Almost Innocent

by Jane Feather

  By midafternoon, Magdalen lay in an exhausted stupor, her body momentarily resting from its toil. When she could think at all, she was aware only of bewildered indignation that anyone should have to endure this atrocious thing. Why had she not been forewarned? Why was this happening to her? What had she done to deserve it? Was it the wages of sin? Of the mortal sin that brought this other life in combat with her, it seemed, grappling with her, and yet they should surely be fighting together? Did this happen to everyone, or was it special because of her sin? Through her disordered, fevered brain the thoughts ran. Tears glistened at the corners of her eyes, and despair ran deep as the pain built again, inexorable, eternal, unendurable—yet it must be endured.

  Erin held a water-soaked cloth to her lips, and Magdalen sucked greedily, too weak to drink from a cup. Afternoon became evening, and the two women attending her were white and tense as the pains seemed to die down, the exhausted body on the bed to sink into a state resembling a trance rather than sleep.

  “We must summon the midwife,” Erin said. “She must pull the child from her body.”

  Margery shuddered. They both knew what happened then, a child in pieces, the mother torn, bleeding to death more often than not; and if not, then the death-dealing fever always came in such cases.

  “Perhaps she needs to rest, then she will able to help the child,” Margery said uneasily. “My lord will be greatly angered if aught were to happen that could be prevented.”

  They both knew this to be true, both remembering the night on the ship and his joy when he knew that the Lady Magdalen would live.

  Erin soaked the cloth again and gently bathed Magdalen’s face. Her eyelids opened, and for a moment her eyes were unclouded with the mesmerizing pain.

  “Lady, we must summon the midwife,” Erin said in low-voiced urgency. “The child will not be born.”

  Magdalen shook her head weakly on the pillow. “I will not have her … not yet.” She seemed to the watching women to gather herself together, as if for one final effort. The pain scudded over her face again, her breath coming in shallow gasps as she struggled to contain the agony.

  The moon rose in the dark sky, hanging, a perfect crescent, in the chamber window. The two women counted their rosary beads in passionate whispers.

  Guy de Gervais was removing his armor in his tent outside the lists on the plain beyond the castle of Compiegne. It was early evening.

  “Wine, my lord,” Geoffrey proffered the cup. “It was a well-fought joust, my lord, at the last.”

  “Mmm.” Guy acknowledged the compliment absently. He went to the door of the tent, sipping wine. The air was fresh and pleasant on his face after the stifling heat of visor and helmet, and his body moved fluidly, released from the confining plates of armor. He was weary, but pleasantly so, and the prospect of the banquet that would end the revels, followed by his bed, filled him with contentment. Or should do.

  He frowned, watching the evening star prick the darkening sky. He could be back at Castle de Bresse in two hours. The thought appeared unbidden in his head. But why should he ride at night? His companions would not appreciate either the effort or the danger, and if he rode out they must accompany him. Ridiculous, when there was a banquet, good company, a comfortable bed, and an easy ride home in the morning light on the morrow. He turned abruptly from the tent entrance.

  “We return to Bresse, Geoffrey. Inform the knights-at-arms and the rest of the household. We set out immediately.”

  The party made good speed as the evening became full dark. No one questioned the Lord de Gervais’s peculiar, whimsical decision, but they rode with haste and vigilance, supperless, tired after the day’s combats, anxious to be off the roads and behind castle walls. They kept their complaints among themselves, not a whisper reaching their overlord as he rode at their head, a frown etching his brow, his mouth taut.

  He did not know why he was doing this, only that the decision had made itself and could not be gainsaid.

  It was ten o’clock when they arrived at the Castle de Bresse. Magdalen did not hear the imperative note of the herald demanding that the drawbridge be lowered to admit the lord of the castle. Her women heard it, however, the sound coming resonant through the casement, opened to let some cool air into the room where the heat of suffering hung heavy.

  “It is my lord,” Erin said, bending to Magdalen, wiping her brow. “My lord is come, lady.” She did not know whether the suffering woman heard the words or could understand them, but she repeated them, hoping that they might offer comfort.

