurses know. We have hear every kind of scream from Lunedie babies, and this the terror kind, from a girl grown too old for screams but told just press the hands together like saints in church, and moan if you must but not too loud.

We the nurses, we start to pull our skirts up ready to run inside that room, but the ladies do n’t say to go. Countess Elinor, that once was my lady, make a back ward sigh in her skinny nose, and she do n’t need to look around to make us keep our places. She push her bosom up.

“Duke Magnus is the King of Sweden’s brother.”

We wait.

But Magnus him self throw open the door, so hard it hit old Duchess Margrethe in the shoulder where she sitting. “Help!” he shout, as a woman in a fire. “Help in here!”

Then Countess Elinor will not stop us any more, we all go in. The Countesses and Duchess Margrethe and Lady Drin and Baroness Reventlow and Bridget Belskat, then all we nurses from pale Annas and Marias to including me. We know this Duke’s story, we know he fall in love with some thing in the water and jumped him self fifty feets to meet her. We fear for our Sophia, what a mad man might do to her.

Fears ever justify.

Our girl is lying half off the bed, stiff like a board, with eyes staring at the bed drape. One side curtain come pulled down and puddling on the floor. All the candles blowing wild, like there been a wind, and some gone out.

We gape a minute. This be some thing never seen before.

Then she not stiff any more, she curling on her self like a snail, and her mouth foam like a snail too, once it poison with salt. This when she scream again and again, till she straighten out once more with that glass-eye look above her.

“She was asleep,” say this Duke Magnus of Östergötland. His beard is neat and greasy, so I do n’t know to trust him. He must fixed it before calling us. Madness may be on him again.

We pull back the sheets, and there am some blood but not much. A little girl can ’t sleep just after That, I know this to be true here as any where else.

“Too much wine,” say that Magnus. He rubbing his arm in his night shirt, he have an itch like may be she scratch him. “She kept drinking till she went to sleep, and then this. I had some too,” he adds, as if he worry for it now.

The Countess Elinor send some boy to fetch the Queen and King. She step her self to the bed and try to put a hand to Sophia’s forehead, but the girl curl up again. Countess Elinor snatch her hand away like it be burned.

“Something’s wrong,” she say, and it is so obvious I want to laugh. Not for meanness but from what a lady call her nerves. But I press my hands like saints, and I put on that face of sorrow that every one wear for the
Morbus,
and I watch the ladies watching Sophia and waiting for the Queen.

Ladies think a Queen know best all ways, better than her three doctors and all they powders. Even this incomplete Queen. May be they are correct, not for me to say.

The Princess curl and straighten, curl and straighten, making messy in the bedclothes and pulling down the other curtains. She do n’t fall from bed, though, stay just on the edge and some time pokering off it as if she going to float up to heaven with all the fire in her body. Her whole face flaming red now and her night dress wet in sweat, with the skirt rode up to show some shadow on her leg that might be blood, might be vanished all ready.

She scream again. And there come a thumping at the door.

Ladies wave apart, and three doctors walk in, black robes and flat hats and assisters with bowls and things in jars. They all gape too, while the Princess throw back and forth and scatter foam from her mouth.

“Do you see those sores?” ask Doctor Candenzius, the chief of them. He come close and poke the Princess neck with a stick. “A plague necklace” he call the wounds, though I never seen a necklace from the Lunedie
Morbus.

The second doctor, Venslov, the old one, say, “That is not the typical presentation.” The third doctor agree, it is not what they expect. They gape some more.

No body say
poison
out loud. But ladies look at the floor and maids look at each other, all communicate in that perfect-quiet way of this place.

“Do something,” Countess Elinor say to those doctors.

“We must wait for Queen Isabel,” say a young lady.

The Countess cross arms below her bosoms, push them high as they will go, and look down her nose with one eye. This what she do when she most vexed with some body. She say sharp to the doctors, “Don’t wait.”

More screaming from that bed. I want to slide up and pat the Princess on her brow, but she all ready too far gone. Her necklace (so they call it) bursts, and the blood go shining out like the fountain of wine at her wedding feast. The ladies scream and Countess Elinor breathe in again. Even the doctors pale now, and they can ’t but watch.

After Sophia spray her bed with blood, she fall back to her pillow with eyes wide. Not screaming any more.

There come howling, though, from rooms around, those where the other princesses and their brother sleep with some maids and grooms and nurses. The children heard they sister and know they have the same
Morbus
she do. They howl so loud, it seem seven going to die instead of just one.

“See to them,” the Countess say, still more sharp, with bosoms at her chin, and some ladies leave for that.

I do n’t. I hold a shiny bowl, though I do n’t know how I come to got it. The youngest doctor unpack little knifes and glass bubbles from a wooden box. His hands tremble and one glass thing break. A drop of mercury fall to the floor and divide in to a thousand little mirror-balls, they roll about and bounce off shoes and reflect what sit inside each lady’s skirt. No matter, he want theriac instead. It be what they think best against a poison, though it be made with poison it self. Vipers.

I do n’t see Duke Magnus any more, but he is not so tall and there be many around the bed now. And I am one of them. The young doctor push me to it so I hold my bowl under Sophia’s elbow, where the blood flows now from a new cut.

“It ’s black,” say Candenzius, but then old Venslov bring his candle close and the blood look like ordinary blood.

“Ah,” say Candenzius. He make another cut below the first, then tug my basin to make sure it catch Sophia’s stream. I all most laugh again, though the moment be most awful. The bed so soaked in blood now I taste it in my throat, like a child that linger round a market on butcher day and lick the blocks. But he want to be sure none of it from
his
cutting go to waste.