Learwife Read online

  To Eglantine

  This is the story.

  There was a king, Lear, or Leir, son of Bladdud the Mad. Great gift-giver, with his many knights and liegeman Kent, he ruled for decades. He had three daughters, no sons.

  When old and care-bent he said to these daughters, I will pass on my crown and divide my kingdom, and give most to the one who says she loves me best. And the Lady Goneril said, I do love thee most, and won a portion. And the Lady Regan said, I do love thee better, and won a portion. And the honest Lady Cordelia said nothing, and was banished, married to a foreign king over the seas. And Goneril and Regan took all.

  Alas for foolish Lear, he went to Goneril and said, Will you care for me in my age? and she said, No. And he went to Regan and said, Will you care for me in my age? and she said, No. And so he became mad as his father had been.

  And Cordelia and her king returned, to conquer his land and care for him, but were broken in battle with the sisters, and Cordelia killed where she stood. And the ladies Regan and Goneril did die of spite. And Lear died of heartbreak for Cordelia; and only his liegeman Kent was left, to mourn him.

  So: hearken to this, messengers, men on the fleetest of horses.

  Care-bent king Lear is dead.

  His two eldest daughters, the Lady Regan, the Lady Goneril, dead.

  His youngest, most beloved, Cordelia, dead.

  No sons.

  So let it be known.

  BOOK 1

  1.

  The word has come that he is dead, now, and the girls. And that it is finished.

  Today they will ring the bells. The priest will say four masses, for their souls. The autumn light is fragile and my veil is thick, and I must descend. To light the candles. This is just and Christian, and I am afraid.

  I pause now at the head of the stair. The arc of a silvered glass on the wall holds my face, its jaw thrust like blackthorn. Through the density of my linen veil it loses its distinguishing parts, becomes mass and hollow, an unnamed plain. I trace the forehead, the lips he once called house of all my country, and they are foreign, without place. Hidden, like a white fox in a blizzard.

  Though my sight is covered I feel the first shadows of vespers arriving. The peeling off of sky.

  I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear’s wife. I am here. History has not taken my body, not yet.

  The lady Ruth holds my arm, her shoulder’s serving thickness at my back. I lean to the wall of the stair and pitch forth, into the dark.

  * * *

  In the abbey chapel they are massed, waiting. Few of them have seen me; I am mostly myth, the abbess’s legendary woman. Taut in herself. Their covered heads turn: nuns are not invulnerable to curiosity – they seek God in every small stone.

  Shame flows into me. That the queen should be here, that she is thrown so low in the world. It makes me ache in my lungs and mouth, a pain that smothers even the misery I have been under since yesterday, when the messenger came. That was low and brutal, a keening. This new raw feeling is higher, cruel, as if pressed burning on my hand.

  Ruth moves to lay my veil over my shoulder. As a modest widow should wear.

  I feel its weight on my body and am engulfed with fire. Scorch across the floor. The bloodiness of my rage, the colour of it on my skin, burning all that touch me. Hence Lear would call me storm-wife, as he walked through the upper hall banging shutters in pretended caution, knowing that my anger could tear away a roof, strip a palace clear.

  I full throw the veil across my forehead and find the light. My age-scored cheeks, the famous eyes that Lear’s Fool held as ‘sweet vipers’ in verse: let them witness it. A queen wrapped, indistinct, is no queen. Let me be fresh to them, bleeding, brought in still shuddering from the hunt. Let them prise me from the jaw of this.

  A woman’s small intake of breath, at my nakedness, the raw circle of my face. Which they have never seen. Then silence.

  So unveiled I take the front pew, with its royal mark, the crest of the king upon a cushion never used. The priest Manfred will not look at my face. Begins.

  * * *

  After he has done, we process down the aisle. The abbess pauses, lets me pass before her from the front pew. Rank is here even in death.

