Learwife, page 15
I have a gift for perception: to walk into a chamber, a merchant’s parquet lobby, and see – here is the emerald earring, the gossiping servant. Things that could be useful, things for gain. Power is inch by shivering inch, building a skin out of fine scales.
Lear wondered at it. How did you know?
He put his hand on his purse as we left. The plate is poor. Not difficult.
Where did you learn that, witch?
Being a young wife, looking to learn a man’s mood when he will not give you a trace of affection, that’s an education! How Michael dressed, the lie of his face in the morning: I could build an entire day from a droplet of a glance, where I would walk and wearing which flowers. Clues, like seed in the snow.
So: I became the type to pick. Out of a field of wheat, one poppy. Out of a row of heads, one eye with a disloyal cast. Out of the sky, one star.
Tonight two women fight in the corner. A little noble woman and an older common girl. I will tell Brother Manfred, says the common-born one, petulant. The other pouts, bridles. Each performing their righteousness.
Calyssa says, Peace, her voice nicked at the edges, but they do not attend.
Whoever thought that gentleness is the nature of women when it is such violence that we come from, that we live within? The swift crack open of hipbones, month-blood, bruises from hard lacing at the waist, teeth marking our nipples red, smack and sore and night agony under a husband-weight. Even the holy women ache: the saints have their breasts cut off.
A fight can be amusing, but I have had enough. I say, loudly, If you’ll be quiet I’ll tell you a secret.
They are silent immediately. One stares, the bottom of her eye-white just visible, a slice of rind.
I stage-whisper, The abbess bathed in milk. She did. Up to her neck.
A laugh. We are bound together in our knowledge, the slyness of it. Both sides are drawn together; they pucker. I am skilled, still. Outside the wind, outside the night tightens around us.
Calyssa says, Do not slander the dead.
I saw it myself, I say to her. My friend’s rising skull, flowing. As if her hair were white, as if she were four hundred years old, a being of chalk. Do you question my eyes? They remain sharp. They see such things, Calyssa. You would be astonished.
Calyssa’s eyes pull away. She has her own bruises, perhaps. And cannot quiet the whispering women. Not like I can.
Of course I know how to calm a room. My political education was practical: I came at it as farmhands learn the lines of a cow’s body, the shift of its limbs in the warm dark before dawn. They give the boys books. Lear had books, and learning from good masters, and whatever he’d gleaned from his father, that half-starved field of grain picked over by birds. He would, he said, rather be hunting, pale boy streaking overland away from court into the wilder version of himself.
Girls are formed by increment. We deepen our knowledge slowly, by parts. I was dipped again and again into the substance of it, until my colour darkened and the shade stained through the bone.
Kent attempted to teach me; and would give me small pieces of knowledge. Twisting his fingers under the lap of the trees he said there were rules: service, and obedience, and care of secrets, and rigour in God. I have my code, his mouth open to reveal austere small teeth, and it has served me, but as queen you must make your own. Form a rule and they’ll follow. Light through the leaves threw us into relief. But I was too young, and rattled in my power, like a badly scabbarded sword, and was awaiting deliverance.
Four years married. Michael had gone on pilgrimage, crawling over hills in some distant direction with bloodied knees. He would kiss the ring of a relic, I forget now the point. Had watched him go, moving from the door of the palace at sunrise, on all fours, sinking at the hips, like a thin cat. Lanterns held by servants all the way to the ridge of the next county. Laid my veil over my eyes and turned away, in weariness.
And we would wait, held until the session was over, and he came back brittle and happy, praising the saints. The rhythm of the marriage had laid itself out. I knew it rigorously by then. The plot of every day worked around faith, the shift of it under his skin.
