The Kingdom of Little Wounds (13 page)

She were the favorite for most other aunts, who like to make each other sick, or make they husband slow or fast to love them. This poison-auntie live away from others, in a little house back of a garden, where the rain rise from the floor instead of through the roof, and even the guards afraid to go.

Why did your father allow this woman on his grounds?
ask the history-keeper. He have interest now for my own story.

For this question there be no answer, only she was there and the others fear and love and hate her. At last some one kill her with her own plants, a stew of thorn and leaf and flower that may be she swallow be cause she were grown tired of so careful tending of the garden and no man to visit her.

It was from her funeral that I run away, between the horses’ hooves when they pass the gate, and so in to the town. To walk just a little in the market and chase a spotted cat and then be caught and sold and shipped to this land.

At first it feel like some dream brought on by poison-auntie’s tea. For a long time I be sick in the bottom of the boat, heaving up and down and fevered. Then my body come back to me, when the ship cut through a puzzle of ice and fish that spit ocean in to air, and I see my breath in clouds around me and frosting over the sail-captain who churn above and drip sweat in to my face. And then the man who buy me in a different market, in a great house with candles made of brass, where men come round to see they first Negresse and hear the sailors’ tales of countries sleeping under sand.

Afric, China, Lebanon, Persia: all lands of sand and sun and dusky skin, might so well call them Greece, which be the farthest place from what the usual people here have imagine. I can ’t say which land would be mine, which language I would speak if I had my tongue. Just that my tongue be not my own.

When that man give me to his Countess wife, I feel I come home to poison-auntie again. Her cold hand, her white eye, her skinny smile all new to me, but the bitter air around her make me feel like in the house at garden’s end. I become her maid and learn the new clothes of this place and the way of keeping long white hair. Her husband like our differents, call her the moon and me the night. He like to sleep under us both, though this she pretend not to know.

Bad things happen in that place. I will not write them now.

It were the middle of the war. The man go away with a sword and the riches from his trip, and the wife keep me close. We live in they castle on a green island; we visit the palace in the royal city, for the Countess make friend to the Queen. We go back to the castle, we are called to the palace, and here we stay, even when the Count return from war. His arm be gone and also his leg, may be his mind as well. He cry and cry for Elinor, but the Queen cry harder.

Elinor give me to her at war’s end as gift and as promise, all naked but for sugar-sparks and holding a plum in my mouth that I were not allowed to eat. All the court clap when I step front to represent Peace and kiss the plum over to one lord who represent Justice, though I have heard Elinor tease him private that he be among the least just in her acquainting.

I do not like the taste of sweet. The men lick and lick and lick to get they sweetness off of me. The dwarfs make fun and the ladies clamor.

Today there been clamors, too, in the innerst courtyard, by where all they nobles sleep. A hole have opened right where ladies like to walk from they grand door to the portal where boats row them to the flower islands.

When we look in to this hole, we see the earth’s inside. It is warm and wet and turning mud, and it suck at bricks and any thing we throw, swallow them and pull in to it stomach. Some apron tell a story and call this a witch’s bed; such places be where the Devil lay his wives. One other girl say it be called a hollow and in no way part of Satan. Some say it is a new grave, that Princess Sophia be not resting on Saint Peter Isle but come to lie here, so she can call the man who gave her death and pull him down to Earth’s hot heart. If she do n’t find him, she will take her brother and her sisters so she have a playmate in the swampy land of souls.

These be stories, just as poison be one story for the Lunedies and a plum be one for me.

The historian say this is just a hole where earth give way to sand and water. It happen all the time be cause this city were built on islands made of trees and clay and not on land it self. Some time houses fall, or bridges, or once the market place for fish. Then a canal rush in to feed the bay, so the waves go silver from the scales and dead fish float away to feed bigger fish at sea. Now there is just a dock at that place, for little boats to use.

Here what Countess Elinor say about the witch’s bed:
There will always be a clever man to invent a story, and a pack of silly women to repeat it.
She say this to the Queen by way of comfort. The Queen do not like that a smelly ditch be open by her window.

The Countess never tell a story her self, just explain and store up ideas of others.

The scholar tell me that some time in this place there be dark people (from Greece, China, Afric, Persia) who live by they selves, or dark people who have coins enough to sail away back to the sunshine. These sound like pretty stories to make a Greek work the harder.

Now I finish. Fix time and numbers if you like, Arthur Grammar. Be fore you kiss me.

Every half year, Christmas and Midsummer, I earn four silver shield coins and a new set of clothes. My wages have not diminished with my new position, so this June I have a fresh russet serge dress and a linen shirt that I plan to embroider to display my skill, plus five shields to count (having spent two on necessities as the months have gone by, then one on sweet cakes and wine to wash away the feel that Nicolas Bullen left on me).

In the narrow dorter that reeks of nurses, where I am meant to sleep through daylight, I stir my coins against each other and count one through five, again and again, as the Queen would pray half the rosary. The noise chinks off the whited bricks and fills my heart with gladness and yet with wanting, for five are not enough to pay a ship for passage and a friend for protection on the way to Copenhagen. I count again. I am angry with myself for spending on frivolities, when poverty just keeps me in Nicolas’s clutches.

The nurses’ dorter is long and narrow, crowded with cots and pallets where we sleep two or three to a mattress; our clothes hang from pegs on the walls, and the lone window has no glass. We all get our monthlies at once (except Midi Sorte, who never acts with any of us). I am not alone. Midi Sorte herself seems asleep on her cot — but she hears my sound. One brown eye opens wide and stares, not even wavering at the bright flash of silver.

I shape a brittle smile. Not quite daring Midi to covet my riches, but wanting to be recognized. Or even to win a friend — though I could never tell that split-tongued demon about my trials with Nicolas.