  So: I lead them all out into the pale sun of the abbey cloisters. Head of the funeral column. I think of horses, of a small local animal being hitched to tiers of carriage-ponies to guide them across rivers or dense marsh ground. Pushing through mist in the royal coach, I once looked out and saw a donkey raise its trembling ears at the front of the train, listening to the air.

  They are expecting me to weep. Also they wish to see me in full, the sun on my half-greyed hair, and compare my face to the circulated woodcuts from my marriages. Most had it near to the bone: a long chin, high eyes in a watchful oval under a blotted, spiked crown. Ancient blood pooling in my cheeks. The artists gave me a small mouth for fashion, but really I have a broadness in the lower lip, which Lear’s braver poets liked to pun upon. She’s of good stock, she has the lip of a stockfish.

  What one remembers, what comes swimming up from the silt.

  I have been here for fifteen years.

  The abbess comes and places her fingers on my bare wrist, then does the sign of the Holy Cross, stitching it into the air, where it hangs. In great grief there is still the glory of the Lord, she says, and is so deeply young she has perhaps not presided over a memorial of rank before. Even a mocker such as this – a funeral with no bodies, merely four candles on the altar-cloth, to signify. One flame, and one, and one, and one.

  Suddenly my density, the anger that had weighed me to my seat, like a stone, is dissolved, and instead there is dangerous lightness, hollow, as if a child could blow and collapse me.

  I take my wrist from her and give it to the lady Ruth, who grips it wholly, within both hands. She has been crying, the moist edge of her habit clinging to her neck. The abbess wants to speak, looks at my face, retreats.

  When the messenger came I was rising from prayer, shaking the dust from my tunic, which has Flemish thickness to distinguish myself, my visible rank. I heard his horse stamp beside the gate and thought, Stallion, eighteen hands, hard-ridden. I have animal-sound in me: I can hear the brush of them through walls and know their bone-weight, how they move.

  He came through the courtyard, asked for the abbess by name to give his news. Had sweat across his back down to the slick of his breeches from the swiftness and inelegance of the ride. I knew and measured men by that once.

  The abbess said, May his God protect and cherish his soul.

  A violent thing descended. Hawk-swoop. All that was raised in me, every round part, was flattened. Scraped clean. The remainder was sheer, one could not grip it. I felt slick, slipping out of palms like a wet stone. Forgot speech, forgot how to move my throat for breath.

  A nun offered me her hand. In what I distantly recognised as an indication of my own madness I took it. I who would not accept an arm to aid me onto a horse fifteen hands high.

  The thought surfaced: Once again he surprises me.

  2.

  I remember the king learning: of nothingness, of the idea of being gone.

  There was a noble’s eldest boy at the winter court – he’d been trained in the city in the new Arabic numerals, for his accountancy. When Lear and I tired he offered to show it. Wrote it out, his strange system, on the back of a book. A family of symbols: 8, 3, 2, 5. Watching I thought they looked like animals, curled in on themselves, or stretching light limbs, showing a neck to the breeze, a tail, a tongue. The last he explained denoted nothing, the state of it, to have an empty purse or no more debt. This shape: 0. Like a mouth; like a
cunny.

  Lear had difficulties. What is this, this round thing? You cannot build on a hole in the earth. If I have nothing surely I need no mark of it.

  Can you not leave a space? I wondered. Surely that was sufficient. A gap, a fall through the ink: here is naught, avoid it, map elsewhere.

  The boy drew it again, larger, struggled to explain. Lack defines plenty. It is how we know that we came from God: darkness, and then the light. So we are aware of the light.

  Lear was beyond youth then, beyond the subtleties of abstract thought on a winter afternoon in a cold hall; preferred old bloated epics, his own verse, rich food and bad sport. He snorted. Religious arguments are perfidious. I have no pigs of a saleable size, no purple weave, no fruit left after my daughters finish with the stores. You would spend an eternity enumerating what it is I do not have. No, keep close to the real. Hand banged on the table.

