Eleanor Crosses, by Jennifer Falkner

Eleanor Cross at Geddington, England, sculptor unknown (1294-1295). Lofty at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Eleanor Crosses

Late November, 1290

They snipped me open and tugged out my heart, my lungs, my guts, seat of all my appetites. They get their own burial here in Lincoln, a tomb, and even chantries. Imagine holy men singing prayers to your stomach, or the snakes of your intestines, even your womb. You can’t, can you? That is because you are not a Queen.

My heart is to journey with us, in its own special pewter box. Part of the royal cortege back to London. I took a peek before they sealed the lid. The colour of damson tarts, but such a limp little thing. Curious to have been the place of so much passion.

So I am now simply me. Eleanor, undiluted. A brain atop a hollowed out corpse. It’s not unlike the sudden emptiness after the yank and pull of the midwife and the whoosh of blood and babe and placenta. After months of feeling confined in my own body, out of breath, elbowed from the inside, to suddenly be alone and myself again.

***

Now begins the long journey back to London. For much of the journey north I was unwell. Edward sent my fools home, while in my feverish state, plans for the funeral began to obsess me. Edward pleaded for me to rest but I pushed him away and demanded my daughters, for them to bring me more paper and ink. They would not plead with me. They feared me too much. My poor girls. Rudderless now. 

I have arranged good marriages for them. Good for them and advantageous for the kingdom. They will soon be too busy with households and babies to lament me. Yes, when it came to my children, I did my duty.

***

My body still breathes – my soul goes in at dawn, rests in its familiar flesh, and as the sun descends, I am released as an exhale. As the days go by, as the sun loses its power shows itself less and less, I am less myself. Less Eleanor, more just a breath of air. The light of a candle rippling over a pane of coloured glass.

I flit about, now with Edward, now with his coachman when Edward’s weeping becomes too oppressive. Lighten up, I want to tell him. It’s only death. It’s only a body. Imperfect, impermanent thing. But I am being unfair. He is still trapped in his and doesn’t have my perspective.

He’s not used to this, this constant change in the body. I have been so many shapes, contained so many lives. He has only been himself and now, growing older, fatter, full of inexplicable aches, he doesn’t know how to handle it. How to surrender and let the changes take him.

He denies the evidence of his body, despises the signs of age as weakness. Sickness and decay are aberrations. He will marry again soon, I have little doubt, if only to trick himself into feeling virile again. He’s always been good at beginnings. He’ll leave the messy endings to others, to the women who clean and dress the body. Even these crosses he’s started planning to have built in my memory, to mark each place the cortege rests on the way to London, he’ll leave the design and execution to others. Just watch.

***

I don’t see my little ones now. The ones that passed too early. Little Katherine, Joanna, John, Henry, Alphonso. And the ones too tiny even to have borne a name. I thought they would be waiting for me. Perhaps it is to do with the removal of my heart, but I don’t mind their absence. They would only have distracted me.

I flit and glimmer. Sometimes I am the road, the horse, the cold wind, the racing hare. I do not think Eleanor as I have known her will make it to Westminster.

***

Poor Edward. His senses keep seeking me out, the sound of my voice, the weight of my hand on his arm. Even the taste of me. He would never confess it, but he craves the way I tasted before age, children, cracked teeth and the constant smell of cloves. He wants my sweetness. He wants me at thirteen. The year we were married.

The girls, forlorn in the other carriage, want my authority.

***

I spend the night out upon the ground. No, I am the ground. I am the earth. I slip down into it, the busy soil, teeming with tiny creatures constantly munching and moving and multiplying, life life life. The earth, I discover, is always eating itself. Fecundity and decay in equal measure.

How can I return to my body after this? I can’t lie in my fleshy shell, where my stinking decay had been barely slowed by bunches of smelly herbs. In the morning I follow the cortege on the wind. I blow the horses’ tails into fans and tickle my husband’s ears. 

He pretends he hears my voice. He replays my tired phrases, our old jokes, the Spanish expressions that used to grate on him so when I was alive.

***

He doubts the men in the monastery, the supposedly holy men, who are charged with praying my soul into heaven. He is right to doubt them. My soul is here, with him. It’s not going anywhere.