Eighteen, twenty, twenty-one, I would not yield: I held his house, his fiefdoms, his line. While he indulged himself in rotten sackcloth I collected rents, spent days with cooks and angry thanes, flushed and furious to be faced with a queen so small at the waist you could join two hands around it. They were discomfited, I threw their planets off-centre. Wiser ones knew the king was no help, and I at least had open ears. I made victories through accident, or colossal luck. God having given me a husband devoted purely to Him was at least granting me beneficence in other areas. Long lists, dark oaken chests, the exchequer. I forged the king’s signature, carried his seal hidden in my chatelaine, swaying at my pelvis. Things within things within things. Transparent ivory, money in cool palms. Fronds of ferns, quivering in the afternoon conservatory, when I should have been lying with the king, but instead wrote legal letters, stained my mouth with wine.
So: the king had vanished. Then, trouble.
Diplomats had arrived. Kent in the corridor: What will we do? The king is not here – they cannot follow him to the monastery.
The Fool: Yea, and would have to go like dogs just to catch ’em, with tails lashing their backs.
Give them to me, put them in the hall.
They, the four of them, thought me a poor thing. At twenty-one enough to flourish and yet no children, and a king absent, off biting stones out of hills instead of performing on me in a bed! But being odd I charmed them. That advantage, the strangeness of it. A thing to tell others, The queen is alone with eight hounds, the boy’s a pilgrim or likely dead, but the house holds, who knows?
Late, drunk, they rolled their sleeves to their elbows and told me indecent things. The silver thread in the cock of a current prince, they said, to keep him virile. Looking to see if I’d shift, if a blush would rise to my hair. Instead I asked them for help.
I needed education on matters of state, I explained. I was so young, barely out of a convent, with a king (they knew this) weeping most nights and exhausting the priests. Could they aid me?
They saw, I knew, a weak spot on the map, and reached to touch it. So they were generous with their advice. An audience is a weapon: do not give it freely. Ignore the first visits of a person who intimidates. Spy on friends more than enemies, and keep good spies, well-fed. Build sober armies that love your king. Befriend ruthless men through their soft wives, hawking, hunting. Give sons, give sons. I had the heads of my dogs in my lap. The room turned green with the dawn, slowly, as if peeling off the top layer of skin on the world.
So I was blooded in. And I worked, slave-hard. Candles in the halls, a council that wrote well for the will of the absent king, who moved deeper into his God as into moss, a soft working. Took a whip to a maid myself one night as the others watched (a small crime, but persistent, and needing to be wormed out); he passed at the door, saw her bared back and the blood and his dark wife standing astride with a lash, and moved on, without remark. When my father passed away he came to kiss my forehead. You have not wept.
No. Weary, and the harvest to count, and still several miniature scandals to care for; and the fire banked high so that my cheeks were scorched; and I had known my parents so little, had seen them all my life at one remove, as through thin gauze, moving in circuits of their own mystery.
You grieve little as you are the Devil, he noted serenely, and left me.
I had gifts, and luck; I had the width of myself and other bodies, strong men, and the grace of the Lord between myself and ruin. Kent, coming into beard then, drilling the armies under Michael’s colours; the archbishop, tender for the holiness of the king, and bunkering the edifice of his God-given command. And no children, no children! It was a rare doomed thing: it was like riding an animal as it was hunted, hearing the yells of the pursuit in the trees.
It ended as it had to. Death was in it – we were carrying it at our necks. It could not be repeated, that terrible court. If you told me of it now, I would not believe you.
7.
The feast of Saint Nicasius passes, with its prayers for cities and for the decapitated saints, and then the feast of the Immaculate Conception. Our Lady’s scent fills the chapel, fills our throats: rosewater, incense, burning green wood. The illness runs still, but its floodwater has thinned. Barely brushes to the ankle.
I am offensive to Ruth. Smack across her collarbone. She had been feeling along my veins, the pocks along them from past blood-letting, like holes in the earth. At the birth of Cordelia they bled me so vigorously I thought I would be dried, husk, rattle-bones.
Why are you so hard, Lady?
I am honest. My life has been poorly balanced.
