Now, one of the girls was escaping and her seven sisters looked on with envy. Never mind that the man she was marrying was so thin his bones nearly showed through his clothes and that his manners were worse than any stable lad’s. What mattered was that tomorrow this daughter would be able to escape their father’s house.
As for John he tried his best to forget that his life was plagued with eight daughters and two worthless sons. He spent every waking moment badgering the peasants in the fields, trying to squeeze yet more money and work out of them, and killing any creature that had the misfortune to walk or fly across his lands.
“Look you at them,” John repeated to his wife. “I must bribe some poor man to marry them, eight of them. Do you know what that will cost me?”
Alida wanted to say that it would cost him about half of what her father had given him to marry her, but she did not dare. Brains did not stand up against muscle and obstinacy.
It wasn’t that her husband was stupid. In fact, he was clever in his own way. He was very good with the everyday aspects of life, such as hounding the peasants into producing more food than any other farmers in the county. He knew where every grain of wheat went and no one ever cheated him, as he always found them out. And when he did, his punishments were swift. He was a big, good-looking man, with as flat a stomach today as he had when they were married nineteen years ago.
But John had no understanding of anything that didn’t involve producing more coin, food, or power. Music bored him. “It does not feed me,” he said. He thought education was a waste of time; he thought any entertainment except getting drunk now and then was for fools. Once when he caught his wife reading a book, he grabbed it from her and threw it out the window. “This is why you give me daughters,” he bellowed at her. “I put sons into your belly and you change them into worthless females with your fairy stories.”
Now, John was in his worst mood because he could see all eight of his daughters and his two young sons. Four years ago when Alida had at last given birth to the much-coveted son, she had wept with joy. And through her tears she had seen her husband come running to her. As he grabbed her into his arms, heedless of the fact that she had just given birth, Alida did not care, for there was such happiness on his face. For a moment her heart filled with all the hope and joy she’d felt before she married him. Dreams of a happy life filled her as John held her, kissing her face and neck, telling her she was the most wonderful of wives.
“Let me see him,” John had demanded, and in an instant Alida’s happiness had fled her, for she saw the faces of her maids and knew instantly that something was very wrong.
“No,” she whispered, trying to prolong the moment of truth when that sublime joy would leave her husband’s face when he saw whatever was wrong with the child.
Alida could see that the maids were trying to conceal the problem, so they presented the boy in swaddling clothes, bound tightly to prevent his limbs from growing crooked. But John wanted to see for himself that the child was a boy and bade the maids unwrap him.
With her breath held, Alida watched her husband and when he saw the boy’s perfect body, his face seemed to melt in tenderness as he cradled it in his arms. John had never touched one of their daughters, never done anything but ask its sex, then wave it away. But now he cradled his son as though it were what he had lived his life for—as it was.
“He is beautiful,” John said and Alida’s eyes overflowed with tears. Her husband had never seen beauty in a flower or a sunset or even a woman, but he thought that this son she had given him was beautiful.
With her maid’s help, Alida had sat up straighter in the bed to look with her adoring husband at the child and, innocently, she had started to move the swaddling cloth back from the child’s feet. But the quick intake of breath from her maid had made her draw her hand back as though the cloth were on fire.
John, not usually aware of subtlety, had caught the movement and tossed the blanket back from the child. One of its feet was deformed. The boy would never be able to walk properly.
What had a moment ago been love and joy in John’s eyes was replaced with hatred. “How could I have thought that you, madam, would give me what I want?” he spat at her as he opened his arms and let the child fall. Had not the nurse caught the baby it would have hit the stone floor. In another moment John had left the room and thereafter he did not try to conceal the disgust he felt for his wife.
The next year she presented him with another son but by then John had grown cynical. He did not go to see the boy when he was told it was born. “What is wrong with it?” he asked, and when the maid hesitated, he bellowed, “What is wrong with it? I do not believe that that wife of mine would give me a perfect son.” John had three choices in life: He could believe that God was the cause of his having only daughters and a deformed son, he could believe that he was the cause, or he could blame it all on his wife. He chose to blame his wife.
“The child is not well,” the maid managed to whisper.
At that John began to laugh. “I will not hope that it will die. Nor will I dare hope that that cursed wife of mine will die in childbirth and free me to marry a woman who knows how to breed proper sons.” He grabbed a tankard of wine from a table. “It will live,” he said with fatalism. “As all my children live so will this one. It will cost me to feed and clothe it and never give me pleasure. Go! Leave me.”
John’s prophecy was right and the child did live, but the boy was always sickly, with a disease of the lungs that made him cough continually.
Two years later Alida gave birth to a healthy baby girl, but John did not even look at it; he did not so much as ask after it. He noticed that his wife had once again been relieved of a child, but he threatened never to visit her bed again. What use was it? The surrounding villages supplied him with women to appease his lust. He refused to notice that whenever a girl was brought to bed with a child that he had reason to believe was his, it was always a girl. John merely denied that these children were his. No matter that the baby girl had his blue eyes or the set of his chin. John’s policy was that if the child was a female then he did not father it. It was well known that if any woman, no matter what her background, could give John Hadley a son, then he would take her into his home and she would live a life of luxury. Although several had tried (one woman three times) no one had yet succeeded in giving him his perfect son.
