Learwife, page 16
I remember her voice. Thick, with an intimate solidity. Later when I needed to be statesmanlike I took on her voice, its small confidential vowels, like gifts passed between hands.
I laughed. How troublesome can a poor man be?
More than a rich one. She rolled her eyes. Pale blue, glimmering, like a wren’s egg. He has barely a strip of land to manage and so rides around prodding others into fights. Curled her slim hands, their pink-scrubbed nails. I don’t know why Kent welcomed him. Perhaps some debt.
This stung. The king’s knight has a good mind. Perhaps he believes the prince to be useful.
She snorted. Kent likes to find useful people to galvanise us. Sarcastic. Women so rarely loved Kent, his faithful bald head bowing before the throne, his elegant distance. I never wondered why this was so.
At least the new prince will have little entourage to burden the kitchens. I did not care. Michael was praying in sackcloth all night again, his skin blue with fervour and cold. I suspected perhaps he whipped himself, though I saw only flicks and flashes of his nakedness, interpreted it in the dark. Reckless red-headed boy-princes hardly signified. The wreck of my marriage was all-consuming.
Do you think we’ll move on soon? This castle is so cold.
Not until Lent is over. The king will not be moved before his penance is complete. And if he sits in the cold for it, so much more pleasing for him. Bitter, even then, the sourness beginning to filter into my skin, my flesh.
I tell it lightly for the nuns: a stray little boy, causing trouble in a court of gold. Who’d thicken into a rising king, red-headed, blazing with laughter. They take it, and smile conspiratorially. Well, it is a history, of a sort. I lived through what came next – Michael’s illness, the country of his plague, his death – and I look at these holy women, their limited thinking, and I cannot make them endure it. Even in story. Even in dreams.
The Fool came to me before Cordelia was born. The bottom of my stomach was bruised, so I did not swallow what he gave me.
I do not speak plain, it does not suit the cut of my garment. But let me lay a word for you, Majesty. Blood is not speaking well of blood, in this place. The savvy animal sleeps out the winter. Do not taunt the blizzards by wandering naked. His plain face, his hands upon my wrists.
Fool, I am eight months with child, I do not understand you.
You are beautiful as ever, Queen. May all be well and end as well.
And left me. I was not alert: I did not see what was breeding in the water. The fate that was coming from the depths to drown me. I was fat, and happy, and thought it was all charmed. When there was such a seething thing underneath it all.
8.
The end of the illness seems to release us from some unspoken bounds. In the morning a nun comes to the door and says, Do come and watch Sister Calyssa. She is birding.
Birding?
Come, watch.
Is she hunting? There are no prey-birds here: the abbess disapproved. Though the bishop himself had a goshawk he called Lucy, brought to the king’s feasts, and loved like his own fat soul. I do understand this. Hawks are not luxurious but they move against civilised sense. Have no regulation, will be quiet only by forced hooding or after a meal, not by delight in God. This place filled with the cries of some hungry birds in the mews would feel vicious, as if somebody had hung it with legs of meat. This is why the young should have no hunting-birds: one needs to know lust, and the body, to read their gluttony.
In the open courtyard Calyssa has laid a noose, a thin string. It has become an arrow, at its end is a swift: the head of it, beating and beating, tracking the straightness of the line across the air. Its shadow on the grass like a sundial, marking time. Calyssa is still, laying a trail: a handful of gold, some seed, crumbs. Waiting for terror to lessen into curiosity, a captured thought.
Gives the swift a little, a little. Bread crumbled from the long loaves. It hops to the feed, lays one wing out, turns to regard the light.
A fox could lift it out of the air, that bird. Too small.
Sssst.
From the postures of the other women – many of them, massed at the windows – I know this is a frequent piece of theatre, though I’ve never seen it.
It is resisting. Listens to the wind. Pick pick.
And what good, I note quietly, is a swift? No practicality. Unless you want to draw a carriage made of acorns, like Queen Mab.
Sowing myself some seeds: the thought of Mirabel’s disapproval giving me a brief charm of happiness. Watching the lure and the bird she is unmoving; she keeps her counsel.
