In the middle of one of the pains, the lady reared, and there was a rush and a gush, and Joan exchanged sodden cloth for dry, out of sight there, under the lady’s nightgown. She looked up exultant, over the bump of the baby. “That’s your waters popped,” she said. “Not long now, love-a-do.”
I was almost in a faint, such a strong scent billowed out from the soaked cloth beside us, from the lady herself. Jessamine, I thought. No, elderflower. No—But as fast as I could name the flowers, the scent grew past them and encompassed others, sweet and sharp, so different and so strong my mind was painted now with scattered pinks, now with blood-black roses and with white daphne.
“Oh,” I whispered, and drank another deep breath of it, “I can almost taste the sweetness!”
The lady’s head lolled to the side; released from the pain, she faded into momentary sleep, her face almost rapturous with the relief. Beyond her, Joan held the nightgown out, and watched below, shaking her head. “What is coming?” she said softly. “What is coming out of you, lovely girl?”
“A little horse,” said the lady in her sleep. “A little white horse.”
“Well, that will be a sight.” Joan laughed gently, and arranged her cloths beneath.
What came, four pains and pushes later, was of course not a horse but a child— but a child so strange, a horse might almost have been less so. For the child was white—not white in contrast to Moorish or Mongol or African prince, but white like a lily, white like the snow, like the moon, entirely without color, except … He was a boy-child, and the boy spout on him was tipped with wrinkled green, like a bud, and the boy sacks on him—a good size for one so small—were also green, and darker, like some kind of fruiting, or vegetable.
He was small, he was unfinished, he did not live long. Joan gave him into the lady’s arms, and I sat behind her on the floor and supported her, and over her shoulder I watched as he took a few pained breaths of the sweet, heated air, and then took no more, but lay serene. He was barely human, barely arrived; he was an idea of a person that had not got quite properly uttered, not properly formed out of slippery white clay; and yet a significance hovered all round him quite disproportionate to his size. He smelled divine, and he looked it, a tiny godlet, precise in all his features, delicate, pale, powerful like nothing I had seen before, like nothing I have seen since.
“What is that on his forehead?” I said. Perhaps all newborns had it and I was ignorant.
Joan shrugged, touched the crown of his tiny head. “Some kind of carbuncle?”
The lady held him better to the light.
“It looks like a great pearl there,” I said. “Set in his skin. It has a gleam.”
“Yes, a pearl,” said the lady distantly, as if she had expected no less, and she kissed the bump of it.
Joan gave her a cloth, and she wrapped him, her hands steady, though I had begun to cry behind her, and were dripping onto her shoulder.
There was business to deal with—a body that has birthed needs to rid itself of all sorts of muck, and be washed, and dressed cleanly, and laid in a clean bed to rest, and it can only move slowly through these things. We proceeded calmly, Joan saying what I should do, task after simple task, and always I was aware of the little master, in his wrappings there by the fire, as if to keep his small deadness warm, and the dance we were doing around him, in his sweet air, in the atmosphere of him.W hen she was abed, the lady asked for him, and the three of us sat there in a row very quiet, and she held him, unwrapped, lying along her up-propped thighs.
Quite lifeless, he was, quite bloodless, with the scrap of green cord hanging from his narrow belly; he ought to have looked pitiful, but I could feel through the lady’s arm against mine, through the room’s air, through the world, that none of us pitied him.
“He looks so wise,” I whispered. “Like a wise little old man.”
“Wise and wizened,” said the lady. I have never known anyone so tranquil and strong as this lady, I thought. Whoever she was, all I wanted that night was to serve her forever, me and Joan together in that tower, bonded till death by this night’s adventure, by the bringing of this tiny lad to the world, and the losing of him from it.
In the morning the flower scent was gone; the fire had died, the tower was cold, and the air felt rotten with grief. He will haunt your dreams, Joan had told me, of that lover’s head, but in fact he filled my waking mind, so well remembered in all his details that it was as if a picture of him—his ragged neck flesh, the turned-up eye— went before me, painted on a cloth, wherever I went, to the well or the woods or wherever. And when he was not there, his son, pale as a corpse candle, floated before me instead.
