The Kingdom of Little Wounds (18 page)

Sitting with knees bent upward like a stork’s, Grammaticus plaits his ink-stained hands together and says, “I’ve noticed that you are a teller of stories.”

At that, my legs give way. I find myself on a floor again, certain I will be tortured; in a posture for begging, though I struggle to defend myself. “I — but who doesn’t like a story? Most people find pleasure in them. Both listening and speaking.”

At the door, Midi Sorte crosses her arms. Grammaticus blinks at her.

“I have also noticed,” he says, “that you have a special acquaintance with Lord Nicolas Bullen.”

At that, I cannot speak.

My silence says all I need to say, for Grammaticus was sure of his information before he spoke. Grammaticus lists the dates on which I visited Lord Nicolas and the crime of which I was first accused. How silly a little needle stab seems now! And he describes my latest meeting with Lord Nicolas as if he, Grammaticus, were a bug on the wall. I wonder how else this man could possibly have observed so much about me, when I have scarcely noticed him before.

“I know you are cunning,” he says. He also knows I am the source of the gossip about Countess Elinor’s dalliance with Sir Georg.
How?
He knows that Lord Nicolas planted that gossip carefully.And someone — perhaps many — watered it and let it grow until the pair had a reputation for poison. “I know it was you who put them in prison.”

I look over at Midi, who once belonged to the Countess. If Nicolas has an army of angels, Elinor might have a legion of devils such as Midi to take her revenge. Perhaps this scholar is one of them. And Midi has somehow indicated to him that she hates me. (
Saa,
she certainly is not kind to me, but then she’s not kind to anyone.) Midi has been spying on me . . .

Has there ever been a moment in which I was more afraid? I could fall dead and be grateful for it. Or for a good shove into a witch’s oven, or a fatal spindle prick, or a pair of shoes that would dance me away from here to a hell that would surely be more friendly than Elinor Parfis’s wrath.

“It was not by design —” I begin, but then, on some impulse, I stop myself. It occurs to me that I might find an advantage in appearing crafty, especially in such a way as to harm one so much more powerful than myself. I stammer out, “Lord Nicolas’s orders were to report what I saw and heard.”

“By design or no, you achieved what statesmen and physicians could not,” Grammaticus tells me, and no longer in the easy tone of a flatterer. “You uncovered a conspiracy. You saved the royal children. You found their poisoners.”

I would indeed feel wonderful at hearing this if I had not made up the rumor about Elinor and Sir Georg myself. Arthur Grammaticus appears to believe me a heroine. “I wasn’t the only one who knew,” I say, wishing desperately for this to be truth. “Lord Nicolas would never take my word alone. He must have . . .”

Must have what? Heard the rumor elsewhere from his secret army? I don’t dare to hope it. Must have decided on his own how to use the story I gave him —
that
he most definitely did.

“. . . must have a strong connection to the King if he was able to have those two arrested,” I finish uneasily. “With Sir Georg having been the Secretary.”

Grammaticus mulls this over, acts as if it is an observation worthy of mulling and I a person so worthy as well. I sneak a look at Midi Sorte. Still with arms folded and eyes shut tight: she hasn’t moved a hair, hasn’t even vented a
Shh.

“No doubt that is true,” Grammaticus concedes. He removes his lenses and rubs at the bridge of his nose. “But he is not the only person who has the King’s ear. Or eye, as it were.”

“What do you mean?”

“The King reads my chronicles every day,” Grammaticus says proudly. “Or has them read to him in his chamber. Sometimes I am the reader.” He puts his spectacles back on and blinks some more. Being my father’s daughter, I want to adjust the lenses for him, perhaps try to find a new pair that might be clearer. “They keep him informed of what happens in his kingdom.”

“I can’t read.” I wonder if this is what he’s been hinting at, that I should read aloud to the King. I stay on my knees and sit on my heels. “Or, at least, not very much. And I can’t write, except my name.” My name, there on a page in Nicolas’s vanished cabinet.
AVA.

“You don’t have to, though you might learn eventually. For now I would like to take advantage of your mouth.” At his own choice of words, he flushes — and I wonder (ridiculously, at such a moment) if Arthur Grammaticus might want me. Although I’m already hot with anxious sweat, I feel myself blush. It is more likely he knows of my awful congress with Nicolas.