The bird, however, is not a good mummer in the play: unpicks the knot, flickers, streaks away. Calyssa’s white hands still full, at her sides, of hot grain. Perhaps, I think, it comes daily, allows itself to be caught, wooed – and then a vanishing, like any coquette.
Failure in Calyssa makes her movements stiff. Gathering the twine, the knot. High colour on the visible planes of her face. I lean to look: penetrable, perhaps. This could be the dark gap through which I enter, and divine her, the way she is laid.
The swift’s loss is no anguish to me. I have no tenderness for small things. I was built for the broad, the outsized. My birds were bigger than Lear’s, and hunted more hares. My horses outpaced Michael’s at a pursuit. I never took a lesser portion, or let my king have higher ground.
The common women watching whisper lovingly. Her cell is full of wings. White reed and rope, you can’t move for millet or seed on your foot. Thrushes, a fat dove she spoils, and one other, exotic, I think a parrot. Blue like the sky. And two parakeets, and crows. The abbess would let her keep them, but only in her cell. The women pass it to me, this knowledge. They like to give their own secrets; they like to imagine a trade.
I think of her hidden place, with bread-white beaks, a flash-cruel parrot on a windowsill, the bluster and boom of big black birds. Wings rattling like shields. Full of sweet-singing in the dark.
It is logical. We all have our own armours, our own courts.
When I mention the birding in the chapter-house that evening one of the noble women laughs. One of Mirabel’s garden-sisters. Her father was a bird-trainer in a hunting-ground. Or something. Though she does draw beautiful birds in illuminations.
Common I call it, says another, quietly. Rank breathes in the room. It is another self: it sits on all their shoulders. If asked it would probably have its own voice. I remember the seed by the gate, its gentle fall upon the snow.
When she is abbess, comes the voice of a common-born nun, shrill with disdain, nobody will call her common.
They will. Another nun’s voice: casual, cruel. She will be the commoner abbess. People will be proud to see her, risen so much from her background. Wherever it was.
Still no letter from the bishop, but the truth of Calyssa’s rule hangs, an axe yet to be swung over a bough, a plait of hair. The noblewomen seem to feel it as a taunt, this elongated wait. They begin to shift, to pry. Thwarted vines regrowing in another plot. They know Calyssa will outrank them when she takes the abbess-crown, with the smear of scented oil on her hair; the head of the abbey ascends, leaping over the things she could not have by birth or fortune, to sit closer to God, virtually in cloud-cover. I heard once: a daughter made abbess while her mother remained a nun, in the same convent, her name lagging far behind, in the ledgers. I wonder if the mother ever spoke again, or if it was the consummation of all her own desires, if she was the keenest, the one carrying her daughter’s robes, smoothing rosewater into her hands.
But the noblewomen are beginning to reshape the future to suit their structures. Superior before God she may be perhaps, but Calyssa’s weak blood will never be forgiven. They will remember.
I will not deny that there is a difference in temperament. Though royalty has its own fragility. Lear, Michael, the royal blood relations of my past acquaintance, all having a certain sensitivity, a breadth to them. Perhaps they were made of finer material, to switch and waver at slighter breezes than the harder-hide lower orders. Lear snuffled after scents, knew apples coming into ripeness on the precise day, could pick up the touch of his own musk on my belly a week after we’d last made love. Or perhaps he played at it, to please me. I loved it, to be so marked, under the starch and brushed linen.
But people would always want to look inside us. Thinking there would be holiness within, the drip of pure water, to inspire them, or else decadence, with gold-dipped peaches and saffron in the baths. Of course it is neither. What they pin upon us is so much what they themselves require, and we are false as any other man, and fighting drunk at table, and full of wit and salt, like fishwives.
The knight Gloucester warned me of it, early, in my days with Lear. He feels strongly, Queen. No ordinary dullard, this one. A passion’s got him by the throat for days. His way of ingratiating, thinking I had no such strain of my own, that sought it in others. When I had seen early, in the convent, that I was a more subtle and delicate creation than other children, who snotted and wept and were happy in thick shades. No mottling to them. Hurtling from sense to sense, without discernment, like trade-winds.
