Beauty

  As Havoc, I watched that day as Edward set off to ride to Westfaire, which was known by most local residents to be under an enchantment. I heard Edward talking about it with the men who were riding with him. “An enchantment of roses,” is the way he put it, sounding excited. That evening, when he returned, he looked scratched and frustrated. One of the men told the head groom that Lord Edward had not been able to penetrate the roses around Westfaire though he had repeatedly tried! I considered it a hopeful sign.

  That night I put on the second gown—I had brought only three from Westfaire—and went to the Dower House again. Again I told him tales until Matins, and again he pursued me when I ran away.

  On the third night I took my cloak in with me, set it beside me on the chair, and in the midst of my discourse sighed and interrupted the tale. When he asked me why, I told him I was under an enchantment. That until I was married to a man who would ask me no questions, I could appear only after dark and the barrier around Westfaire would remain. I said this twice, being sure he understood it, before I directed his attention to a spurious spy at the window and disappeared while his head was turned. He looked around him wildly, cursing and crying my name. I had done it as well as it could be done, I told myself again, making my weary way home across the fields.

  The fourth night I did not go at all. Nor the fifth.

  On the sixth, I returned in the gown I had worn when he saw me first. He was stalking up and down on the terrace outside his window, clenching and unclenching his fists, muttering and sighing. This was a good sign. I took off the cloak and sighed loudly, myself. The moment he saw me, he went to one knee and asked me to marry him. I turned away, thrusting out one hand as though my maidenly modesty had been deeply surprised. He begged. I looked at my hands and wrung them dramatically. He begged the more. At last, on an expiring sigh, I said yes. I would meet him at the Wellingford chapel at dusk, three days afterward, and marry him there.

  He would have time for second thoughts. So did I, when I was awake enough to have any thoughts at all. Lord Robert cursed at me for being asleep in a horse’s stall, and Lady Janet told me to wake up when I dozed against the side of the steed she was mounting. Mostly I thought that I did not want to be married. I would not have minded if Giles had been there to marry me, but I did not want to marry Ned. What I really wanted to do and had set out to do was find my mother. I longed for a mother. Someone to tell my troubles to, a shoulder to cry on, a sympathetic hand on my forehead, a voice saying, “There, there, dear, we’ll work it all out.” I thought of using the boots, assuming they would take me wherever she was, but the thought of going to my mama pregnant! She had told me to come to her at once, before I grew older. Coming to her in my present condition did not seem appropriate. It would be like going home in disgrace. Despite my fretfulness, that night I slept like one dead, and in the morning woke to hear the news everyone was babbling. Lord Edward was going to be married in three days, but he would not say to whom.

  I went in my cloak to keep watch on him that night. There were no ladies at the Dower House, nor on the night that followed. It appeared he really intended to go through with it.

  The Wellingford chapel was a small one, large enough for the family and servants only, served by a resident priest who said daily masses and took care of christenings and burials. Also, three monks had been taken in from the abbey when it was destroyed, and it was they who rang the bells for the holy office. The chapel was set in a graveyard, and there were Wellingfords buried all around and beneath it, the whole place smelling a bit of sanctity and dust and rot, as well as of incense and tallow.

  I did not go openly. I went in my cloak, ready to flee if something appeared amiss, and I stood on the porch for a time, looking in at the people. The priest was there, looking grumpy. So were various members of the family, irritably glancing around to catch a glimpse of the putative bride. Ned was there, jumpy as a cat, darting glances at the door every second or two. The priest gave up his unpleasant look to yawn. Ordinarily, Ned and I would have pledged our respective properties and exchanged rings in the church porch. I had no property to exchange, or at least none I was willing to use as dowry. Ned would have to take me as I stood.

  I put the cloak down in the porch and walked slowly down the center aisle. Everyone stared at me and murmured. I pretended not to notice the admiring looks cast my way by some of the gentlemen and even a few of the ladies. I had done what I could to look well. There were summer flowers twined in my hair. I had returned to Westfaire for yet another dress, the pink one I had worn at the banquet the night before Papa had intended to marry Weasel-Rabbit. When the priest asked my name, I told him in a clear and carrying voice that all might hear: “Beauty, daughter of Elladine of Ylles and the Duke of Westfaire, under an enchantment which can only be broken by marrying an uninquisitive man.”

  Ned looked into my eyes and swore to honor and keep me. He whispered in my ear that he would be uninquisitive. He would not ask questions. He trembled when he took my hand. I looked at his chin and pledged to render him my duty, wondering betime what Father Raymond would have said about all this. Father Raymond had had definite opinions about the sacrament of marriage, and I concluded he would have been disappointed in me, taken all in all. The priest babbled a great deal of comfortable Latin and we took the sacrament together. Ned kissed me, delicately, as though I might break. I curtseyed to his older brother, to Janet, to his younger brother, to other members of the family. Janet gave me a hug, rather quickly, as though she were afraid the enchantment might rub off on her. We left the chapel and walked across to the manor house where the kitchens had been steaming since noon, preparing a feast.

  “We didn’t have time to prepare anything elegant,” said Janet. “Or to think of a proper gift.”

