"Starved,” he whispered.
"Oh, God.” Mona gathered his shivering body to hers. She could have counted his ribs with her fingers in the dark he was so thin. She wrapped him as best she could in her thick skirts.
"Food,” he said, and it sounded like he was trying to ask her a question.
"I have nothing,” she said. "They searched me.”
He nodded, resigned to his death, and closed his eyes.
She rocked him against her like a baby in her arms. He was so frail, so helpless, it made her heart ache. The pain in her breasts grew unbearable. She wept in sorrow and in pain. Malcolm rested his head on her chest and she groaned under a fresh wave of agony. Something was happening. She felt the front of her dress grow damp and warm. Was Malcolm bleeding on her? Frantically, she pushed the bodice of the dress down. She saw no blood, only her breasts, red and swollen and her nipples distended. The fluid was leaking from her breasts. White fluid, not red.
At once she understood the painting and the meaning of Roman Charity. It wasn’t a painting of a prostitute paying a conjugal visit to a prisoner. It was a painting of a woman feeding a starving prisoner from her own breasts. Without a second thought she took her breast in her hand and lifted it to his mouth.
"Suck,” she told him, but he seemed too weak to hear her. She tilted his head gently forward and cradled him in her arms like a child. The guards had searched her body for food but they couldn’t take the food from inside her body. Malcolm slowly parted his lips. She pressed her nipple into his mouth, and this time he was able to latch onto her breast. She wrapped her skirts around him even more, hiding this private act from prying eyes lest they rip her away from him and the nourishment that would keep him alive. As he nursed from her breast, her pain eased. She kissed his forehead, his hollowed cheeks as he drank from her body. As the minutes passed, he seemed to gain strength. His thin hand clutched her bare shoulder as he drank more deeply of her. By the firelight of the torch, his hair darkened from white to gray and slowly, ever so slowly, to black again.
When he’d emptied one breast, she shifted him in her arms, pressing her other breast into his mouth. He latched on far more quickly this time and she wept with relief. He would live. She had saved him.
"What crime did you commit?” she whispered. "Why are you here?”
"I loved a woman I shouldn’t have loved,” he said, so quietly she wouldn’t have heard him but for the echo of his words off the stone walls.
"And you were imprisoned because of that? Starved?”
He nodded and took her nipple into his mouth again and suckled.
"Did I hurt you?” she asked.
"Yes,” he said against her breast. "Not your fault.”
Her hot tears fell on his face as he nursed. She asked him no more questions as he fed from her. She’d never known such terrible tenderness as she knew now with his frail body in her arms and her body feeding his in this most intimate of ways. Holding him in her arms, nursing him from her breasts, she knew she did love him, though what that meant for them she didn’t know. Nothing made sense. All of this was impossible. How could she lactate like this without ever having had a child?
At last he seemed sated. He released his hold on her breast and lay his head back in her arms. She rocked him like a mother with a child, though the words she whispered were the words of lovers.
"Forgive me,” she said to him. Though his body was still thin and weak, his face was again the face of the man she’d seen in the gallery the first night, the face of a man at the prime of his life.
"It isn’t your fault,” he said. "You didn’t know what you were doing to me when you brought him to our bed.”
"Sebastian.” She sighed. "I was angry at you. I wanted to be with someone else so I could pretend I didn’t want you anymore. I didn’t think I could hurt you.”
"I felt it happening,” he said. He sounded like a man recovering from a long illness. His voice wavered, weak and tired, but he would live. "It was like…bleeding. Bleeding out.”
"How? How did you feel it?”
He shook his head. "I can’t explain. Not yet.”
"I want to have your child,” she said. "Will you do that for me? You said you would leave me, but I want to have your child whether you stay or go. Can I?”
"You may have my child. It’s what I’ve wanted all along, for you to have the next heir.”
"Why?”
"A deathbed promise.”
"What was the promise?”
"I can’t explain.”
"Not yet?”
"Not yet,” he said. "But you’ll understand soon enough.”
"I can wait,” she said. "I trust you now.”
"That’s all I ask.”
"Do you need more?” she asked. As soon as he told her he would let her have his child, her breasts felt painfully full again. He nodded and she lowered her bodice again, giving him her breast. The milk flowed into his mouth. By some magic his rail-thin body filled out until he was once again whole and healthy and he looked himself again, proud and virile. She didn’t question it or fear this magic anymore. It simply was.
"I’ll have a son.” As soon as she said it she knew she wasn’t dreaming of the future but seeing it. Somewhere a house made of stone awaited her, iron gates, and a garden of red-thorned roses. "He’ll take after you. I’ll name him anything you tell me to name him.”
"Name him for me,” he said before returning to her breast.
She nodded, smiled. Her son would be named Malcolm, after his father. And she would nurse the son like she’d nursed the father and she would love them both until the day she died.
Mona wrapped her arms around Malcolm to hide them from view. She’d heard footsteps in the corridor and feared discovery.
"I must help you,” she said.
"Let me inside you,” he said.
That was easily enough done. She pushed him gently onto his back and straddled his stomach as he lifted her skirts to her waist. With one finger he stroked her, splitting her along the seam of her sex with his fingers. The folds parted for him easily as he touched her. As soon as she’d grown wet enough, he positioned his cock at her opening and eased her down onto it.
Mona wept with joy to have him inside her again. Her purple skirts made a blanket for them and under that blanket they coupled themselves together, deeply, slowly, and with such tenderness she feared she’d never stop crying. Malcolm kissed her face, her tears, her hair that spilled over her shoulders. Somehow—he didn’t tell her and she knew he wouldn’t—somehow she knew he’d been languishing, a prisoner, all this time. She’d fed him through their lovemaking and when she’d taken it away from him, she’d starved him somehow. Someone else had made him a prisoner but it was she who’d taken his sustenance from him.