  “She’s all but gone,” muttered the beldame, approaching the bed cautiously. Magdalen had still not permitted her to touch her, although she no longer had the strength to forbid her the chamber. “She and the child will be dead within the hour unless I can pull the child from her.”

  “No!” Somehow the words penetrated the laboring woman’s absorption. “You will not touch me.”

  Shaking her head, the crone withdrew into the shadows. She’d offered her skills. If they were rejected, then the consequences were nothing to her.

  “But my lady—” Erin began, but her words died as the door of the chamber flew open.

  Guy de Gervais strode in, pulling off his gloves, his face pale beneath the weathered tan. He had been told at the gate that the Lady de Bresse had been laboring long to bring forth her child, and the atmosphere in the castle had told him all he needed to know. Everywhere he saw the grim faces of those who expected the worst at any moment.

  “How is she?”

  “Bad, my lord,” Erin said bluntly. “The child will not be born, and my lady is at the end of her strength.”

  He approached the bed and stared down in despairing disbelief at the changed countenance on the pillows. Her eyes were sunken in deep purple hollows in her face where the skin was drawn tight over the bones, revealing the skull beneath, as if the flesh were already gone from her. Her mouth, that wonderful, full, passionate mouth, was set in a fine line of suffering.

  “She will not let me near her, my lord,” whined the beldame. “I would pull the child from her. It is the only way to save her, but she will not let me touch her.”

  “Guy?” It was a whispered exhalation, and he bent low.

  “I am here.”

  “Send her away. Do not let her touch me.”

  He stood in dread and irresolution, knowing that if he ordered the midwife to do what she could, then it would be done. But if Magdalen, even in this extremity, could express such a wish, then surely he must comply.

  “The priest, my lord.” Erin spoke softly. “We should send for Father Vivian to hear my lady’s confession.”

  “I am not dying.” The whisper came again from the bed. “I will not die.”

  “Send for Father Vivian. He may wait outside, in case there is need. And you, beldame, get you gone.” Guy made these decisions, unsure what had led him to them but sensing their rightness. But now he found himself at a loss. Magdalen had retreated again into the twilight world of endurance. His hands shook with the need to help her, and his soul was cold with dread as he stared down at the ravaged face from which all life seemed to have gone.

  “I go to the chapel,” he said suddenly. On his knees at the altar rail, he would wait out this dreadful time. “Send for me immediately if she is …” He did not finish because he could not say what he believed in his icebound heart was now inevitable. That loving, laughing, passionate, willful soul was going to leave this world and leave him to face the wasteland of loss as he had done once before.

  He reached the door. There was a sudden rustle of movement behind him. He turned back to the room, his hand on the latch. Erin and Margery were bending over the foot of the bed.

  “What is it?” His voice sounded thin and scratched in the room where a hushed and urgent expectancy had replaced the dull hopelessness of inaction.

  “The child … It comes, my lord,” Erin told him. “But my lady cannot help it. She is gone from us.”

  “No!”
He ran back to the bed, dropping to his knees at the head, touching the cold, still face on the pillow. “No, it cannot be!” His fingers brushed her mouth, then stilled, lightly covering her lips. He was not mistaken. The faintest stirring of breath touched his skin. “She is not dead,” he said quietly as a feeble, attenuated cry sounded in the room.

  Magdalen’s eyes opened, and to his joy he saw lucidity in their pain-haunted depths. “Over.” The one word was all she could manage.

  “It’s a girl, my lord.” Erin came up to the head of the bed, holding something in her hands. “She is small but appears sound, even after such a struggle.”

  Guy stood up and looked at his daughter, lying exposed for his inspection on a blanket. Such a pathetic, bloodstained, wrinkled mite to cause so much suffering, he thought, gently covering the child before taking the bundle from Erin.

  “Magdalen, here is your daughter.” Kneeling again beside the bed, he laid the bundle against her cheek.

  “Healthy?” Her eyes opened again. Her hand moved feebly to touch the child. “She is but an eight-month babe.”

  “So were you,” he told her, smiling, moving the child to her breast, closing her hands over the living package. “I remember your father saying.”

