The Kingdom of Little Wounds (40 page)
Read The Kingdom of Little Wounds Online
Authors: Susann Cokal
Christina-Beatte is woman enough to love the bright jewels on the handle, queen enough to love the blade’s sharp edge. It is mostly ornamental, not so sharp as a sword or even a carving knife, and it bears her father’s famous motto (“In the darkness, fear my light”), and it is still capable of cutting quite a slit in a mattress when it is tested (which she is child enough to do). Count Nicolas has shown her how to pull it from her belt and make a threatening sweep to impress her enemies and protect her
virtue,
the meaning of which word he had Lady Drin explain to her.
She also loves the polished blade in which she can see herself reflected, eyes and lips gleaming, skin powdered so white that the ugly scars and blotches of
Morbus Lunediernus
are hidden.
“The rubies make a pattern of hearts and love knots,” that chinless, pock-freckled Reventlow points out, every time Christina-Beatte removes it from its sheath. Reventlow loves love.
Christina-Beatte waves the blade at the Baroness for daring to comment on this object that is hers and hers alone.
She remembers a time when she was so annoyed with her little sister, Gorma, that she seized Gorma’s wax doll and broke it to bits against the neck of her carved swan bed, even weak from
Morbus
as they both were. Elinor Parfis pinched Beatte hard in punishment but kept the secret, and Gorma was too afraid of another pinch to tell Maman.
Christina-Beatte studies her dagger again, sliding it in and out of its gilded leather sheath to taunt Reventlow, whose hips wiggle with the itch of fear. Christina-Beatte understands that a queen must not go about stabbing people, or even dogs, without cause. But she would like to test this blade on something more than her feathery bed.
She remembers there are dark places in the palace, rooms she has never visited but about which the legends fly like bats. Blood, chains, torture. This is where, she has heard, Elinor Parfis now resides.
“The Lower Chambers,” Christina-Beatte declares, so suddenly as to mystify anyone who cannot guess her private thoughts. “I want them opened. I want to see inside.”
Baroness Reventlow blanches. Without asking permission, she runs to tell Count Nicolas that the Queen Apparent is making plans.
There was once a princess whose parents sent her to town with a coin and the instructions to bargain with it for bread. They thought in this way to build the sort of practical character in her that would attract a husband, for she was sadly lacking in beauty.
Along the way, she crossed paths with a hideous crone carrying a covered basket. The princess steeled herself for a test: Should she give the crone her coin, as she would surely be asked to do, and perhaps receive some magical reward? Or should she keep the coin and follow her parents’ orders strictly?
To her surprise, the old woman asked for nothing but gave her a piece of advice: “Whatever you do, my girl, you must not interpret a coincidence such as meeting me to be a sign of anything. It may in fact be one, but the meaning is not necessarily for you. So you’d best forget all about me.” She turned to the muddy road and hobbled on her way.
The princess was disappointed, for as the crone had guessed, she ever tried to find meaning in the small incidents of her life. She would have liked to feel she was participating in a grand plot of adventure, not simply trudging into town for bread that a servant could just as easily have brought back. Still, she went forth on her errand, bargaining well and heading home by a less muddy path with a brown loaf steaming under each arm.
She was just in time to see the crone knocking on the door of a hut all but hidden among the trees. She noticed that the old woman had uncovered her basket and that it was full of trinkets, ribbons, and apples, the last of which were perfectly formed and such a bright red that they might have been made of glass. But they were not glass, they were real apples, and the pretty dark-haired girl who opened the door grabbed one gleefully and took a big bite.
The smell of apple juice spread heavy and sweet through the air. The princess felt faint with longing, for her parents believed that fruit was an indulgence she would have to deny herself, since she would be unlikely to attract the sort of husband who would give her such things.
But then the pretty, dark-haired girl fell to the ground, the apple still between her lips; for it was poisoned. When the crone saw what she had done, she cackled and, suddenly spry, took off running with her rags flapping behind her.
The princess trembled in fear, but she guessed that this might be the test she was expecting: She must go to the fallen girl and see if she could help. Yet when she leaned over the motionless form, there was no breath; neither could she feel a pulse when she loosened the girl’s bodice.
As she worked, the princess noticed a pair of jeweled combs in the dark hair. Surely these were too fine to adorn the head of a mere peasant!
Realizing that
this
coincidence must have meaning for her after all, the princess plucked the gleaming combs from the dead girl’s hair and slid them into her own mousy locks. The jewels’ reflected light made her braids much finer, and she walked with her head high and tossing to make them flash.
The bread was cold by the time she got home, but her parents were so pleased with her clever acquisition that they gave her an apple of her own. Much later, the combs became part of her bridal crown when she married a prince as crafty as herself.
In the morning, I wake to find that fortune’s wheel has spun again.
