THE LAST SOPHIA
C.S.E. Cooney
The gestation period for a Gentry babe is brutally short. Later, one is hard-pressed to remember any of it. As soon as ever I spew her forth into the world (this time, it is a girl; I’ve been dreaming of her), she will be taken away to be raised elsewhere, and I will not remember her face. Of my other children, I know only the names, but these I feel were all—or for the most part—in very bad taste.
When I am spared a moment of lucidity (this, I confess, happens but rarely; most days I lie in a kind of swoon or stupor, and the ivy patterns against the window form the queerest fantastical faces, and sometimes I think they’re singing to me), I scold my relatives for allowing someone like me to retain titular power over her innocent progeny. Or would it be nominal power? I can barely remember my own name most days—how should I be accountable for the appellations of infants?
I came under enemy enchantment at the soft age of fourteen. For some reason it pleased the Gentry that I should breed their changeling babes, will me nil me, and breed them I have, though I had little else to do with them. Since then, it’s been fumes and nostrums, narcotics and elixirs. I have existed in a kind of padded dream designed by the Abbot’s wizards to protect me from further Gentry meddling—although, if you look at my record, these potions hardly seem worth their weight in piss. I have now borne three Gentry babes in as many years and will any day deliver myself of a fourth.
As I seem this afternoon to be granted a brief window of lucidity, I am here going to voice my suspicion that either these potions are little more than prayer and sugar water, or the Abbot, for reasons of his own, desires my body to be the fertile flower pollinated by any passing Gentry, that he has use for my changelings in the great war against them, that he has placed me under drugs and supervision and allows the whims and whammies and magical caprices of the Gentry to be worked upon me without a care for my own well-being—but no, no. This is paranoia. I am in my mother’s cottage. She would never allow it. She’s a hetch, you know—the finest hedge witch east of Braseling. Am I writing this or thinking it? Perhaps I am speaking out loud. Your eyes are so green, so gold, so full of leaves. But like the ballad, your smile is sly. I do not know if I trust you….
Dear Aunt Hortensia,
Your last letter tells me that Darren gets on very well at your villa. I did not perfectly recall that you owned a villa. But now I remember mother telling me you were a famous courtesan in your day, and that the King of Leressa nearly made you his consort, but you would not settle for a morganatic marriage, so he gave you a villa instead. It all comes back. Do you still see His Majesty? No, you wouldn’t, for he is dead these ten years, isn’t he? Murdered during the First Wave of the Gentry invasion, lured into a bog by a ‘Lisp’s blue candle flame and drowned. Did you weep, I wonder? But we were talking of my oldest son, Darren.
Did I really name him Darren? A stodgier, more stuffed-shirtish, unfortunate prig of a name there never was. You might have alerted me to my error sooner. I had not crawled to his cradle after his birth but I learned you had whisked him off to live with you. I don’t mind that he lives with you, Auntie H—indeed, I do not like children. But can we not change his name? I feel I have asked you this before, and that you answered me already. Ah, yes. It is here in your letter. You write that the child is now four years old and firmly fixed in his Darrenness.
That is too bad. I wonder if he is like his father? If you want my opinion it would be simple enough to ascertain Darren’s patronage by countenance alone. As you probably know, I never met Darren’s father. I was outside one morning in my garden, digging for potatoes, when all of a sudden a quite large potato opened five of its eyes and winked at me in the most lascivious manner. I didn’t faint. I never faint, Auntie H, don’t you dare think it of me, but I don’t know quite what happened next.
Sensations. All through me. The smell of mud in my nostrils. Never before had I smelled mud like that, and never have since, mud that made me want to roll in it with my mouth open, the richest, blackest, cleanest mud, full of the most squiggly delicious worms, the greenest loveliest moss, the sharp edge of quartz crystals raking down my back. I remember they left marks like fingernails….
Five months later, Darren. Five months, you will perhaps not know, is the time it takes to grow a potato from seed in these parts. We have very vigorous soil here. Mother said it is due to volcanic activity in an earlier age. If this is so, I have lived too long off the fruits of this land. Indelicate as it may seem to commit such a thought to paper, I confess to feeling as fertile as the earth in my potato patch.
I do not mean this rudely, Aunt Hortensia, but is Darren very squat and brown? Does he have more than two eyes? I seem to remember a profusion (or do I mean a protrusion?) of eyes blinking up at me from his cradle, but I can’t tell if I was dreaming. After all, he was already gone by the time I managed to visit him. Wasn’t he? My affliction is dreaming, Auntie, as you know.
I do not think Darren shares a father with the twins. I had forgotten the twins until now! Who owns them, I wonder? Is the term “owns” erroneous? I cannot tell. I will ask my mother and make further inquiries of my relatives.
As the twins are, or were at one point, mine, I hope they are happy. If they have ever written me, I am sure I do not know what I have done with their letters. I just cannot seem to respond with any kind of temporal efficacy. Besides, they must be quite young yet.
Yours,
E. A.
No one has berated me for my pregnancies. However, I cannot help but think there is about certain of my aunts an air of disapproval. Do you see it too? As if every time I spoke, great quantities of dung beetles fell from my tongue, or like the sound of my voice is as unpleasant as chewing on frog guts, or like I carry an odor of skunk with me. Nothing so breezy as one of those creatures wafting its anxious spray, but rather one who is three days dead and rotting in a pile of bones in some coyote’s den.
But between our current theocracy (mother has taken to frowning whenever I ask her about the Abbot. She forbade me to swallow any more of his wizards’ potions: an imperative for which I can only thank her, as not a one of them tasted better than drinking my own waste water, and besides that, here I am, belly near to bursting with my fourth Gentry babe, and this despite swallowing every sour mouthful!) and the Second Wave of the Invasion (to my mind, far more insidious than the First Wave, which resulted in many deaths, but not, I think, in quite so many births), I cannot be held responsible for the state of my uterus. I move through an occluded world. Ignorant? Or the victim of an enforced amnesia?
You smile. You tap your twiggy fingers against the windowpane. Yes, I know you’re very clever and can hear me even when I’m only thinking, as now. Except my mouth is dry. It is possible I have been talking out loud again. Or singing.
My mother worries about me. She has set wards and enchantments about our cottage and thinks it little enough, knowing, as I do, that the Gentry have ways of stealing through the cracks. Come now, will you deny it? There you are, beaming and fluttering, in sunray and snowfall, the color of an autumn leaf, a westerly breeze. I cannot help being touched, though I remember little of it after.
Dear Grandmother Elspeth,
Some of my cousins—Mewsie’s get—were in to visit the other day. Mother wouldn’t let them up to see me, but I heard them very clearly through the walls. Caro said: