Edward hovered over me, too, but, as was thought proper in those times, did not invite me to his bed for the forty days I lay with the bedcurtains drawn, seeing neither the sun nor moon until time came to be churched. Father Raymond had always said the churching of women was a ceremony of thanksgiving for a safe delivery, but at Wellingford it seemed quite another thing. There, so the midwives said, a woman was considered unclean and unholy by virtue of the blood she had shed in giving birth, and only the priest’s words said over her put her in a state of grace once more. While there were some at Wellingford who disbelieved such nonsense, Lady Janet believed it wholeheartedly, and it was her way the wives forced on me, whether I would or no. In some other time or place I might have made a fuss, but since Edward and his kin were kindly and generally well-disposed toward me, there was no point in making them uncomfortable.
At the end of the “lying in,” I went to the chapel, all muffled up in the traditional veils, to take a seat near the altar and have the priest read psalms over me to compensate for my having offended God by bearing a child in holy wedlock. The “chapel smell” was very strong that day, as it had been the night Ned and I were married. I still couldn’t identify what it was. When the priest had finished, I was supposedly free of the world again, able to look upon sunshine and stars. I did not tell them I had been sneaking out of bed nighttimes to sit in the window watching the moon and longing for something I could not quite name. My own mother, I think. Someone of my own, at least, who could explain to me what I was feeling. Despite all my good intentions I could not love my own child. It horrified me that I saw Jaybee’s malevolence in that tiny face. She was half me! Surely my half counted for something! Often though I convinced myself of that, when I saw her, when she opened her dark eyes and looked at me, I saw only violence and terror and felt only a memory of pain.
In addition to her fears about newly delivered women, Lady Janet also feared the babe would be taken by fairies, so there were maids about day and night, hovering over the cradle. Janet told tales of babes snatched away with changelings left in their place. No one said why fairies preferred human children to their own, and I considered it unlikely. I had seen one that Janet spoke of and knew him to be no changeling but a poor idiot, what the twentieth called a Down’s syndrome child, born to a woman in her forty-fourth year, but there was no point in arguing the matter with Janet. It would do little Elly no harm to have loving people about her, even for a spurious reason.
Though I kept her at a distance from me, she had no lack of caring hands to help her and gentle arms to hold her. Ned played with her as if she had been a novel toy, doing peek-a-baby and pat-a-cake until both he and Elly were helpless with laughter. More than once I surprised on his face an expression of grateful wonder, as though there were something in being a father he had neither expected nor dared hope for. As for me, I wavered between resentment that the babe was not the child of someone I loved and thankfulness that at least she bid fair to be beautiful and not apish as Jaybee’s child might well have been.
Remembering what I had learned in the twentieth, I took such precautions as I might to be sure I did not conceive again. Luck or God was with me. Almost a year went by and I did not kindle. Remembering Ned’s boistrous talk before our marriage about having scattered his seed widely without issue, I began to think he might be sterile. I wished I knew for sure, that I might give up the counting of days and the playing of games, pretending to have headaches or other infirmities to keep him at a distance betimes. Still, the thought gave me some hope that Elly would be our only child.
I took to riding a good deal, for exercise, and to get away from the house. I went often alone, preferring that to being pursued by panting stableboys mounted on fat carthorses, for the master of horse would let them ride nothing better and there were no men to spare to keep an eye on me. One day I had ridden out early, going up into the hills, and I came to a ridge where one could look down, over the burned abbey and the lake and across the lake to the mound of roses where Westfaire slept.
I didn’t see the man there until I had dismounted. He moved, and it startled me.
“M’lady,” he said. “Do not be afraid.”
Oh God, I knew that voice. I turned and went toward him, he looking across at me, at first in curiosity and then, almost, in terror.
“Beauty!” he cried.
“Giles!” I screamed in return. Oh, he was the same, the same. He had hardly aged at all The same light brown hair, though it was cut short, as though he had spent much time under helm. His eyes were the same when they looked into mine.
“You can’t be,” he said firmly, like a man turning his back on an enchantment. “Oh no, you can’t be!”
“No, I am!” I cried. “I really am. It wasn’t me who got enchanted, Giles. I was outside!”
He took my hands. He pulled me close to him and I felt the thunder of his heart. It was the first time he had ever held me, and everything in me turned warm and molten