  “I was given a proper gift,” I said in what I fondly hoped were mysterious tones. “A young boy, seeing me approaching the chapel, told me he would give me his dearest possession as a gift for my wedding. The gift is a cat called Grumpkin, he is in the stables, and I would like him brought here.”

  Someone went for Grumpkin, coming back later rather the worse for wear with my poor cat in a sack. I cursed myself for stupidity in letting anyone else go in my place and turned him loose, giving him a saucer of cut up fowl on the floor at my feet.

  “We couldn’t find the boy, ma’am,” I heard one of the servants saying to Janet.

  “He told me he was leaving,” I said, my words carrying over the clatter of the diners. “Going away. Never to be seen in these parts again.”

  It was true, then, so far as I knew. What need had the wife of Edward Wellingford for Havoc, the miller’s son.

  • • •

  Remembering what I had seen in the Dower House as a voyeur, I made no effort to compete in innovation or athleticism with the women Edward had consorted with in the past. It was no lie to pretend virginity. It was no he to pretend shyness. I felt them both. When, on the third or fourth night after the wedding, Edward made love to me at last—I having held him off till then out of a genuine feeling of revulsion which I managed to overcome at last only by much purposeful wine-bibing—I felt nothing much except discomfort and relief when it was over. Jaybee had evidently unsuited me for the enjoyments of the flesh, though thereafter, knowing what to expect from Edward, it became easier. I knew it was supposed to be a pleasant experience. Out of curiosity if nothing else, I had read in the twentieth how a woman can assure that it is pleasant, but I felt no impetus toward talking with Edward about it or doing what in the twentieth would have been called “working at our relationship.” It would have been a lie. I did not want to work at the relationship because I did not love him. I came quite to like him as the days went by, but I did not discern in myself even so much affection toward him as I had often felt toward Bill or so much as I felt toward Grumpkin. Edward did not know me and never would. Our relationship was built upon a fiction. It was shallow and, I feared, temporary. I could not visualize myself staying at Wellingford
long after the child was born. The child itself, I could not visualize at all.

  Still, I was carefully gentle and kindly in my mood, receptive in my manner. So much was owed the man, after all. I took my wedding vows as seriously as I might for what time I had. He liked me to look lovely, so I made a point of that. Even when I became, all too soon, swollen as a melon, I could smell sweet as any garden and wear flowing things that rustled gently.

  We rode. He insisted I ride sidesaddle, which I hated. My grandfather’s invention evidently had gained some little reputation among the neighboring nobility. We read together, he evincing delight that I knew how to read and write, which, indeed, I did than he. I told him stories, things I had experienced, things I had heard of, and he was mightily amused, wondering how I had come by such a store of tales. I made up a lie about my father’s fool, that he was a widely traveled creature with a retentive memory who had fed me on stories from my childhood. It was more or less true. The fool had fed me on stories, right enough, though they had mostly been of a less than salutary kind that made the women he had known the butt of his evil humor.

  When we had been married about four months, Edward came in from riding one day to tell me that the roses mounded Westfaire still, that the enchantment remained. He looked hurt.

  I was prepared for this. I told him that we knew half the enchantment had been removed, for I was able to appear regularly in the daylit hours, but that since complete lack of inquisitiveness was the conditio sine qua non there must be some kernel of curiosity in him still, which prevented the entire enchantment from being broken. He flushed, and I knew I was safe from further conversation on that matter.

  Time wore on through the winter to the early spring, and the baby was born. It was early, of course. I made much of that when labor started, saying no, no, it could not be yet. I need hardly have troubled. In that time, babies often came early and were too tiny to live. Often they died. I thought I would die, wished to die, wished I had stayed in the twentieth where there are drugs for such pain, almost screamed out for my boots to take me there, but was drowned out by the midwives’ exhortations to breathe, to breathe, to push, to push. I screamed and breathed and pushed. There was a squall, followed by bustling to and fro, then the tiny swaddled creature was laid on my arm while someone messed about between my legs, cleaning up. There was much clucking over the afterbirth, in which the midwives purported to read signs and portents of both good and evil, but they soon gave over and set things to rights. I thought of Aunt Lavvy as they sprinkled oil of lavender about and burned sweet resins in the candles to kill the mudflats, seaside smell of birthing. When Edward was allowed in, we were clean and sweet once more, and he gazed at us both as he might have gazed at heavenly angels.

  “What shall we name her,” he asked in a whisper, his hand gently upon my arm.

  “After my mother,” I told him. “Elladine. That was my mother’s name.” I wanted to love the child. I wanted to remind myself that children need a mother’s love.

  He added a string of family names, and a day or so later she was taken to the chapel by Janet to be christened. Though she was one-quarter fairy, I made no mention of the fact. My own christening had started all this mess. Better the baby get by as simply as possible with Robert and the Lady Janet as her godparents and the blessing of Holy Church to guard her through life.

