Tess rushed to her tent. She heard Gen snapping at everyone to stop gaping and get back to work, and then heard the soft sound of the flap as someone came in.
Tess looked up from her cot, face streaming, but it wasn’t Gen who’d come after her, and it wasn’t Felix (her second guess). It was Big Arnando.
He sat cross-legged on the ground near the head of her cot until her sobbing stilled. Then he ran a hand through his graying hair and said, “I told those fools, Felix and Mico, that you seemed unenthusiastic about the damaelle, that maybe you were a Daanite—like me—and didn’t want to tell them. They didn’t listen, and here you are. Felix has a good heart, even if he has no sense. He’d have rushed in here, but I thought you might not want to see him yet.”
“Thanks,” said Tess, who never cared to see Felix again, and hoped he fell down a hole.
Arnando lowered his voice. “Gen’s prowling around, keeping everyone away. Nobody’s going to overhear you. You may tell me anything, comrade, if it would help. Dulsia didn’t make you do anything against your inclinations, did she?”
Tess shook her head, but started crying again. Arnando took her small, newly callused hand in one of his enormous rough ones.
He asked for no further explanation, but still she wanted to give him one. The memory was loose in her, and she was too wrecked to fight it down and lock it up again. The only way to release it was to utter it aloud.
It wasn’t the sort of thing one tells a stranger, and yet there was comfort in the fact that Arnando wasn’t a friend. It would be like confession to a priest or, based on the size of him, a mountain. She could hand him her pain, she felt instinctively. She wanted to.
“She made me remember my baby,” said Tess, and then she was off her cot and in Arnando’s arms, weeping against his mighty chest.
And he didn’t say, Wait, you’re a woman? or Your name isn’t really Tes’puco? You didn’t become the foreman of Boss Gen’s crew unless you impressed her, and you didn’t impress her unless you were smart.
Arnando cradled Tess to him, a rock in her stormy sea, and said, “Tell me your story.”
* * *
Grandma Therese had been a comfort during Tess’s pregnancy, but Chessey the midwife had been solid as granite. At their weekly checkups in the cherubic panopticon bedroom, she was all business. When she said, “Gown off,” Tess obeyed. Chessey would prod and palp with devastatingly competent hands, listen to Tess’s belly through a tube, and measure the latitude and longitude of her bump.
If Tess felt sorry for herself and began to weep—as sometimes happened—Chessey snapped, “None of that. You may’ve played the dog in getting this baby, but you’ll play the princess delivering it. This is not defeat, not ‘illegitimate,’ whatever your family says. Heaven brought each of us forth into this world, and you can’t tell me Heaven don’t know what it’s doing.”
The night Grandma Therese died was the night the contractions began, three months early. The memory was blurred now: Tess screamed in the garden; Uncle Jean-Philippe brought her indoors; a scullion was sent running to the village for the midwife; someone must have carried her grandmother’s body indoors, but Tess was privy to none of that. She was sent to the cherubic chamber, where servants buzzed around her like bees, fetching towels and boiling water. By the time Chessey arrived, they’d swaddled Tess like a mummy.
“No,” barked Chessey, shooing people out and excavating Tess from the mess of linens. She laid hands upon Tess’s belly, reading it with her fingers. “That feels serious,” she muttered, flinging back Tess’s chemise. Tess was too racked with contractions to protest.
Chessey shook her weathered head. “Saints’ bunions,” she said. “You’re determined to have this baby right now. I don’t like it, but you’re so far along the tea wouldn’t stop it. Might even hasten it. Can you stand with an arm around my shoulders?”
Tess answered with the negative, or tried to, but all that came out was a steam-kettle shrill of panic. Chessey wedged a wadded rag into Tess’s mouth.
“Be quiet and listen,” she said in a voice that brooked no compromise. “You can give birth the agonizing, terrible way, or you can do it the less terrible way. The latter involves listening to me and doing what I say. What’s it going to be?”
Tess, tears streaming down her cheeks, pointed urgently at Chessey.
“Good,” said the midwife. “Now stop screaming. It wastes power you’ll need later. Stand up.” She pulled Tess firmly upright and plucked the rag from her mouth. “It’s less frightening on your own two feet, I promise. Walk with me—I won’t let you fall—and when your time comes, you shall face it upright, like a proud young lady, not flat on your back like a cowering hound.”
They walked, paused for pain, walked some more, paused again. Every time they paused, every time Tess began to flag and fear, Chessey whispered: “You are the traveler, taking this journey. You are the hero, writing this story. When the trickster Pau-Henoa wandered under the earth, what did he find?”
“The sun,” Tess gasped when the contraction had passed and she could speak again.
“Right,” said Chessey firmly. “Even the pagans knew: you will wander the dark places under the earth, but you will come back with the sun.”
The image of the sun, the idea of light, sustained her. She walked when she could and waited when she had to, Chessey guiding her through the labyrinth of pain.
By the time the baby came, Tess had walked herself toward proud young lady, every trace of terrified, subjected dog long gone. Chessey caught the baby, as she’d caught generations of sun-stars, and she cut the cord and bathed the child. Tess—who, having striven and conquered, was permitted at last to lie down—arranged her exhausted limbs on the bed, and yet she wasn’t entirely exhausted. Her heart soared with unexpected euphoria, like she could do anything, like nothing would ever hurt again.
Chessey brought the bundle, and Tess gazed for the first time upon that tiny, wrinkled face, like a wizened old man’s. His hands were perfect. A warmth rose in her chest, the purest, most aching love she had ever known. Her baby stretched his neck like a tortoise, eyes closed, feeling for her with his mouth, and Tess thought she might die of joy.
“I’m here,” she whispered into his damp, sweet scalp. “Always, Dozerius, my heart.”
* * *
His breathing wasn’t right. Every intake was raspy and irregular; Tess felt the sound like cuts against her skin. “What is it, Chessey?” she cried, but the midwife shook her head grimly.
“He came too soon,” she said. “Like bread too early from the oven. He’s unfinished in the middle.”
At Chessey’s urging, Tess tried him at her breast—“Not that you’ve much to give yet, but let’s see if he can suckle.” His mouth was so weak and tiny that he choked and turned blue. Tess panicked, but Chessey, unflappable, revived him. She had goat’s milk brought from the village and showed Tess how to dip the corner of a handkerchief and let milk dribble into his mouth. Some went in, some came up. Dozerius didn’t open his eyes and didn’t sleep, either, mewling fretfully like a kitten.
By the next day, his limbs, never strong, grew floppy; his skin, never bright, grayed alarmingly. Uncle Jean-Philippe had sent a fast rider to Lavondaville as soon as Tess’s confinement began; Mama arrived without Papa, Jeanne, or Seraphina, and the little bit of sun Tess had managed to retain went out. Mama stormed in, a cloud, and glowered over the bed.
“It’s a mercy,” she said at last. “I prayed to St. Vitt that you’d miscarry, but this will do.”
“You talk like he’s already dead,” said Tess, clasping Dozerius to her chest.
“Steel your heart to it. I’ll fetch a priest to do his psalter so some Saint may petition for his entry into Heaven, irrespective of your sins. We’ll need to name him.”