The Wedding Band
Imogen, 1486
Miles and Imogen married for love, neither family rich enough in property or title to object to the union, and for a few halcyon months following their wedding in the spring of the year 1484, the two were happy. Miles had steady work chopping and delivering wood to the neighboring village, and spoke of taking an apprentice. Imogen was busy with her duties as wife, excited by the novelty of keeping her own house. She had been taught by her mother to find joy in life’s daily patterns—sweeping the floors, treating the stains on Miles’s shirts, churning the butter. She sensed herself building a life out of these patterns, and took comfort in the fact that through them she could glimpse her future just as well as any oracle or seer. She would bear Miles’s children, wash their clothes and cook their meals, she would go to church on saint’s days and Sabbaths. As the children grew, they’d learn to do the same, and one day Miles and Imogen would have grandchildren to coddle.
A proper wife, Imogen worshipped her husband second only to her God. She tended to the livestock: their two plump pigs, the bony cow her father had given as her dowry. She tried to have a proper supper ready for Miles when he came back from the forest, conjuring hearty meals from nothing even when meat was scarce. She went to his bed happily, holding her tongue when he twisted her body too roughly or his beard scratched her cheek. She prayed for him daily.
And Miles would come home to his wife with wildflowers in hand, with tales of wolf kits he had spotted in shaded glens, bright cloth he had bought in the village. His smile would widen upon seeing Imogen there in the doorway of their cottage, and together they would thank God for granting them such happiness.
When Imogen told Miles that she was with child, he kissed a trail across her stomach, and with tender, calloused hands he cupped her breasts. He marveled at the elasticity of his wife’s skin, the pop of her navel. He wanted her more once she was no longer simply herself, once he had claimed her so completely. Their lovemaking, for Miles, became a sort of onanism. When he thrust he’d imagine himself and not his wife as the recipient, himself in small, pure form, slowly devouring her. He could not explain the sudden onset of such solipsistic desire, nor did he understand the void left in its wake once the baby was born. He was no longer content with just Imogen, once he had known her as an embodiment of himself.
The day of his son’s birth, Miles paced the trees outside their cottage. His own mother had died several hours after bearing his brother, and Imogen assumed this initial anxiety stemmed from the fear of a similar loss. Yet even after both the child and Imogen were declared healthy, Miles remained anxious. Imogen watched him for signs of the sweating sickness that had swept a nearby town, but his apprehension was not trailed by shivering or fever. Was he worried that the child was not his? He had no reason to suspect her of unfaithfulness: the boy had his gray eyes, his father’s auburn hair. Still, Miles would not hold his baby. He would not look at his wife. He took to frequenting the far side of the village, returning late, smelling of ale and other women’s bodies. Imogen prayed for him, but no saints seemed to hear her.
In the night, when the child cried and Imogen rose from the bed she shared with Miles to feed him, she might catch her husband watching her nurse. Lit by the dying fire, he looked gaunt and old and jealous. Jealous of what? Imogen wondered. If anyone had cause to be jealous, it was Imogen herself, raising Miles’s child while he found comfort with others. And yet she did not feel jealousy, rather sadness at Miles’s new affliction, at her own inability to please him. She felt she must not have tried hard enough, that it was not Miles to blame but her own failure to excite him. Imogen saw no other way to reconcile her husband’s behavior with his previous elation, could not otherwise understand such disdain from a man she thought she knew, her own simple woodcutter, who’d wooed her with sweet words and gentle smiles.
As time passed and Miles grew more distant, Imogen felt she had to act. She attempted to seduce him, but their lovemaking was wooden, passion drained. She tasted other women on his breath. She was afraid to tell Miles of the second child, whispered the news late at night, hoping he might be asleep. But Miles was not, and to his wife’s surprise, he was thrilled at her announcement. He leaped up and kissed her, smiling his old smile for the first time in months. He swore to be faithful. He cried in Imogen’s arms, and she promised to forgive him.
THEIR LAST WINTER together was a harsh one, early snows destroying crops, blocking passages for trade. Firewood was in demand and Miles delivered, but many of his usual customers were unable to pay. Their small family kept warm, but went hungry.
Imogen heard no more rumors about Miles. She was pleased with his renewed attentions, to herself and to their son. Still, the dark season seemed endless, and Miles was often gone. In the house, one son crying at her feet, another sucking life inside her, Imogen grew restless. She imagined Miles kissing the neck of another, imagined him dry in the whorehouse while his own roof leaked.
One night it grew increasingly late; it grew unbearable. Be patient, she instructed herself. Have faith in him, faith in the Lord. The hours passed. Miles did not return. The drip of melting snow through the crack in the roof grew ever louder. Her son’s whimpering increased. The child within her womb twisted and writhed. Imogen could no longer be patient. She bundled herself and her child into their warmest clothing and set out to hunt for Miles.
ALL IT TOOK was a single moment: Imogen’s feet cold in the snow, her son pulling her skirt, her husband off with another village whore. They were hungry, there’d soon be another mouth to feed. The child tugging. Her husband gone. Who does he think he is now, getting his fill of that woman— The cupboard at home, bare. Wind blasting, ice in Imogen’s bones. Her child whimpering. If only—
Imogen squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head, tried to banish sinful thoughts. She reached back for her son, who she’d brushed off her skirts in uncharacteristic frustration. There was no one behind her. The wind had softened; the snow had disappeared.
“I didn’t mean it,” Imogen said aloud, sinking to her knees. “I didn’t mean any of it.”
But the only response was the low whisper of trees.
10
Regarding the disposal of bodies, I knew more of ancient practice than modern. A picture I remembered from one of Peter’s books displayed a burial mound, a small hill like a tumor squatted green upon a meadow, marked by rings of upright stones. These mounds were man-made, though I could not imagine how a man might mold the earth in such a way. I could not imagine how a king, upon his death, might ask his retinue to follow, to crawl into his cave, close their eyes, and take their own last breaths. Voicing my disbelief to Peter, he’d explained that mine was a concern that stemmed entirely from the culture I’d been raised in. There were still, today, societies, he told me, where a wife might end her life with loss of husband, strap herself onto his funeral pyre and embrace his flames.
“But not a husband’s loss of wife?”