Long Live the Queen

When they told her she was to wed and bed the king and birth him an heir, she gazed out of the window and would not meet any of their eyes. They were the picture of delight, the three of them, waiting for her to smile at their gift and complete the tableau.

“This will be the death of me,” she said levelly when she couldn’t take any more expectant silence.

One uncle dispassionately agreed that it was probable, but told her that in all likelihood she would have served a great purpose by then.

The other had the grace to look uncomfortable. “He is not his father,” he remined her. She certainly hoped not. The old king’s first wife had died when they had scarcely said their vows, and when the second had failed to produce a child of any kind, he had promptly rewritten the law to allow a king to take a second wife if he had no heir. The household grew bigger, but by no accounts happier, and soon after the fourth marriage came the first execution.

Her aunt told her that she was being hysterical and dramatic and that she ought to be grateful for the best match in all the kingdom, and most importantly to never again repeat those words.

She wasn’t so much of a fool as that. At the wedding she was all joy: smiles and laughs and little kisses and whispers – as if there had ever been so much as a chance of anything else. The kingdom was all joy too, and the court, and above all her aunt and uncles. The young, healthy king marrying the young, healthy daughter of his late father’s late rival, and just like that the kingdom in harmony. This would not be like the last reign. This time, a son would come in no time. There would be no waiting seven royal weddings and two constitutional upheavals and the deaths of three queens and more stillborn babes than they cared to count. And the king held her and called her his ray of summer moonlight and his little beauty and a dozen other sweet things. That night they stood in the summer moonlight on his grand balcony, and he stroked her hair, and stroked her all over. She found that she could bear him well enough. That night at least, he was not his father.

His tenderness lasted almost three months after the wedding. Most days he would whisper to her that he could never need two wives when he had such a one by his side. She wondered if his father had said the same thing, before he became desperate. She wondered how she would like to be a disgraced first queen in the shadow of a second. Perhaps better than she would like the alternative if no son came.

They said that she would be a fine queen, and she determined to be just that. She entertained, she played cards, she hunted and all the rest of it. She found that her opinion had become desired on topics from farmers’ disputes to the lives of a band of rebel peasants, to the behaviour of a certain diplomat. She formed opinions and opinions like a baker churning out the morning rolls, careful to ensure that each was palatable first to the king, and then to herself.

When she first became certain the king’s child was growing in her, he had already learned pretty well how to give her pleasure and had become bored of it, but that night he caressed her again in thanks. Her uncles gave their thanks too, and her aunt looked appreciatively at her stomach, little though it was showing. A lot of gratitude for lying in a king’s bed a few nights a week.

She felt she was resting her hand protectively on her belly every moment of every day, but a gentle hand could do nothing to stop what had already been determined, and she had barely begun to grow when her stomach cramped and lurched and she miscarried alone and in tears.

Her husband knelt by her side, but wouldn’t touch her. He stared into her tired face like a boy in a severe schoolroom and resolutely did not know what to do. “My father’s second wife lost a child not half a year after her coronation,” he muttered the story that he had been told like it was a prayer. “And she never conceived again as long as she lived, not even a girl or a stillbirth.”

She did not know why the dowager queen hadn’t borne any children. People talked about bad airs and bad company and bad thoughts. You could even hear a whisper of adultery if you asked in the right place. People always talked, but the king held his first stepmother in high honour. She could have mentioned none of the rumours even if she did believe them. Instead she had to tell him with nothing but her own wishes behind her that one time need not be like another, they had years left of life and health to bring children into the world, it was only a first time, it was nothing, it meant nothing, she swore it. Next time would be a healthy son. After she said that he took her hand again, gently between careful fingers, and when he took his leave he pressed dry lips to it.

She was as grateful as the king was himself when her predictions bore fruit. The minute he heard the news of a second pregnancy he was almost as he had been with the first. He caught her in his arms in front of the whole court and declared that he had never doubted for a second.

She doubted always, though she would never breathe a word of it, half expecting disaster each day as the months marched on. Months where she wouldn’t stop growing and her feet swelled and ached along with her belly, and she would empty her bladder and feel it like it was in a vice inside her right away after.

A good queen cared for the poor. She would not have anyone say she was anything less than a good queen, so she kept up her visits as long as she was able, until the apothecary ordered her behind closed doors. She took comfort in a washerwoman she met, who was as far along as she was, and who smiled like a contented cat when she felt her baby kicking, and grunted in pain just as she would have done herself if there weren’t always members of the court all around to hear. She found there often seemed to be some excuse to direct visits and little gifts to the washing quarter.

After she was confined to her rooms, three of the best physicians in the land were ordered to attend to her alongside her family’s own apothecary. They stood in a little huddle outside the door, talking about whether the baby was to be a boy or a girl. Her aunt and uncles stood there too, talking about what was to be done if it was one, and what was to be done if it was the other. She found that she was thinking often about the washerwoman, still going about her work as she neared her time. She had messages sent, to ask news of how mother and baby went, and boys ran about the city, citing as their mission ‘the queen’s whim’.

The news of the washerwoman’s child came, and it heartened her. A healthy boy, large and lusty and loud with lungs to rival any blacksmith’s bellows or piper’s pipes in the country. Her aunt laughed at her. Babies were born every day, and this was one that she had never seen. Still the words filled a balloon of hope inside her chest.

When her baby came and was a boy, she finally knew true joy, levels above the relief that skittered about her aunt and uncles. The child was small, but no matter: the kingdom had been delivered the requisite heir. And still that meant nothing next to holding her child in her arms and touching his tiny, perfect hands and stroking his soft hair, thick and dark though he was a newborn – a newborn and the best thing anybody could ever dream of.

The king came in as soon as he heard. He took the boy up in his arms and whooped like a child on his birthday. The kingdom’s relief was his ten times over. She realised suddenly that it was a child’s birthday quite literally, though not the king’s, and she couldn’t hold back a smile.

He saw, of course. “What are you laughing for, my love?” he asked.

My love. She scanned over the reason in her mind. She would not tell him that, so she shook her head to clear it away. “I am just so happy we have our son,” she said instead. He did not question it, the most natural feeling in the world.

And the love lingered, in the king’s visits. Each time, he would take the boy and hold him as delicately as if he were made of spun sugar, and gaze in wonder, and each time he gazed at her in wonder too.

When the days wore on and she was still too weak to rise from bed, the king’s love was so ignited as to make him her constant companion. He would leave the sickroom only when he must, return with gifts large and small, settle himself on the bed right alongside her while their child slept. Her aunt fussed around her too, and told her how honoured and blessed she was to have both the king’s son and his true love. Some days she just wanted to lie still and sleep.

It was when her son too fell sick that her uncles first entered the room, each looking grave and saying little. The king’s visits did not stop, but now he would stand by the crib, gazing down into it, looking around the room as if for help, staring upwards as if in prayer. Each quarter hour, he would call in the blank-faced apothecary and ask how the boy went, and what was to be done. He behaved exactly as she felt, while she lay forgotten to the side.

When the apothecary whispered to her uncle that he doubted whether the child would survive, she shook her head. She would not believe it. Such a perfect boy was not destined for such a short life. Her uncle approved. “No need for his Majesty to hear such wild conjecture,” he told the man with the air of a captain not yet resigned to the fact that his ship is sinking. “You must keep the prince alive.”

It was not until a week later that he would acknowledge the danger. The apothecary tensed after he examined the boy, sighed and stood straight before delivering his sentence. “My Lord, it grieves me to say it, but this child is not long for this world. Whether he is in my care or attended only by the poorest peasant in the land, he will not live to see the coming of winter.”

Perhaps it was that which gave them the idea. She was never to know how it came about, just handed her role in it. It was her favourite uncle that told her. He came in the next day and closed the door very deliberately and quietly. She stared straight ahead at the bed hangings. He sat on the edge of the chair by the bed, then stood again and crossed to the side of the crib, then to the foot of the bed, before he slowly explained what they were to do.

She would not have it. They could not take him away, not her son, her boy, not now when he needed her most.

“I am sorry, your Majesty,” he said to her, again and again as she raged and cried. Half his eye was on the door as he tried to quiet her. “But I’m afraid we are not asking your permission.” He seemed to be asking for it nonetheless, as he listed the plan’s virtues. The child would die anyway, there was nothing that could be done to save him, and her position – all of their positions – hinged on the son she soon would not have. The king still believed the sickness was a passing late summer fever, and one baby boy looked much like another. If they acted fast, the King would still have a son, and she would still have his love and her safety.

