The Queen's Lover: A Novel by Vanora Bennett

Author:Vanora Bennett [Bennett, Vanora]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061689864
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2010-03-22T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

Catherine had been lying there all day, for hours, just like this: utterly spent, but utterly at peace too, gazing at her baby.

She didn't mind the aches, the rips, the soft sag of belly that still hung from her bones, or even the strangely ugly reflection of a much older woman with dark patches round the eyes and a shapelessness to the jaw that had stared back from the mirror they'd brought her. She'd shooed them away when they'd tried to comb her hair and make her beautiful after her bath. She didn't need anyone weaving flowers into her head. She was clean and warm and free of fever; her milk was coming; that was all that mattered. That, and the little creature staring back at her.

She'd done her duty. She deserved her English crown. She had a son: a King for England.

But the truth was that she didn't care about her son's royal blood. She was too full of awe at his very existence. Her baby had big, blue, wondering eyes, and perfect miniature fingers that curled pinkly around hers and held on tight whenever she put her giant's thumb into his hand. His tiny body startled out into a star of alarmed arms and legs if she moved it too fast. When he slept, he whiffled and sniffled, screwed up his eyes or opened his mouth or muttered, as if he were dreaming; but what could a person so fresh and new, who knew nothing of anything yet, possibly have to dream about? He was full of mystery. He was so small, so helpless; he couldn't move by himself. Yet, if she put him on the bed away from her, it seemed no time before she'd feel his little body relax luxuriantly against hers again; he'd somehow have dragged himself to her, without muscles, without understanding, just full of a child's natural urge for warmth and love. He had his father's wide-set eyes in a red, wrinkled little face. The top of his head smelled milky--of happiness, she thought, drawing him to herself to kiss again, knowing that she would give him all the warmth and love a child could want, for every day of the seven years he would be in his mother's care, and for the rest of his life, too, even once they took him away to teach him to begin to be a man. She couldn't imagine that future; but, for the first time in her life, she was completely confident that it would be full of happiness. She'd make it be. How beautiful he was.

She didn't bother to turn her head when people came in to tend to her. She didn't know the midwives' and nurses' names. She didn't need to. She had enough, right here in this room. There was nothing she wanted to do except be left with her baby for the rest of the forty days of her lying-in, until she had to go out and be churched, and rejoin the rest of the world.

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