Beauty (36 page)

"What did you do?" I hissed at her.

"I just told her her feet were too big," Elly said indifferently. "That they might fit if she cut them in half." She took the other glass slipper from her pocket and went out to the waiting gentlemen while we struggled mightily to stop Gloriana's bleeding. The huge girl was too strong for us. She fought us off until she had lost so much blood that it was too late to help her. While Elly melted into the arms of her prince outside in the garden, Lydia and those of us in the kitchen gathered around the body of her stepsister and wept. Gloriana was not a pleasant girl. She was a great cow of a girl, with a cow's mute and intransigent hungers. She had little intelligence. Still, there was something monstrously tragical about the manner of her death, not the least that it has shown me what my daughter is. Of the two of them, Elly had been the more brutish.

ST. WILFRID'S DAY, OCTOBER, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1367

Gloriana was buried in the chapelyard at Wellingford. Elly lay on her bed in her room and dreamed lascivious dreams. The prince had a tantrum in his own suite at his own house, but his parents remained adamant that they would not allow his marriage to a woman without a dowry. It was no more than I had expected. I got the warrant out from the hole where I'd hidden it and took it to London, where I sought the man who had issued it, a Jew named Yeshua ben Levi. Yeshua was dead of plague. I found his son. His house had advised my papa, some years before the first great Death, to use the money in the purchase of grain. During the times of plague the price had soared. The two warrants were now worth so much that Papa could have settled all his debts and found it unnecessary to marry Weasel-Rabbit. I told the House of Levi to keep the other warrant upon their books, for some heir would come to claim it, perhaps hundreds of years later. They stared at me strangely, but one of the bearded sons made a note of it.

When I returned to Wellingford, I carried with me a more than adequate fortune for Elly's marriage portion. I went to the prince's parents and represented Elly's interests. I signed the documents as her guardian, as her father's nearest kin. I arranged the nuptials. I did it all without meeting with her or discussing it with her. The prince's father negotiated with me, his ponderous mind plodding after me, step by step. He was not quick, but he missed nothing. It was like being tracked by a bear. Still, I did not give him everything. I saved some for myself.

I attested to the fact that Elly was a virgin of noble birth. True. She would not have stayed a virgin long, but she was still, technically, a virgin. And yet I lied. I wanted to say, "I fear she is a monster. Her father was a monster, and she is like him. I fear she is both sensual and cruel, a succubus who will twine herself around your son and suck him dry, making him rue the day he ever saw her." I said none of that. For all his intelligence, the prince's father did not ask. He cared only about the money, her virginity, and that she was nobly born.

I should have stopped it, somehow. And yet, wasn't it fated? Hadn't the story been told for hundreds of years? Wasn't my daughter to have her prince and live happily ever after?

While I was there, I asked again for Giles, saying I had known him for many years. He had gone, they said. He had never returned after delivering the glass-slipper message.

I don't know what has happened to him. I don't know where he is. I want more than anything to go looking for him, but I can't do that just now! First I must arrange this wedding. When it is over, I'll find him. Then he and I will come back to Wellingford. There are fields to harvest and geese to pluck. There are apples to store and cider to make. I can't decide what to do next. There's an old pain burning in me and a new love. Between them both, it's hard to decide what to do.

Was this what Carabosse meant when she asked me to be merely ordinary? Is being a mother ever ordinary? Is caring about one's children ever ordinary? Is there always this much pain?

FEAST OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS, DECEMBER, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1367

Elly became pregnant even before the wedding. I had not thought to tell her anything about that. Neither had anyone else. Now that she understands there is no way to escape it, she has settled into a sullen resentment at the facts of life.

"I don't want it," she told me. "I just wanted the other, not this."

I told her I understood. I did understand, for I had not wanted it either. At least she had enjoyed the begetting.

Her eyes grew dreamy. "I like the other," she said. "I like it a lot. More even than he does."

I think perhaps I blushed. There is something so frankly lecherous in her tone when she talks like this, an insatiable hunger totally untinted with affection or humor. I tried to change the subject.