He corrects himself quickly: “That is, I would like you to tell
me
your stories. I’d like you to come to me with them.”

“Instead of Lord Nicolas?”

“Ah” — he shifts in his seat, storky legs folding further — “I cannot order you to do that.” (
So, he can order me to do some things,
I think.) “I can’t even request it. But if you would like to share your stories with the King more directly, if you would like to have that hand in chronicling history . . .”

“To spy for you
and
Lord Nicolas?”

“Not to spy, no, I wouldn’t call it that.” His voice hoarse. “But to
report
— for the chronicles only. All I ask for is the information. So that I have many perspectives for my history. I will write everything down. It is your choice.”

Now comes my turn to mull. I think of the words flowing from my lips into Grammaticus’s quill, from the inked page into a reader’s mouth and thus to the King’s ear. (I don’t believe for a minute that Christian V bothers to read for himself when he can have someone else do it; I picture him in bed with his nightcap and a cup of wine, listening.) There is something thrilling in this prospect, that my words might be marked down for both royalty and the ages.

I ask, “Are you trying to bring down Lord Nicolas? Or to become his rival?” A thought strikes me: “Do you want to be the King’s new secretary?”

Grammaticus regards me as if I just leaped to the window and shouted that he’s the source of Italian Fire in the court. “Good woman, I am a historian and a scholar,” he says. “And the Crown Prince’s tutor when he’s well. I honor Nicolas Bullen as the lord of the island where I was born.”

I take note of this, that he has perhaps known Lord Nicolas for many years. He is surely either a rival or a minion. I hope a rival.

“And Midi Sorte — is she already your spy?”

Grammaticus looks at Midi. She leans against the door, her skin melting into its dark wood. Of course, a mute woman can tell him nothing. Only
Shhh, shh, sh
occasionally, which she doesn’t bother with now.

Grammaticus concludes, “We are all, of course, in service of the Crown and King. Who is known for being liberal with his gratitude, no matter what the rank of the creditor.”

I recall something my mother used to say:
Be wary of a promise without a clear price.
“How will the King be grateful to me?”

With this, I give myself away; Grammaticus’s beard stretches in a smile, for he knows he has me to command. But I think it is not merely a triumphant smile; there is generosity in it, too, and earnestness — he reminds me of Jacob Lille, just a bit. “At my request, and given good reason to do it, the King could restore you to your former position in the Queen’s household.”

“I would be a needlewoman again?”

“If all goes well.”

He is not the first man to promise me this, but what choice do I have? I grasp at straws, hoping to spin them, yes, into something. I give my newest master another curtsy.

As I leave that bookish room, with the sun cracking the sky over the bay, I think of the pearl that I watched Queen Isabel pluck from her bodice on the first day of what I now think of as my long demise. I wish I’d had the courage to pull another one off when I was so close to her. It might have given me a start in life elsewhere.

If I ever come across such wealth again, I will cut a hole in my own skin and sew the thing inside, to use in extremity. Lord Nicolas has taught me that much, at least.

S
ITTING in her prison cell, alone although never without some attendant or watcher, Countess Elinor of Belnát becomes an actor. Silently, in her mind, she runs through every play and masque she has witnessed in her too-brief career at court. Sometimes startling those attendants when she slips into the role of audience and lets a gasp or a laugh escape at a particularly moving mental performance.

Thus far, her imprisonment is not so bad. She is treated more or less like a lady. She has friends in court; she has a husband who is a count. The guards and attendants are polite, not sure whether the Countess will be restored to her old influence. Elinor herself is encouraged by the fact that she has not been tortured. Her perfect limbs and milky skin are still unbroken, except by the bug bites that plague everyone, everywhere.

The worst is the waiting. Not knowing. Unable even to launch a scheme.

And so, plays. Her favorite now is one she didn’t much like when it came to Skyggehavn. It was based on an Italian poem of forty years ago:
Syphilis; or, The French Disease.
Here Syphilus, a hapless shepherd, affronts Apollo by revering his earthly lord more than the god. He is consequently sentenced to a fiery torture, all concentrated in the place one least wishes to feel a fire.

