The Kingdom of Little Wounds

by Susann Cokal

  COMMON PARLANCE

  PERHAPS even a Negresse who was once a slave and now is known to have trafficked with the King’s Secretary — perhaps especially such a person — is entitled to secrets. But one who taught her to write is also entitled; he may question her. He may stand her at the desk where he first put a pen in her hand, and he may set paper before her, and he may insist that she answer him.

  In some questions, he echoes the Queen. “What did you think when you saw the finger emerge from the mud?”

  She slits her eyes, keeps the lids smooth. She writes, I thought there be some power at work after all.

  “‘After all’?”

  After all the ugly that has happen. After all the medicine and madness and sorrow.

  “So you believed right away that this was the finger of Princess Sophia?”

  I was not who said it were Sophia’s. I was not who saw it first. I only plucked it when the others were afeared.

  “You believe it might have belonged to someone other than the Princess?”

  She thinks for a moment. Or, rather, wants to give the impression of thinking; she probably has her answer ready all along.

  Fate have a finger. Such is an expression of this land. She looks up between long black lashes, a look she has used to advantage in the past. She puts down the pen.

  There is one more question — unrelated, perhaps improper, but even a questioner guided by reason cannot prevent every emotion from bubbling up:

  “Why did you go to the King’s Secretary? Why did you seek him out? Why did you — converse with him?”

  Sometimes even a man of letters betrays emotion.

  At this, however, her eyes shutter down. She puts her hands behind her back as if to say she will not pick up the pen again, under any circumstances. She takes a deep breath, then two, and looks at her questioner. Her eyes are hard as stones.

  He must ask: “Is this some scheme? Did Nicolas Bullen tell you to discover this object and call it Sophia’s? Did he give you the ring to put on it?”

  Slowly she brings her hands around to the front again. She picks up the pen. She writes, He tell me no thing. You tell me no thing. I say no thing, but I see every thing. Every thing.

  It is impossible not to feel frustration, not to say, “But why Lord Nicolas? Midi, you knew I would have protected you — though we could obviously never marry — all your life, I would have watched over you, no matter what else became of me . . .”

  She writes, I know you. You be no better than any lord who swive among the aprons. You betray.

  With the flourish of a duchess, she gathers her red skirts around her in a knot, ready to go.

  He, the scholar, accepts frustration and defeat. He gathers up the sheets on which she has written, then drops them on the brazier that heats the room.

  From the doorway, she stares. The pages flare into a flame as long as an arm.

  If she could speak, she would say she hates him.

  If he dared speak, in spite of everything, he would voice a different feeling.

  AUTUMN

  THE bells ring again in October. They ring all the way through the season of leaves falling and flowers curling into the earth, night skies beaming green swathes of light that fuddle Stellarius — what the Queen fancifully calls the River of Angels and the commoners know as fairies’ flares.

  The bells ring for change of season. They ring for death.

  First it is Princess Amalia. Then Princess Margrethe. By Hendrika’s turn, death is no longer a surprise; the princesses are perishing like the winged insects of summer. They go in the manner of Sophia, with a grand convulsion and a host of frightened witnesses; or they go quietly, mewling their way into eternal sleep, to be recognized by a single nurse who wakes from her pallet when her own bladder’s full and the girl’s body cold.

  The princesses, never pretty in life, are hideous in death, with faces mottled red and purple. Eyes bulge and mouths gape as if astonished at what lies beyond the curtain that separates this world from the next. It is to be hoped that their spirits are granted a new beauty and vigor, that they travel that highway of northern lights into a kingdom where they will be free of pain.

  First, a few final attentions to what is left behind. King Christian cannot bear to order more dissections; nor does he think them of use. Ladies prepare the bodies for display with thick layers of white lead paint and scarlet cochineal (a powdered beetle) for the lips. A nursemaid sews their lips and eyes shut with a delicate chain stitch; others wrestle them into splendid silk dresses. When the bodies are displayed in the smoky cathedral, courtiers file dutifully past and remark on the girls’ loveliness, the land’s loss. Among themselves, occasionally, they admit to feeling a chill when they pass the sarcophagi.

  Coincidentally — eerily and alarmingly to some — there is a rash of pregnancies among the ladies. Four of the Queen’s attendants announce that in a few months’ time they will have to leave her service to devote themselves to their bellies. Privately they pray that Morbus Lunediernus will not leave a lasting impression in their quickening wombs; that the dead princesses have not taken up residence there, to burst forth with strange powers and angers.

  The King, grief-struck and yet bored with grief, sends for a new doctor from Poland and, for good measure, a new astrologer from France. Both recommended by Lord Nicolas, whom Christian V is thinking of creating a count so he might sit closer at table.

  King Christian orders that this time, rather than sorrowing over the losses, the court should offer up thanks that the Prince has not been taken (or not yet, as some mutter under their breath). Courtiers spend hours each day on their knees, praying that the boy will not pass. Some even pray for the remaining two girls, ten-year-old Beatte and little Gorma.

  Christian is attacked by worsening pains in his gut. He spends much time on his close-stool. He weeps, but only in private. Lord Nicolas attends him.

  Ambassadors and councillors keep busy with the mundanities of death. Letters go out on ships to Lithuania, Iceland, and Saxony: alliances by betrothal are regretfully broken, wishes expressed for continued peace and mutual benefit. The monks of Saint-Peter’s-on-the-Isle keep up a constant chant that’s heard at the palace when the foul-smelling wind blows west: Dominus tecum, Dominus tecum.

  In the south wing of the royal quarters, the nursery is an echoing place. Now the silver walls and golden branches gleam around the remaining children as a menace rather than a comfort; the delicate glass leaves shatter in the slightest breath. In their suddenly enormous animal beds, young Christian, Gorma, and Beatte keep up a high, piercing whine; they fear the physicians, they fear the shards and shadows cast by falling leaves, they even (sometimes) fear each other. They wake from terrible day-dreams and are impossible to comfort.

  Most of all, they fear their mother. For Queen Isabel has become a wraith herself. She haunts the nurseries, keening over the empty swan beds, which she will not have removed. She wears black and gray; she shreds her own clothing. When she kisses her children, her breath smells like the tomb. She is said to eat nothing but milk pudding, in a complicated mourning for all she has lost. Her belly grows around the newest Lunedie.

  One night Isabel is discovered sleeping in Hendrika’s former swan, though it is not known how she got there. When elderly Duchess Margrethe bends in to wake her, the Queen is disoriented. She seems to think the swan is in some sense her protector, that it is bearing her over the sea to a beautiful garden where she and her children will stroll amid shrubbery and paddle about in pleasure boats. She calls the poor, ugly Duchess a gargoyle spouting urine.

  The King orders Isabel dosed for tranquillity and confined to her rooms for the good of the baby within. He allows her favorite physician, Candenzius, to attend her. He refuses her request to receive a visit from Elinor Parfis, whose crimes she has somehow forgiven amid so much sorrow — or whom she wishes to murder outright; no one is sure.

  The Queen yields despondently to Candenzius’s thick fingers. He dec
lares (somewhat desperately, for he dreads the impending addition to the physicians’ ranks) that the baby is progressing well. He spreads salve on her cracking skin.

  Theories, or rather speculations, take form elsewhere. The Danish and Swedish ambassadors opine, in what they believe to be a secret conference, that the cause is purely a disease of the blood, that the Lunedies are tainted and should be eliminated from the rest of Europe’s bloodlines. This conversation is reported to Christian V, who relegates the ambassadors to disgracefully low seats at the grieving feasts. Members of some secret Protestant sects believe the cause of death is papist corruption; they use the princesses’ demise as pretext to scatter handbills agitating for a reformed Church. Further arrests come as a result; the prisons grow crowded.

