Chapter Eight #2
Death was no stranger to me or those that I knew—it was part and parcel with being alive.
(I had heard the squeal of an animal that knew it would be slaughtered.
I had seen men hung in the town square. I had seen, also, people crushed to death in the rabid crowd at one of the same executions.
I had heard the stories of the women—the fevers that come after birth, the bodies in the stream, the promise behind the purpled eyes.) So, it wasn’t the death, but rather the loss, that I had to make sense of.
The letter said that my father’s estate had been divided to pay his debts.
But it did not say what had become of my family’s belongings and I could not stop thinking about Father’s canvas-and-serge apron, the garment that had covered his chest as reliably as a second layer of skin.
The idea that it had been burned or discarded was almost as unbearable as the loss of his life itself.
I learned: A whole world of sorrow could be delivered in the news of one letter.
For a time, I was unmoored by the loneliness of what had happened. I found myself unable to fulfill household duties, unwilling to join feasts at the Tremaines’ hall. The hours were gray. And then, I learned I was pregnant.
When I told Henry, his brown eyes went browner, bigger, wider. I felt a surge of feeling as he took my fingers in his and squeezed. The hope and fear on his face were familiar. They were the same opposing forces—push and pull, hot and cold—driving my own beating heart.
My daughters were born twelve months apart, almost to the day. If time were your only consideration, you might consider them close enough to be twins. Bathed together, raised together, hair braided together. But the girls turned out to be nothing alike.
Mathilde came first—and early. She nearly wrecked me.
Even now, I don’t like to recall the days after.
The smell of iron and the stupor. You are so tethered, so madly in love, so trapped.
I lived in an echo chamber of insanity. In the chaos that followed the birth, the blood and piss and vomit, the touch-and-go and near goodbye of it all, she was unnamed.
I didn’t want to name her, and refused, for days, for what must have been weeks.
She was sickly and small and certain not to make it.
I kept her on my chest, on my body, refusing the wet nurse, refusing to leave her.
Her limbs were afterthoughts. Bones in skin.
The whole of her balanced in my palm. I wanted to give her my very breath.
Live, live, live, live, live, I told her. It was the message in my every heartbeat. Mathilde means mighty in battle. She is named for those days, for the instructions she ultimately followed. She is the victor of a tiny war, of my womb; she still, to this day, gives me life.
The year that followed passed unconsciously.
Henry’s face, looking at me, always. Filled with questions.
What had happened? Where had I gone? I was too anxious to leave the baby and angry to be so unfree.
Too exhausted to sleep, too in love to relax, completely thrown and consumed by these new patterns—a shrieking cry during the night’s darkest hour, the sweetest softest breath, the slow fattening of limbs, my life a syncopated rhythm of fear and a deep abiding affection.
And then my dresses, never taken back in, were growing tight again and I realized I would be repeating the experience.
I named Rosamund before she ever arrived: my promise to and ask of her.
Her name means rose of the world. It is perhaps too much to ask of a child, but she faithfully followed through.
Healthy and round. Somehow her appearance in our lives, instead of doubling my troubles, seemed to halve them.
The two of them balanced me, tugged me in opposite directions so that I was stabilized in an upright position.
Finally willing to turn toward, if not look at, the light.
We spent a handful of good years on that leased estate, memories I revisit often.
The smell of the lavender bush that flowered beneath our bedroom window.
The warmth of a bath prepared in a copper tub.
Afternoons without responsibility. Rosie lining up seashells Henry brought home from a trip.
Mathilde stepping on a broken bottle, and Henry cradling her head as he withdrew the shard.
Afterward, I watched him lift her young foot and kiss it.
Because our happiness was not overwhelming—because it was subtle and constant and threaded through every day and every interaction— I did not know to covet it, to hold on to it, that it might suddenly be taken away.
I will just say it directly because it is easier this way: Henry—who was the bark to my tree, who held my head between his hands, whose presence was a happy ending—died.