But those men, they were too sleek, too well-fed and earthly in their pleasures for true piousness. The common people, though. They are, for the most part, slight enough. Half-starved, some years, though Edward does not care to have the connection between their state and his endless costly wars pointed out. He sees their simplicity as akin to purity, their earnestness in trying to please him makes him see their prayers as stronger, worth more in the eyes of God. That is how the idea for the crosses is born. Stone memorials for every stop from Lincoln to London. A natural route for pilgrimage. Barely twenty miles a day. Enough to make its pilgrims work for it, not enough to burden them.

In Grantham, Edward dreams of the crosses. Slender and straight, as he pretends my fingers had been. Already I am transitioning into sainthood. The crosses will point to heaven as reminders that he has been focused on all the wrong things. Reminders of his soul, as well as mine, and their need for salvation.

It is all absurd.

***

My soul is drifting through the fog. I am diffused with every drop of water suspended in the air like stars. They move through me and I through them, spreading myself thin, bunching myself up like a bundle of laundry. I pull silly faces at him through the fog. He pulls back from the window, petrified.

***

When the carriage breaks an axle in the thick mud, Edward seizes on the opportunity for penance. He trudges through the rain, refusing all comforts, even a horse to cover the miles more quickly. Oh my love, don’t you remember the night in Caernarfon, after putting down the troublesome Welsh, we danced so raucously the floor gave way? 

Somewhere between Stamford and Geddington, the chest containing the royal bedding and furs developed a crack and rain seeped in. The King must sleep under a stranger’s blankets for a night. He refuses to suffer the same indignity a second night and so is tormented by the smell of damp wool and musty sheets every night thereafter. He would have complained to me, if I had been there, and I would have calmed him, pointed out the ridiculousness of sleeping under damp blankets, and he would have grumbled and made do with the substitutes. Instead, he rages at the girls, at his steward, and no one can assuage him. He can no longer find my smell in his bed.

***

While the cortege rests at another small town, winter cold steals over the land. The mud hardens, the grasses glitter with frost and the small pools of water that gathered into the tracks will crack like glass underfoot. Before the sun rises much higher, I slip into the pulse of a lone red fox, trotting along the bottom of the hedgerow, a mouse dangling from its jaws.

When I turn into the wind to catch up with Edward, the procession passes through the ancient walls of St. Albans to be greeted by the bishop. It’s a shock to realize it is already Advent. The church has been caught out in its preparations for Christmas by the royal arrival. There are too many people. Too much noise and rancid breath, too much limp mistletoe and dying holly draped over doorways and along windowsills.

I slip out, past the servants, the guards, the clergymen, out beyond the confines of the town to where purple evening shadows gather. The wind brings me to the warm rush of blood, the steady heart-thrum, the puffs of warm breath in the cold air, of a stag.

***

Oh this stag is alive. And I am alive again within it. And he - I - we are hungry. The winter world, the world that darkens a little more every day, is growing thin. Food is getting scarce.

His - my - our antlers are heavy. Strips of velvet like pennants dance weakly in the breeze. He will shed this rack when the winter is over, when the days are long, and there is no more need to grow a protective forest out of his head.

There are men nearby, talking, not deviating from the path through the woods. He - I - we are invisible. We are the colour of the barren trees, the leaf-littered earth. We melt in and out of view at will.

We scent a female nearby, a docile thing, one who has borne us on her back before. We could roar, let her know we are here and ready. We pace, puff out frosty air, lift our nose to smell her scent again. Perhaps it’s my presence that holds us back. The stag knows he’s not alone. Or perhaps tonight just isn’t the night. We keep silent and watch the creeping gloom gather in the forest instead. The grasses we fed on earlier revisit our mouths for another ruminating chew. It is all life in here, all strength - the blood, the vigorous heart, the lust that holds us almost in its sway -

***

My face may last as long as my tomb endures, as long as the crosses Edward dreams of point the way to heaven. But I am faceless. Formless. I have become forest and marsh. I am the tilled field and the wind that strokes its back. I am every scurrying creature and its hunter.

I am nothing at all.

***

I hope Edward will keep my fools. They could make him laugh again.

Jennifer Falkner

Jennifer Falkner (she/her) is a short story writer living in Ottawa, Canada, on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe First Nation. She is the author of Susanna Hall: Her Book (Ottawa Book Award finalist) and the short story collection Above Discovery.  www.jenniferfalkner.ca