The Kingdom of Little Wounds (4 page)

It was in the glassworkers’ district, at Holy Spirit Church, which would site the beginning and the end of our story. His parish church had crumbled into a mud puddle, and his parents needed a new place for Mass. On the Feast of the Assumption, Jacob came with them to our Helligánds Kirke.

I saw him first as the ring of bronze bells marked a wooden Virgin’s ascension into Heaven and drowned out the howls of the madmen locked in the nearby hospital. His eyes were very blue — no bluer than the eyes of a typical Skyggehavner, it is true, but they caught the last light of summer and smiled into mine, which I knew in that moment were just as blue as his, and that I was as lovely as a man could ever imagine.

Our families took Communion that day. When it was my turn for the cup, I took care to place my lips where he’d put his. I saw him notice my boldness, and we both flushed so red that our fathers laid wrists to foreheads to check us for fever. We stared forward at the wooden Christ with his five wounds; in a strange way, I found the sculpture exciting.

I learned only later that Jacob was actually a Protestant. He believed in direct communication with the heavens; he belonged to a secret sect that met to pray and discuss the word of God, at least as much as was recognizable in our tongue, for the priests kept a stranglehold on Latinate verses and forbade translation. On that Assumption Day, he had brushed his lips on the cup only, refusing to take Communion through a priest.

Yes, the blue eyes burned for God as for me. But, in my presence, mostly for me. I was
his jewel, his treasure, his heart, his heart’s desire.
He said he loved me to madness, and he joked that one day he’d be confined to the Holy Spirit Hospital for love of me. I laughed away his compliments, but a secret part of me hoped they were real, not simply poetry.

And soon came October. Officially betrothed, with our wedding just a week away, we took my father’s little boat onto the canals to gaze at the green lights that blur the night sky in that season. We rowed bedazzled with light and love, ignoring the trash that struck the oars and the rats that paddled after us, toward the room he shared with another journeyman at his master’s studio. While everyone else was out marveling at the skies, we tied up our boat and went inside and marveled at each other, tossed the spiders, and made them part of our love nest.

“The wedding is only a week away,” I said in the teasing manner I had back then. His eyes sparkled and he grabbed at me.

By candlelight, Jacob unfastened my clothes and kissed every spot where I could dream of receiving a kiss. When I was dizzy with pleasure, he rubbed himself against me — rubbed only, for he declared he still wanted to marry a virgin; he owed me that much. “It would be disrespectful to treat my wife otherwise,” he said with a note of indignation, and I couldn’t help grinning with delicious anticipation. I had a new red dress waiting for our wedding, embroidered and trimmed with lace of my own needles.

Jacob kissed me again, and again, and again. And again he rubbed himself on me until he couldn’t rub anymore — with an exultant groan, he spent himself over my belly and thighs, and I felt the tickle of it dripping down the curves of me, and believed this was the first of many times together.

Jacob made me happy this way, happy with myself and with him. We parted as lovers, with more of his flowery declarations and a perfect kiss, as I returned to my father’s house.

But Jacob also made me mistrust vows and songs and stories and their conceits ever after, as well as love itself. Because in the end, we did not marry.

All I know is what I heard from Jacob’s father, who wouldn’t look at me as he delivered the news.
Our boy’s gone to sea,
he said, gazing into the throng that was filing into Helligánds Kirke that Sunday. He walked away before I could open my mouth.

I had to conclude the rest. Just that morning, our servant had reported that a forbidden vernacular translation of Holy Scripture had been discovered nearby. So I imagined soldiers tapping at the Lutheran sect-house door. I imagined a list of names with Jacob’s prominent among them. I imagined Jacob imprisoned — and then, because I couldn’t bear the thought, and because I was sure gossip would have named any who were arrested — I convinced myself that he had fled in time to protect himself.

In church I caught sight of the wounded Christ. I could not bear it.

Running home, I wept through the time of Mass, through bells ringing and madmen shouting, the plash of oars as some burgher or other traveled along the canal below my window.

Danger of death: this was the only reason I could think that Jacob would have abandoned me. It was the only reason I could accept. I was sure he’d gone to some country full of Lutherans — Denmark, Iceland, one of the Germanies. I was left to imagine him leaning from the deck of some great ship, casting a net to catch the amber with which he’d make his fortune in the new land. Or perhaps a mermaid to take as bride.