“Look you at him,” John demanded of his wife, nodding toward a man on the far side of the room. “Why is it that his wives can beget sons and you cannot? It is said that his wives give him sons so large that the women die from the birthing of them.”
Trying to look dutiful, as though she wanted to learn something, Alida turned toward the man John was pointing to. But her heart, indeed her entire body, was filled with rage. Was this another point against her, that she had not died in giving birth to a child the size of a calf? Were children to be judged solely upon weight, as though they would be sent to the butcher’s? Her husband did not look at the fact that the daughters she had given him were intelligent and comely; the oldest were even pretty. Their two sons were sweet natured and the oldest could already read. It did not matter to her that one of the boys limped and the other coughed as though each day would be his last.
With a cold heart, Alida looked at the man her husband was pointing to. Gilbert Rasher was a brute of a man, the size of a bear, unwashed, bad-tempered, uneducated, but, in his day, he had been a great jouster, unseating any man who took him on. Some said that too many lances hitting his helmet had scrambled his brain and made him stupid. But then how did one account for his calculating eyes that saw everyone and everything and always managed to get every bit he could get out of them?
Gilbert had had three wives, each presenting him with a hulk of a son in the image of the father, then dying from the birth. Gilbert liked to brag that his virility killed his wives, but most women agreed that the women died to get away from his filthy body and his filthier mind.
Now Gi
lbert was burying his face in the overgenerous bosom of one of the kitchen maids, a girl Alida vowed to get rid of on the morrow, while his sons were, as always, causing trouble in the noisy chaos of the wedding festivities. One son, about eight years old, but looking at least twelve, was terrorizing a couple of dogs with a little whip and laughing delightedly. His younger brother was making two of Alida’s daughters cry in fear. There was a third great lout of a son somewhere else, but Alida didn’t want to know where he was or what he was doing.
Is this what her husband wanted in a son? she thought. She had given him two boys who were good and gentle, intelligent and thoughtful, loving children. John had never so much as addressed an encouraging word to his sons, but here he was drooling over these despicable churls whose only pleasure was in terrifying something smaller than themselves.
Around them, no one listened to John. His ranting had gone on so long that everyone considered John’s complaints a great joke. His neighbors held up their own sons and offered to show him how it was done. When John had no sense of humor about this matter, they laughed harder and teased more.
But her husband’s rage was no laughing matter to Alida. Her knees were raw, bloody, from kneeling for the last nine months as she prayed to God to give her a healthy son. She was 35 years old now and she knew that she would not get many more chances to produce the perfect male child her husband wanted. If only…she thought. If only she could produce that child. Night and day she was haunted by the look she’d seen on her husband’s face when he had thought she had borne him a perfect son. A woman could live on looks like that, she thought. A woman would not need heaven if she had a husband who looked at her like that.
This time when she knew she was with child she began to pray. She spent most of the night and day on her knees, begging God, beseeching Him to give her this son.
She did not like to remember what else she had done. There had been a furtive, secret trip to another village to a horrid, dirty woman who said she could foresee if her ladyship was carrying a boy. When the old woman had said that the child growing in her belly was another girl, Alida had become hysterical and said she’d see the woman burned for witchcraft. But the woman was gone the next day, fled from her tiny house to travel the roads. Better to die of hunger, she thought, than to be killed by fire.
Alida had found another woman who said the sex of the child could be changed by concentrating on masculine things. Even now, Alida’s face blushed when she thought of the pictures and the tiny statue the woman had given her to concentrate on. All of them male. In these nine months Alida had read no books, as her husband said reading was a feminine pursuit. She had done as little as possible that was considered women’s work, trying to point her every moment toward men and think only of them.
But more than anything, she had prayed to God, staying so long at her altar that her maids had entreated her to come away, saying such long kneeling was not good for the babe. “I would rather that it were born dead if it is not a healthy boy,” she said as the maids hauled her upright. They did not tell her not to think this way because each of them silently agreed with her.
But her husband saw none of this. To him she showed a face with as little emotion as possible. She would not throw herself on him and beg him to forgive her for not giving him a son. She would keep her pride, if nothing else.
Because of her memories, she did not hear the first of what her husband was saying.
“It must be a boy if it is killing the girl,” he was saying. “Now she lies above and I have seen her. Her belly is larger than she is. It’s said she has not been able to walk for a month. It will be another boy for Gilbert.”
This startled Alida. “There is a woman in my house who is giving birth?” Why had no one told her of this? She would skin her maids when she got them alone. If someone were indeed giving birth to a child while in her house, there were things that must be done.
Clumsily, heavily, Alida started to get up. “I must go to her.”
