Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
Morwen had said to follow the passageway all the way to its end, and take a set of stairs to the right.
I was nearly to the stairs, I could make them out ahead, when I heard voices and a door swung inward, ahead of me.
I sucked in air. I had no time to check.
I reached for the nearest rectangle of light without any idea of what awaited me on the other side.
The room was empty.
I was not sure what I was after. Why was I taking such risks? Proof, perhaps. Something about the look in Rosie’s and Mathilde’s eyes. Information, I had told Morwen. But what does one do with information? Wield it? Trade it? I only knew I felt urged forward.
I looked around the bedchamber I stood in. A white sheet covered what appeared to be a desk and chair. The bed had a coverlet, but no pillows, and beneath the cover the mattress was bare. On the other side of the secret doorway, I could hear the voices—two chambermaids, it seemed—get closer.
Here, too, the shades were drawn on the east-facing windows.
I pulled them aside to reveal a view of the enclosed garden I had seen from the ball.
In daylight, I could see its outer wall was new.
No vines grew upon its surface, and the stones had the flinty look of a recent quarrying.
As I had noticed before, the wall was unbroken by gates or breaks or arches.
Inside, there were roses. A series of fountains.
A copse of trees. No people. The whole thing—well manicured, thoughtfully looked after—was empty. Inaccessible.
When the voices from the passageway had passed, I listened at the secret door for a moment longer, and, hearing nothing, pushed back into the inner hallway.
I found the stairs at the end of the hall.
Went down them, and through an archway, past a pile of mops and hazel brooms. From there I reversed directions and counted doors—rectangles of light—and came to a stop in front of the seventh.
The entry was locked from the exterior with an iron dead bolt. I could open it—what lay beyond was what could not get out. But there were no ghouls or beasts or demons in this cage: If Morwen was right, inside, I’d find a pregnant woman.
With a scraping noise, the bolt loosened. I pushed through, intent on reaching Hemma.
I understood right away.
Elin’s malleable delicacy—her fainting, her weakness, her years of conditioning by the sweet maxims of her well-worn book—was appealing, certainly. The nature of a girl who could be cajoled to participate in a lifelong ruse. But she had been picked for her looks.
Hemma’s hair was as colorless as Elin’s.
Icy, near-white tresses. She had the same pinkness around her eyes.
Skin so pale it looked translucent. Even if the girl’s dress hadn’t belied an obvious swelling at her belly, I would have seen the truth of Morwen’s tale in an instant: The women looked too similar for the story to have been made up.
The princess’s baby would look like Elin’s without raising any suspicion.
“It all makes more sense now,” I said, to myself, more than to Hemma, who was staring at me, the stranger who had burst into her room, with alarm. She had sprung to her feet when I came through, and held, still, the sampler she had been working on, the needle now brandished like a weapon.
“Who are you?” she demanded. Clutching the hoop in her other hand.
A part of me wanted to laugh. At the absurdity and intelligence of it.
On Rosie’s behalf. After all my orchestrations—the market, the picnic, the damn broken chaise.
Both of my birth daughters had sun-kissed skin and dark, abundant hair.
Hair that flowed black. There was no amount of performance, no beauty, that could have passed this inevitable test. Otto had been right: For this task, they were wholly, undeniably not suitable.
Something had loosened inside of me, some tightness I had been holding on to. The world unspooling. “I am Etheldreda.” I took a step toward her. “The stepmother of your future sister-in-law.”
My announcement did not relax Hemma. The hand that held the needle flipped and rested protectively in front of her belly, as if the splayed fingers might disguise its swelled form. “You should not be here.”
“I already know about your…” I eyed her torso. “Condition.”
“Who sent you?” she demanded.
“It is clever,” I said, ignoring the question, “how much you look alike. You and Elin. Your painting, the one in the gallery, looks otherwise.”
Hemma’s eyelashes quivered and her hand fell. “I was painted to look like my mother.”
“She had you painted other than you are?”
Hemma’s coloring was the same as Elin’s, but she had had years of being conditioned as a princess.
She fixed me with an even stare and narrowed her eyes.
“She said I look depleted in the original. Bats and fleas, my brother used to say, drain all my blood when I sleep. Now, tell me—what are you doing in my rooms?”
From the size of her abdomen, I guessed she was a little less than halfway along. But she had small hands. A round face. The girl was just a child.
“Is your plan to deliver in secret? Keep the baby squirreled away and try to pass it off as Elin’s nine months after the wedding?”
“My plan?”
“I suppose people won’t really be able to tell the difference in size after a few months,” I mused aloud.
Such a big baby, people would exclaim. The blood of a king, I could imagine Simeon saying.
A hand on Elin’s arm squeezing too hard.
I shook off the image. The princess was being kept in a locked room.
The beautiful tapestries on the wall and the feather bed in the corner were no different than when Sigrid had tried to put a lace bow on the bandage that had covered her missing finger.
“Morwen is worried for you,” I told her.
