“Father wouldn’t believe me. No, he chooses not to believe me.”
The Duchess nodded understandingly. “I wondered about it to Gardagger only once, sounding properly foolish in case it was a taboo subject, as it turned out to be, for I was told to keep my mouth shut. Either Gardagger doesn’t believe it or, more likely, he doesn’t care. The older men don’t seem to worry about it. As though they are immune to whatever the Lord Paramount is doing.”
“Alicia, where do the young mothers go?”
The Duchess turned ashen. Her lips writhed back from her teeth, and she threw back her head, the long tendons of her neck stretching as though she wanted them to break, wanted her head to fly off, fly away. She trembled, a wracking convulsion, as though every muscle was drawn taut.
“They die,” she whispered. “While they’re nursing, they die. While their breasts are swollen with milk, they die.”
“Why do they die?”
The Duchess turned away, hiding her face from the house, tears flowing down her face. “It’s the fevers! So they say, all the physicians from Chamis, and the people here at court, but … I can’t believe it, Genevieve. It doesn’t happen to the servants! Not often, at least. It doesn’t happen in the little villages. It only happens in Havenor, or in the noble houses.”
“So, if I married, if I had a child . . .”
“You’d want to go to a village, Genevieve. Maybe the air is cleaner in the villages, maybe it’s in the diet they eat there, or some herb they use for seasoning, but you’re almost sure to be safe in a village. You’d want to get there before the child was born if you could, or as soon after as possible, to nurse it and wean it, quick as could be.”
“You were a young mother. Twice.”
“Yes. But my babies were born in County Benderly in Dania, in a tiny village where no one even knew who I was. When I was twenty, I ran off and married a commoner, Genevieve, and I didn’t tell my family where I was, not for years. Such a scandal. I am the youngest daughter of Tranquish, Earl of Rivernigh, Duke of Dania, and he and I were invited to court, like you and your father. The Lord Paramount proposed I should marry this old . . . boarpig of a man, father to the current Duke of Barfezi. My half-sister had been married off to an old man, and she’d had a daughter and had died while she was nursing the baby, and I’d felt a kind of warning, maybe only a suspicion, but I wasn’t of a mind to emulate her.”
“There was a young guardsman from Dania among His Majesty’s guards. I met him when I was leading my little tours at the palace, and we fell in love. He had a small holding in Dania, a good little farm. So, ran off alone, first, so no one would suspect him. He met me later, and we hid in plain sight in Dania. It’s truth, the searchers couldn’t see past the mud on my face and the tangles in my hair! Oh, Genevieve! We sang at our work! The whole village sang! It was wonderful. We had three children, two daughters and a son, all of whom lived! Then, fifteen years after we ran away, my husband disappeared. He went hunting, up into the mountains. He never returned, no one ever found him.”
“By that time the man Papa had wanted me to marry was dead, and his son, Earl Vestik-Vanserdel, had a wife, Petrilla, and their children were half-grown. The threat was over, so the girls and I went home to Papa.” She looked sorrowfully into the distance, her face saddened by memory, her body slumped with dejection.
After a long silence, Genevieve prompted her. “What happened then?”
“Oh, Papa had remarried again, a woman younger than I. She and I got to be good friends, and he rather ignored us both. Maybe he’d mellowed with age, he was eighty-some-odd by then. And then when I was fortyish, I met Gardagger. He’s much older than I, of course, and he had children of his own, by his first wife. She had died shortly after the boy was born. Papa told me I’d be wise to marry him, with strong hints that if I didn’t, I might be thrown into the street with my children. Marrying Gardagger made my girls covenantable—my son had chosen to stay in common life—but they were young enough to make the change. So, we married and I came to live here, at court, to raise Gardagger’s children and mine. I might have preferred a bit more romance, and a great deal more ardor, but Gardagger is pleasant in his way, and if he’s decided he’s too old for intimacy, I shan’t make a fuss over that.