S
YPHILUS:
I broke with the Sun by setting

Altars not to him but to my King;

And, as I tended that King’s flocks,

Apollo struck with flame and rocks;

And vicious minions of th’ angry god

Bit blazing wounds in this shepherd’s rod.

What a pretty way to describe the burning and the telltale sores that (so Elinor has heard) swarm over poxy private parts. The trembling, the blindness and madness and visions that follow after. The collapsed noses and gnawed-away fingers, the bones hollowed out and tumorous. Disease figured into poetry and rendered something fit for gods after all. And for entertainment, for royalty.

When the play was performed in the palace’s great hall, it brought a flush of embarrassment to the Queen’s cheeks. Thereafter it was retitled simply
Syphilis,
in deference to Isabel’s French birth and delicate feelings; the disease itself was renamed Italian Fire. Nonetheless, Isabel’s blush lasted over a fortnight and was said to have caused a miscarriage. Elinor, of course, nursed her through that, stirring poultices of frankincense and pennyroyal herself.

King Christian thought
Syphilis
witty in parts. No doubt he, with his sheeplike countenance, imagined his subjects setting up altars in his honor. Perhaps he himself even prayed at one. He is that vain.

Now the Countess laughs out loud, a bitter, angry laugh that ends in a cough.

“You are thirsty, my lady?” asks the sour-faced old woman assigned to Elinor today. She puts aside her busying work, a pile of stockings to be darned, and looks ready to serve, if somewhat grudging.

Elinor scratches her scalp. Her white-yellow hair is snarled and greenish in places. She accepts a cup of weak ale and dips the ends of her hair into it, trying to get them clean. She needs to look like her old self if the King or Queen sends for her.

But just then comes news that squashes hope: Sir Georg Oline, her putative lover and co-conspirator, has been found dead in his cell.

“Dashed his own brains out against the pillar he was chained to,” says one attendant to another.

(Perhaps alone of her rank, Elinor understands servants’ talk, hears the whispers that other courtiers take for silence.)

The sour-faced woman allows a perverse delight to rearrange her features, even as she draws the raveled edges of a hole together. “Such a shame,” she breathes. “He were a handsome man.”

Elinor breaks into their talk before she hears something that might convince her that Sir Georg did not take his own life, that he was killed by a dark force — cloaked in the name of justice — that might visit her too.

As if anyone still cares about Sophia or what killed her! Of late, even Isabel had forgotten to mourn. It is easy to forget a dead pawn when there are kings and knights to play with.

“Give me your sewing,” Elinor says abruptly. Snappishly, holding out one pallorous, imperious hand. “Or no, a new needle and thread. Wool thread and a canvas. I have an inclination to embroider.”

She will make a cushion. A gift for the King, a gesture of appeasement; perhaps a picture of a dog or some other faithful animal. Not a sheep.

As she begins to stitch, she imagines a few more lines to the play.

S
YPHILUS:
Let such be the reward for loyalty —

For choice ’tween gods and royalty

Is inevitable as breath . . .

She puzzles over what the next line could be, what might best but not most obviously make a rhyming couplet.

I
N the darkness that has begun to swallow the edges of daytime, Princess Sophia climbs out of her virginal coffin and winds among the sarcophagi of her ancestors. All those dead Lunedie grandparents and great-aunts. She, the Perished Lily, knocks gently on the marble lids: already gone, or not ready yet.

It is odd to find that she is lonely. She misses her mother and father and nurses and ladies and sisters. Not so much her brother; she barely knew him, for before they all got sick, he was always off at some lesson or other, riding and fighting and Latin and history. While she learned only what she would need in order to marry Sweden. Östergötland. Where is it she was supposed to be duchess of?

At first, Sophia was surprised to find that, in death, her bones hold the same ache they did in life. Her skin still itches, and she still cannot sleep. But she finds that these things matter far less in the afterlife. Despite the discomfort, it is possible to enjoy oneself very much — to dance among the sarcophagi with the kind of abandon that is said to be the mark of a peasant, rather than with the carefully measured but immensely tiring hops and swirls that were expected of her at her wedding. She does not get tired now, not in the same way. When the monks of Saint-Peter’s-on-the-Isle light candles so they can pray over the sarcophagi, Sophia dances among them without catching fire. She is reckless. She is joyful.