  He saw a light flicker in her eyes, as if the seemingly irrelevant scrap of information made a comforting sense, as if it connected her with the child she now held. Then the delicate, blue-veined lids closed over the light, her hands slackened and fell from her breast. But the faintest tinge of color had crept into her cheeks. It was not color so much as a patina overlaying the grayish hue of before, a patina that indicated the true sleep of recuperation.

  “God is merciful,” Erin whispered. “If there is no fever, my lord, I believe she will live … and the child, too.”

  “We will tend her now, my lord.” Margery took the baby from her mother’s breast.

  Guy looked at the two women who both bore the signs of acute exhaustion. They had been watching at this bedside for eighteen hours. “I will dower you both for this day’s work,” he promised. “For your loving care of my lady … and for your loyalty,” he added quietly, but with an emphasis they could not mistake.

  “Our loyalty does not need to be bought, my lord,” Erin said.

  “But it may be rewarded.” He went to the door. “Send for me when your lady is strong enough.”

  Magdalen slept for many hours. She slept as they cleansed her of the residue of birthing, as they changed the linens on the bed and the sun came up on a balmy spring day, filling the chamber with healthful scents and breezes. She slept through the thin wailing of her daughter and was but barely conscious as they put the child to her breast and the warm life-giving fluid began to flow beneath the desperate, hungry suckling of the infant mouth.

  She awoke as the sun went down. The chamber was quiet, infused with a great sense of peace. Languidly, she turned her head on the pillow. Erin and Margery lay on pallets beside the bed, both dead to the world. A wooden cradle stood at Erin’s hand, a hand which lay slackly on the rocker, evidence of the work it had been doing before sleep had overwhelmed the woman. Magdalen could not see within the cradle and effortfully she turned on her side, propping herself on an elbow to lift her head from the pillow. She could see little more than a minute mound beneath a white coverlet, but when she leaned over the edge of the bed, she could see the crown of the tiniest head, tipped with a faint fair down.

  Exhausted afresh, she fell back again, smiling to herself. If she kept very still, she could hear the infant’s breathing. There were tiny disturbances to the even tenor, little catches and snuffles that for a moment alarmed her until she recognized a curious rhythm to them. She wished she could reach out to her child but knew it to be impossible. Curiously, the horror of the child’s birthing had receded. Oh, she could remember the despair of relentless pain, the terror of helplessness, but it was a mind memory, not a bodily one.

  The noise from the cradle changed, the snuffles became quick sucking noises, then a thin wail pierced the chamber. A rush of anxiety, unlike anything she had experienced before, flooded Magdalen as the pathetically intense wail rose. She struggled up, aware only of the compulsion to reach the child, to satisfy whatever need was causing her such distress. But Erin was already staggering up from her pallet.

  “Hush now, lovely,” the woman murmured, rocking the cradle.

  “Give her to me, Erin.”

  “Ah, you’re awake, my lady. It’s the breast she wants.” Erin lifted the child from the cradle. “She’s wet. Let me change the breachclout first.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Magdalen said, holding out her arms. “I cannot bear to hear her cry so piteously.”

  Erin wrapped the damp baby in an extra layer of toweling and gave her to her mother. Magdalen moved her nipple into the tiny opened mouth, looking down in wonder at the life she had nurtured. A clenched fist pushed into the swell of her breast as the babe pulled, suckled, lost the prize, wailed instantly, found it again and settled down, her cheeks growing round with contentment.

  “Where is my lord?” Magdalen tore her eyes from the entrancing sight at her bosom. She knew he had been there in the last hideous hour of her labor, but the memory was smudged, a vague memory of determination, some infusion of strength that had driven the acceptance of death from her soul. “He has seen his child?”

  “Yes, my lady. Shall I send to him? He said we were to summon him when you were strong enough.”

  “Do so, but not until the child and I are fresh and fragrant again.” Magdalen chuckled, a weak chuckle but nonetheless her own. “I am rank with sleep, Erin, and my hair is tumbled. And this little one is needing. She cannot be presented to her sire in this state.”

  Erin touched the sleeping Margery with her toe, and the woman rolled over with a groan. “Wake up, sluggard. My lady needs hot water and spiced gruel, and the child must be bathed before my lord comes.”