Eventually weakness got the better of her rage, and she found that she could cry no more. She would not have let them do it if she had been well, so she told herself every day. She would never have allowed it. Her gaze turned to stone and just once, she nodded. She watched the door open and a hooded figure enter, scoop up her son and deposit the washerwoman’s boy, wrapped in swaddling, into his place. She reached out, but the hooded figure did not turn, and the man who stood before her would not meet her gaze.

“You will let me see him,” she said. “Every day until his last.”

He swallowed and cleared his throat. “Your Majesty, this plan does not even afford the king himself that luxury.” He spoke gently, as if to a child.

“You will let me see him,” she told him again. “Or I will tell my husband exactly what you have done.”

“You think that you would be spared-?”

She did not let him finish. “I will tell him what you have done and hang the consequences and hang myself too if I must. You will let me see my son.”

She did see him, every day until his last, while the washerwoman’s son slept beside her. And one baby boy wrapped in swaddling did look much like another: the king rejoiced that the late summer fever had passed and smiled at how his son had grown and swore that they would make another child the moment she too was recovered.

And recover she did, into a world that was darker without its newest brightest light. She pleased the court by standing to dance at her first feast after the birth, and she returned to the production of acceptable opinions. The production of children was another matter. None came but the king did not remark upon it: he had one son and that, for now, was enough. She knew he visited the boy often, and each time would have some new story to make the court dutifully delighted. She liked to visit him too. She liked to see his soft, gentle sleep, and watch him gurgle at his minstrels. He learned to smile, to sit, to stand, to step, and she learned happiness again to watch him.

The deception was watertight for a full two years, and it was the washerwoman who finally betrayed it. She had been paid off, of course, but two years’ philosophising had convinced her that a purse of gold was not a son, however loudly it clinked. She carried a theory that the king would not want a son that was not his, and once the news was broken he would simply give the boy back. Poor fool.

She met with the king in private, a small mercy. She piqued his curiosity enough that he allowed the irregularity.

Once he heard her story, the very sky broke. It carried him to his wife’s rooms as if on a hurricane, but it wasn’t his wife that he sought. They were there with her, the three of them, the two uncles and the aunt. He strode to the first uncle and pulled him out of his chair by a fistful of shirt.

“You dare–” The king could barely form the words. His face was dark red, white foam forming on the corners of his mouth and flying into the uncle’s face. “You thought to steal my son from me!”

Everybody knew what he was talking about, but the room remained silent, looking anywhere but at the pair. The king had not turned to the rest of them yet and they would not prompt it.

“I thought–” Her uncle licked dry lips and tried to shift his position. “I thought to help…”

“You would give a washerwoman’s whelp my name – my throne – and you have the gall to suggest you act for me?” The king let the uncle crumple to the ground and turned on the rest of them. “Such a treasonous plot was never before heard of.” He forced out each word with effort, then called a guard in. “Take these three away.”

The three of them. He did not include his dear wife, but collapsed like death on a couch by her side. At first she thought she saw how she must survive, and she hurried to show the appropriate outrage. The three of them – they had stolen her boy from her. While she was weak with sickness, while she could not stop them, while she slept. They had deceived her, deceived them both. Wasn’t one swaddled baby boy much like another to a sick woman? Oh no he was not, not at all, but she cried prettily that he was and perhaps she could have convinced him and lived out the marriage a while yet, watched as her husband forgot their false son. It would not be easy, but just perhaps.

The thing was, he did not feel a false son to her. She had grown to love the washerwoman’s boy. And the king would never let him live.

She took a thick pillow in one hand and wound her husband’s hair in the other, gently pushing. The pillow covered his face before he knew what she was doing, and she never saw his look of disbelief.

She breathed in gasps, dragging in struggled breaths until he could not.

She composed her face into the grief of a queen whose king has suffered a sudden fit, and allowed the pillow to hang limply by her side.

Standing there by the couch, she had a passing thought that kings die just the same as other men, but in truth there was no way she could know. She had never killed any other men.