  After that, time seemed almost to stop. I tried to nurse her myself, rejecting the wet-nurse from the village. I rather liked the feel of it, liked being close to her. The sight and sound of the tiny fuzz-covered head so tight against me, the little star-shaped hands pushing like a kitten’s paws, the toothless pink mouth agape like a bird’s, all were interesting. Then one morning when she was about two weeks old—it was midmorning, actually, with the sun casting westward beams along the wall at the edge of the heavy curtains—as she was nursing, she opened her eyes and looked at me and it was Jaybee’s look, greedy and violent. Her mouth clamped down on me as though strong fingers pinched me. There was blood on my nipple. I gave a cry, and the maids came rushing in. I told them to fetch the wet-nurse, that my breasts would no longer be enough for the child, keeping my voice as calm as I could though inside I bubbled with hysteria. He too had bitten me there. He too had drawn blood.

  [“Now,” I said to Israfel

  “Wait a little,” he said. “She is coming to it of her own accord.”]

  Thereafter they brought her to me once or twice a day, to look at. She was everything tiny, precious, holdable. Everything fragile and sweet. And yet his eyes looked out at me from the infant face, as though he lay within the infant mind, waiting. After that, I could not touch her without an instinctive aversion, a revulsion. The wet-nurse fed her; the nursemaid changed her napkins; and Edward adored her. Seeing his face above the child was like seeing the spring sun rising over the fields. He was so full of love it shone from him.

  Edward hovered over me, too, but, as was thought proper in those times, did not invite me to his bed for the forty days I lay with the bedcurtains drawn, seeing neither the sun nor moon until time came to be churched. Father Raymond had always said the churching of women was a ceremony of thanksgiving for a safe delivery, but at Wellingford it seemed quite another thing. There, so the midwives said, a woman was considered unclean and unholy by virtue of the blood she had shed in giving birth, and only the priest’s words said over her put her in a state of grace once more. While there were some at Wellingford who disbelieved such nonsense, Lady Janet believed it wholeheartedly, and it was her way the wives forced on me, whether I would or no. In some other time or place I might have made a fuss, but since Edward and his kin were kindly and generally well-disposed toward me, there was no point in making them uncomfortable.

  At the end of the “lying in,” I went to the chapel, all muffled up in the traditional veils, to take a seat near the altar and have the priest read psalms over me to compensate for my having offended God by bearing a child in holy wedlock. The “chapel smell” was very strong that day, as it had been the night Ned and I were married. I still couldn’t identify what it was. When the priest had finished, I was supposedly free of the world again, able to look upon sunshine and stars. I did not tell them I had been sneaking out of bed nighttimes to sit in the window watching the moon and longing for something I could not quite name. My own mother, I think. Someone of my own, at least, who could explain to me what I was feeling. Despite all my good intentions I could not love my own child. It horrified me that I saw Jaybee’s malevolence in that tiny face. She was half me! Surely my half counted for something! Often though I convinced myself of that, when I saw her, when she opened her dark eyes and looked at me, I saw only violence and terror and felt only a memory of pain.

  In addition to her fears about newly delivered women, Lady Janet also feared the babe would be taken by fairies, so there were maids about day and night, hovering over the cradle. Janet told tales of babes snatched away with changelings left in their place. No one said why fairies preferred human children to their own, and I considered it unlikely. I had seen one that Janet spoke of and knew him to be no changeling but a poor idiot, what the twentieth called a Down’s syndrome child, born to a woman in her forty-fourth year, but there was no point in arguing the matter with Janet. It would do little Elly no harm to have loving people about her, even for a spurious reason.

  Though I kept her at a distance from me, she had no lack of caring hands to help her and gentle arms to hold her. Ned played with her as if she had been a novel toy, doing peek-a-baby and pat-a-cake until both he and Elly were helpless with laughter. More than once I surprised on his face an expression of grateful wonder, as though there were something in being a father he had neither expected nor dared hope for. As for me, I wavered between resentment that the babe was not the child of someone I loved and thankfulness that at least she bid fair to be beautiful and not apish as Jaybee’s child might well have been.

  Remembering what I had learned in the twentieth, I took such precautions a
s I might to be sure I did not conceive again. Luck or God was with me. Almost a year went by and I did not kindle. Remembering Ned’s boistrous talk before our marriage about having scattered his seed widely without issue, I began to think he might be sterile. I wished I knew for sure, that I might give up the counting of days and the playing of games, pretending to have headaches or other infirmities to keep him at a distance betimes. Still, the thought gave me some hope that Elly would be our only child.

  I took to riding a good deal, for exercise, and to get away from the house. I went often alone, preferring that to being pursued by panting stableboys mounted on fat carthorses, for the master of horse would let them ride nothing better and there were no men to spare to keep an eye on me. One day I had ridden out early, going up into the hills, and I came to a ridge where one could look down, over the burned abbey and the lake and across the lake to the mound of roses where Westfaire slept.

  I didn’t see the man there until I had dismounted. He moved, and it startled me.

  “M’lady,” he said. “Do not be afraid.”

  Oh God, I knew that voice. I turned and went toward him, he looking across at me, at first in curiosity and then, almost, in terror.

  “Beauty!” he cried.

  “Giles!” I screamed in return. Oh, he was the same, the same. He had hardly aged at all. The same light brown hair, though it was cut short, as though he had spent much time under helm. His eyes were the same when they looked into mine.