Elementals - A. S. Byatt [33]
‘I felt that in my bones, listening to your story.’
‘It is your story, Princess. And you too are framed for cold. You must live – when the thaw comes – in cool places. There are ice-houses in the palace gardens – we must build more, and stock them with blocks of ice, before the snow melts.’
Fiammarosa smiled at Hugh with her sharp mouth. She said:
‘You have read my desires. All through my childhood I was barely alive. I felt constantly that I must collapse, vanish, fall into a faint, stifle. Out there, in the cold, I am a living being.’
‘I know.’
‘You choose your words very tactfully, Hugh. You told me I was “framed for cold”. That is a statement of natural philosophy, and time. It may be that I have ice in my veins, like the icewoman, or something that boils and steams at normal temperatures, and flows busily in deep frost. But you did not tell me I had a cold nature. The icewoman did not look back at her husband and son. Perhaps she was cold in her soul, as well as in her veins?’
‘That is for you to say. It is so long ago, the tale of the icewoman. Maybe she saw King Beriman only as a captor and conqueror? Maybe she loved someone else, in the North, in the snow? Maybe she felt as you feel, on a summer’s day, barely there, yawning for faintness, moving in shadows.’
‘How do you know how I feel, Hugh?’
‘I watch you. I study you. I love you.’
Fiammarosa noticed, in her cool mind, that she did not love Hugh, whatever love was.
She wondered whether this was a loss, or a gain. She was inclined to think, on balance, that it was a gain. She had been so much loved, as a little child, and all that heaping of anxious love had simply made her feel ill and exhausted. There was more life in coldness. In solitude. Inside a crackling skin of protective ice that was also a sensuous delight.
After this clarification, even when the thaw came, and the snow ran away, and fell in damp, crashing masses from the roof and the branches, Fiammarosa’s life was better. Hugh convinced the King and Queen that their daughter needed to be cold to survive, and the ingenuity that had been put into keeping her warm and muffled was diverted, on his suggestion, into the construction of ice-houses, and cool bedrooms with stone walls on the north side of the palace. The new Fiammarosa was full of spiky life. She made little gardens of mountain snow-plants around her ice-retreats, which stood like so many summer-houses in the woods and the gardens. No one accused her of witchcraft – this was a later age – but there was perhaps a little less love for this coldly shining, fiercely energetic, sharp being than there had been for the milky girl in her rosy cushions. She studied snow-crystals and ice formations under a magnifying glass, in the winter, and studied the forms of her wintry flowers and mosses in the summer. She became an artist – all princesses are compelled to be artists, they must spin, or draw, or embroider, and she had always dutifully done so, producing heaps of cushions and walls of good-enough drawings. She hated ‘good enough’ but had had to be content with it. Now she began to weave tapestries, with silver threads and ice-blue threads, with night violets and cool primroses, which mixed the geometric forms of the snow-crystals with the delicate forms of the moss and rosettes of petals, and produced shimmering, intricate tapestries that were much more than ‘good enough’, that were unlike anything seen before in that land. She became an assiduous correspondent, writing to gardeners and natural philosophers, to spinners of threads and weavers all over the world. She was happy, and in the winter, when the world froze again under an iron-grey sky, she was ecstatic.
Princesses, also, are expected to marry. They are expected to marry for dynastic reasons, to cement an alliance,