  Forgive me, my king, but if you die, would you not like your subjects to have a word for your absence? ‘There is no king.’ Not a space, or a gap in the ledger. We must acknowledge loss and account for it safely, otherwise—

  I was astonished: the daring. Talk to Lear of king-death, the end of himself! I looked then at the pate of the king, its rushed redness, the flush of broken veins around his eyes, and felt the metal of it: his will. That would not vanish; that would drive his mortal softness on, even through rot, through fields of sharpened pikes, the things that lay us low, and still push forth into the world, livid as living flame.

  Ah, he said, drawing his robes, preparing to rise. Old; or feeling age, experiencing its indignities, the crackle and fuss of bones. Your death may be an emptiness, boy, but the world would know of mine even if they were blind, or senseless. They would look at the hole and say, ‘There was Lear.’ That’s a king, boy.

  The boy was right: it is necessary to leave a mark. To say, There was, and now there is not. To draw the circle, and stand within it, and hear – what?

  Silence, now. The end of the account.

  * * *

  Back in my rooms, this little eyrie for noble visitors marooned above an abbey courtyard, I have taken the pins from the funeral veil and let it slough off behind me, like a skin.

  How is it possible to have been married once, let alone twice? To be that animal condition mate. When you are knotted – and put your head to his shoulder, find the small softnesses.

  Even in years alone, locked in this place, I was Lear’s wife, I had threaded his body with mine, like a long needle. And still then I was another wife, the first, of the boy who died. And still now I am wife to them both, perhaps. Is this possible? Like being the mother of many different children, mother and mother and mother, all laid upon one another like layers of leather in a saddle.

  I shiver, my body vibrates, a bird arranging its feathers in a new wind. I will be leaving this place, perhaps soon; perhaps in the next hours. Before vespers. They may see fit to do it then. As Lear is gone, as the protection that glazed me here, in this place, has cracked, and the clay shown through. They have no more reason to harbour me, and so.

  Whom will I be out in the world now, after so long? What is my name, when the man who named me has entered the roots of the earth, and opened his mouth to the deep death-waters? Queen of no-word. Queen of stopped breath.

  I am dressed in white; this is the noble’s mourning-clothes. Ruth had found some paler robes and laid them in lime in the autumn sun, until they washed into pale grey. I feel as if I am wearing cloud, as if I am no longer a solid thing.

  When my first husband died I remember I was portioned his mother’s mourning-clothes. Lace darkened by sweat. Her arms even in age were thinner than mine, and as I prayed for his soul in his chapel the cambric sleeves split gently at one elbow, then the other, in what felt like an act of sarcasm. I thought then, This cannot be worse, and here I am, in bleached robes discarded by religious sisters for their threadbare elbows and knees.

  The woman who gathers the funeral veil, who tends me in my rooms after the funeral, the lay sister, has never married. Will never. Her family have sent her here to shift water for the nuns and aristocratic dying, her broad back for heaving our washing, her thick wrists over our slops. I watch her and her high skull as she crushes the veil into a square for storing, and am conscious of how skinned I am, how my nerves are standing thick across my forehead. But it is better than the idea of the deaths, of the four little ghosts, husband and three daughters dead, so I speak to her.

  Stupid girl, will you ruin everything.

  I am sorry.

  Just take it away. Burn it. I will not wear it again, peevishly, knowing the smallness of this. But she goes, stolid and rebuked, and the four little ghosts recede, under this weight I have placed on them.

  I do not wish them to be married, Lear had said. Half-day. Religious, to honour a saint who’d died spectacularly; a feast, dancers flickering their bells, mummers doing the saint-death again with paint for blood and paper spears. Too much ale. They will be ruined, some useless man’s donkey.

  I was combing his hair. The two eldest girls were young then, small babes. We were still hopeful of a son. Had spent the feast crushing their floral wreaths and being fed fingers of meat by my ladies. The notion that they would elongate, would unfold and harden into women with plaited hair and husbands, seemed blindly impossible, particularly in our drunkenness; of course they would be young, round as buns, for ever. The youngest, Cordelia, years away, hidden in the lining of my body.