A life lived with two weights upon it, kings, has no true centre. It cannot be still, or even. I am haphazard, so I swim in incomplete or incorrect emotion. I am a vision half sketched by a stumbling painter, insecure and feeling his youth, in bad light; in the one clear hoped-for shaft of sun it would be clean and properly wrought, but at other points it shows a viciousness, a capacity for teeth.
A witch on the pyre, a woman told Lear once, will burn tongue-first. You will open her mouth to find blackened teeth, a palate of ash. Women lie. Women are unbalanced in their souls. And daughters worst of all.
I kiss Ruth upon the forehead. Let us be at peace together.
Tell me again of what we’ll do when this is over, Lady.
We’ll go south, where it’s warmer. We’ll find my old friend Kent, whom you loved so much. Such a gracious man. When the quarantine lifts, when the gates are open. Kent, who will know the graves, and the right places: to restore myself, my name. To re-enter the high bright places of the world, to the sound of trumpets, battering drums. Here cometh the queen.
When will it be?
When the season of illness is over. Soon. There will be such happiness.
Such happiness, and I sit with her, stroking her hair. When was the last true happiness, the last feeling that the world was good, and honest, and white as apple-flesh to its deepest parts, and that bad luck and bruises were just illusions? It was Cordelia: Cordelia’s first whisker-scratch against my stomach. Calling, with her small mouth. The memory is a flood: it dives over my head. I am overflowing with pearl.
Kent. I am with child again.
Is it true?
I have not told the king. Kent – I’m terrified. What if I bleed?
You will not bleed. If it is a boy and lives, our fears are gone. You are a remarkable woman – and you’re sure? It is not just the end of your courses through age?
Quite sure. I’m widening like a tupped sheep.
Ha! It will be his greatest happiness. May God keep you. He embraced me suddenly. I felt the hold of his breast across my stomach; he was shaking. I held his neck with a hand, the fraying curls of it, suddenly concerned – the man is ill, perhaps. But no – and he was gone, with a frantic kiss to my hand that left it white with force.
A rustle of sleeves. Magdalena. The maidservant was on the stairs above, fixed at the landing: I knew the shape of her, the angle of her head, though it was in darkness. Pressed into shadow. Come, help me. I am disarranged and must appear before the king. True, for Kent had crushed the silks on my bodice.
And yet she did not hear: she ran upwards, without pause, gathering her skirts, to meet Regan, on the upper floor, whose hands I could see clasped under her ribs, poised for some event. Her hair is thickening, I thought. I must tell her it looks well. Even in the torch’s dimness, I remember, the caul of my happiness made her and all other parts astonishing in their beauty. She in her woman’s height, watching the stairway, shoulders bared, was radiant, the shadows beneath her cheekbones sepulchres, crowned plaits waiting for the wreaths of sacrifice.
When I see her it is this vision, of her in her most incarnate self, that appears: full, at the height of her beauty, and silent.
My apologies, Mother. I seem to have interrupted you enjoying yourself.
Regan, come, I have news—
But they moved away together. I was alone.
Further. I tread into the trail of happiness, feel it crushing under my feet.
That evening was like none other in my life. Lear thought me a liar, until I laid his horned paw on my stomach and let him feel the warm, the rise of this new sun between my ribs. So old, both of us. He lay in silence with it, and I saw he was weeping generously; and would have forgiven him then, forgiven him all and anything.
It is a blessing from God, he said dimly. He gives miracles arduously, but He gives them nonetheless.
It is no miracle, Lear. I was laughing. It is as ordinary as anything.
You think you would have struck a seed in the belly if it weren’t for God’s great will? Woman, you’re all chin-hairs and warts, and here you are blossoming as if it’s May. It is a sign of Lear’s righteousness.
Yes.
There is something lacerating in human happiness, I think now. In the rise and swing of it; a punishment. The Fool knew. He was an artist of self-brutality. His grasp for our laughter, as he feigned shaving in a mirror with a feather as the blade; when the real, savage edge was us, our clapping hands, pouring over his head and nicking holes wherever it fell.
