When a servant fetches him to meet his child, Petrus cannot at first understand her, her words soft and unreal against the cacophony of a court still reeling from the fear and bloodshed of the last weeks.
“A girl,” she says, and then, with a flick of her eyes that seems to Petrus like the sketching of a cross over her breast, “Very—like you.”
His own breastbone aches suddenly, as if from a physical blow. Petrus is dressed all in black, severe as a Spaniard. He follows the narrow sweep of the servant’s woolen skirt down a network of corridors until he arrives at his own door—or what was his own door, until his wife’s confinement transformed it into something else entirely. A place for women’s secrets, which he was glad enough to let them keep, until the night of the massacre. He thinks of his wife’s hand, grasping his of its own volition, and his stomach clenches.
He taps at the door with one knuckle, lightly enough that he is not certain he even wants her to hear. His ears are filled with a rushing song, at once familiar and strange; it is several moments before he recognizes it from long ago as the voice of the sea, as he used to hear it on Tenerife: echoing faintly through the streets on stormy nights; in the spiraling bellies of the shells he liked to hold to his ears.
“Enter,” he hears, muffled, through the wood. After a moment, he does.
The room is shadowed and overwarm. His wife sits up in bed, surrounded by pillows. Her elbows are propped against two fat cushions, to support her arms as they cradle something small and tightly swaddled. Petrus’s hands curl around the edge of the door.
“Are you well?” he says, and her face turns toward him, creased and smudged.
“Very well,” she says, with something that approaches, but does not quite become, a smile. “Thanks be to God.”
He takes a step into the room. “I heard—it is a girl.”
“Yes.”
“And”—his voice rends—“that she bears me strong resemblance.”
A laugh that sounds like water from a fountain; like rain. “Yes.”
“Ah,” he says, more sigh than word, and stands limp as a flag when the wind stops blowing. “I am sorry.”
A log shifts; the fire snaps. She looks down at their child. “Petrus,” she says. “Come here. Meet your daughter.”
His lips close at her use of his name, which sounds like earth, like sage leaves, from her mouth. He comes forward very slowly, each footstep weighted. When he passes the mirror, he sees himself accidentally and falters—his reflection looks untamed, his hair standing up wildly from his scalp, as if he spent the walk to this room tearing at it with his fingers.
A step or two from the bed, he stops, hands hanging at his sides. His wife moves the child’s swaddle aside so that he can see her unobstructed: the curl of ear, the curve of cheek, her little mushroom nose. The closed eyes and diligently working mouth. Petrus’s heart stutters oddly in his chest at the sight—of her hair, fine as clouds, covering every bit of her that he can see; of her miniature hand, so softly furred, splayed against her mother’s breastbone. Of his wife’s breast, unashamedly bare, threaded with startling blue like a river’s tributaries spread across a map. He has felt the weight of her breasts, but until now has seen them only in gray, moonlit flashes. He glances away, full-throated and hot, to where the child rests on the still-rounded shelf of his wife’s belly.
“Come closer,” his wife says, still not looking at him, and he does, the command tugging him like a lead rope. He leans over a little and has the dizzying sensation that he is looking at his past self. When his wife’s eyes find his, Petrus sees his every fear and joy reflected in her face.
Then she yawns, long and wide as a whirlpool sucking down a ship. He starts backward.
“I should leave you to rest,” he says; but his eyes stray once again to their child.
Her hand reaches out. “No—” she says. “Please—stay. I have . . . I have been almost entirely on my own ever since . . .”
He pauses.
“Please,” she says again; and she looks at him—at him—until he finds himself shifting forward, perching with tentative care on the bed beside her. For an excruciatingly long moment, there is no sound in the room but that of their child’s determined swallows.
“I would have thought,” he says at last, “that Her Majesty would provide a nurse.” Nevers’s wife has engaged a nurse for all three of their children; the ladies at court all do, as far as he knows.
“She did.” A pause; he hears the scrape of his wife’s top teeth against the bottom. “But the midwife—she said—” She looks down at the baby, then up at him, just for a moment, before her eyes dash sideways. “It does not matter what she said. It was clear the nurse—was not suitable.”
Then she laughs a little, softly. At his inquiring look, she flushes; and then tilts her head to a defiant angle. “Her tongue,” she says. “I can feel it. It tickles.”
The babe chooses that moment to come away from her mother’s breast, mouth slack and dribbling. Her eyes are closed, her head thrown back over Catherine’s arm. His wife, face flushed, rearranges her chemise as best she can one-handed.
“We will need a name for her,” she says. She smooths the hair on the child’s brow. One corner of her mouth curls; her face is tender as new grass. She glances sideways at Petrus, and her smile drops just a little.
