Chapter IV The Mummers
IV
The Mummers
Agnes was not forced to confront Liuprand again until supper. She had thought to take the meal in her chambers, for the mere notion of seeing him, especially under the scrutiny of others, threatened to desolate her—how could she maintain this farce of remote civility?
Once, perhaps, they could have been companions, with nothing but the amity of common interests between them.
Who but the king could tell the prince which company to keep?
But they had poured themselves these gushing goblets of passion and drained them both in a single gulp.
And now neither could be satisfied with the bland waters of companionship.
It left them both so weak and wanting these past nine months.
Either Agnes was always thirsty, or she thought she would never be thirsty again.
But Waltrude came to her door and said, “The king requests your presence tonight, my lady.”
Agnes tried to appear unmoved. Waltrude knew her too well by now, however. The wet nurse’s brow arched.
“Do not tell me he has found another act,” Agnes said wearily.
Waltrude pressed her gummy lips together.
Agnes sighed. So supper would not be a simple affair, and she could not go in her current state.
Waltrude picked through the gowns in her wardrobe, holding each one up for Agnes to affirm or to reject.
There were gowns of lavender and lilac and gray, but Agnes passed over those, not for their color but because she did not fit them anymore.
In these nine months she had eaten meat and drunk wine, and flesh had begun to fill the empty spaces between her bones.
She would never have Marozia’s lush figure, but her breasts now strained the bodices of those old gowns and her hips split the seams of their skirts.
It was not that she had had a child’s body before; it had been a corpse’s.
She was now not only a woman but a living creature after all.
Her cheeks could even be persuaded to fill with color.
So new gowns had been ordered from the seamstress in shades of deep violet, rich plum.
These gowns had necklines that Agnes would have once considered daring—which would have scandalized her grandmother and which not even Marozia would have deigned to wear—and she chose them not despite this, but because of it.
Adele-Blanche was dead and gone, and so was the silent Lady Agnes who had always seemed halfway to joining her.
The Agnes who spoke, and smiled, and sometimes even laughed—she bared her collarbones and her shoulders and the necklace of teeth, refitted to suit her coloring and her coloring alone.
Mistress of Teeth was a title she had made new, with the help of Pliny’s craft.
But Agnes’s form was not without its faults.
As Waltrude laced her into an orchid-colored dress, Agnes looked down at her hand.
Compelled the fingers to curl, the disloyal fingers.
She could get them halfway up, but she could not cajole them to touch her palm.
And again and again the quill slid out from her flaccid grip.
“It will come right,” Waltrude said. “Pliny knows his art.”
“Perhaps.” Agnes then clenched and unclenched the fingers of her right hand. “But I think that if I wish to write again, I should start learning with the other. I cannot wait forever.”
Waltrude sniffed. “You are so young, to think that nine months is forever.”
“Nine months is all it takes for a mere thought to become flesh and blood.”
At that, Waltrude fell silent. She used the excuse of crossing the room to fetch Agnes’s slippers. When she returned and knelt to slide them onto Agnes’s feet, she said, lowly, “I know it causes you grief.”
Agnes felt ice flood her veins. She did not allow her mind to turn, to truly consider Waltrude’s words, to let the panic spread its cold roots through her. With a short breath, she replied, “It causes me grief to know that the union between the prince and the princess is not a peaceable one.”
Disdainfully, Waltrude said, “I was never fool enough to believe it might be peaceable. This castle has not seen a peaceable union in all its years standing.”
Agnes’s skin prickled. She did not like to feel as though her world were the execution of some prophecy.
Yet so often it did. Despite the articles of the Covenant, despite all the swords that had broken to banish bitter death from Drepane’s shores, the bones of their ancestors were the castle’s foundation and the past was always pulsing under her feet.
Perhaps it was not so horrible a thing to consider, the legacy of the royal line in this respect.
Widsith had his squires, and Nicephorus had his whores.
Agnes could only assume that even Berengar had his overt indiscretions.
It was no sin to seek pleasure outside the marriage bed. But to seek love?
I would want you even if I could not touch you.