  Countess Elinor’s friends (she still has a few, as well as her half-dead husband) clamor for her release, as she cannot possibly be responsible for so many poisonings from the Lower Chambers. Her enemies claim she commands a network of conspirators who carry out her orders aboveground; some again suggest that she is a witch and that her poisonings are magical rather than physical. Her attendants and her comb (the latter inexplicably) are taken away.

  Some sanguine courtiers believe, still, that there is simply a chord struck wrong in the music of the spheres that wheel above the palace, and that eventually all will be put right. The husbands of the gravid ladies-in-waiting congratulate each other and speculate that someday their own offspring might take the place of one or the other of the Lunedie children.

  Stellarius draws chart after chart, as if he expects to find something new in the swelling nights. He finds nothing. He is wedded to truth and cannot invent new configurations, even under threat of replacement.

  The three physicians, by contrast, are trained for imagination. Working against time, they spend their nights devising new possets and unguents. They have the Queen squat over a brazier burning rhinoceros dung and nightingale livers, that the smoke might calm the baby inside her. They grind up gold and rubies and pepper, narwhal horn and dolphin bone to be mixed with myrrh and the oil of the common house cat. They plaster the concoction onto the chests of the remaining girls and boy and bind it there with linen.

  The children break out in new boils, red and burning, shimmering with the hint of greasy gold. Candenzius declares that this is a healthful sign; the poisons are leaving the children’s bodies. He prescribes valerian and poppy to stop their weeping.

  Fewer children mean fewer duties for nurses and maids, who begin to linger voluntarily with a mix of excitement and fear around the great chancre of the witch’s bed in the inner courtyard. They are waiting for new bits of Princess Sophia to appear. They believe that she climbs up through the muck at night to claim her sisters and brother; if they can catch her, they can stop the deaths. So they stand at the ready, armed with kitchen knives and hairpins. They think to be rewarded for their bravery.

  Yet again the King orders his engineers to find a way to drain the hollow and pave the ground over. The hole only grows larger.

  CHRISTIAN V

  NICOLAS, the man who replaced Sir Georg Oline in office and more than surpassed him in importance; the man who stands beside Christian while he grunts and sweats his hour upon the stool; the man about whom Christian has such dark dreams night after night. Nicolas, the man in whose body Christian wants to lose himself.

  “Your Majesty,” Nicolas asks delicately one evening, “have you considered what is to be done with Countess Elinor? Should she be put to the question?”

  Willem Braj has dared to hint that before Elinor Parfis became Sir Georg’s lover, she was Nicolas’s. But surely that is impossible. Surely such a kind man would not insinuate that his former lover ought to be tortured. Although, as Christian is discovering, everything about love itself is torture.

  “No,” he says, firm. “I will not approve doing that to a countess.” He hates the very idea, as much as he hates the thought of Nicolas coupling with that milk-white woman. “Not yet. She sent me a pillow embroidered with a cat.” He waits out a pain, then adds, “I gave it to my wife.”

  Christian thinks over the long list of problems facing his reign: the suffering children, a Protestant colony on one of the green islands, the eternal question of Sweden. The coffers’ depletion after a full summer’s residence in Skyggehavn, without recourse to the remunerative hospitality of country lords. Of course, that particular problem comes of the children’s illness and the Queen’s insistence on caring for them herself. In the last weeks, he and Nicolas have discussed these topics until Christian is sore from sitting on what is not so comfortably padded a stool after all.

  Christian says, as if continuing one of these discussions, “Isabel is a worry to me.”

  “Oh?” Nicolas stands slim and straight and appears genuinely curious, as if it has not occurred to him to wonder about Christian’s wife. “Your Majesty?”

  Christian sighs heavily and the stool shifts beneath his weight; one of the wood slats grinds against its neighbor and makes a popping sound. Nicolas waits.

  At last Christian admits it: “My wife is not what she should be.”

  “She is with child, Your Majesty. Most fortunately for all of us.”

  How generous Nicolas is.

  “I mean more that . . . It is true a woman with a belly is not herself, but this exceeds any explanation.” Christian has an image of Isabel scratching herself, filling her fingernails with cakes of dead skin. She has no awareness of decorum. “I once did suspect she might be poisoned along with the children, but when Countess Elinor was arrested, the Queen got no better.”

