50. Then Trap
THEN: TRAP
The marriage of my sister and my sweetheart was announced at the following tenth-day service.
I sat next to my parents and Rowena, head bent slightly, eyes red rimmed from hours of tears.
Most of them had been shed at Magda’s feet while she, not a terribly sentimental woman, passed me her pipe and told me I would get over it eventually.
I needed to hear that, though I did not believe her. My heart had been sundered as if a cleaver had come down on it. I felt there was no recourse for me. I would weep over this forever. But I was nineteen, skinless and untried.
My heart was put to another test at church.
Starling finished his sermon, something having to do with hellfire, and then said, “And it is an honor to announce that our lord’s second son has chosen a wife in Rowena Miller.
They will marry three moons from now. May their union be fruitful and a credit to the spirit of Rodwin, the groom a strong hand and the bride a dutiful wife. ”
There was a collective murmur around the church, whispers and exclamations. Surprise was understandable as Bertram, Torm’s firstborn and legitimate son, was not yet married. And though our father was an elder and prominent business owner, Rowena had no noble blood in her.
Numbly, and refusing to look ahead to see Thane’s reaction, I looked down our pew to see my parents beaming with pride and my sister smiling nervously. She turned to me and widened her eyes in apology.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I did not get a chance to tell you. It happened so fast. Please don’t be angry with me.”
“Why would I be angry with you?” I asked, daring her to say it.
“Because I am your sister and I am supposed tell you things,” she said. “I tried to this morning, but—”
“It’s alright,” I said and smiled, though it felt like I was dying inside. I knew then, saw it in her face—she had no notion of Thane and I having been lovers. She was only apologizing for not telling me.
“I—I don’t know that I want to get married,” she continued in a low tone. “But I have to eventually, and Thane asked me, and he is the best of the boys our age. By quite a lot.”
“He is the very best,” I agreed.
Torm Sheridan officially chose to then install Rowena in the apothecary building with the house in front and garden in back.
Rowena spent more and more of her time in town, only a few days here and there at the farm.
I spent the duration of her betrothal shamelessly leaning on Magda.
The old woman may have been her usual grumpy self, but there was a softness in her eyes when she regarded me.
She seemed to double the number of tasks I had to carry out for her, but I was grateful for it. I needed the occupation.
Had I known what would transpire next, I would have paid more attention to the midwife, would have gleaned all that I could from her.
Half a moon before Rowena’s wedding, Magda and I were sent for in the middle of the night.
A keep guard carrying a cresset torch rode his mount hard up to our fence, flung the gate open, and pounded on our door.
A lady-in-waiting to Torm’s wife, married to the captain of the lord’s guard, was having birthing pains.
Magda only recently knew of the woman’s pregnancy and turned to me, a satchel of supplies slung over her shoulder, saying, “This is bad, Robbie. This is too soon and the mother is untested. It is her first and she’s barely three moons on. ”
“Why don’t they just ask for Rowena? She is mostly at the mill house now and would have been closer.”
“They asked for us and so we go.”
Magda mounted Apple Dumpling and I mounted our old mare.
We rode with the rather rude guard back up to Torm’s castle keep.
I had never been inside it. It was impressive and large, housing an entire community of folk within Sheridan.
We entered not through the monumental double ironclad doors at the front but a servant’s entrance in the side.
As we made our way up several stairs within a turret to the lady’s chambers, I glanced around, stupidly looking for Thane. I had not let myself really see him since our fight in the forest. I had kept my eyes downcast on tenth days.
The idea that my twin would marry my lover, that he would then have all that he wanted from his father and that he had so quickly moved on from me, sickened me.
When we arrived at a sedate but richly furnished room, mostly in reds and grays, a tapestry of a silvery flame hanging from the wall over their bed, I realized the woman and her husband were likely Perpatanian.
They must have been sent to Torm by King Pollux to increase the lord’s guards and control of the town.
They were more folk who would readily endorse Starling’s every word.
The priest himself stood just outside the half-open door, arms folded over his chest, a polite smile on his face.
“Madam Geist,” he said, nearly cheerful in his greeting.