Hemma let out a small huff of air. “What do you know of Morwen?”
I didn’t say anything and waited.
“Where is she?” she asked, more plaintively. She set her needle back down on the tabletop, making a show of the gesture.
“She’s tried to see you. She’s been turned away.”
The princess glanced at the door I had come through. “If Morwen sent you, then you are certainly not supposed to be here.”
I thought she was going to tell me to leave, to point at the door—but instead she stepped toward me and grabbed my wrist. Her fingers so thin. Delicate. “Someone might come at any minute. Please, I need to hear of Morwen. Let’s go to the gardens.”
She beckoned me through a set of doors that led outside and pulled me along a trellised walkway.
Explaining over her shoulder that we had to stay under the arbor.
Her mother’s chambers looked over the enclosed yard.
We must not be seen. “She had the garden built with no entrances except to and from my own rooms,” Hemma went on, “so that I could go outside, and no one would stumble upon me. But my mother worries, still, that someone will see from above.”
The girl was given an outdoor pen like a common animal. But it explained the rows of closed curtains. I looked up to all the mullioned windows—closed eyes—in the palace walls.
Hemma followed my glance. “My mother cannot see me with anyone other than her maidservants.”
“Surely you have a lady-in-waiting or an attendant?”
“There are two servants that attend me, the only ones in and out, and they are my mother’s. Everyone else was sent away.” Hemma shook her head. “That is why Morwen was dismissed. They could not have anyone partaking in the secret.” She let out a bitter laugh. “I had already told her.”
I felt a wave of dismay. “You are not allowed outside of your rooms?” How lonely it would be for a young girl to be given only a needle and thread to pass all the hours it took to grow a life inside of her.
Hemma gestured to herself. “How could I go anywhere? Now, please, give me news of Morwen. She attended to me since I was eleven.”
“And you are now?”
“Sixteen.”
“Morwen is safe,” I assured her, trying to keep the alarm from my face. “But unable to find employment. She was turned out with no references.”
We’d come to the end of the trellis. Sparing a worried glance toward the windows, Hemma led me farther, to the copse of trees. “No one can see us here,” she told me. “And I shall be Morwen’s reference.”
“Write one, and I will give it to her.” I thought of the lock on the door. “Are you confined here against your will, or by choice?”
“I cannot go out and about like this.” She gestured at herself again, as if imploring me to see: She could not go out and about in her own body.
“So, you are hidden—you will stay hidden—until the babe comes, and then return to the life of a princess.”
“There is no life for an unwed princess with child.” Her lips puckered, as if she were swallowing something sour. “My life has always been these rooms and these walls.”
I looked at the trees around us. Their trunks still weak with youth.
I was trying to make sense of it, of being here in this walled garden, in the construction of the garden itself, when Hemma might have just been sent away to a summer home.
“Why are they not just giving it away, your child? Why will they pass it off as Elin’s child? Why keep it in the royal family?”
“It is royal.” She stared at me.
“But—it will appear to be the firstborn child, the heir to the kingdom.”
“Yes, exactly.” Hemma watched me closely and looked, for the first time, unnerved. She shook her head. “Elin is your daughter? You are here for her?”
“Stepdaughter.” I nodded, feeling, again, the sensation of trying to wrap my arms around a boulder.
“And you say we are alike?” Hemma glanced worriedly at the palace windows. “Have you not wondered why Simeon would agree to take a wife so abruptly? Why a future king would stoop to such levels?”
“Stoop?” I repeated, offended. “He must care about you, greatly, to go to such lengths. Or your mother does, and he is doing as she wishes. But I cannot make sense of—”
“Stop,” she demanded, frustrated by my words.
I agreed with my silence and Hemma held my eyes, trying to say so much with her own.
“Who got you pregnant?” I asked, stupidly, because I knew a second before she said it. I was sorry to make her say it aloud, but it was too late.
“My brother.” She didn’t look away.
“Simeon?” I was still stunned by the confirmation.
“King of the beasts,” she confirmed. Her whole body tense.
“You two are—”
“No,” she whispered.
“You did not want—” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence.
“No, I did not,” she confirmed, with less vehemence, her shoulders falling.
“He preyed on you?” I asked, appalled. I could not help but think of my girls. Mathilde’s scar. The twin braids. The freckle on a calf. How easily all the world’s children become your own.
She shook her head and whispered, as if frightened: “Not just me. Not only me. Also me.”
The wall around the garden felt, suddenly, monstrous and suffocating.
Not only a snake—a constrictor. “You are his sister.” I did not want to believe her.
I did not want to accept her story. But—I thought back to the wound I had seen on Simeon’s arm, the day of our picnic.
His apologetic smile. His haste to dismiss it.
The sleeve pulled down. The lesion had had a distinctive pattern.
Semilunar and curved: It followed the crescent shape of human teeth.
Hemma was quiet. “Woman first, sister second.” Then she looked up and held my eyes. “She deserves to know.”