“She is perfect, is she not, Monsieur?” she says; and now, in terrible contrast to her tenderness, there is a sudden hardness to her voice, like a shield thrust out between him and the child. As if he might wield a sword. Petrus leans a little back.
“You called me Petrus, only a few minutes ago.”
Everything soft has left her face, as if the sword she thinks he wields has sliced it off. “You have not answered my question.” And then, when he cannot speak, only makes a drifting, helpless motion with both hands, she says, “I did not think you—anyone—you—could look at her and not see—”
His eyes are drawn again, of their own accord, to their child. The slow rise and fall of her chest. The toothless mouth, half-opened. The ache in his own chest presses, more insistent; he can feel his wife’s eyes fixed upon him, and after months of her eyes resting everywhere except on him, her stare now is ferocious.
“She is—” He reaches out, and then lets his hand drop to the coverlet. How to say that until this moment, the babe she carried had not seemed entirely real to him? That he observed the swelling of her week by week as if through church glass, the colors distorting, making everything appear unreal.
This, though, is real. The scents of herbs are sharp in Petrus’s nostrils; and underneath is another smell, somehow earthier than the herbs, and less pleasing. The smell of birth, he suspects; though it smells disconcertingly like death. He has the sensation that his wife, in giving birth, has become someone like one of the queen’s astronomers—a person who can decipher meaning in curls of smoke; a scattering of stones; a crooked angle in the stars. Someone who has brushed the mysteries of the universe with her finger ends.
When he looks at her, though, he sees not an astronomer but a young woman with a creased and crumpled face, clutching a child who looks like him. And it is that clutching that loosens something that has, for much of his life, been drawn tight and painful inside him; for this woman, his wife, has no intention of giving up their child to anyone.
One thought slipped free from his mind’s fierce grip as he followed the servant who fetched him to the birthing chamber. A reluctant half-formed image, and the accompanying squalling noise. His child—his daughter—lying naked and alone, her mother’s eyes pulled away from her inexorably as a compass needle pulls north.
He has imagined the scene so many times—how he was placed on the steps of the church—but he could never decide whether his mother, his father, would have felt any reluctance as they set him down, as they released him from their arms, their care. Whether his mother might have turned back to see him one last time before hurrying away; whether Pedro’s cries might have echoed in his father’s ears. All he knows is how hard Manuel said he was screaming when Manuel came upon him, when he was too small to do anything but scream, too small to know why he was screaming.
That scream, he thinks sometimes, has been lodged inside of him all his life.
“She is beautiful,” Petrus says at last, his voice catching on the last word. His wife’s eyes jump; her brow loosens, just a little. Mouth thin, she nods, short and emphatic.
“She is.”
They sit in silence. She has not offered the babe to him, and he does not yet feel that he can ask; is not even confident that he can hold her without somehow causing her injury.
His fingers curl into his palms, lest he reach for her anyway.
And then Catherine yawns again. But before Petrus can try to excuse himself again so she might rest, she says, “Tell me a story.”
He blinks. “A story?”
Another yawn, so wide her eyes close helplessly. “Your story,” she says when it has passed. “Your true story.” Very gently, she strokes a finger down the soft slope of their daughter’s nose. “I want to know where this little one comes from.”
“I—”
“The caves are false, no? They are not where you lived?” Her eyes pluck at his, one brow raised.
“They—no,” he says, and then, “that is, they are real. But they were not where I lived.”
Her second brow joins the first. And then questions come from her mouth in such a scramble, he understands that they have been waiting there all this time, unspoken. “Where are you from?” she says. “Was this all very strange to you, when you came here? France—the court—the church—?”
Petrus shakes his head. “I was baptized as an infant,” he says. “I’ve been attending church all my life, even before I came here.” Her face shows astonishment, all the more so when he allows a little harshness into his voice. “The Spanish conquered my island—Tenerife—a few dozen years before I was born, and brought Catholicism with them to the poor rude natives.”
She gapes. And then she astonishes him in turn. “Tenerife,” she murmurs, and closes her eyes, as if trying to recall something. When she opens them again, she says, “Near Africa?” and tucks her lips together, as if trying to keep back a grin.
He stares. “How did you—?”
“My father was a merchant, Husband,” she says, tart. “He traveled widely. We owned maps. Many maps. My father let me look at them as much as I wanted, and endured all my questions with good humor.” She softens a little when she says again, “Please—will you tell me everything?”
He swallows, loudly enough to hear, then pushes himself back so that he is sitting beside her, back against the great carved bedstead. He folds his hands over his stomach. And then, haltingly, he begins.