Still, I was carefully gentle and kindly in my mood, receptive in my manner. So much was owed the man, after all. I took my wedding vows as seriously as I might for what time I had. He liked me to look lovely, so I made a point of that. Even when I became, all too soon, swollen as a melon, I could smell sweet as any garden and wear flowing things that rustled gently.
We rode. He insisted I ride sidesaddle, which I hated. My grandfather’s invention evidently had gained some little reputation among the neighboring nobility. We read together, he evincing delight that I knew how to read and write, which, indeed, I did better than he. I told him stories, things I had experienced, things I had heard of, and he was mightily amused, wondering how I had come by such a store of tales. I made up a lie about my father’s fool, that he was a widely traveled creature with a retentive memory who had fed me on stories from my childhood. It was more or less true. The fool had fed me on stories, right enough, though they had mostly been of a less than salutary kind that made the women he had known the butt of his evil humor.
When we had been married about four months, Edward came in from riding one day to tell me that the roses mounded Westfaire still, that the enchantment remained. He looked hurt.
I was prepared for this. I told him that we knew half the enchantment had been removed, for I was able to appear regularly in the daylit hours, but that since complete lack of inquisitiveness was the conditio sine qua non there must be some kernel of curiosity in him still, which prevented the entire enchantment from being broken. He flushed, and I knew I was safe from further conversation on that matter.
Time wore on through the winter to the early spring, and the baby was born. It was early, of course. I made much of that when labor started, saying no, no, it could not be yet. I need hardly have troubled. In that time, babies often came early and were too tiny to live. Often they died. I thought I would die, wished to die, wished I had stayed in the twentieth where there are drugs for such pain, almost screamed out for my boots to take me there, but was drowned out by the midwives’ exhortations to breathe, to breathe, to push, to push. I screamed and breathed and pushed. There was a squall, followed by bustling to and fro, then the tiny swaddled creature was laid on my arm while someone messed about between my legs, cleaning up. There was much clucking over the afterbirth, in which the midwives purported to read signs and portents of both good and evil, but they soon gave over and set things to rights. I thought of Aunt Lavvy as they sprinkled oil of lavender about and burned sweet resins in the candles to kill the mudflats, seaside smell of birthing. When Edward was allowed in, we were clean and sweet once more, and he gazed at us both as he might have gazed at heavenly angels.
“What shall we name her,” he asked in a whisper, his hand gently upon my arm.
“After my mother,” I told him. “Elladine. That was my mother’s name.” I wanted to love the child. I wanted to remind myself that children need a mother’s love.
He added a string of family names, and a day or so later she was taken to the chapel by Janet to be christened. Though she was one-quarter fairy, I made no mention of the fact. My own christening had started all this mess. Better the baby get by as simply as possible with Robert and the Lady Janet as her godparents and the blessing of Holy Church to guard her through life.
After that, time seemed almost to stop. I tried to nurse her myself, rejecting the wet-nurse from the village. I rather liked the feel of it, liked being close to her. The sight and sound of the tiny fuzz-covered head so tight against me, the little star-shaped hands pushing like a kitten’s paws, the toothless pink mouth agape like a bird’s, all were interesting. Then one morning when she was about two weeks old—it was midmorning, actually, with the sun casting westward beams along the wall at the edge of the heavy curtains—as she was nursing, she opened her eyes and looked at me and it was Jaybee’s look, greedy and violent. Her mouth clamped down on me as though strong fingers pinched me. There was blood on my nipple. I gave a cry, and the maids came rushing in. I told them to fetch the wet-nurse, that my breasts would no longer be enough for the child, keeping my voice as calm as I could though inside I bubbled with hysteria. He too had bitten me there. He too had drawn blood.
[“Now,” I said to Israfel.
“Wait a little,” he said. “She is coming to it of her own accord.”]
Thereafter they brought her to me once or twice a day, to look at. She was everything tiny, precious, holdable. Everything fragile and sweet. And yet his eyes looked out at me from the infant face, as though he lay within the infant mind, waiting. After that, I could not touch her without an instinctive aversion, a revulsion. The wet-nurse fed her; the nursemaid changed her napkins; and Edward adored her. Seeing his face above the child was like seeing the spring sun rising over the fields. He was so full