Lear held a feast, to celebrate. Garlanded me, rose-petalled, his blossoming girl. His delight, my delight, like golden rain, showering us. The girls and their husbands came, as ordered. Their cool hands pushed close to the orb of it, the last child in me. Is it not admirable? He was dizzying, he boasted. That I am so thick with seed I can fatten a dried-out bag such as this! I have even outrun your green-grass husbands! Well, your children and mine can be playmates together. I was holding his hand. We were lovers again, then.
Regan said quietly, A seed-victory indeed, and most improbable.
Hmm? What was that?
Her curtsey. I held my own glowing prosperity and would not let her touch it; the sense of doubt in it. It is a great blessing to our mother the queen, and we may pray that none goes ill.
Ill? None will go ill. The worry across his forehead washed me with love. But you did not desire to upset me: you are a gentle woman, and a loving daughter.
So I am, Father. So I am. Kissed his hard hands, and handed him a drink. I may prove that loyalty in great service on a future day.
I reached out. I’m hot, Regan. Fetch a fan or a cool cloth.
She turned. Magdalena? A fan or a cloth for the queen. I am indisposed.
At last the final nun heals. She walks, wavering, into the open gardens, the fever having released, and rolled away from her body. Boulder from Christ’s tomb. She looks resurrected, an Easter-woman; her face sallow as greenery. Calyssa glows, as if it was her own miracle.
In celebration of recovery, to dampen the fights, I pick out the best stories of court for the sisters that night. Dances, fans, pools of slow golden fish that lay glossy in sunlight. Stillness, languor. The Fool, tinselled and belled, lolling on a cushion. In the chill of the chapter-house they step into the haze of a hot summer, and breathe in perfumed air. I show them the meeting with Lear.
The court of my first husband: hot June, women in linen pacing the parquet, dampening their necks with perfumed water from bowls held by servants. My first encounter with Lear: sitting with Kent. We exchanged nothing. I barely saw him.
This is my young friend, Queen, the Prince Lear. Kent put down his pen, had been inscribing. Maps, letters. Like a diplomat he wrote himself in and out of the world. After fetching such a respectable young queen-bride (a good girl, the court shadows said, and sensible), his value was high. Lear bowed his head in the accepted manner. He was kind enough to visit me at court, while I do duty.
You put a good sheen on it, Kent. My pursuit of employment.
That’s my office.
Not a pretty princeling. Not good-skinned or well-clad. Half broken already in the right thigh, a riding accident’s deep puncture I would later lay my lips against. Altogether – and he would roar at this, later, well into the marriage – not a man to be remarked.
I had heard of him occasionally. His mad father, the lands lost. He spent years in skirmish, running a taut line, inching back land his father had relinquished. Peasants liked him for his youth, his freckled head, his penchant for ducking into village brawls and cuffing all offenders. Soldiers too. Seeing themselves in him, barely a skin-width from a child, and yet thrusting himself over precipices; they laid their loyalties in hundreds.
Was still ‘boy’ in court, youth still burnishing him for mockery. The ugly boy is amok again. Though by the Archangel Michael’s last illness he was king and high thane, no longer a child.
Strange, but I would not lie in the cool of my own body and think of Lear, or desire him. Nobody believes this now: they think the net of his love was thrown over me long before. But saintly Michael was all to me. I was his mirror, his faithful animal. Lear, the freckled young fighter, was just a part of the landscape.
I saw Lear only in flashes, in segments, behind Michael’s aureate glow. Red-headed. Burned cheeks from riding with the hordes daily. Chewing as he turned to watch me process with my women through the throne rooms to the lower garden. Michael was not ill yet: I was still caught in the struggle to bear a child with a man who refused my body as a temptation from Hell.
We were at Michael’s winter court. Some graceless remote castle, chosen for its proximity to shrines, holy waters. His advisers would prickle constantly at his tendency to move according to the geography of faith, rather than political expediency. My lady’s voice at my neck as we stood at a window, wrapped in furs. The young foreign prince, the poor one. He’s caused some trouble.
