The Kingdom of Little Wounds (23 page)

Christian sighs heavily and the stool shifts beneath his weight; one of the wood slats grinds against its neighbor and makes a popping sound. Nicolas waits.

At last Christian admits it: “My wife is not what she should be.”

“She is with child, Your Majesty. Most fortunately for all of us.”

How generous Nicolas is.

“I mean more that . . . It is true a woman with a belly is not herself, but this exceeds any explanation.” Christian has an image of Isabel scratching herself, filling her fingernails with cakes of dead skin. She has no awareness of decorum. “I once did suspect she might be poisoned along with the children, but when Countess Elinor was arrested, the Queen got no better.”

Nicolas gives this some thought. “Perhaps she was poisoned, but not by the Countess. Perhaps she and Georg Oline have accomplices — as we might discover if we —”

“Perhaps there is no poison at all,” Christian interrupts. “Perhaps it is only grief that infects her. She was exceedingly fond of our Sophia, as was I. And the other children, of course.”

Nicolas is deferentially silent, allowing Christian to think over the idea of grief-sickness. Ultimately, he rejects it, sighs, and motions for the sponge. This time with Nicolas, helpful as it might be, is over for the evening.

Nicolas dips the sponge in the cup of vinegar water but holds it just out of reach on its stick. He smiles, a beautiful sharp smile with gleaming white teeth. “No doubt Your Majesty knows best. No one is better acquainted with the Queen than you.”

Christian feels Nicolas’s fingers wrapping around his wrist, pulling him upward. It is much easier to stand, even half naked, with Nicolas’s strength behind him. Christian discovers a kind of pride in his vulnerability, and a great sense of hope. He remembers the motto on his coat of arms:
In tenebris lumen meum metue.
In the darkness, fear my light. With Nicolas, he feels stronger. He feels light.

In these strange days of dying children and troubled Queen, it is perhaps not surprising that the rest of us feel sicker than usual. I, for one, am afraid to eat anything, lest it come back up and give others the impression that I am falling sick or have a poison in me that should lead to some physician’s explorations. I am afraid to speak lest words bring the same result. And I am afraid to scheme, because there’s more danger than advancement in trying to bring Nicolas down, especially now. I starve in so many ways.

Not so with Midi Sorte. When I retire to the dorter one wet morning, I find her on her knees, vomiting into one of the basins in which we wash our personals. She’s alone except for a scrub maid sleeping on one of the far cots, snoring as if to make a point.

Midi is not like the rest of us. I’ve never seen her even so much as blow her nose before. Now she chokes and gasps, tears pouring from her eyes; she is fighting it, hates this weakness in herself. Her cap has come off, and her hair is loose. I’m surprised to find it’s so long; it’s even supple enough to slide over her shoulders and toward the foul basin.

Midi does not like me, and I don’t think so much of her. But she obviously needs help, and I cannot ignore her. I go and take her hair in my hands.

It is soft, oiled, a strange texture to someone used to combing the thin yellow strands of this country. I wind it around my hand and hold it at the base of Midi’s skull, and I put my left palm against her forehead to cool it. She shudders, but she lets me help her.

When she seems to have finished heaving, I fetch a drying cloth and help her wipe her face, and I tie back her hair with a cord.

Of course, Midi does not thank me. She cannot. But she continues to accept my attentions, much as if she were one of the little princesses. Quiet, docile, childlike.

“Are you better?” I ask, since it’s strange that there should be no talk at all.

She spits a little, like a man on the street. Then she nods.

I believe she’s dismissing me, but I inquire to be kind, “Do you think you’ve eaten something bad?”

She shakes her head.

I am stroking her arm now — her sleeve’s ridden up, and her skin is so soft, though dark. I am amazed that she allows this much, but she even leans a little bit against me.

“Is there something else?” I ask, as if there would be any way for her to answer me. “Something you want?”

She gets up then, pushes herself off the floor, and staggers away from me. I sit for a moment ablaze with foolishness, embarrassed at again having made a friendly gesture and being rebuffed. And tired; it is my sleeping time.

But Midi comes back. And she has a piece of paper, once crumpled but now smoothed out, and a stick of charcoal. She sits down beside me and her reeking basin, and she writes — she writes!

It takes me a long moment to sort Midi’s letters into a word.

G, R, A . . .

A speechless Negresse, a slave and former servant of Elinor of Belnát — she can write. And I can barely parse the alphabet.

She is writing the name of the man I think of as mine.

“What about him?” I snatch the charcoal from her hand, then put it back when I remember she needs it to answer.

She leans over and vomits again, a thin, clear stream.

When she is finished and I have again wiped her face, Midi rolls the charcoal stick between her fingers. She’s growing back to her stiff old self; that sly, hateful smile-that-is-not-a-smile creeps over one side of her face.

P, O, X.

I pull back. “What does that mean?”

ON YOU.

Her hand continues to move down the page, filling it up with more wavery black marks. But I refuse to look at anything she might write now; I stand and shake out my skirts and draw myself up like Countess Elinor. I even give a nudge to my bosoms. “I’m glad to see you’re feeling well enough to curse me. And now I hope you’ll be more careful what you eat.”

I am not unaware that this could be interpreted as a threat to poison her; but I am rather proud of it. I walk away, shrug off my clothing down to my shirt, and climb into my own little cot. I close my eyes and don’t watch what Midi does next. But as I tell myself to go to sleep, I see her black letters smearing across my eyelids:
G, R, A
. . .

