“I already know about your…” I eyed her torso. “Condition.”
“Who sent you?” she demanded.
“It is clever,” I said, ignoring the question, “how much you look alike. You and Elin. Your painting, the one in the gallery, looks otherwise.”
Hemma’s eyelashes quivered and her hand fell. “I was painted to look like my mother.”
“She had you painted other than you are?”
Hemma’s coloring was the same as Elin’s, but she had had years of being conditioned as a princess. She fixed me with an even stare and narrowed her eyes. “She said I look depleted in the original. Bats and fleas, my brother used to say, drain all my blood when I sleep. Now, tell me—what are you doing in my rooms?”
From the size of her abdomen, I guessed she was a little less than halfway along. But she had small hands. A round face. The girl was just a child.
“Is your plan to deliver in secret? Keep the baby squirreled away and try to pass it off as Elin’s nine months after the wedding?”
“Myplan?”
“I suppose people won’t really be able to tell the difference in size after a few months,” I mused aloud.Such a big baby, people would exclaim.The blood of a king, I could imagine Simeon saying. A hand on Elin’s arm squeezing too hard. I shook off the image. The princess was being kept in a locked room. The beautiful tapestries on the wall and the feather bed in the corner were no different than when Sigrid had tried to put a lace bow on the bandage that had covered her missing finger. “Morwen is worried for you,” I told her.
Hemma let out a small huff of air. “What do you know of Morwen?”
I didn’t say anything and waited.
“Where is she?” she asked, more plaintively. She set her needle back down on the tabletop, making a show of the gesture.
“She’s tried to see you. She’s been turned away.”
The princess glanced at the door I had come through. “If Morwen sent you, then you are certainly not supposed to be here.”
I thought she was going to tell me to leave, to point at the door—but instead she stepped toward me and grabbed my wrist. Her fingers so thin. Delicate. “Someone might come at any minute. Please, I need to hear of Morwen. Let’s go to the gardens.”
She beckoned me through a set of doors that led outside and pulled me along a trellised walkway. Explaining over her shoulder that we had to stay under the arbor. Her mother’s chambers looked over the enclosed yard. We must not be seen. “She had the garden built with no entrances except to and from my own rooms,” Hemma went on, “so that I could go outside, and no one would stumble upon me. But my mother worries, still, that someone will see from above.”
The girl was given an outdoor pen like a common animal. But it explained the rows of closed curtains. I looked up to all the mullioned windows—closed eyes—in the palace walls.
Hemma followed my glance. “My mother cannot see me with anyone other than her maidservants.”
“Surely you have a lady-in-waiting or an attendant?”
“There are two servants that attend me, the only ones in and out, and they are my mother’s. Everyone else was sent away.” Hemma shook her head. “That is why Morwen was dismissed. They could not have anyone partaking in the secret.” She let out a bitter laugh. “I had already told her.”
I felt a wave of dismay. “You are not allowed outside of your rooms?” How lonely it would be for a young girl to be given only a needle and thread to pass all the hours it took to grow a life inside of her.
Hemma gestured to herself. “How could I go anywhere? Now, please, give me news of Morwen. She attended to me since I was eleven.”
“And you are now?”
“Sixteen.”
“Morwen is safe,” I assured her, trying to keep the alarm from myface. “But unable to find employment. She was turned out with no references.”
We’d come to the end of the trellis. Sparing a worried glance toward the windows, Hemma led me farther, to the copse of trees. “No one can see us here,” she told me. “And I shall be Morwen’s reference.”
“Write one, and I will give it to her.” I thought of the lock on the door. “Are you confined here against your will, or by choice?”
“I cannot go out and about like this.” She gestured at herself again, as if imploring me to see: She could not go out and about in her own body.
“So, you are hidden—you will stay hidden—until the babe comes, and then return to the life of a princess.”