  Margery rubbed the sleep from her eyes and looked at mother and child. She nodded her satisfaction, despite her weariness. “I’ll go to the kitchen. My lord would not have the bells rung to announce the child’s safe delivery lest they disturb my lady’s rest, but they can be rung now.”

  She hastened from the room, and within half an hour the bells from the four towers began to peal the joyous news of the birth of an heir to the de Bresse fiefdom. A male heir would have been preferable, but this little girl would provide the currency to maintain the stability of de Bresse dependents under the ultimate suzerainty of the Duke of Lancaster.

  Guy listened to the jubilant pealing as he crossed the court from the garrison. He had tried to spend the hours since he had left Magdalen in ordinary activities, tried to behave as if the life of mother and child were important to him only in terms of the discharge of a vassal’s duties and responsibilities to his overlord. He held within himself the bittersweet joy, the piercing poignancy of a fatherhood that he could not openly acknowledge, and the unfathomable gratitude for the gift of Magdalen’s life, so nearly lost to him.

  On impulse, he turned aside into the orchard, where beneath the trees daffodils and bluebells massed in heady springtime profusion. He picked an armful, his fingers sticky with their juices as the thick stems broke for him. Abruptly, powerfully, he was reminded of the juices of love, spilled with so much delight, and he inhaled deeply of the fragrance in his arms, a fresh, youthful fragrance so redolent of Magdalen.

  Carrying the bouquet, he left the orchard, climbed the outside stairs, and made his way to Magdalen’s apartments. The door stood ajar. He pushed it open. Erin and Margery were not there, only Magdalen sitting up in the big bed, still pale but smiling at him. She held out her hands in welcome.

  He closed the door softly behind him and trod to the bed. “You are feeling stronger, love?”

  “Immeasurably,” she replied. “What beautiful flowers.” She lifted the sleeping baby from her nest within the crook of her arm. “Your daughter, my lord.”

  Guy let the flo
wers tumble to the bed, scattering in scented yellow, blue, and white across the coverlet. He took the child as Magdalen scooped up the flowers and buried her nose in the blooms, smiling with her eyes as she saw the soft melting of the strong features, the delicate exploration of a fingertip accustomed to sword and steel.

  “Zoe,” she said. “I would christen her Zoe, my lord. The gift of life.”

  “Zoe.” Again he touched the tiny snub nose with the tip of his little finger. “But it’s hardly a Plantagenet name, sweetheart.”

  Magdalen’s face hardened. “She does not have to bear a Plantagenet name. She is our child, Guy, and will bear the name we bestow upon her. A name of love, not of dynasty.”

  He raised the child and lightly kissed the wrinkled forehead in benediction. “Zoe, then,” he said softly. “In affirmation of life and of love.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Edmund de Bresse stood on the forecastle of the St. Anne in the fresh dawn, watching as the ramparts of Calais became defined in the early mist lying over the smooth water. Running before the brisk dawn wind, they passed within the harbor walls, the pennons of Lancaster and de Bresse flying at the masthead to match the standard of England, lilies and leopard, flying from the welcoming ramparts.

  Edmund felt his spirits lift, the energy so long depleted in his body surge anew as they approached the familiar quay, gateway to the royally disputed territory of France and to his own fief. Within that fief lay his wife and his child. The child must have been born in the last few weeks. Had he sired a male heir? Did the child live? The latter question always served to make the former unimportant. Whatever the child’s sex, it was still his heir. And the child’s mother? Had she survived the birth? There were so many hazards he’d heard tell of, even if she survived delivery: the fever, the milk leg, the flux, and the wasting.

  Please God to have kept her safe, he whispered in an agony of anticipation. They had been parted, it seemed to him, as soon as he had discovered a world wherein his love for Magdalen of Lancaster was the defining characteristic. Her image filled his waking moments; the soft, supple lines of her body filled his arms during the long reaches of the night. He had recognized that his passion was unshared. His wife did not feel such a one for her husband. He knew she liked him, accepted her marriage and everything that went with it. But she gave him no more than friendship and acceptance. It was a recognition that disappointed him, but with the optimism of youth, the confidence of a man who had done and seen and succeeded as he had, he believed that she would come to love him as he loved her. He would teach her the ways of loving, and in his arms she would at last respond with the ardor and delight he took in her.