Our boy’s gone to sea.
Why did love come to me as a Protestant?

“We’ll find you a husband,” Father promised when he came home, through the door by the stone head that advertised his trade. “Your stepmother and I will take care of it.”

Sabine added, “A better husband. A richer one. A good Catholic.” So she, too, had added and made the same deduction; this made it all true in my mind, and I wept again. Abandoned for a different version of God — it felt worse, I sobbed, than if I were jilted for another girl.

“Nonsense,” Father said; he meant well. “Nonsense,” gently, over and over.

He and Sabine had just married that week themselves, also for love. Sabine was twice widowed, now prosperous. Both she and Father felt sorry for me, and generous, and eager to share their happiness. They even offered to increase my dowry.

I begged them to wait. I thought Jacob might change his mind and come back. Maybe he’d hear somehow that the names denounced in church did not include his, and he’d know it was safe to return. Or if he stayed gone, I pleaded to go after him.

Father and Sabine were shocked.

“Not by yourself,” Sabine said.

“Not without knowing your destination,” said Father.

I proposed going first to Copenhagen (somehow my bones told me he’d be there), then Iceland and elsewhere, but Father and Sabine held firm. They would not give me money to travel, to pay for myself and a companion to try our luck, and they would not go with me themselves unless I learned for certain where Jacob had gone.

“It would be better to marry someone else immediately,” said Sabine. I heard the two of them talking in their bed at night, worrying that
I
had made myself mad with heartbreak.

I visited Jacob’s parents in the fragrant amber-handlers’ quarter, to find out what they knew.

“He’s gone,” said Jacob’s mother.

“To sea,” said his gaunt father.

My lover was their only son. His four unmarried sisters stared, and so did the neighbors who saw me at their door. The coincidence of Jacob’s disappearance and the raid on the Lutherans had made everyone draw that one conclusion, and there was a taint about the family now.

“If you have news from him before I do,” I said boldly, “let him know that I don’t give a pin for religion.”

The whole family recoiled, crossing themselves, and I was never welcome there again.

I was desperate. I wondered if we were all wrong. I even thought that maybe — and this was madness itself — he had indeed lost his senses out of love and needed me to save him. I brought a basket of cakes to Helligánds Hospital and walked among the madmen, breaking off bits of sweetness for the poor souls inside (some meek, some fighting in chains), searching each grimy face for my beloved. I asked the monks about a tall blond, sweet-smelling man, and they (having taken vows of silence) sadly shook their heads.

So I forced myself to return home and wait, stitch collars and cuffs for the fine ladies of Sabine’s acquaintance, and at last learn the virtue of patience. Like many a fool before me, I congratulated myself on having remained a virgin in deed if not intention (and though it was not
my
restraint that preserved my maidenhead).

Thereby I made everything worse, because for all our cleverness, Jacob and I had been careless. In time I discovered that as his seed dripped between my thighs, my greedy womb had reached down to grab a drop for itself. Though to any eyes a virgin, I began to grow a child. Not without some happiness; I had a notion, a tiny seed of hope, that the drop within me would call its father homeward. But when another month passed and then a third, the slow break of my heart scraped the seed away.

That it took riddance in a public place — in front of the church, no less — was my downfall. It was the Saturday before Epiphany, so there was a market on the
plads,
lit by torches on a dark winter midday. Father and Sabine and I put on our finest for it. Father had just sold a pair of spectacles to the court astrologer, who had also commissioned a perspective glass for looking at the heavens and a hat embroidered by me. Despite the embarrassment of my jilting, our family fortune looked full of promise, and Father and Sabine wanted to savor it, to bask in the neighbors’ envy. They planned to buy little things at the stalls and to enjoy the antics of an acrobat troupe the guild master had praised.

I walked dully behind the two of them, trying to put a brave face on grief and fear. Many a girl has been rejected; many a love has been uprooted from the marsh of a wounded heart. But what was I to
do
? I pulled my stomach tighter and tighter, and pressed my fists into the hollow that would soon swell to become a baby, under cover of cinching my shawl.