The lady gave the bab into Joan’s hands, a tight-wrapped, tiny parcel, banded and knotted with lengths of her own hair. “Oh, of course!” I said when Joan brought it down the stair. “So that he always has his mam around him! And such a color, so warm!”
She laid him on the table. “So we’ve more digging to do, for him and the other birth leavings. It is best to bury those, with proper wordage and herbery.”
“How is she?” I said timidly. I was unnerved that our bond was gone, that we were three separate people again.
“Resting,” said Joan. “Peaceful.”
Then I must have looked very lost and useless, because she came to where I sat on the bench, and stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders, and she held me together while I cried into my apron, and “There, there,” she said, and “There, there,” but calmly, and patiently, as if she did not expect me ever to stop, but would stand quiet and radiant behind me, however long I took to weep myself dry.
I sent the girl home. She was in too much distress to be much use to me, and I could not let her near the lady. I thought it odd—she had hardly been squeamish at all when that head was brought in. I had had hopes for her. But the bab undid her, whether its birth or its death or its strangeness, or the fact that its mam shed no tears over it but sank straight back away into the stupor we were used to, as if she had never been childered, as if she had never raved and suffered over her man’s death.
With the rider who brought supplies and took the girl away, I sent a message to Lord Hawley that the mistress was delivered of a dead child, and what were we to do now? For my contract with him had only specified up to the birth, but now that the bab was gone, could not some other woman, without midwifing skills, be brought to the task of guarding my lady? For though I could use the good money he was paying, I felt a fraud here now, when there were plenty of childered women in my own village to whom I could be truly useful, rather than playing nursemaid here.
For answer he sent money, money extra upon what he had promised, as if the death of the bab had been my doing and he wanted to show me favor for it. And he bid me stay on while they sorted themselves out at court about this state of affairs.
I could see them there in their ruffs and robes, around their glasses of foreign wine, discussing: Ought they to humiliate the lady with further exile, or ought they to allow her back, instead to be constantly reminded of her sullied state by the faces and gestures of others?
And so I stayed nursemaid. Although there were only the two of us now, I kept to my contracted behavior and did not keep company with my prisoner, but only attended her health as long as that was necessary, and made and brought her meals, emptied her chamber pot, and tended her small fire. I was under orders to speak to her only when spoken to, and to resist any attempt she might make to engage me in conversation, but had I obeyed them we would have passed our days entirely in silence, so to save my own sanity I kept to my practice after the birth of greeting the lady when I entered, and she would always greet me back, so that we began each day with my asserting that she was a lady, and her acknowledging that I was Joan Vinegar, which otherwise we might well have forgot, there being nothing much else to remind us.
A month and a half we lived together, the lady and me in our silences, the mountain wastes around us. The lord’s man came with his foodstuffs and more money, with no accompanying message. He told me all the gossip of court, sitting there eating bread and some of the cheese and wine that he himself had supplied, and truly it was as if he spoke of animals in a menagerie, so strange were their behaviors, so high-colored and passionate. He filled the tower room with his noise and his uniform. I was so glad when he went and left us in peace again that I worried for myself, that I was turning like that one upstairs, entirely satisfied with nothing, with watching the endless parade of my own thoughts through my head.
I stood, with the man’s meal crumbs at the far end of the table, and a cabbage like a great pale green head at the near end, and the gold scattered beside it that I could not spend, for how much longer yet he had not said. She was silent upstairs.
She had maintained her silence so thoroughly while the man was here, he might have thought me a hermit, hired only to do my prayers and observances for sake of the queen’s health, not to attend any other human business. And none of this made sense, not the gold, or the cabbage, or the smell of the wine dregs from the cup, or the disturbance his cheerful voice had wrought on the air of the usually silent room, but all flew apart in my senses like sparrows shooed from a seeded field, in all directions, to all quite different refuges.