  I am not a donkey, I said, laughing. Will you send them to the convent then?

  Nuns to pray for their old father’s soul and grow pale and stupid as flapping geese! No. He was tired. Even then he had the purple circles of an old dog around his eyes. By God’s eyes I want them happy. I have always said.

  I can hear myself scoffing. Girls like ours need men. Think of them – each pecking at her sister. They need playthings – a house to run, servants, a husband. Alone they’d eat each other. Like lampreys.

  Yes. He turned his face to me: the glorious profile, struck into coins, medals, the heart-place on the armour of ten thousand men. Kiss us then, kiss our old face, the king demands.

  The messenger said they killed one another. The two. The pair of them, kissing each other’s cheeks to lick off the sugar.

  There is no looking at it directly. One must run at it, and dive, as if throwing oneself into a well. As a child in the convent where I was raised, we were told to fear wells. I would lay my head over one, dip into the black mouth for whole inches of time, then run, with a new cold skin to tell of my courage. Here it is. The well-mouth, where there was Lear, and my girls.

  These rooms, the halls for rich visitors to the abbey, where for fifteen years I have lodged, as if on my way elsewhere, merely a passing guest. The falsehood that I could leave, at any time, that this small restraint was temporary.

  My thoughts seem to come from a great distance and strike me till I resonate, as arrows against a shield.

  It is necessary to be practical. To moor myself to an object, outside my own body, which may yet betray. To my name. Which has not corrupted, which I retained before I was wife to anybody, and keep now, telling nobody.

  I kneel before my possessions. A row of white sacks, against one wall untouched. Packed in readiness for fifteen years, so that I could return at a moment’s notice: I am prepared, let us go.

  I saw the abbess looking at them once, eight years in, as we mulled a plan for an extension to the kitchen garden: maps, on my bed. Leave them be. I am a witch smuggling my familiars in them, I said, and she smiled and turned away.

  Such ordinary things. One packet cracks at the corner under my fingers, shows its innards. Pieces I had forgotten I owned: small scissors in the shape of a hand, a folded belt. Ruth has taken care of them: the coils are still in place. They are innocent of everything.

  I will be leaving once more. I lay the sacks each on the floor, with wide spaces between them that could take my entire body. Six of them. Stand a
bove them, seeing them laid out, in a constellation: shoes in this, a travelling shawl I think in another. For a higher perspective I step up onto the linen-chest. Lear and I would do this, plans pinned to the floor, to see the fringes in the whole, how territories interlocked and moved across one another like moss. It was a trick I taught him, like so much else, an education I gave to him, as it was given to me.

  I have made a circle. I may step inside it. The nothing of my life may become something, and so.

  * * *

  What you take when they come for you. What becomes treasure?

  Fifteen years ago I took linen: bundles, some still stuffed with scent from storage. A chatelaine, inlaid with silver, from my first marriage. Hard shoes for walking – there would be walking. Furs for warmth, a black comb, a book of prayer. I gathered less than I could have, for propriety: the queen does not carry like a beggar. A small bright knife. My girls’ hair, in a pocket. Cordelia’s from her first illness at three days old, white wisps, barely real.

  Coins loose in my bodice. The attendants strapped them to me quickly, whispering, palming them against my chemise, then dropping them down my clothes in handfuls, like leaves. I walked into the dark fearing they would fall from me and be lost in the mud, that it would seem as if the queen’s flayed skin had peeled off gold.

  I step heavily down from the chest and the floor shudders. The assembled parts scatter into the darkness. The circle is broken.

  * * *

  Night. I open my eyes into darkness. Which? The parts of time have moved off. I am lost in the turn. Men talk of a sudden return of memory after long sleep, in a flood. As if grief could possibly give you respite. No. It slept with me; it rose as I rose, like a well-trained dog after its master in the night fields.

  Ruth breathes beside me on her pallet bed. My mouth tastes of iron.