And yet, on their wedding night, when they were finally alone together in the royal bedchamber … Let’s say she could not have been the virgin that tradition and propriety demanded her to be. She couldn’t have invented tricks like that, untutored. Who knew how many stableboys, how many pages, she had pushed down onto haystack or secluded lawn?
He liked not only the fleshly revelations — he who was, in fact, as virginal as she was supposed to be — but the evidence that she had been ill-behaved. He liked as well his first sight of her nakedness. She was stocky but firm, her body all hillocks and white, satiny risings. On that first night she told him, unembarrassed, what to do, and he, being inexperienced, was glad to obey; he who faced a future of issuing commands, of others looking at him questioningly, waiting for him to make the decision, every decision, every time.
The king died soon after, trampled on a hunt by the very horse he’d considered his truest companion. The prince was, to his horror, made king three weeks before his nineteenth birthday.
She fell into love with a strange sense of powerlessness, as if she and her husband had contracted the same disease at the same time. She looked forward to the mornings, seeing him groggy but sweet upon awakening (he liked to be held, just for a few minutes, before getting out of bed and attending to his kingly duties); she liked talking to him at night, after the duties had been dispatched, about everything, from the small particulars of the day to his love of a local poet, recently deceased, from whose work the new king could quote, at length. She was surprised (and oddly, if only briefly, disappointed) to find that she’d been wrong about the chambermaids and harlots; that he actually intended, every night, to return to their bed; that he did not cease to delight in her willingness to command (Hold still, relax, I know it hurts a little but give in to it, pain in moderation has its pleasures…)
During the months after his coronation, it was increasingly impossible for her to believe that he undervalued her intelligence (she was, in fact, intelligent). It was ever more apparent that he prized her opinions over those of his counselors (she whose only official purposes were peacekeeping and the production of heirs). By the time he’d turned twenty (just after she’d turned twenty-four), it was evident that they ruled together, secretly; that he (as tradition demanded) would offer as his own pronouncements, every day, that which they had decided together, the night before, when they were alone, in bed.
Decades passed. They had a son, a daughter, and a second son.
Their lives, their reign, was not untroubled. Among their subjects there were robberies, contract disputes, lawsuits over property lines that had been drawn a century ago. The axe-maker’s wife beat her husband to death with a lamb bone and, as the police took her away, proclaimed that she hadn’t wanted to sully one of the axes. In the castle, a maid was impregnated by a page, and (although the king and queen would not have punished her) drowned herself in a well. The cook fought continually with the housekeeper, each delivering, for almost thirty years, a weekly report about the excesses and callousness of the other.
Among the family, the daughter, the middle child, who had not only inherited but doubled her mother’s tendency to corpulence, jumped out a window at the age of twelve, but — it being only a second-story window — landed unharmed on a hydrangea bush and, having made the gesture once, seemed to feel no need of making it again.
The second son, the youngest child — knowing he’d never be king — ran off when he turned seventeen, but returned less than a year later, thin and ragged, having tried to live as a bard and troubadour in a neighboring kingdom, but having found that his limited gifts attracted scant attention. He decided he could manage as a prince, composing verses and singing songs at occasional palace recitals.
The oldest boy was almost suspiciously untroubled. He was hale and stalwart, confident without an edge of arrogance, but his was not the most subtle and penetrating of minds, and it was impossible for his parents to refrain from periods of doubt about his ability to be king himself when the day arrived.
Although the king and queen never ceased entirely to worry over their children, the older boy remained true and devoted, and took on a more royal aspect as he entered his twenties. The younger boy married a homely but insightful princess from several kingdoms away, wrote volumes of verse for his wife, who believed him to be a genius, unheralded in his time but sure to be vindicated by history. The daughter did not marry (though she had offers) but became an expert archer, a hunter, and a sailor, and took great joy in everything she did so well.
The king and queen themselves were not untouched by sorrows or trials. In late middle age, the king believed himself to have fallen in love with an absurd but imperiously serene, lunar and ethereally pallid duchess, and needed a fortnight to learn that she intoxicated but bored him. The queen, soon after the duchess episode, returned to her old habit of pushing pages and stableboys down onto hay bales and secluded lawns, until the boys’ helpless willingness, the thoughts of advancement that were audible through their lascivious moans, became more humiliating than gratifying.
The king and queen returned to each other, battered, humbled, and strangely amused by their escapades. They found, to their mutual surprise, that they seemed to love each other more rather than less for having shown, rather late in the game, this capacity for their blood to rise.
She said to him, on occasion, I’m turning slender and sly, I’m learning to weep discreetly when the nightingale sings.
He said to her, on occasion, Straddling me won’t raise you any higher, are you sure it’s worth the effort?
Which (to their shared surprise) always made them both laugh.
* * *
Eventually, decades later, when the king was dying, the queen gently ushered everybody out into the corridor, closed the door to the royal bedchamber, and got into bed with her husband. She started singing to him. They laughed. He was short of breath, but he could still laugh. They asked each other, Is this silly? Is this … pretentious? But they both knew that everything there was to say had been said already, over and over, across the years. And so the king, relieved, released, free to be silly, asked her to sing him a song from his childhood. He didn’t need to be regal anymore, he didn’t need to seem commanding or dignified, not with her. They were, in their way, dying together, and they both knew it. It wasn’t happening only to him. So she started singing. They shared one last laugh — they agreed that the cat had a better voice than she did. Still, she sang him out of the world.
When the queen was dying, years later, there were twenty-three people in the room, as well as three cats and two dogs. There were her children and their children and their children’s children, three of her maids, two pages (the older and the younger, long known to be lovers, their secret honored by everyone), and the cook and the housekeeper (who’d delivered their final complaints only weeks earlier). The animals — the dogs and cats — were in bed with the queen. The people knew, somehow, to stand at a certain distance, except for Sophia, the oldest maid, who moistened the queen’s brow with a handkerchief.
The room wasn’t silent, or reverent. One of the babies fussed. One of the dogs snarled at one of the cats. But the queen, who was enormous by then, and pale as milk, looked at all the beings surrounding her, human and animal, with a certain grave compassion, as if they were the ones who were dying.