Beauty (18 page)

When we had been married about four months, Edward came in from riding one day to tell me that the roses mounded Westfaire still, that the enchantment remained. He looked hurt.

I was prepared for this. I told him that we knew half the enchantment had been removed, for I was able to appear regularly in the daylit hours, but that since complete lack of inquisitiveness was the
conditio sine qua non
there must be some kernel of curiosity in him still, which prevented the entire enchantment from being broken. He flushed, and I knew I was safe from further conversation on that matter.

Time wore on through the winter to the early spring, and the baby was born. It was early, of course. I made much of that when labor started, saying no, no, it could not be yet. I need hardly have troubled. In that time, babies often came early and were too tiny to live. Often they died. I thought I would die, wished to die, wished I had stayed in the twentieth where there are drugs for such pain, almost screamed out for my boots to take me there, but was drowned out by the midwives' exhortations to breathe, to breathe, to push, to push. I screamed and breathed and pushed. There was a squall, followed by bustling to and fro, then the tiny swaddled creature was laid on my arm while someone messed about between my legs, cleaning up. There was much clucking over the afterbirth, in which the midwives purported to read signs and portents of both good and evil, but they soon gave over and set things to rights. I thought of Aunt Lawy as they sprinkled oil of lavender about and burned sweet resins in the candles to kill the mudflats, seaside smell of birthing. When Edward was allowed in, we were clean and sweet once more, and he gazed at us both as he might have gazed at heavenly angels.

"What shall we name her," he asked in a whisper, his hand gently upon my arm.

"After my mother," I told him. "Elladine. That was my mother's name." I wanted to love the child. I wanted to remind myself that children need a mother's love.

He added a string of family names, and a day or so later she was taken to the chapel by Janet to be christened. Though she was one-quarter fairy, I made no mention of the fact. My own christening had started all this mess. Better the baby get by as simply as possible with Robert and the Lady Janet as her godparents and the blessing of Holy Church to guard her through life.

After that, time seemed almost to stop. I tried to nurse her myself, rejecting the wet-nurse from the village. I rather liked the feel of it, liked being close to her. The sight and sound of the tiny fuzz-covered head so tight against me, the little star-shaped hands pushing like a kitten's paws, the toothless pink mouth agape like a bird's, all were interesting. Then one morning when she was about two weeks old-it was midmorning, actually, with the sun casting westward beams along the wall at the edge of the heavy curtains-as she was nursing, she opened her eyes and looked at me and it was Jaybee's look, greedy and violent. Her mouth clamped down on me as though strong fingers pinched me. There was blood on my nipple. I gave a cry, and the maids came rushing in. I told them to fetch the wet-nurse, that my breasts would no longer be enough for the child, keeping my voice as calm as I could though inside I bubbled with hysteria. He too had bitten me there. He too had drawn blood.

["Now, " I said to Israfel.

"Wait a little, " he said. "She is coming to it of her own accord."]

Thereafter they brought her to me once or twice a day, to look at. She was everything tiny, precious, holdable. Everything fragile and sweet. And yet his eyes looked out at me from the infant face, as though he lay within the infant mind, waiting. After that, I could not touch her without an instinctive aversion, a revulsion. The wet-nurse fed her; the nursemaid changed her napkins; and Edward adored her. Seeing his face above the child was like seeing the spring sun rising over the fields. He was so full of love it shone from him.

Edward hovered over me, too, but, as was thought proper in those times, did not invite me to his bed for the forty days I lay with the bedcurtains drawn, seeing neither the sun nor moon until time came to be churched. Father Raymond had always said the churching of women was a ceremony of thanksgiving for a safe delivery, but at Wellingford it seemed quite another thing. There, so the midwives said, a woman was considered unclean and unholy by virtue of the blood she had shed in giving birth, and only the priest's words said over her put her in a state of grace once more. While there were some at Wellingford who disbelieved such nonsense, Lady Janet believed it wholeheartedly, and it was her way the wives forced on me, whether I would or no. In some other time or place I might have made a fuss, but since Edward and his kin were kindly and generally well-disposed toward me, there was no point in making them uncomfortable.