Gudrun, Mistress of the Needle, comes to fetch me from the dorter herself. She shakes me out of an hour’s sleep and informs me that I am to replace old Nidia Stinesdatter and work the under-linens again — for both Queens, she adds darkly, as if this double service is more onus than honor. “The Dowager and the Apparent. And little Princess Gorma, of course.”
“But why?” I blink, try not to yawn in her face. “Who ordered this?”
I’ve been a maid so long now that I can’t believe in good luck, even after hard work. And I am fearful, still, of my day with Isabel and Midi — of course I never asked a favor; I fled as soon as they released me from my task.
“It wasn’t me.” Gudrun waves her hands as if to dispel a bad odor, then leaves me to push off my pallet and make ready to keep seamstresses’ hours.
I stuff my hair into a nest beneath my cap, my face greasy but rubbed with a petticoat to dull the sheen. If I don’t make haste, I’ll lose my chance. Then I discover it’s my monthly time after all, as for most of the sleepers who follow the cycles of the moon. I lose precious minutes to grab a still-damp cloth from the drying racks and pin it to a little girdle beneath my clothes, and I’m out of the dorter before most of the other daytime aprons have stirred.
While I’m scurrying across the outer yard, I hear about the Lower Chambers.
Again, Fate is spinning. And so is my head.
The prisons will open this evening, runs the talk as men unload carts and women haul baskets of laundry away. And then the Chambers will be emptied, for tomorrow Nicolas and little Christina-Beatte plan to celebrate their union with multiple executions, cleansing the palace of sin and crime.
“
All
the prisoners?” I ask of the skirts and jackets switching around me. “Even without trial?”
Not a single answer comes. Perhaps there is no answer; perhaps nobody knows, or the way in which I’ve asked has removed me from the circle of inaudible whispers. But most likely the answer is yes: for the Queen Apparent’s pleasure, every prisoner, including my father, will be killed without the formality of even the simplest trial. Every soul in the Lower Chambers is now considered guilty.
I ask, standing still, “How? Will . . . will it be hanging?” I see Father’s tongue protruding, blue, his eyes bulging in a purple face. “Or beheading?” His thinning pate rolling on a blood-damp floor. I can’t bear to think of other possibilities: stoning, drawing and quartering, slaughter by a thousand arrows — terrible, agonizing earthly deaths for a man who lived aspiring to the stars.
No answer. The busyness of the palace goes on, as cold breezes twine our bodies and ice forms a creaky skin on the bay. I hear only some murmur about it taking more than one dose to make an old biddy die. So I go on too, numbly, past the guards and the carts and the bubbling witch’s bed that still fills the inner yard with the smell of sulfur. I have a position to keep. And a little, desperate time to pray.
Gudrun sets me first to hemming alongside other needlewomen. Pale blue silk, an embroidered underskirt for the little Queen’s betrothal costume, which is being made over from the defunct Princess Sophia’s day-after-wedding dress. The hem is to be scalloped and tacked with nun-made lace; it will take the six of us all day.
“But if you finish in good time,” says Gudrun, with an eye on my chapped fingers, “you all may visit the Lower Chambers when they are opened. The regents want everyone to see.”
The others in the cozy paneled room breathe in as one. As if they’re thrilled to think of peering at the wretched souls driven desperate by conscience, confinement — injustice . . .
“Count Nicolas says the Chambers will make a useful lesson,” Gudrun finishes, “for any who are tempted to stray from duty. But of course,
this
duty, ours, comes first, being more important than most. The young Queen’s got to dress well for her ceremony. So none of you will leave this room until we finish . . .”
As one, we thread our needles. Or try to.
I wish for the lenses my father assembled for me long ago, now utterly lost in my months of keeping the Queen’s house. The dress for that awful waxen thing was easy enough to make, a matter of cutting fabric with scissors the Dowager gave to me, then tying threads by feel. Now, however, without spectacles, I get the thread into the needle by sheer chance, and then I can barely see where to plant the sharp end. I quickly fall behind the other women; what’s more, my hands have grown stiff and clumsy, unused to such fine work, and cracked calluses pull up threads until the crevices bleed. This may not have mattered when I clothed the gruesome doll, but it will be noticed now.
My fellow seamstresses keep looking over, frowning at my lack of speed and fineness, no doubt asking themselves how I re-elevated so suddenly. As I still wonder too. So for a while I dig blindly into the soft blue blur, trying to hide my mistakes and pricking my fingers over and over. I don’t care about blood, I don’t care about anything in this room, not even the Virgin and Saint Anna watching sternly over me from the wooden wall. I think of my father. And Jacob. And Queen Isabel and Midi Sorte, the horrible things I saw last night . . . and my false sense of relief as I stumbled back to the dorter under my father’s star.
No more than an hour passes before Gudrun yanks me away. She doesn’t have to tell me why. I even start for the door. Nonetheless, she takes me to a corner and says, shortly, “You can’t compare with the others.”
I curtsy. “Apologies, mistress —” I might be glad to go back to buckets and brushes.