The Forbidden Queen

I denied my symptoms at first, hiding them as much from myself as from Owen for they were fleeting moments, soon passed, merely a growing unease, I told myself, brought on by a dose of ill humours as winter approached with its cold grey days and bitter winds. Had I not been so afflicted in the past? I need not concern myself.

Some days, on waking, my mind scrabbled to grip the reality of where I was, what was expected of me. Some days I found myself just sitting, unseeing, without thoughts, not knowing how long I had been so engrossed in nothingness except for the movement of sun and shadow on the floor.

I felt a tension tightening in my chest, like a fist drawing in the slack on a rope, until I feared for my breathing.

And then such feelings receded, my mind snapping back into the present, and I forgot that I had ever been troubled, except for the faint, familiar flutter of pain behind my eyes that laid its hand on me with more frequency. I forgot and pretended that nothing was amiss. Owen and I loved and rode and danced, enjoying the unfettered freedom that had become, miraculously, ours. Had I not experienced such symptoms in the days following Edmund’s conception? Although I had been afraid then, fearing the worst, they had vanished. Would they not do so again?

Our children ran and thrived in the grass beside the river and I watched them.

But then the darkness closed in again. Minutes? Hours? How long it engulfed me I could not tell. I saw it approaching and, leaving my children in the care of Joan or Alice, I took to my room, my bed, pleading weariness or some female complaint as I had done once before to ensure no questions were asked. Only Guille was aware, and she kept her own counsel.

I managed it well.

And what was it that I hid? A space widening in my mind, a vast crater that filled to the brim with dark mist. I did not know what happened around me in those hours. It could be a black billowing cloud, all-encompassing, or a creeping dread, like river water rising, higher and higher, after a downpour. My hands and fingers no longer seemed to be mine. They did not obey my dictates. My lips felt like ice, clear speech beyond me. My servants, my family were as insubstantial as ghosts emerging from an impenetrable mist. I must have eaten, slept, dressed. Did I speak? Did I leave my room? I did not know.

Was Owen aware of my travails? He suspected, even though he was often away, busy now with his own affairs. How could he not know, when I became increasingly detached from him and our world? He said nothing, and neither did I, but I knew he watched me. And perhaps he told Guille to have a care for me, for she was never far from my side.

‘Are you well?’ he asked whenever we met. A harmless enquiry but I saw the concern in his sombre gaze.

I smiled at Owen and touched his hand, the mists quite gone. ‘I am well, my dear love.’

When he took me to his bed, I forgot the whole world except for the loving, secret one we were able to create when I was in his arms. I denied my inner terrors, for what good would it do to bow my head before them? They would engulf me soon enough.

Alice knew, but apportioned the blame for my waywardness, my increased awkwardness to my pregnancy with Tacinda. When I dropped a precious drinking goblet, the painted shards of glass spreading over the floor, splinters lodging in my skirts and my shoes, she merely patted my hand and swept up the debris when I wept helplessly.

Four children in as many years, she lectured. Why was I surprised that sometimes I felt weary, my body not as strong as it might be, my reactions slow? She dosed me on her cure-all, wood betony, in all its forms—powdered root or a decoction of its pink flowers or mixed with pennyroyal in wine—until I could barely tolerate its bitter taste.

‘It’s good for you,’ Alice lectured. ‘For digestion. For every ache and pain under the sun. And for the falling sickness too.’

My minutes of dissociation concerned her, but it was not the falling sickness. I took the doses, and wished that wood betony might indeed cure all, but my mind went back to my father and his delusional existence. My father, who had sometimes recalled neither his own name nor the faces of his wife and children, who could be violent, running amok as he once had with a lance, killing those unfortunates who had stood in his way and tried to restrain him for his own good.

I tried to shut out the memories but I failed. They muscled their way into my consciousness, forcing me to acknowledge my father’s constant attendants, more gaolers than servants. His guards: to protect him and others from him, as he became more and more divorced from reality and in the end had to be restrained.

‘Drink this,’ Alice insisted. And I did. I clutched at every hope.