I remember Father grumbling that he could not get one of the lenses on the perspective glass right, and with the clouds over the city, he would not be able to spot the stars all night. It was the sort of grumbling that’s really a boast, for of course everyone thought it wonderful that the work of his hands would be mounted on the palace’s flat west tower, perhaps even to be examined by the King’s keen eye. This device was an innovation of my father’s, the fulfillment of the promises we’d made to each other after the Great Sickness. It was much more sophisticated, with its system of glass wafers and tubes and candles, than the water-filled orbs used at most courts. It brought the stars halfway to the ground; it allowed the viewer to see the surface of the moon.

As Father bragged, I blew my nose into my sleeve, pretending to have a rheum. I wished he could grind me a glass that would show the way to my lost suitor. Looking around at the chilblained crowd, I wasted some small hope for following Sabine’s advice, finding a new husband who would rescue me and accept my baby.

Sabine was in the full spirit of the day, walking broad and proud as a ship under sail. Her eyes sparkled through a pair of Father’s lenses as, one after another, masters and their wives came to greet her and to congratulate Father on his success.

Eventually we found the acrobats, their breath pluming in the cold. We stopped to look as a man swallowed fire, then blew it before him like a dragon. A boy threw himself flat on his belly and planted his chin on the paving stones, then ran circles around his own head. I watched drearily, rubbing the beads of my mother’s amber bracelet between my fingers and wishing the old wives’ tales might be true: that amber brings happiness, fidelity, and a banishing of evil spirits.

As part of our wooing, Jacob had given me a needle case he’d made himself out of amber and brass. It was full of the best needles and pins, with a tiny scissor for snipping threads. A gift, he said, to sew our hearts together.

I hated amber in that moment. I tore the bracelet from my wrist, but it was all I had of my mother. I shoved it into the pocket at my waist. I told myself,
I must try again, I must try not to mind, I must at least look as if all is well,
and forced a smile at a glassblower who had always blushed in my presence. He blushed now, too, and bowed at me.

My father bought Sabine some ribbons; she hinted flirtatiously that they were for a petticoat. A neighbor teased about the stone head on our house, which had recently come loose and was beginning to list to the right. The man in motley opened his mouth and slid a sword into his throat. And then I screamed.

It was as if the sword had entered my body. I felt myself tearing apart; I felt blood splashing my thighs. I knelt on the square, and the blood puddled under my skirts. It left a stain that remains on the stones to this day, if only to my eyes.

Back then, all entertainments stopped as fairgoers gathered ’round me, clucking with what seemed to be concern but was, naturally, speculation. Madmen bore witness in the hospital nearby. The glassblower vanished.

“She’s always had spells at her monthlies,” my stepmother said, fast and so loud I would have flamed red under any other conditions. Instead I clutched my stomach and groaned. “Poor thing!” Sabine fairly shouted, gesturing to my father. Naturally she’d already guessed what was happening to me.

“There, there, my dear,” Father said stagily. He was as shrewd as his wife and caught her clue neatly. “This time will be fine, as it always is.” He wrapped me in his cloak, and the two of them bore me home, my head a lolling broken daisy.

I took to my bed. I was fevered and sick, though the blood didn’t last long. Our servant, Gerda, stayed with me day and night; Father and Sabine brought me soups and poultices of herbs. They campaigned in the neighborhood to insist that this was just an episode of terrible courses.

“Some virgins have a time, you know.” I heard Sabine say it over and over, down by the canal below my window. “She’ll be up and about soon.”

Every soul has its secrets, and it is no secret that there are some who make it their business to ferret these out and spread them through town. I myself had been guilty of gossiping, telling stories to the girls at needle school or to my lover. Harmless secrets, I thought them; but I’ve since concluded there is no such thing. Not since I was the subject.

When my stepmother came upstairs, she repeated the rumors about me angrily. Not just that I’d fallen pregnant and Jacob had discarded me for it, not just that I miscarried from the shame of being abandoned. But even more: that the bloody squall was of my choosing too, and that I had defied holy law by bringing it on in front of a church. The kindest of the neighbors believed it was God or the Spirit Himself who purged me, enraged at a sinning presence on holy ground. The least kind thought me an abortioness and said I should be pilloried for the crime. Some — and these made Sabine angriest of all — said my new stepmother had given me the poison, as one of her previous husbands had been an apothecary.