The brown eye closes again. I put the coins into the purse at my waist, settle back down for sleep.

In my imagination, I keep counting my coins, one through five.

Until the night I pricked the Queen, my palace friends were other needlewomen: Anna and Nidia, close to the age of blindness; Maria, Soria, Ente. Since that night, I have seen them only at meals in the kitchens or crossing the courtyards. They are either too embarrassed to address my change in fortune or too proud to acknowledge one who’s fallen.

Gudrun, Mistress of the Needle, must acknowledge me — so I tell myself. When my position changed, Gudrun bundled up my sewing things, my amber needle case (the gift from Jacob Lille) and a book of embroidery patterns I brought with me, and tied them with twine to wait on my new cot. Nonetheless, the day after Midsummer, I go to the seamstresses’ dorter to beg on my knees for her help.

“I stitch a good seam, you know that,” I plead, even though the girls with whom I used to sew are looking on, either giggling or with pity. Some may giggle for pity itself. “And you’ve praised my embroidery — can’t you vouch for my return here?” For my escape from Nicolas Bullen.

Gudrun will not meet my eyes, uses an apron’s trick of staring at my earlobe. “Ava, I can’t,” she says abruptly. “It has been decided already. And I must ask you not to come again.”

“But you are my stepmother’s friend!” My eyes well up. “Don’t you want me to honor her? And the Queen?”

Gudrun stares beyond my ear, into the cracks in the wall. She says, “Even the lowliest turnspit boy or goose girl serves the Crown. Now stand up and go back to your place.”

What can I do but obey?

I try to plot for a better life. My new position comes with new connections, and I count them up. During the physicians’ nursery visits, I have smiled at short young Doctor Dé, and he at me; his position, too, must be a lonely one. I fetch basins and beakers for the great Candenzius and for the nurses who do most of the work there, and they speak kindly enough to me now. I fold linens sharply and starch the children’s laces just before the daily opening of the doors for the Queen’s visitations. I imagine myself like the miller’s daughter in the fairy tale, working hard until one night, quite by chance, spinning straw into gold. Not as a member of a dark angel army.

One-two-three-four-five silver shields so far.

In this time, I miss my father and his new wife; it’s been several months since I saw them. So on a Sunday I get permission to leave the palace and visit the house with the stone head.

After so much time, the city seems dull and ugly, but alive. Walkers clog the footpaths by Skön Kanal, the “beautiful water,” lined with fine houses where the mossy fundaments beckon with a promise of splendor and the kitchens push out smells of cinnamon and mace. Peasants sniff the air so the memory will make their brown bread richer at night. My feet clatter over wooden bridges and knock against stone ones under which trolls fight over animal bones; one of them has built himself a house of old fins and scales. My new russet skirts swing past canals and coppery churches, big houses with water gates that hiccup in the tide, humble ones that squat in between. Stray dogs, skinny cats, a furtive rat or two; children playing at some hop-dance among ropes stretched out to cure in the long yard that runs down Reb Kanal. In front of one magnificent house, a scattering of white petals curls along the water’s surface, the remnant of some courtship or funeral.

Several times I must double back because a bridge has collapsed or an alley I once knew well has been filled in with a kitchen garden or privy. But soon enough, I am crossing the longest, sturdiest bridge in town and entering the district where I became myself, where the air sings with glass shivering against glass.

Glasvand Kanal. The glassworkers’ waterway.

I
clack-clack
past Helligánds Kirke and see (or believe I see) that my blood still stains the square; then Helligánds Hospital, with madmen screeching out the torments of imagination. It’s just a quarter mile farther to the wind-scrubbed stone head beside my father’s door. Today the glass lenses on its nose shine like moons and the head has increased its lean to the right, like a scholar squinting to recognize a once-familiar face.

Gerda, our servant, lets me in. She curtsies to me, and I nearly topple her over with a hug. Father embraces me like one he has long missed, and my stepmother gives me a hearty kiss on the cheek. I am the daughter returned from court! They haven’t heard of my demotion. They draw me into the paneled hall and offer me ale and cake like a guest.

“We have so much news!” Sabine declares, looking about to burst with it. She is even squeezing herself. “Ask your father to tell you.”

Sitting in a room that I might call mean if I hadn’t been raised to think of it as one of the grandest in our district — painted wood, pictures of Saint Catherine and Jesus, pewter ware on the sideboard — I listen. Klaus Bingen, my father, has another commission for a perspective glass. This one will be even larger than what he ground for Stellarius, and it will be part of the King’s new observatorium atop the flat west tower. He is very proud of —

Sabine interrupts to announce that she is pregnant.

“Yes, Ava, you will be a sister again!” Sabine strokes her belly as if it were the subject all along, and Gerda (who I think hoped to marry Father herself) sulks as she refills our cups.

A sister. I look dubiously at my stepmother, who has always been stout and rosy but is definitely fat and glowing now, though she says she’s only three months gone with child. She’s forty years old if she’s lived at all — rather late to be having a first baby.

“It’s a miracle,” Sabine pronounces, as if reading my mind. “I prayed and fasted. I took a boat to the green islands and visited the house where Saint Ruta worked his miracles. There’s a lovely little shrine . . .”

“If it’s a boy,” Father puts in, “we’ll name him Klaus Ruta.”

I smile weakly.

“Won’t you like having a brother?” asks Sabine. Her red face is set; she truly expects us all to join in her joy. “You know, in case you never marry and something — the saints forbid! — should happen to your father. You’ll have a protector.”

Yes, in case I never marry
. . . I could return here and keep house for my brother, to whom all this naturally will belong. If he would have me. I remember that splash of blood on the church square and think myself more likely to find a home among madmen. I have no right to jealousy.