Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [51]
"Oh, I bought you this from a pedlar," says Bell, pulling what looks like a twig out of her pocket. "It's a bit of Saint Anne's own knee bone, the best thing for a birth."
"Shouldn't I rely on the Sacred Name of Jesus?" quibbles the Countess, panting.
Bell shakes her head. "Only the Saint cares to ease women's pain."
The Countess grabs the bit of bone, encloses it in her fist.
Bell scans the horizon in the direction of Genoa. "John might be home by nightfall."
"And sparrows might plough fields," spits his wife. "That man's going to end up drinking himself to death, in the best O'Donnell tradition, before his children are old enough to know his face. And what I cannot reconcile myself to," she says, talking fast and breathing hard, "is that after all my exceptional adventures, I, a hero's daughter, am going to die like any ordinary woman, in a bed of sweat and blood and ¿bit."
"You won't die," said Bell sternly.
"No?"
"Not this time. I know these things."
"Liar." The Countess smiles through gritted teeth.
"Then after your confinement you can invite that Gentileschi woman down from Naples to paint the pair of us."
"As Judith with her maid; that's her speciality."
"Knives dripping blood!"
"Oh, Bell." The Countess stops laughing. She clutches her skirts. The waters have come down, seeping through her petticoats like the Po when it mounts its banks.
"Come in, now, my lady," says Bell. "It's time."
"What about the cherries?" gasps the Countess, distracted.
"Leave them for the birds." She takes her mistress by the sweating hand and leads her in.
Note
"Figures of Speech " was inspired by the Dictionary of National Biography entry on Mary Stuart O'Donnell, Countess Tyrconnel (1607–49) by Richard Bagwell, which mentions an unhappy letter she wrote to Cardinal Barberini in February 1632 when she was pregnant for the second time. A heavily fictionalised Spanish biography of the Countess's early adventures was published by Albert Enriquez in Brussels in 1627; my main source is the French translation by Pierre de Cadenet, published in Paris in 1628 as Resolution courageuse et lovable, de la comtesse de Tirconel, Irlandoise.
Nothing further is known of Mary Stuart O'Donnell, except that she survived this second childbirth and lived another seventeen years.
Words for Things
The day before the governess came was even longer. Over a dish of cooling tea, Margaret watched her mother. Not the eyes, but the stiff powdery sweep of hair. She answered two questions—on the progress of her cross-stitch, and a French proverb—but missed the final one, on the origin of the word October. Swallowing the tea noiselessly, Margaret allowed her eyes to unlatch the window, creep across the lawn. She thought she could smell another thatch singeing.
The next morning woke her breathless; one rib burned under the weight of whalebone. The dark was lifting reluctantly, an inch of wall at a time. Practised at distracting herself, Margaret reached down with one hand. She scrabbled under the mattress edge for the buckled volume. But it was gone, as if absorbed into the feathers. Confiscated on her mother's orders, no doubt. Clamping her eyes shut, Margaret focused on the rib, bending her anger into a manageable line. She lay flat until the room was full of faint light that snagged on the shapes of two small girls in the next bed.
Her belly rumbled. Margaret was hungry for words. None on the walls, except an edifying motto in cross-stitch hung over the ewer. Curling patterns on the curtains could sometimes be suggested into letters and then acrobatic words, but by now the light was too honest. She shut her eyes again, and called up a gray, wavering page with an ornate printer's mark at the top. "The History of the Prim-dingle Family," she spelled out, "Part the Fifth." Once she worked her way into the flow, she no longer needed to imagine the letters into existence one by one; the lines formed themselves, neat and crisp and believable. Her eyes flickered under their lids, scattering punctuation.
The black trunk sat in the hall,