  Nicolas gives this some thought. “Perhaps she was poisoned, but not by the Countess. Perhaps she and Georg Oline have accomplices — as we might discover if we —”

  “Perhaps there is no poison at all,” Christian interrupts. “Perhaps it is only grief that infects her. She was exceedingly fond of our Sophia, as was I. And the other children, of course.”

  Nicolas is deferentially silent, allowing Christian to think over the idea of grief-sickness. Ultimately, he rejects it, sighs, and motions for the sponge. This time with Nicolas, helpful as it might be, is over for the evening.

  Nicolas dips the sponge in the cup of vinegar water but holds it just out of reach on its stick. He smiles, a beautiful sharp smile with gleaming white teeth. “No doubt Your Majesty knows best. No one is better acquainted with the Queen than you.”

  Christian feels Nicolas’s fingers wrapping around his wrist, pulling him upward. It is much easier to stand, even half naked, with Nicolas’s strength behind him. Christian discovers a kind of pride in his vulnerability, and a great sense of hope. He remembers the motto on his coat of arms: In tenebris lumen meum metue. In the darkness, fear my light. With Nicolas, he feels stronger. He feels light.

  In these strange days of dying children and troubled Queen, it is perhaps not surprising that the rest of us feel sicker than usual. I, for one, am afraid to eat anything, lest it come back up and give others the impression that I am falling sick or have a poison in me that should lead to some physician’s explorations. I am afraid to speak lest words bring the same result. And I am afraid to scheme, because there’s more danger than advancement in trying to bring Nicolas down, especially now. I starve in so many ways.

  Not so with Midi Sorte. When I retire to the dorter one wet morning, I find her on her knees, vomiting into one of the basins in which we wash our personals. She’s alone except for a scrub maid sleeping on one of the far cots, snoring as if to make a point.

  Midi is not like the rest of us. I’ve never seen her even so much as blow her nose before. Now she chokes and gasps, tears pouring from her eyes; she is fighting it, hates this weakness in herself. Her cap has come off, and her hair is loose. I’m surprised to find it’s so long; it’s even supple enough to slide over her shoulders and toward the foul basin.

  Midi does not like me, and I don’t think so much of her. But she obviously needs help, and I cannot ignore her.
I go and take her hair in my hands.

  It is soft, oiled, a strange texture to someone used to combing the thin yellow strands of this country. I wind it around my hand and hold it at the base of Midi’s skull, and I put my left palm against her forehead to cool it. She shudders, but she lets me help her.

  When she seems to have finished heaving, I fetch a drying cloth and help her wipe her face, and I tie back her hair with a cord.

  Of course, Midi does not thank me. She cannot. But she continues to accept my attentions, much as if she were one of the little princesses. Quiet, docile, childlike.

  “Are you better?” I ask, since it’s strange that there should be no talk at all.

  She spits a little, like a man on the street. Then she nods.

  I believe she’s dismissing me, but I inquire to be kind, “Do you think you’ve eaten something bad?”

  She shakes her head.

  I am stroking her arm now — her sleeve’s ridden up, and her skin is so soft, though dark. I am amazed that she allows this much, but she even leans a little bit against me.

  “Is there something else?” I ask, as if there would be any way for her to answer me. “Something you want?”

  She gets up then, pushes herself off the floor, and staggers away from me. I sit for a moment ablaze with foolishness, embarrassed at again having made a friendly gesture and being rebuffed. And tired; it is my sleeping time.

  But Midi comes back. And she has a piece of paper, once crumpled but now smoothed out, and a stick of charcoal. She sits down beside me and her reeking basin, and she writes — she writes!

  It takes me a long moment to sort Midi’s letters into a word.

  G, R, A . . .

  A speechless Negresse, a slave and former servant of Elinor of Belnát — she can write. And I can barely parse the alphabet.

  She is writing the name of the man I think of as mine.