In the week after that terrible night, Catherine waits and waits for something worse to happen; but it does not. She remains padded inside her room. And yet, when twinges spark along the sides of her belly, across the meat of her lower back, she finds herself pausing where she stands, saying, “No!” with such firmness that the nips of pain subside. She must wait, she thinks, until she is certain it is safe before she brings this child into the world.
At night, she finds herself thinking of her husband. How he came to her, nearly naked, only a shirt for armor. How she woke from her doze to her cheek pressed against the hard knob of his shoulder. She shakes her head to stop these thoughts, as if in doing so she might shake off the influence of his hairy-handed touch; but still they return, shuffling in like rueful children who know they are doing something naughty. When she finally sleeps, the midwife snoring on the floor beyond her bed curtains, Catherine dreams of the queen.
Her Majesty is hunched and weeping, her black gown and veil painted all the colors of the bright glass windows of the chapel. In life, she is so formidable a figure that it is strange to see her so diminished, her spine bending into the shrimp-like curl of old age.
Catherine approaches this dream-queen hesitantly. She can see only in chinks, the edges of her vision dark, as if something sits there, blocking them. Her footsteps make no sound upon the stone church floor, and the air is humid with patient anticipation. Only when she draws close to the queen does she realize that someone sits beside her, someone round and sturdy who cradles a swaddled child in the thick, hair-covered arms that the queen herself chose to deliver Catherine’s babe.
Catherine stumbles back and tries to cry out, but her voice will not come. And she realizes she holds in her mouth a small, round bead, attached by a short span of ribbon to the mask that keeps the sun from her face and the air from her lungs. Something squeezes her, starting slow but steadily gripping tighter until Catherine’s knees buckle.
Her Majesty turns, smiling through her tears. “Saturn will rule you during the birth,” she says; and now her smile is a frozen thing, as if she set it down upon her face and forgot it there.
No, Catherine tries to say; but something is crushing her, and the bead is in her mouth and she cannot spit it out, however she tries.
She wakes to the midwife’s brisk and gentle hands, swimming up from the depths of her dream and into wakefulness, gasping like a drowned woman brought to the surface. But no—she cannot be awake—whatever was crushing her is still there. When she tries to wriggle away from it, it squeezes impossibly tighter until Catherine thinks her spine might snap.