The bells in the spire of the meetinghouse pealed through the spring air as I watched her mother help her into her linen shift and stockings, followed by a fur-trimmed brocade overdress that crisscrossed with satiny ribbons at the back.
Her mother laced her in tightly, disguising that the bride had a belly fast quickening with child. Few knew about that. Only Linnea and her mother and Isak.
And me, of course.
13
Keeper of Secrets
Day 2,500
I’d seen it all.
For six years my eyes were spared nothing. No raw or tender or ugly scene. Things hidden were not hidden from me.
This was my curse. To live forever a witness. Never a participant. A wanderer drifting in and out of the lives of others.
I saw too much.
Heard too much.
Knew too much.
And yet I couldn’t look away.
In the beginning, I’d felt a flash of guilt at witnessing things intended to be private. Secrets never meant for the light. Over time, though, I rationalized those qualms away. I didn’t have much in life. I would not beat myself up for beholding all that was withheld from me, from the things I would never be allowed to experience for myself. If I would only ever have vicarious thrills, then so be it. I would have them and not allow myself guilt for the rightness or wrongness of my actions. I spied to my heart’s content, observed any and all with the gluttony of a drunk guzzling the bottle.
I watched my friends and family and neighbors in every state imaginable (and unimaginable). I witnessed it all, full of envy and resentment and hopelessness. Ugliness twisted in me, a terrible tangle. Hate for what I was—for thething, the creature that haddone this to me, sentenced me to a wretched existence. A life that wasn’t a life no matter that I went on breathing. No matter that I spent most of my days lying to myself, pretending that I was still someone and not a shadow.
I was there when the children I grew up with had their first kisses, when they married and surrendered to the give and push of flesh.
I heard the foulest utterances—things said and done in private or select company that no one would dare reveal in public.
I knew which husbands slapped their wives.
The wives who slipped the finely crushed roots of belladonna into cups of ale, poisoning the men who would use fists on them. This happened with surprising regularity. Husbands expiring peacefully in sleep...their deaths, in truth, not so peaceful at all.
I’d seen the baker’s assistant surreptitiously spitting into the dough she vigorously kneaded.
Little boys wiping their snot on walls and under tables when no one was looking.
Wives waving farewell to their husbands whilst a lover slipped in through the back window.
I could tell which villagers were deep in their cups before midday.
I’d seen where villagers buried their valuables to hide from the bursars sent north by the lord regent. I could point to the graves of coin, jewelry, and silver buried in the cold soil.
I watched street urchins lifting the pockets of busy patrons on market day...no one the wiser.
No one except me.
Old widows carrying on one-sided conversations in the silence of their houses, dishing soup into solitary bowls as they chronicled their lonely day into the void.
And yet every one of these secrets was safe with me because I was the keeper of secrets.
I knew everything everyone had to hide—and I wasn’t talking.
At twenty-one, I felt a hundred years old. Anoldyoung woman.