As she stood, the first pain came to her belly and she knew that her own time had started. No, no, she thought, it is too soon. She was not big enough. She had prayed for a boy that was huge, something that would impress her husband. If she gave birth now, with a stomach only this big, the child would be small.
Grabbing the back of the chair, she tried to keep her face from contorting as another pain took her, but she did not succeed. John, looking away from her, his attention on some jugglers, would not have noticed if she’d given birth in the straw on the floor at his feet. But their guests were not so callous.
“John!” someone yelled. “It looks as though you are to be a father again.”
“And what day does he not become a father?” someone else shouted, making everyone laugh.
John didn’t join in their laughter. Fatherhood had long ago ceased to be of any interest to him. Airily, he waved his hand. “Leave me,” he said.
“It is good of you to give me your permission to leave,” Alida said with as much bitterness as she dared.
Gilbert Rasher removed his face from the bosom of the maid long enough to yell to John, “You should put your wife next to the girl I married. Mayhaps she can teach that woman of yours something.”
Alida did not know that she could despise the filthy creature more than she already did. Her husband and this man were alike: to them women were only bodies, put on earth to give them children. And if those children killed the mother in the birthing, what did it matter? There were more women about. To them women had no souls, no thoughts, no wants; they had only bodies.
With the next pain, Alida’s maid Penella came to her, putting her arm under her elbow, and helped her mistress upstairs to her chamber where all was ready for the birth. As they neared the door, Alida halted. “Take me to Rasher’s wife. I will give birth with her.” And mayhap some of what Rasher has will come into my unborn child, she thought.
Penella, who loved her mistress well, looked at her in concern.
“Yes, yes, what is it?” she snapped. “I do not have long.”
“The girl is dying,” Penella whispered. “The priest has already come to her. She will not live more than a few hours. It would not be good for you or your unborn babe to be so near death. That is why I did not tell you of her presence.”
“But what of her child?” Alida gasped as another pain overtook her. “What of it?”
“It has not come. The midwife thinks it will die with her. It is too big for her.” Penella took a breath. “Oh, milady,” she whispered, near to tears. “You should see her. She is a foreign thing, so tiny, not a word can be got out of her. And she is dying from this babe inside her. She has been in labor for two days now.”
Alida’s mind was working. If the woman was dying from having a boy and the boy was about to die, perhaps at the moment of death the boy’s spirit would enter her child and change it into a male. Someone had told her once that the sex of a child was not determined until the actual moment of birth. Before that the child was neither male nor female. Perhaps this was true.
“Take me to her!” Alida demanded, leaving no room for the maid to disagree.
Alida was led to a small, dirty room where a flea-infested straw-filled mattress was tossed onto the floor. On it lay a girl, her face streaked with dirt and tears. She had bitten her lip through and there was smeared blood on her chin. Black hair straggled about her face in limp, dirty strands, entangling under her arms, and around her neck as though it meant to strangle her.
Under the dirt, Alida could see that the girl had once been pretty. Her olive skin showed that she was from a country that had been kissed by the sun. Looking at her, imagining what she must have been once, a person could see sunlight and flowers, could hear birds and the tinkle of her laughter. She was young, no more than sixteen, if that, and under the pallor of death was the bloom of youth in her pretty face and skin.
But now Alida could see that the girl was very near death. It was as though this girl had given up the w
ill to live and now all that was left was the slight movement of her chest above the great lump that was her dying child.
“Help me,” Alida said, motioning for her maids to help her lie beside the dying girl.
Penella, ever protective, protested that she, the lady of the house, could not lie on such filth, but Alida gave her a fierce look, forcing her obedience. The bed was narrow and with the bulk of the two women, the contact between them was intimate.
There had been a time in Alida’s life when she would have felt sympathy for this poor, dying girl lying so close beside her. But that time was long gone. Now all she could think of was giving her husband a strong son.
Berta, the midwife, came trundling up the stairs. She was a fat, lazy creature who was needed so often by Lady Alida that she had permanent residence, living somewhere in the top of the old stone castle. Yesterday she had pronounced that the foreign girl was dying and nothing could be done to save her or the baby. Berta was not about to exert any effort on the wife of a man like Rasher, who she knew would never pay her. Never mind that she worked only a few hours every nine months, she thought she was nearly a lady herself since she delivered her ladyship’s babies.
When Alida raised her legs to the very familiar position of birth, the old woman’s hands were so slick with pig grease from the wedding feast, she did not need a lubricant to check the progress of the coming babe.
“It will be here soon,” Berta said with authority, then glanced at the closed eyes and the deathly pallor of the girl close beside Alida. “That one’s done for. I told you so yesterday,” she said as though the girl’s persistence at holding on to life was an affront to Berta herself. She was thinking only of the dinner she’d had to leave behind to attend to her ladyship and she wanted to make sure that everyone knew it was not her duty to look after dirty, dark-skinned foreigners as well.