(The drip at the back of the throat, the soft tissue between your vertebrae, the plum-colored crescent from a fingernail dug into skin; grief is felt in so many more places than the heart.)
On a long, warm summer day, the kind of afternoon where the light feels endless—insects buzzing, flowers and trees backlit, a fuzziness around the edges of your vision, the sun burning with such steady reassurance you forget there is anything in the world to fear—Henry’s eldest brother arrived with the news.
They had been traveling together. A trip involving trade negotiations for nutmeg. His death, illness from contaminated water—in a nameless inn, in a nameless place—was sudden.
I had the wherewithal, then, to think of my father and brother, and the letter I had gotten with the news of their deaths.
How a letter could also be a gift. Because instead of clutching a scroll of parchment, of being able to fall to the floor, I had to offer my brother-in-law tea and refreshments.
Had to send the servants scuttling for a tray.
Had to avoid looking at the liquid hanging from the tip of his nose.
It was only after he left that I could fully collapse and, shutting the door to the daylight outside, wish for darkness. How could the sun still shine on such moments?
Henry did not die at home—a cause of deep, enduring grief. I wanted to ask him: Did you collect any more seashells? Did you suffer? Did you know how much we loved you?
Of course, he wasn’t there to answer.
There is nothing new to say about grief.
If you’ve grieved, then you know sorrow, and if you have not, then I will warn you: There will forevermore be days where happiness is forsaken.
But there is no grief like watching a young child mourn a parent, though the inverse would be an amplification beyond comprehension.
Rosie was six and Mathilde was seven. They did not need a cameo to remember Henry.
He was soft flesh and pumping blood; he was every manner of being alive, throughout every day of their life—until, quite suddenly, he wasn’t.
How do you take a six-year-old’s face in your shaking hands and explain this?
“He is never coming back?” Rosamund asked. And I had to repeat—made myself repeat—the word: never.
After our initial shock, we were left to ourselves. Our home was managed—meals prepared, chamber pots emptied—by our household staff. The girls and I had to learn to accommodate sorrow: a new companion and bedfellow in our recently diminished family.
During those weeks, I allowed Rosie and Mathilde to sleep in my room.
Neither of them wanted to be on the outside edge of the bed, and so they took turns in the middle, their matching, indistinguishable bodies swapping all throughout the night, slithering over and under one another like snakes.
Fear and grief had turned us cold and scaly.
Mathilde would try to console me. She would hold my hand, and once whispered: “We are not alone as long as we are together.” Rosamund, who was already prone to tears, and becoming more prone to outbursts, would wake herself crying.
I had so little left to console them. But, when they finally fell asleep beside me, each slumbering breath became a gift: the reminder of a purpose.
Besides the soft exhales of my sleeping children, I also had to listen to another noise during those long nights. The sound of thrashing—and screaming—from down the hall.
Before Henry died, he had acquired a young falcon with the intention of training it.
When he did not return from his trip, and our household became absorbed by its new rhythms, the bird was neglected—given food and water and little else.
The peregrine grew increasingly agitated, making sharp and shrill noises, and banging against the sides of its room. I began to call him Lucifer.
Late one night, when the noises were loud enough to cut through my fugue of self-pity, I slipped out of bed and went through the dark house to the room Henry had used for his mews. Imagine my surprise when I discovered Lucifer was female.
She was so angry. Furious. An eye like a serpent’s. A coldness in her stare. Beak open. She hated me, hated the world and everything she knew of it. And why shouldn’t she, when she’d spent all her time in a dark room with no fresh air. She was terrified.
Imprinting a falcon means you have to teach it to trust you, a process that is painful and uncomfortable because you knowingly have to cause a living creature fear.
(Again and again you expose them to their own fear—fear of you—until it dissipates.) It took me four days.
It was an eternity. When you experience time alongside a terrorized bird, each particle of dust or muffled sound is a threat.
I could see from Lucy’s tightly held feathers, the quick swivel of her head, that she was miserable.