Common. There is so little variation in it: between the noble sisters, the nuns. Though they believe it to be a gulf parted by Moses, a mile-wide stretch of silvered sand. They have the same hungers.
The passing of the illness seems to grant permission. They all begin to make havoc, now. Common, noble girls. Creating miniature insults, like mice. Sent to nip at toes. The long quarantine broods, and they seek little fights to fill the evenings, to give themselves their own entertainment – and, perhaps, to win me, to claim me to their side. The older nun, tripping over ice with her breast puffed like a goose. The girl’s laughing dark eyes.
They grapple and make stabs, for and against, then look to me, judging my face. If I approve I’ll foment their little games; if I disapprove, I can slaughter any of them, at a whim. They know. They fear me.
At court, lazy, made fretful by the length of afternoons, I invented wars of my own. Ladies in waiting: I set them sparring, sly, a hand in a pocket, grazing a remark on the skin like a brand. Helena thinks you uncouth but I like your manners, Margaret. I shall keep you close. Do you not think Matilda heartless for her remark? You are my most comforting friend, I must share all your confidences. Notes, tears in closets. I was clever and bit nobody twice.
At present this seems too small to concern me. Years of Calyssa as abbess for them, while I break out afresh into the new world, make my own way, and die independent of this, the enclosing egg of this world, that smothers. Well, good luck to them. The atmosphere grows dank with grumpish women, their nicking voices, and I am yawning when Brother Manfred appears.
We are silent, as if caught in a crime. I blink at him through the blueness of my lashes; he bobs, seems scarcely real.
I was passing – such noise! He opens and shuts his mouth. And has chosen, perhaps, to expend his authority, feeling braver. I remind you all that the hour of vespers is close. Perhaps you should rest.
The sisters are meek. And united again. His bald head glowing with cold makes us remember: the land of women has many divides, many landscapes, but the border with men is the thickest of all.
They murmur apologies, exchanging cunning glances. Manfred nods, hesitates, and vanishes, perhaps sensing the words held in throats as he opened the door, the white teeth lip-softened. To give him our blank and pleasant acquiescence. More likely, though, he is satisfied that we are obedient. Men always think they are the architects of women’s actions, when we can slip under their demands and flee, away.
I think, If I had been in a monastery with an abbot, I would be almost to Dover by now. I could take any abbot, any archbishop in high pomp, and reshape their will in two afternoons. Three, perhaps, if I were tired.
One nun turns to me, flushed with the feeling of camaraderie. Tell us what happened to your first husband.
I am saddened suddenly. He went mad, and died. There is little more to tell.
When I was a child in the convent, a girl beat herself to death upon a wall. She was twelve. Commoner’s daughter, who’d come up to money. She’d been sleepless in the heat; we had tried to tempt her to rest with soothing and milk, though I saw the white of her eyes as she rolled in the night, and was afraid. The nuns gave her draughts of dark stuff that stained the corners of her mouth. On the fifth day without sleep she took her skull to the hard slab and cracked it into bloody moss and paste. It was a raw death, and her eyes open throughout, though they closed them when she was put into the earth.
I had been a companion to her previously; she taught me her mother’s foreign songs on slow afternoons after catechism. One learns. The dangers of closeness with a rough mind that will condemn itself.
Still. Temperament does not save. The deep blood-legacy of sense in my girls, the vast thrum of their veins as they were exposed to the world, did not breed sense, or gratitude. Lear’s face, in the end. Fringed with the feathers of swans.
Went mad how?
There is no how. Mad is mad.
Kent, haggard, said, The king is growing mad.
The archbishop was dismissive. He is increasing his devotions. Piety is a thing to be admired in a king. Sunburned hands and thick nails. As if he had spent years labouring. A man who had scaled up a hard rope to finery and suckled to it firmer than a babe at a breast.
I was furious in terror. Yes, and you benefit well from it, you and your monasteries. How much has he promised you in the past months? What price have you weighed on his soul?