At the end of the "lying in," I went to the chapel, all muffled up in the traditional veils, to take a seat near the altar and have the priest read psalms over me to compensate for my having offended God by bearing a child in holy wedlock. The "chapel smell" was very strong that day, as it had been the night Ned and I were married. I still couldn't identify what it was. When the priest had finished, I was supposedly free of the world again, able to look upon sunshine and stars. I did not tell them I had been sneaking out of bed nighttimes to sit in the window watching the moon and longing for something I could not quite name. My own mother, I think. Someone of my own, at least, who could explain to me what I was feeling. Despite all my good intentions I could not love my own child. It horrified me that I saw Jaybee's malevolence in that tiny face. She was half me! Surely my half counted for something! Often though I convinced myself of that, when I saw her, when she opened her dark eyes and looked at me, I saw only violence and terror and felt only a memory of pain.

In addition to her fears about newly delivered women, Lady Janet also feared the babe would be taken by fairies, so there were maids about day and night, hovering over the cradle. Janet told tales of babes snatched away with changelings left in their place. No one said why fairies preferred human children to their own, and I considered it unlikely. I had seen one that Janet spoke of and knew him to be no changeling but a poor idiot, what the twentieth called a Down's syndrome child, born to a woman in her forty-fourth year, but there was no point in arguing the matter with Janet. It would do little Elly no harm to have loving people about her, even for a spurious reason.

Though I kept her at a distance from me, she had no lack of caring hands to help her and gentle arms to hold her. Ned played with her as if she had been a novel toy, doing peek-a-baby and pat-a-cake until both he and Elly were helpless with laughter. More than once I surprised on his face an expression of grateful wonder, as though there were something in being a father he had neither expected nor dared hope for. As for me, I wavered between resentment that the babe was not the child of someone I loved and thankfulness that at least she bid fair to be beautiful and not apish as Jaybee's child might well have been.

Remembering what I had learned in the twentieth, I took such precautions as I might to be sure I did not conceive again. Luck or God was with me. Almost a year went by and I did not kindle. Remembering Ned's boistrous talk before our marriage about having scattered his seed widely without issue, I began to think he might be sterile. I wished I knew for sure, that I might give up the counting of days and the playing of games, pretending to have headaches or other infirmities to keep him at a distance betimes. Still, the thought gave me some hope that Elly would be our only child.

I took to riding a good deal, for exercise, and to get away from the house. I went often alone, preferring that to being pursued by panting stableboys mounted on fat carthorses, for the master of horse would let them ride nothing better and there were no men to spare to keep an eye on me. One day I had ridden out early, going up into the hills, and I came to a ridge where one could look down, over the burned abbey and the lake and across the lake to the mound of roses where Westfaire slept.

I didn't see the man there until I had dismounted. He moved, and it startled me.

"M'lady," he said. "Do not be afraid."

Oh God, I knew that voice. I turned and went toward him, he looking across at me, at first in curiosity and then, almost, in terror.

"Beauty!" he cried.

"Giles!" I screamed in return. Oh, he was the same, the same. He had hardly aged at all. The same light brown hair, though it was cut short, as though he had spent much time under helm. His eyes were the same when they looked into mine.

"You can't be," he said firmly, like a man turning his back on an enchantment. "Oh no, you can't be!"

"No, I am!" I cried. "I really am. It wasn't me who got enchanted, Giles. I was outside!"

He took my hands. He pulled me close to him and I felt the thunder of his heart. It was the first time he had ever held me, and everything in me turned warm and molten and, oh, I lusted after him. I wanted him, there, then, on the patch of grass beneath that tree. I put my arms about his neck and kissed him, the kissing burning like a fire. We kissed one another, turning our heads this way and that, as though if we found the proper position we could somehow transcend our separateness and become one person, fused at the lips.

"No, no," he gasped at last, putting me away from him. "This is not proper. You are a virgin girl ... "

I laughed. I reached for him, clung to him, said I wasn't. I was married, a mother, married to Edward of Wellingford. I babbled, holding on to him like a cat to a tree. He went white. He loosened my hands. He backed away from me.

"Married," he whispered. It was as though he had said, "Dead."

