Isabel is moaning quietly. I can see that she is bleeding but nobody staunches her wounds. My mother has the baby wrapped warmly. One of the women looks up smiling, her face stained with tears. We all wait for the little cry, we wait for my mother’s smile.
My mother’s exhausted face is grey. ‘It’s a boy,’ she says harshly: the one thing we all want to hear. But oddly, there is no joy in her voice and her mouth is grim.
‘A boy?’ I repeat hopefully.
‘Yes, it’s a boy. But it’s a dead boy. He is dead.’
THE RIVER SEINE, FRANCE, MAY 1470
The sailors take down the sails and cart them to the sailyards for repair, and scrub out the royal cabin where the boards are stained with Izzy’s blood and my vomit. They say that it is a miracle we were not drowned in the storm, they speak of their own horror when the chain went up across the Calais harbour entrance. They say only my father’s weight on the wheel made it possible for the steersman to get the ship round. They say they never want to take a voyage like that again, but if they had to, they would only do it with my father at the wheel. They say that he saved them. But never again will they sail with women on board. They shake their heads. Never again with women who are chased by a witch’s wind. They are exultant in their survival. They all think that the ship was cursed with a woman in labour and a dead baby on board. They all believe that the ship was chased by a witch’s wind whistled up by the queen to blow us to hell. Everywhere I go on board there is an immediate and total silence. They think the witch’s wind was hunting us, will follow us still. They blame us for everything.
They get up the chests from the hold and at last we can wash and change our clothes. Isabel is still bleeding but she gets up and gets dressed, though her gowns hang oddly on her. Her proud belly has gone, she just looks fat and sick. Izzy’s holy girdle and pilgrim badges for her confinement are unpacked with her jewels. She puts them in the box at the foot of our bed without comment. There is a wordless awkwardness between the two of us. Something terrible has happened, so terrible that we don’t even know how to name it or speak of it. She disgusts me, she disgusts herself, and we say nothing about it. Mother takes the dead baby away in a box and someone blesses it and throws it into the sea, I think. Nobody tells us, and we don’t ask. I know that it was my inexperienced tugging that pulled his leg from the socket; but I don’t know if I killed him. I don’t know if Izzy thinks this, or Mother knows it. Nobody says anything to me either way, and I am never going to speak of it again. The disgust and the horror lies in my belly like seasickness.
She should be in confinement until she has been churched, we should all be locked in her rooms with her for six weeks, and then emerge to be purified. But there are no traditions for giving birth to a dead baby in a witch’s storm at sea; nothing seems to be as it should. George comes to see her when the cabin is clean and her bed has fresh linen. She is resting as he comes in and he leans over the bed to kiss her pale forehead, and smiles at me. ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ he says.
She hardly looks at him. ‘Our loss,’ she corrects him. ‘It was a boy.’
His handsome face is impassive. I guess that Mother has already told him. ‘There will be others,’ he says. It sounds more like a threat than a reassurance. He goes to the door as if he cannot wait to get out of the cabin. I wonder if we smell, if he can smell death and fear on us.
‘If we had not been nearly wrecked at sea I think the baby would have lived,’ she says with sudden viciousness. ‘If I had been at Warwick Castle I would have had midwives to attend me. I could have had my holy girdle and the priest would have prayed for me. If you had not ridden out with Father against the king and come home beaten, I would have had my baby at home and he would be alive now.’ She pauses. His handsome face is quite impassive. ‘It’s your fault,’ she says.
‘I hear that Queen Elizabeth is with child again,’ he remarks, as if this is an answer to her accusation. ‘Please God she gets another girl, or a dead baby herself. We have to have a son before she does. This is just a setback, it is not the end.’ He tries to smile cheerfully at her. ‘It’s not the end,’ he repeats and goes out.
Isabel just looks at me, her face blank. ‘It is the end of my baby,’ she observes. ‘Certainly, it is the end of him.’