Kent was cooler, always cooler. I respect your judgement, Archbishop. In your wisdom you must acknowledge that the king’s frenzy is neither natural nor balanced.
No. He has great strength of will. I have attempted to make him consider—
What?
Moderation. But he is my king. None of his wishes have been excessive. Extra masses – perhaps he neglects his court duties, but he has good workers—
He has spoken of flogging himself. I was loud. Of penitence, walking the pilgrimage trail, unaccompanied. He regards me, all the household, as a corrupting influence—
I was so young then. So intent on truth. As if the revelations were solutions, as if throwing open all the windows could burn every miasma from a room.
The archbishop shook his weighty head. It would have been better if his brother had lived. Existence in monasteries is conditioned to prevent these excesses, which are prideful in their basis. A king cannot be a monk entire.
He will drive himself to ruin. Would wear a hair shirt if I didn’t prevent it. He will look ridiculous. My voice a shard now, thinner. People will pity me.
Nobody pities the queen, Highness.
9.
The cook comes to the women after the meal one night to say it is pig-killing time, the blood-month, and there are none here to help: all the men are out and won’t come in for the disease, and she can’t blame them, but the pigs need to be killed. Will there be helpers? she asks. Will anybody aid?
I come forth with some others. There is surprise at this – it rises – but rank does not hold you above knives and the smell of white fat. Being a guardian of all the country by the grace of God only brings you closer, to the swelling bodies of criminals swinging on the pole, the bone you pull from the purple flesh of a deer.
And it has been so long since anybody showed me a new part of human thinking, some freshness. I know all these women, the codes of them. Whatever their birth, however they bicker. Visible even through their habits, even through their subsuming faith, the daily shift and tide of it, their souls. This one punishes, or is a hard mistress to herself. This one wants so much. This one lies. Maybe when shown blood they’ll venture into new patterns. It is entertainment.
The pigs are glowing rounds of good meat, almost gold along the backs, and too intelligent. White-lashed eyes. Watch them pursuing their want of food, grain to hand, hand to pocket. They can follow the line of their need unerringly, nuzzle at the cook’s emptied palm and scream. The strongest, which is Mirabel, slams them on the head with a hammer. As if beating in a stump, or shaping iron. The skulls split and swim apart; the weight shifts under the crack and rolls to the side in the straw. One spits and shows its tongue, purpled, with yellow tushes. We have to hold it, foaming, as the jaw is hit, the dark of the ear.
Pig-soul. Silver, shimmering with hunger. Instead of rising it burrows to the earth, snuffling, seeking acorn-smells, the undersides of mushrooms.
It takes three women to knot and haul the bodies up at the back legs. Ankles finer than a dancer’s slip through the rope. At last the bulk is aloft and the throat cut, and a girl lies underneath with the bowls, gathering the steaming offering. Along my hairline and the ridges of my wrists speckled blood gathers so that I resemble an egg, or a flecked beast’s stomach. I feel young.
One woman hangs back, but the one beside me moves forward on her elbows better to hold her bowl, and is knocked gently at the forehead by the hanging snout, in a kind of blessing. I am reminded: get to the animal heart of anything, the fur, the temperament when kicked, to know it. That’s the method. Most of us are born and thicken into one form. Wolf, soft-bellied lizard. Lear could buck away from it: be deer, bird, stone. When you put out a hand expecting solid flesh and found only feathers, perhaps, a gliding rage that spun off into the dark. Lear, surprise-boy, menagerie of a man. Marriage is husbandry.
Later we boil the blood dark. The cook, to keep us awake in the sweet-heat swelter of the kitchen, blood-fat drunk, tells us shocking stories. A pig so fat a mouse, unnoticed, made a nest in its teat. A woman who gave birth to piglets, one after another, pink and squirming from the bedclothes. We scream and pray delightedly, and are all adrift separately, on the blackened rushes, as the carcasses swing in the smoke like bells.
Mirabel rested after the hammering. Has come up by me and taken a chair.
You do not mind the blood.
No. I am cool. We handle blood as much as anybody else.