"It'll be fun for you to have a child. If it's a girl, she'll probably look like you."

"She can't," Elly said flatly. "I won't let her. No one looks like me. She can look like someone else. Someone pale, like him."

"She'll have your dark hair."

"His pale skin. His red lips. This baby can look like that."

"Like that," I agreed, feeling sick inside. On several occasions I have tried to get her to talk with me about other things: religion, gardening, pets. She doesn't care about any of them. She has some lingering affection for Grumpkin, but it is only a passive thing. Except toward the pleasures of her body, she is closed away. She likes warmth and frequent good food, and, most of all, fucking. She does not read, does not think, does not care. She would ride twenty miles in bad weather for her lust's sake, and would not walk twenty paces down a hallway to do a kindness. She emptied her ashes, not out of any sense of cleanliness, but only so her fire would burn so she could be warm. If she wants something, she could kill to get it, and if she does not want something, it might as well not exist so far as she is concerned.

I blame myself for her nature, though I keep coming back to the real cause. She is not like me. She is like Jaybee. Elly should never have been born, and but for him, she would not have been. But for him and for the fact I remembered too well the things Father Raymond used to teach me. I had told myself it was God's will when it was nothing of the kind. It was only man's stupidity.

Mostly, it was Jaybee's fault. I ask myself if I want Jaybee dead, and tell myself, no. Not dead. Not necessarily. Simply ... simply unable to do to anyone else what he did to me. The more I see of Elly, the more sure I am that he should never father other children!

She sends for me. Every day or so, she sends for me. When I get there, she takes my hand and holds it, as though it were a rope and she were drowning. She looks at her swelling body with terror.

Well, well, I know. She has heard what all women hear in this time, that babies do not come easily nor safely. Women die giving birth. Many of them die. Life comes through the doorway of death in this time, and Elly is in terror of death. So she sends for me, and I sit beside her and hold her hand. After a time, she grows calm, and her eyes grow soft and her mouth

loosens. She begins to think of the prince, and then she sends me away.

I want to go looking for Giles. I cannot. Not so long as she needs me.

Daytimes, I go on about my self-imposed duties at Wellingford. Harry and Bert have gone off to London. Some weeks ago I suggested to Griselda that she might look into the convent where Aunts Tansy and Comfrey-"Acquaintances of mine, now dead"-had found so many pleasant years. She did so and liked it. There she will not have to worry about men or clothes or being ugly, though she will have to bathe. Lydia arranged a dowry for her, very quickly, too, considering that young Edward is still a minor, and Griselda left us. Lydia and the two young children are alone with me. I do what I can with the children. The boy seems past help, but the little girl, Catherine, is beginning to respond to consistency and affection, like a flower growing toward the sun.

ST. BENEDICT'S DAY, MARCH 1368

Little Catherine is dead. My so-called "namesake." Sweet Catherine. Winter came, and with it the diseases that always come, and she died and was buried next to her half sister.

From time to time I go to Edward's grave and talk to him, telling him I am sorry. I should not have left him and Elly. It was my duty to stay. Even as I say it, I know it's not true. Nothing I could have done would have changed things. What looks out of Elly's eyes at the world would have been there even if I had been with her every moment of her life, born in her. Her nature will have its way. Love and good intentions simply don't solve everything.

ST. JULIA'S DAY, MAY 1368

Last night I woke at the Dower House, feeling I had heard someone call my name. Elly's voice. I put on the boots and went. She was in a room overwarmed by a roaring fire, with the mid-wives all around her, wringing their hands. She was screaming as I had done when she was born, as all women do in this time, her eyes bulging. "Mother," she cried. She had never had a mother, but she cried for one. I gave her my hands and would have given her life itself, but it was already too late when I got there. She had waited too long to call my name. She grasped at me, panting.

"White as snow," she panted, her eyes fixed on mine. "Red as blood. Black as death." She pointed to the child the midwives were holding, then died as I held her, sobbing as she had used to do when she was a baby and we put her down for a nap she did not want. The blood ran out of her in a wave. The baby girl had been born early, her white skin bloodied red all over. She did not want to live at all, but the midwives persevered and at last she cried. They washed her and laid her in my arms. Pale as a white rose, with Elly's dark, wild hair.