I stopped talking and looked into his eyes. There was no lack of love there, but I knew that, when I told him I was married, I had lost him. Giles was an honorable man. He was a religious man. He was a chivalrous man. I had lived so long in the twentieth, I had forgotten about honorable, chivalrous men. But Giles was! Not merely in words, but in deeds. He would no more cuckold another man than he would strike an opponent from behind, for such would not be virtuous, and he longed for virtue. Would he have obeyed Father Raymond and gone from me else?

"Giles ... " I whispered. "Oh, Giles. Don't leave me. I need you."

He warded me off, as he might have warded a curse. "I love and honor Beauty, the only woman I will ever love," he said. "But she whom I loved was a girl whom I had the right to love." He went away from me, turned and ran for his horse, and I think I heard him sobbing as he went.

I screamed his name. I stood there, screaming his name, the tears running down my face. I threw myself on the ground and wept. When I looked up next, he was gone. I thought I might have imagined him, but then I saw him, far below, riding full tilt across a clearing, away, away.

When I could, I returned to Wellingford, to Elly, to Ned, to my life. I felt that I had died, and only my shell was there.

As Elly had grown, so had Ned's love for her. He loved me, too, but as he might love an ornament, a thing fragile and fair which he might brag of having, a thing barely utilitarian. He owned a crystal cruet some knight had brought from the Holy Land, and he spoke of that cruet much as he spoke of me. My lovely Beauty. My Beauty without compare. And then, "Mother of my Beloved ... "

When he said that, something cracked. Anger spurted out like blood from a new wound. So, I was the mother of his beloved. I was always something to do with someone else's beloved. Edward's beloved or my father's beloved. And Giles, my beloved, would not have me because I was the mother of Ned's beloved. I went to my bed and cried, and the longing to get away began to grow in me. The longing for someone of my own kin possessed me.

I remembered that while a year and a half had passed in the twentieth, three had passed in the fourteenth. I wasn't sure how old I was. Was I seventeen? Or nineteen? My mama had said to come before I got any older, but I was older. Still, if I spent some time searching for Mama, it might seem only a little time to little Elly and to Edward, for time was different in different places.

I wrestled with my conscience as Jacob wrestled with the angel of God, paining myself in the sport until I could not sleep at night. I wandered about the place all that night, half the night spent traversing the walk to the chapel, there and back again. I went through the still room stores, counting and recounting the cordials, the jams. Through the cellars, totting up the wine. Through the linen closets. As I was counting the linens, it became too much to bear. I locked the closet and went to the nursery.

She was asleep in her cradle beside the fire. The heat had made her rosy. Her hair tumbled in dark curls about her head. Her thumb was in her mouth. Her eyes were shut, but I knew if she opened them, I would see Jaybee once more.

["Now," I said. "She is coming now."

"She is," said Israfel.

"At last."]

I was wearing a simple kirtle. I snatched up my cloak and took my boots from the pocket, dropping the linen closet key deep into the pocket as I did so. I traded the boots for the shoes I had on, putting the shoes in the pocket also. As I went out the door, I picked up a sunshade one of Edward's craftsmen had made for me. It would do to keep off the sun or rain and to keep dogs at a distance. Outside the front door, I said, "Boots, take me to my mama."

The vertiginous darkness swept me up in its embrace. I heard Elly crying from a great distance, a brief, pained cry, and then I knew nothing more.

17

CHINANGA: TIME UNKNOWN, PERHAPS TIME IRRELEVANT

When at last the darkness passed and the boots were still, I stood on a spit of sand that extended like a finger into an expanse of water which seemed, at first glance, to be limitless as the sky. It was full day with a hot sun half hidden behind rising mists. Behind me dark trees full of noises and vines thrust up through the water to make a shimmering wall. Before me the water moved slowly, glossed with metallic lights and sullen ripples. Across the flow were other trees, laced with more vines and echoing with fainter though similar noises, the water going away among them to sheen the buttressed trunks with dancing reflections of greeny light. At a considerable distance to both my left and right, the transriparian growth curved inward to join the closer jungle behind me. The curve informed me I sat on the inner shore of a sweeping bend in a great river.