If a sickness could not be seen, could it ever be cured?
As if intentionally, to break Agnes from her reverie, Waltrude jabbed a pin to the hair near her temple. The wet nurse was never especially gentle, and Agnes flinched.
“I suppose you’ll want your flowers,” Waltrude said.
Agnes nodded.
At least in this, she never had to go wanting.
As soon as they had returned to Castle Crudele, Liuprand had ordered a new plot dug and a new garden planted.
A garden of white flowers, in every species, lilies and camellias and infant’s breath and yarrow.
The garden had its own cadre of servants to tend it, and more than once Agnes had glimpsed Liuprand there himself, cupping the flower heads in his palm to examine their fitness, even lowering himself to the ground to test the dampness of the soil.
And each time her heart broke, and then mended itself, and then broke again, harrowed by this terrible affliction of loving him.
She wondered what the other inhabitants of Castle Crudele thought when they saw their prince among the white flowers, in the garden he had built for a woman who was not his wife.
It was close to treachery because it was close to love.
Would they see the gentleness beneath the epithet, the tenderhearted creature upon whom the crown and the title rested so heavily?
Or would they only squint their eyes and wonder if it was truly just, to behave so devotedly toward the lady Agnes, when it was her cousin who wore his wedding band?
Such thoughts could drive one to madness.
As Waltrude picked the crushed petals from her hair, Agnes flushed to recall how they had been so mangled.
If she tried, she could summon the memory of his body pressed against her, his warmth and his hardness, his yearning made physical and driven into her.
When Agnes had returned from the library, she had slipped her own hand between her thighs and brought herself to release with thoughts of Liuprand in her mind, but it was a hollow pleasure, a shade of what he could do with his fingers and his mouth.
Her flush deepened. She hoped Waltrude did not notice.
“There,” the wet nurse said, stepping back. “You are fit for supper with the king.”
If only it were just supper and nothing more. Agnes’s stomach ground against itself. And then she departed for the great hall.
Agnes heard the jangling of bells before she even reached the chamber; the performance had begun without her.
Dread still knotted her insides, but she pushed through the door and entered.
The feasting table was set out on the dais, but the other tables had been cleared away to make room for the mummers.
Their silk ribbons twirled in endless red gyres, and their slippered feet slapped the floor in a tuneless rhythm.
They seemed to take no notice of Agnes’s arrival, and she gave them a wide berth as she passed.
She climbed the dais and took her seat. The art of silence was still one she knew well, and it was only Liuprand who stirred when she sat.
King Nicephorus was chewing on a leg of lamb and enraptured by the performance of the mummers. And Marozia—
Marozia. She sat at Liuprand’s right and stared straight ahead—not at the mummers but past them.
Yet her eyes were not glazed or hollow or empty.
They were as sharp as they had ever been, flashing like the beaks of carrion birds, and her jaw was held taut.
Her focus seemed to be on not looking at her cousin, on not acknowledging her presence.
A certain grief entered Agnes at this cold neglect.
Marozia had been many things, but she had never been a creature of ice.
Never heir to Adele-Blanche’s legendary apathy.
Now a strange reversal had occurred, one that Agnes half feared and half hoped would never be undone: Agnes wore the necklace of teeth and bore the title, but she no longer shared her grandmother’s pitiless temper; Marozia had lost her inheritance yet now seemed more than ever Adele-Blanche’s successor.
“Good evening, lady,” Liuprand said. “I’m glad you have joined us.”
“Thank you, my prince. I am glad to be here.”
Pure lies and they both knew it. Agnes feigned great interest in her plate. Anything to keep her focus off Liuprand, and off the mummers.
They were mainland mummers, actors of farce, the faint aura of Seraph pulsing from them and turning the air in the great hall a very pale gold.
As Agnes had recently learned, not all those of Seraphine blood seemed to equally inherit its gifts.
These mummers were not especially beautiful; their hair was a dull shade of yellow, and though their eyes did gleam blue, Agnes could not recognize Seraph’s lagoon within them.
She knew this particular hue well, for how long she had spent looking into Liuprand’s eyes.