Magda nodded. “Father,” she replied. “I assume you’ve said some prayers over the mistress inside?”
Starling frowned, but not angrily, almost as if he was disappointed in a child’s behavior. “Now, madam, I would not stain my person or my spirit with the goings on of womenfolk. It is not for a man to interfere. I stand here in the hall to offer comfort to the lord’s captain.”
“I see,” she said calmly.
I was in awe of her restraint and stewing over his use of “stain.”
“Then I pray, good priest,” Magda went on. “Tell me if the physician King Pollux gifted to us has seen to her.”
Starling frowned again. “Calling you is a kindness granted to the lady by our most gracious Lord Torm. We understand that you—you countryfolk once had a way of doing things. It is not for a physician to see to a child’s birth.
If the grace of Rodwin should allow for a babe to live, then it and its mother’s survival is up to our saint. ”
“Well then, that is a kindness. My apprentice and I will see to the woman now. I thank you for your prayers with the father. I am sure he is upset.”
Her words were said with such solemnity that there could be no sarcasm heard within them, but something in her face must have irked the priest.
I waited for his rebuke. But oddly enough, his irritation was quickly replaced with a satisfaction, as if we had proven him right about something. A chill went down the back of my spine.
Something was not right.
Magda charged inside and shooed out all of the other ladies save two female servants who waited, hands crossed over their midsections, heads bent.
The woman’s name was Gayla and she was young, perhaps only a winter or two older than me. She was lying on her back, sweating and weeping.
I watched Magda pull the coverlet down, grumbling about how the poor girl was clearly overheated.
When the coverlet came all the way off of her body, we saw the blood between her legs.
Magda rolled up the sleeves of her dress and then ran her hands over the woman’s flat belly, her pregnancy not that far along. She clucked and shook her head.
“Oh, dear,” she said, and the grace I only saw in the midwife when she was at a birth came over her features. Her usual gruffness faded. Taking the lady’s hand in hers, she said, “Your body pushes the child out soon because it has died in the womb, my poor girl.”
The woman began to sob. “I—I knew it.”
“I am so sorry,” Magda replied. “I know what it is to lose a child like this.”
My eyes flitted to the midwife in surprise, but I continued unpacking the satchel out onto a small table near the bed and looked away.
“This is not the end of motherhood for you though. You’re young and strong.
We’ll help get you through this. And you’ll most likely have other children.
They won’t heal this wound, but you’ll have them.
And you will always think of this babe with a deep and boundless affection.
It is not lost to you in spirit.” Magda looked up from the woman to the servants.
“The two of you need to bring me the coldest water you can pump from whatever wells the lord has,” she said to the servants.
“Off with you, if you please. Thank you.”
After the two women left, she instructed me to bar the door.
Then she turned back to the lady and said, “I worry for your life. We can hurry the delivery with a medicinal and then we will need to remove the afterbirth with my tools. You’ll have a better chance of recovery that way.
You’ve bled a lot without the babe’s delivery. How long has it been?”
Gayla whimpered that she could not remember but she had begun to bleed in the morning.
“They’ve let you be like this for far too long. Do you want what I can offer, or do you want to keep waiting? Either way, a savvy crone like me knows. It is too early and the babe is gone. Your choice, my girl.”
“It’s not a sin as the child is already gone?”
“It’s no sin, girl. What god would want you to suffer so?”
Magda talked the woman through her work tenderly.
Ignoring the knocking on the door, we held the woman between us afterward and clumsily bathed her with cloths and the lukewarm water left over in a jug at her bedside.
We helped her dress in fresh clothing. We gave her yarrow and linens to staunch her blood and some lightleaf for the pain.
We sat with her, and Magda distracted her with talk of how strong she was, how she was in good health and this could happen with a woman’s first quickening.
The lady-in-waiting was utterly exhausted, and though she was not asleep, she was drowsy and closed her eyes.
My mentor looked down at her patient, stroking the woman’s cheek with the back of her hand.
Then Magda got a faraway, ruminating look on her face, as if she might cry, and I grew afraid for she never had any expression other than wryness or contempt.
She blinked, turned to me, and said, “Are you ready for your mantle, daughter?”
“Mantle?”