• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Katherine lay in the great bed, her attendants sponging her and combing out her sweat-soaked hair. Physicians were still scurrying about, clicking instruments and gathering bowls and blood-drenched linens. It was as busy as a banquet in there.

“Henry.” Katherine gestured to me. I came and took her hand. It was so limp, damp, and hot it felt like a wadded washcloth.

“What has happened?” I had to know. Whatever it was, I had to know. Katherine lived; at least I could be sure of that.

“Dead.” There was no need for more than that. The one word said everything.

“A son?”

She shook her head. “A daughter.”

Then that was not quite so bad, not an unequivocal sign.

“I am grieved.” But relieved. The heavens were yet ambiguous. A clear sign was what I dreaded above all. “May I see her?”

Katherine tried to stop me, but I did not heed her feebly gesturing hands as I turned to the little bundle lying at the foot of the bed, its face covered, denoting death.

Gently I pulled the blanket aside, just to see her face once, to make her mine, before consigning her to the earth forever.

It was no human face that I uncovered, but that of a monster. It had but a single eye; no nose, just a gaping great hole; and mushroomlike, puffy lips, over a mouth with teeth.

“Jesu!” I recoiled.

Katherine reached out for me, clutching. So that was why she had screamed upon first beholding it.

“What have you brought forth?” I am ashamed that those were my words to her, as if the monster were her handiwork.

She closed her eyes. “It is not I. I knew not what I harboured.”

“I know. Forgive me.” When I remembered all the times we had looked fondly at the swelling of her belly ... while inside, this horror had been taking shape. “I spoke in sorrow, and stupidly.” I looked at the lump. “Thank God it is out of you, and born dead.” It must be buried somewhere away from consecrated ground. Deep in the earth, where it could decay and never rise.

I motioned to William Butts, Linacre’s young assistant physician. “Call for a priest.” I wanted only a priest to handle the thing. Butts nodded, then started to pick up the bundle.

“Stop!” I cried. “Do not touch it!” Let it lie there on the bedcovers, which afterward must be burnt. And instead of a churching ceremony, Katherine and I must be ritually cleadiwocame and, after muttering a few words, gingerly picked up the dead deformity and put it in a sack. He would know what to do with it. I did not presume to tell him; nor did I want to know where it would lie.

I insisted that a second priest come in to bless and purify Katherine and myself immediately. He did so, whilst the bed was being stripped of its contaminated coverings, and I had to hold Katherine in my arms. But I dared not issue forth from the chamber until it was done. I was trembling with fear—revulsion—premonition.

I carried the limp Katherine all the way through the long wing of the palace to her own apartments, where fresh bleached linens would be laid upon her own bed, where windows were open and healthy summer air could enter. Out of that fetid chamber of contagion and death, and into the daylight of normalcy. She did not protest, merely let me carry her, like a sleepy child past its bedtime.

As I was leaving her quarters, one of the novices from the Priory of St. Lawrence was waiting for me in the guard room. His gentle eyes above his black-hooded robe searched mine.

“The Prior sent me to tell you ... Mistress Blount is brought to bed. Her delivery is imminent.” He waited, not knowing how I would receive the news.

“Then I must come.” Like a man in a dream, I heard myself speaking. It had all taken on the features of a dream now. I was being tested, and I no longer knew what God required of me. But I knew that I must see all that was ordained for me to see. I must be at Bessie’s side, even if something worse awaited me there. The human requirement was that I bear it with Bessie.

“Lead me,” I said.

The young novice—his name was Richard, he told me—and I crossed the Thames directly from