A Court Affair. Emily Purdy

straw, brittle and yellow from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, and everyone waits with bated breaths for the inevitable day when I will break, like a piece of dry straw snapped in two.

      “All right, love?” Pirto asks as she finishes rinsing my hair.

      I nod and smile. “Just dreaming of cinnamon cakes and apple cider, Pirto; they remind me of home, and the cider made from the apples from Father’s orchards at Syderstone. I remember how we used to celebrate the harvest, with dancing and apple bobbing and a great feast with every dish made with apples—every single one, even an apple in the roast pig’s mouth! And hair ribbons, Pirto!” I flash an even brighter smile and half turn round in my bath. I stubbornly ignore the protesting pain, sharp and grinding, at the base of my spine that makes my breath catch, though I hastily hide that, quickly turning it into a sigh of eager excitement instead. For Pirto, I pretend I am once again that giddy young girl she used to know, excited about a day at the fair. “They’re sure to have hair ribbons at the fair, aren’t they, Pirto? I’ve a fancy for buttercup yellow, maiden’s blush pink, and Our Lady’s blue.”

      “Indeed they are, pet, to be sure, they will!” Pirto beams back at me. I can tell it does her heart good to see me like this—excited and looking forward to something, even a rustic and rollicking country fair.

      “And apple green and cherry red! I want My Lord to see me with a rainbow of ribbons streaming down my back when he comes to visit me!” I add, still smiling, as the pain gives my spine another brutal twist, like a master torturer manning the rack to make his victim howl and beg for mercy and divulge her most deeply guarded secrets.

      “Aye, love.” Pirto nods excitedly. “And if we can find one in primrose pink, it will match the new dress you’ve ordered from Mr Edney just grand, it will!”

      “We must look out for one, then,” I say, the smile frozen on my face as the pain causes pearls of sweat to bead my brow as it twists round in the small of my back like a spring wound dangerously tight until it threatens to break. “Oh, I do hope Mr Edney finishes my new gown in time—dusky rose velvet embroidered with bright pink roses with the collar fringed in gold, like the one on the russet taffeta he made for me. I ordered it to match the gloves My Lord sent me for my birthday. Surely that is a sign that he still cares for me, Pirto? If he did not care, he would not have taken the time to choose something so pretty that he knew would please me so much. I want to wear it for him with the gloves when he comes to me. And surely he will come soon; the court is not very far … Windsor Castle is only half a day’s ride away. Only half a day …” I sigh. “Half a day!”

      The thought of the husband I still love so much, even though I know I should not, and long to see even though with all this talk of poison and murder he now frightens me, fills me with such sorrow that the tears I have fought to hold back for so long threaten to overwhelm and drown me from within if I do not let them out. Why do I still love him when he no longer loves me? Why do I still strive to win back a love long gone? Why do I desire a man who has shattered all the trust that ever lay between us, just as he has dashed all my hopes and destroyed all my dreams? He has even tried to murder me. And yet … my head says no, but my heart cries yes, and even as I fear and hate, I still love and long. Life will never be the same as it was again, this I know, but of the dream I cannot let go. Right or wrong, I still love him.

      “Come, the sheet now, Pirto.” I swallow back the tears and force myself to smile as I nod towards it, draped over the back of a chair to warm before the fire. “I will get out now and sit by the fire while you comb my hair.”

      I grit my teeth and brace myself to stand up. But stand I must, and stand I will. Summoning all my strength, steeling myself against the pain that I know will flare beneath my arm and explode like fireworks within my chest, I bite my bottom lip and, with Pirto hovering anxiously beside me holding up the drying sheet, ready to wrap me in it, I lever myself up. It takes everything I have not to scream and to fight back the faintness that threatens to knock me off my feet, and the unrelenting pain twisting agonisingly in the small of my back. It feels as though a little dog were sewn inside me friskily chasing his tail round and round and bumping my spine at every turn, then rounding on it in sudden fury for getting in the way and spoiling his play. But I succeed and step triumphantly from the tub, straight into Pirto’s outstretched arms that wait to wrap me in the sheet. It is just a simple white linen sheet, no longer fit for use on a bed but perfectly fine for drying off with after a bath, and yet, as she drapes it round me, I am struck by the sudden horrific notion that it is not a sheet at all but a shroud, and it’s all I can do not to tear it from me, give way to tears, scream the house down, and curse God for the unfairness of it all.

      “I’ll not have a shroud,” I say suddenly to Pirto, blurting it out before I can stop myself. “When I die, bury me in my wedding gown.”

      “Now, none of that grim, melancholy talk, Miss Amy,” Pirto gently chides me as if I were still a little girl. “You’re to have a good time at the fair today and think naught but happy thoughts!”

      “Yes, Pirto,” I nod and smile and say obediently as I let her lead me to sit beside the fire. She helps me to gently lower myself onto a padded stool, with a quilted purple velvet cushion as plump as the juiciest plum, then comes to stand behind me and begins to draw the comb through the wet yellow waves of my hair. Carved into the stone of the great fireplace, angels and demons fight their eternal battle, mirroring the war that rages between my heart and head, and the skirmish inside my mind as dreams and reality grapple for supremacy when the medicine blurs the boundary between the two.

      I close my eyes and dream of groves of sun-kissed lemon trees and chamomile blossoms swaying in the breeze and the pink-cheeked, barefoot hoyden I used to be, running wild and free, before the chains of cancer enslaved, slowed, and weighted me. Oh, how I wish I could be her again, even if it were just for one more day! I would live it to the fullest and make every moment count! To kick Pain in the bum and tell him to clear off and leave me be until the stroke o’ midnight! I miss the Amy I used to be. Even before I banished the looking glass from my life, I no longer recognised the pale, thin wraithlike woman with the dark-shadowed, pain-glazed eyes who stared back at me. That was not the Amy I knew! That was not the Amy I was inside, and not the Amy Robert Dudley fell in love with ten years ago.

      I sit and drowse and dream by the fire as my hair dries into a wealth of spun gold curls; then Pirto gently breaks my reverie. “It is time to be dressing you now, love,” she says. She helps me to rise as I grimace and brace myself against the deafening though silent scream that only I can hear that my spine unleashes inside of me. Will a day come, I wonder, when it will stop screaming and simply snap in the ultimate protestation against my defiance of the pain? Though numbness may seem like a blessing at times, not being able to move at all or feel anything fills me with such fear, I think I will drown in it. Sometimes I think I feel too much, but to live and feel nothing at all is a living death and absolutely terrifies me.

      Gently, Pirto eases the sheet from my shoulders. I know what comes next and lift my chin and obstinately stare straight ahead, focusing on the inky blackness outside my window; even though I fear losing my soul in darkness, it is still better than looking down and seeing the rot and ruin of my flesh. Although I have only just bathed, already the fetid stink of decay wafts up to my nostrils as the lump begins to weep ugly tears. It isn’t right, it isn’t fair; a body shouldn’t decay until after death! Although some people are not very particular about cleanliness and bathing, I have always been, yet, no matter how much I bathe, no matter what perfume I wear, the stench of death always hovers about me, seeping from my breast.

      From the corner of my eye a movement distracts me. I turn and catch Pirto reaching for the big cork-stoppered earthenware jar that holds a special blend of powders that Dr Biancospino left for me. When mixed with water, it becomes a thick paste of lime, hemlock, and belladonna that, with the deft brushstrokes of a master artist, the exotic foreign doctor used to paint my breast with, creating hope where there was none before, and whitewashing the ugliness of mottled and festering red flesh and charred-looking dead black tissue. When it dried, it hardened so that my breast appeared to have turned to white marble, as though Pygmalion’s Galatea