My lady’s womb ceased its emissions from the birth, and paused awhile dry.
Then came a day when she requested cloths for her monthly blood. I wondered, as I brought them, then later as I washed them, whether this was good or bad, this return to normal health. Would Hawley have preferred—would he have showered me with yet more gold?—if she had died in expelling her child, or thereafter from some fever of childbed? Had I been supposed to understand that she was not to return alive from this exile? Had I failed in an unstated duty?
“Well, she is as good as dead,” I said to myself, rinsing the scrubbed cloth and watching the pink cloud dissipate down the stream. “If you ask me.”
Dreams began to trouble me. Often I dreamed of the dead child. Sometimes he lived, and made wise dreamish utterance that carried no sense when I repeated it to myself in the morning. Sometimes he died, or fell to pieces as he came out of his mother, or changed to a plant or a fleeing animal on emerging, but always these dreams were filled with the scent of him, maddening, unplaceable, all flowers and fruits combining, so strong it seemed still to linger in the room even after I woke, and slept again, and woke again in the morning, so tantalizing that several times I hunted on my hands and knees in the meadow around the cottage for the blossom that might be the source, that I might carry it about with me and tantalize myself further with the scent.
I woke very suddenly from one of these dreams, and lay frightened in the night, washes of color flowering forth onto the darkness, with the surprise of the wakening to my heart and blood. My hearing had gone so sensitive, if one of my grandchildren had turned over in his sleep back home, I think I would have heard it.
Outside a thud sounded, and another, earthen, and then another; a horse was about, not ridden by anyone, but perhaps it had pulled itself loose when tied to browse, and now wandered this unfruitful forest and had come upon our meadow in its hunger.
When I had tamed my heart and breath, I left my bed and quietly opened the cottage door, to see whether the animal was wild or of some worth. I dare say I had it in mind how useful a horse would be, if it were broken and not too grand, how I might add interest to my dreary life here with excursions, with discoveries of towns within a day’s ride of the tower. I might spend a little of my gold there; I might converse with sellers and wives. Figures and goods and landscapes flowed across my imaginings, as I stepped out into the cold night, into the glare of the stars, the staring of the moon.
The air was thick with the flower-scent of the dead boy-child—such a warm, summery smell, here in autumn’s chills and dyings! The horse stood white—a stallion, he was—against the dark forest. He was down the slope from the tower.
He had raised his head and seemed to gaze at the upper window.
“Perhaps you are too splendid,” I whispered, but I fetched the rope anyway, and tied a slip-loop. Then across the meadow I crept, stepping not much faster than a tree steps, so as not to frighten the horse away.
At a certain point my breathing quieted and the night breeze eased to where the low noise issuing from my lady’s window reached me. That rooted me to the meadow ground more firmly, her near-inhuman singing, her crooning, broken now and then with grunts and gutturals, something like triumphant laughter.
I have often been thought a witch myself, with my ugly looks and my childbedding, but I tell you, I have never evoked any such magic as shivered under that fine horse’s moonlit hide, as streamed off it in the night, fainting me with its scent and eluding my eye with its blown blooms and shining threads. And I have never cast such a spell as trailed out that window on my mistress’s, my charge’s, song, if song it were. It turned my bones to sugar ice, I tell you, my mind to sweet syrup and my breath to perfume.
And then among her singing another sound intruded, with no voice to it, no magic, no song. It was an earthly sound and an earthy: stone scraped on stone, heavily, and surreptitious somehow.
Then I knew what she was about, with her mad singing, with her green-tipped baby, with her caring so little for the shame of the queen’s name and family. And I ran—more, I flew—across the meadow grasses and around to the tower door. I must be quiet, or she would hurry and be gone before I reached her; I must be quick!
I took the prison room key from under its stone and managed to open the tower door silently. I sped up the stairs, put the key in the lock and turned it, with its usual squeaks and resistance. From inside, loud now, undisguised, came the grinding, the push of stone on stone.