The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [59]
the second partition
In the gloom of Bedenham House, on the stone bench, Tina lamented. This was her child’s seventh day. Though she felt much stronger, her stomach had remained too unsettled to let her break fast. She had slept, but only in tiny, futile increments . . .
Getting up from the mattress, Tina sat on the stool next to the basinet—which was two pieces of wood, forming a shallow V-shape—holding her baby boy in her arms, face up against the warm, wonderfully scented head. She had sat on this stool every day for the entire week, cradling the child. She murmured to him. She held him when he woke and she tried to comfort him when he wailed.
On the seventh morning, the boy showed signs of continued health and greedily nursed. Then he rested, but he did not sleep. Neither did he cry.
These, of course, were the good signs.
A brief rain fell in the city, loud on the street outside, turning the dirt to mud. The floor in the room Tina shared with her husband and son was gravel, and damp. They could not afford a new door—the old one had been stolen, no doubt for firewood—and so a yellow muslin curtain hung between her and the rest of Nowy Solum. Tina liked yellow. At least, the rain had briefly muted smells that a curtain could never keep out.
When her baby was finally dozing, she placed him down into his basinet, ate a small apple and a piece of hard cheese, vomited it up, and got dressed. Desperate for any form of luck, she fastened a lavender broach to the neck of her tunic. Then she called to her husband, Cadman, to tell him she was ready. He had been back from work for a while now and, by this point, was waiting at the curb, having a cigarette with the decrepit neighbour.
Tina did retain a modicum of hope—for there always had to be hope, no matter how slim. The boy seemed lively now. Almost happy. He had smiled the previous day, a tiny twist to his sweet puffy lips she was sure was a smile. A gift so precious. She tried hard, heart breaking, breath catching in her chest, on this morning (and every morning for the past seven mornings, for hours and hours) to get her baby to laugh or chuckle or show any sign of amusement. Nothing. Some babies made gorgeous, throaty sounds. She had heard these before, many times, and had seen the relief on the faces of their mothers.
The boy was starting to round out, too, his blue eyes so alert, shaped like Cadman’s, who had once been almost handsome.
Today her son would be named, one way or another.
She wrapped the boy slowly in a blanket. He woke to gaze calmly at her. She wept. “There’s blood in your veins,” she whispered. “I know there is.”
The crime of testing one’s own child before their trial by officers of the palatinate was punishable by rack: Tina had not been tempted to jab the baby with a pin, as some anxious mothers had.
Tina nuzzled her boy, then, suddenly, with a surge of desperation, tickled his ribs. Made cooing sounds.
Nothing.
“Laugh,” she said, cheeks dripping, lips salty with tears, the love she felt painful inside her. “For goodness sake, please laugh.”
Water at the centrum well had been exceedingly difficult to draw over recent months, and with Cadman at work every day, standing in line was impossible, especially holding onto a baby and a heavy pot at the same time, so Tina had not bathed her son, as was tradition prior to bringing infants into Bedenham House; she had only rubbed at his skin with her own hands, and with dry straw,