“To find him a wife.” She nodded. “And quickly.”
Three weeks, I thought to myself. I drew in a breath, trying to connect the pieces. To understand the thread. “But why? Because he is a brute? You are saying he is a brute?”
“Haven’t you wondered, ma’am, why you haven’t seen the princess? Not at the ball, not ever?”
I hadn’t. I had never wondered. She was only a girl in a painting. Abstract and meaningless to me. But I thought, then, of all the closed curtains at the palace. Of the walled garden. Of her absence at the ball. A woman could be kept so quiet it was hard to notice when she disappeared.
I watched Morwen, waiting, but she did not answer her own question. I reached for her arm, again, intending, this time, not to use my fingernails, but to reassure. Morwen pulled away and whispered, “She’s pregnant,” as if the fact itself was my fault.
I blinked at her.
“Kept under lock and key,” she continued. “They dismissed her entire staff, but I knew. She told me. And Simeon must marry quickly, for they—he and his mother—plan to pass the baby off as his own.”
A noise came from the door, which swung in. We both started.
But it was only Mathilde, who stood, a look of shock on her face. We turned to her. Me, dismayed. Morwen, afraid. We were caught together in those last, stumbling footsteps.
Mathilde looked back and forth between us and the headless body fell with a final, echoing thump.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
When I was a girl, a butterfly flew through a cracked window, into my room. It knocked back against the parchment, trying to find a way out. Into sunshine. Into air. Chalky wings palpitating. I reached for it, wanting to help. Tried to grab it, cup it in my hands, so I could deliver the thing back to freedom. But my gesture, my very touch, brought injury. The butterfly fell to the floor, wing torn.
Why, after however many years and bloody ends, however many animals gutted and disemboweled by Lucy, however many chickens plucked for supper, did I think of a butterfly? I had tried to help, and I’d hurt. I’d gotten myself caught in the surprise of the mismatch of intention and outcome. The unfairness: a rend, a mangled wing, by my own hand.
I did not sleep well. Or at all. It is difficult to mark the moment you cross over from your own wild thoughts to those of unconsciousness. But I thought of butterflies and white dust falling on golden loaves. I thought of Elin and Rosie and Mathilde. Of Morwen. Of what had happened already and what was still to come. I thought of deceit.
I reasoned: What I had learned was deception, but it was not quite injustice. For an unmarried girl—a princess no less—being with childwas an unrecoverable blow. A woman had only her reputability. Her wifely ideals, her chastity, her projection of following all rules, her performance, meant survival. A swelled belly counteracted all of that. Do not forget the pregnant maidservant whose torso was beaten black-and-blue. Do not forget those swollen bodies in the stream. Some might have preferred a knife in the gut.
So perhaps there was another way to look at what Simeon and Sigrid were doing. Deception, yes, but also a kind of familial chivalry. The protection of a beloved sister and daughter. Would I do it any different? I thought yes. I thought no. I could not get my thoughts to settle.
I rose as I usually did, before first light. Feet searching for slippers. The same sprint to the dressing area. Hoary frost, thicker now, clinging to the windows. Lucy no longer inside.
In the gloom of the hallway, Mathilde was waiting for me in the open cavity of her doorway. She held a candle. Her sable hair streamed around her shoulders. Her face marmoreal in the firelight. Her eyes dark. I got closer and saw another figure, just behind her. The white of a nightgown. The glint of a wet eye. Rosie was in Mathilde’s room, and I could tell, from her expression—the accusation, the need, the laid-bare question—that Mathilde had told her what she had overheard. And somewhere above, Elin slept soundly.
They came toward me like ghosts behind that raised candle. Mouths open, teeth chattering, breathing out the need to know, the need for reassurance, the demand of the promise that all would be well. Each face the mirror of the other. Determined. Certain I could fix the problem.
I wondered if all my life I had misled them. Placated. Made promises. Held their limbs and fretted over every accident of the body and heart—the stubbed toe, the scraped knee, the slipped knife that nicked the finger. All our goodbyes made easy by vows to return. My mothering had always been an offer of certainty. Of protection.
“You are going to the city?” Rosie asked, voice but a whisper.
“Yes,” I confirmed. Still offering that false reassurance. For I did not understand the problem. I could not feel the terrain of its surface, I could not foresee its size. It was like hugging a boulder: my body pressed against rock, my arms reaching, hopelessly unable to meet on the other side. Heavy and immovable. And the girls, peering at me with their oversized low-light pupils, little pools of black, looking at me like I could turn granite to dust.
“You will see about this news,” Mathilde confirmed.
“Yes,” I said again.
“And you will mend things?” Rosie, whispering again.
“Yes.” And to give strength to the lie, I said it twice: “Yes.”
As I saddled Arno, I wondered: What was mending things? I was still unclear about what had broken. Postponement, or even revocation, of the wedding was impossible. We had come too far. We had a hole in the roof the size of a small cottage. But accepting the deceit of the situation left a bitter taste in my mouth, as cold and metallic as a knife on the tongue. I could not shake the thought of Sigrid, leaning toward me from her pile of furs, revealing her pointed little gray tooth.
I did not know what to tell Elin. Did Simeon care for her? Or was it only weakness that had attracted him—the instinct of a moth drawn to the needed flame of her vulnerability? A fragile flower who had collapsed from the overwhelming opulence of a dance floor. A delicate, obedient girl who wanted to please.
But Elin would still become a princess, and later, a queen. And my girls, no matter how their view of the world might have to reshape and form again, would be set up with more advantageous matches, would rub better-adorned shoulders, than I ever might have wished for. Once again, my thoughts looped back around to the protection the queen and prince—mother and son—were offering the princess. An unending cycle of thoughts in my head, ruminations that contradicted themselves, weaving and melding into a tapestry ugly enough to make me feel mad.
I rode Arno hard the entire way to the city. The horse lost his stamina by the time we arrived. Leaving him at a run-down stable far from the palace walls, I had to finish my journey on foot. Hood up. Past men sleeping on the edges of the street. Past a child missing an eye. Past a beggar, who tried to clutch at my riding skirts. As if all the world were the same boulder I was trying to wrap my arms around.