There are many wrongs at court, it is true. One of those wrongs, surely, is that Midi Sorte can write and I cannot. And that I can guess, now, who taught her. Imagine the two of them bent over a table, passing a stylus or a pen back and forth, smiling as she mastered each letter. And when began words and sentences, perhaps something more — a kiss such as a mother gives a child who has just learned to speak, or a kiss such as Grammaticus gives me?

Does he read her stories and observations as he listens to mine?

Jealousy stabs my gut again and again, until I think I might be sick myself.

Sick.

I wish this to Ava Mariasdatter, who pretend kindness to capture some of me. I wish on her
pox,
and she be afraid. I smile to make her more so.

While she walk away, I am sick again. She stay gone.

I take my bowl to the jakes and leave it. This palace have plenty of scrub-maids to take it away. I go back to my cot in the room with two snoring girls, and I get in and curl up around my nasty stomach. I ask some questions of it.

First,
What are you?
And then be cause I can not stand to answer now,
What be locked in the skin of Nicolas’ prick?

The best magic come from ordinary things, like an old bone and a wax doll and a scrap of glove that together become the holy relic of a princess. Or the same finger bone that turn to a sign of evil in the court. Such a trick bring power to the one who make it.

And also danger, as with poison-auntie. Who all ways knew what should be done with a belly, what ever did make it sick.

Any body recognize what some things mean. Any body who be not stupid. To vomit, to swell in the bosom, to stop with bleeding.

G, r, a, v, i, d.

Pox is not the worst that ’s in me.

I
T is through Nicolas that Christian finds the doctor who, at last, solves (or says he solves) the mystery of the children’s ailment. And it is only because this doctor has come through Nicolas that Christian considers believing his diagnosis, not clapping the man in the darkest oubliette in the foulest corner of the prison.

His name is Josef Krolik — no Latinate moniker — and thus far he has been employed by an assortment of towns and barons, recommended by a minor lord who has thought of marrying his daughter to Nicolas.

This Krolik, whose name in Polish means “rabbit,” arrives in a humble bark, in a plain black robe, with the merest of medical essentials rattling in his bag. He has a large head and thin body, a big nose and drooping eyelids. His teeth are yellow and small.

With the King, the Queen, the physicians, Count Nicolas (yes, Christian V has ennobled him further), other council members, and the usual attendants, Doctor Krolik visits the Crown Prince in the day nursery. Leaning over the wooden haunch of the lion bed, he strokes the boy’s sweaty pink cheek. Young Christian’s eyes open, wearily and without interest, as if a visit is being paid to someone else, not to him.

Krolik moves a finger slowly in front of the Prince’s face; the brown eyes follow listlessly. Krolik lifts the princely hand and flaps the arm attached, and young Christian moans. Flakes of the boy’s skin fall away like feathers; two of his toenails are missing. Krolik listens to the lark-fast beat of his heart and pronounces aloud:

“Hydrargyrum.”

When no one reacts but the physicians (who stiffen), Krolik clarifies. “Mercury. Quicksilver. There is your poison.”

“On the contrary, it . . . is our cure,” says Doctor Candenzius. “It is well known to draw infection out of the body, to strengthen the blood and quicken the heart —”

“In moderation,” says Krolik. “When used heavily, it is poison. What matters is the amount of the dose.”

There is a collective intake of breath, then a silence. These words are recognizable to all. Candenzius, after all, has been quoting Paracelsus on this subject since he arrived over a year ago:
Every substance can be a poison; only the dose determines.

The quiet is particularly intense among the nursery staff; the air between them seems to crackle. Each of them has touched mercury. They use it every day. It has been part of the
Morbus
protocol for a year and a half, designed by Candenzius and —

With a moan, the Queen swoons.

The King, sick with love for Nicolas, wanting and yet not wanting this physician his Count has found to be of help; thinking of his own family, his throne, and the future, says, “It cannot be so.”

Doctor Krolik turns to the long-standing physicians, Candenzius, Venslov, and Dé. “Do you pretend you have not suspected it?”

The three men bow their heads.

The ladies revive the Queen with salts and bear her off to her chambers. The King dismisses all but the most essential people. With the medical staff and Lord Nicolas and the historian, he visits the two girls’ beds.

“Hydrargyrum,”
Krolik says of Beatte; and . . .

“Hydrargyrum,”
after one look at Gorma, rocked in her swan by the dark nurse’s hand.

Gorma wakes up and begins to whimper, as if she might actually understand the incantation.

The men retire to the King’s inner chamber to discuss the situation amid the odors of pleasant spices and perfumes, under the suffering gaze of an ethereal painted Saint Sebastian.

“Do you agree?” Christian asks the three original physicians. “Can you possibly agree?”

Before they have a chance to answer, Krolik puts his hands behind his back, fixes his gaze on the bright-painted ceiling, and recites: “Loss of hair, nails, and teeth. Loss of vision and hearing. Aching bones. Itching, peeling skin. Rashes. Weak muscles, red lips, pink cheeks and hands, fever.” He seems to develop a heart then and adds, “The youngest girl is not so badly affected.” But again with the coldness of a medical man: “We have found an excess of mercury leads to blindness, madness, death. But all of this, I am sure, you know.”