When I came into the outer room, Elly's young husband wept, but his eyes were full of some other emotion than grief. Was it relief? Was it gladness? He had the look of a man tried past endurance.

I knew what he was feeling. In college, I had read the Victorian poets. I was much enamored of Swinburne. He had spoken of this same feeling, "the delight that consumes the desire; the desire that outruns the delight." Elly's desire had outrun their delight. The prince did not ask how I came there, but his mother gave me a speculative look.

"There is no question of returning the dowry," she said plainly.

"I did not come for that," I told her.

"What then?" she asked.

What had I come for? "I came because she called for me. I would like Elly to be buried beside her father," I said. "He loved her very much. Perhaps if he had lived, she ... things would have been different."

Red patches came out on her cheeks. She whispered, "I am glad she is dead. She was destroying my son. She was like an evil spirit, sucking his life." It was as though she had to confess it to me, had to receive absolution from me. It came out in a hiss.

I gave her the absolution she wanted. "I know," I said. "It is a hunger she was born with."

"Her daughter ... "

"It is not in her daughter," I told her. "Her daughter is your son's daughter. You may trust in what I say." I knew it was true. I could sense nothing evil in the child at all. There was nothing there but sweet babyhood, innocent as dawn.

They let me take Elly's body away. I have found a priest to bury her in the Wellingford chapelyard, beside her father.

STS. DONATIAN AND ROGATIAN, MARTYRS

Only the prince came to Elly's internment, to stand dry-eyed while they filled in the grave. When it was over, he laughed, then he cried.

"We are going home," he said. "The people rose up and killed the pretender to the throne. He was my half uncle, Richard, and I am glad he is dead. They have sent word we are to return." His words had a childlike simplicity, and for the first time I really looked at him. He met my gaze innocently, without intention or guile. There was no large intellect there. He had none of his father's ponderous mind.

"Are you taking the child?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," he told me. "My daughter. Mama is very fond of her. So am I. Do not be concerned about her."

"Does she have a name?" I asked.

He gazed at me abstractedly, trying to think of the name. "Mama named her," he confessed at last. "After a spring flower that blooms through the snow. I cannot remember at the moment. Of course, she hasn't been christened yet."

He sighed, then smiled, without meaning, then said, "There was a man of ours you had an interest in. Father said you had asked after him."

"Giles," I said, my mouth falling open.

"He was killed. Someone saw the assault and sent word to my father. It was a group of men assaulted him, while he was riding on our business that day." He flushed, remembering that day. "Father said you had wanted to know."

Giles. Dead. Elly. Dead. Edward. Dead. Oh, God in Heaven. All dead. All I had loved. All I had tried to love.

"Where?" I breathed. "Where is he buried?"

"There," he said, gesturing vaguely eastward. "Where they killed him."

He left me and rode off with his serving men, still smiling his ineffectual smile, while I wept until there were no more tears. I had brought flowers for Elly's and Edward's graves, the roses they both liked. I gripped the bouquet until the thorns sank deep into my hands, knowing it was Giles's grave my flowers should lie upon.

I went back to the Dower House and got my boots. "Take me wherever it was Giles was set upon," I said.

And I was there, a weedy sunken spot by the side of an unfamiliar road, marked by a rough wooden cross. There was a man working in the field nearby, and he came to the fence, looking at me curiously.

"I didn't see you coming on the road," he said. "Are you looking for the place the fellow died?"

I nodded yes.

He pointed at the cross, at the sunken place. "I buried him there. I was over there, on the far side of the field. I saw him coming along, on his horse. They came out of the woods there, and set upon him. Eight or ten, maybe. Too many for me to fight. I saw his horse run off. I went to the village to get help. When we came back, the horse was there, grazing, and the body of the man. Dreadful cut about, he was. They knew him by his horse, though, for it had the King's arms upon the saddle."