Miranda and Caliban(47)
Still, there is a small resentful part of me, the faint spark of rebellion not extinguished by my punishment and ensuing affliction, that cannot help but think that Papa might have warned me about the burden of Eve’s curse.
After all, it is an alarming amount of blood that I lose, and it is no easy task to bind the moss-filled muslin pouches in place with the sash to capture it. Although I pass the sash between my thighs and knot it firmly around my waist, the pouches are prone to shifting nonetheless. In order not to dislodge them, I am forced to walk with a careful, spraddle-legged, shuffling gait, ever heedful of the bulky pouch of dried sphagnum that is wedged between my thighs and growing sodden and distasteful as it absorbs the blood that continuously seeps from me. I find it necessary to place the jar outside Papa’s sanctum and knock upon the door at least three times a day. Of course, the shifting of the pouches causes blood to soak the sash, too, in patches that dry and crust and chafe my thighs. Given that Papa regards this blood—this menstruum, as he calls it—as such a valuable and dangerous substance, I am not sure what I am to do about it.
When I ask Papa, he frowns. “I should have thought the arrangement sufficient,” he says. “Can you not manage these matters more carefully, Miranda?”
I look down. “Forgive me, Papa. I am doing my best.”
“Ah, child!” A rueful note enters Papa’s voice. “I would that … no mind. I am doing my best, too.”
In the end, he bids me wash the sash in running water and gives me a generous length of the canvas that Ariel has purloined from somewhere—a wrecked ship within some leagues of the isle, I suspect—that I might make additional sashes from it.
Grateful, I use the canvas to fashion a garment that girdles my waist with a wider sash affixed to the rear of it that passes between my thighs and knots in the front. Although the canvas is coarse against my skin, the garment I devise serves better to hold the pouches in place. It works well enough that I fashion a second and a third such garment that I might always have a clean, dry sash at hand. By the third day, the sickly pain that grips my belly goes away. I empty my wash-basin on barren ground where no gnomes delve, rinsing the basin and my befouled sashes in a swift-running portion of the stream where no undines frolic. Such are the small victories of my messy and burdensome introduction to womanhood.
And yet along with the unexpected inconvenience of the business of womanhood comes a slow-dawning sense of wonder.
In the innocence of childhood, I had supposed that to become a woman grown was a simple matter of reaching a certain age; ten years, mayhap. It seemed likely enough to me that passing from one to two digits of age marked a threshold before Papa disabused me of the notion. He said that I would know when the day came, and I suppose there is a certain truth to it since I most assuredly took note of the day’s arrival.
But it is better not to think of that and fan the spark of resentment. Instead, as the days pass, my thoughts turn from contemplation of disobedience to the words that Papa spoke on the day my courses began.
It is a sign that your body is ready to bring new life into the world. Your womb, which is the vessel of life within you, does but shed an excess of sanguine humor to make room for the possibility of a child.
A child!
I marvel at the notion. To think that a child might grow inside me! There is a great deal I do not yet understand about it, and I know it is a thing that cannot come to pass ere I am wed—and how that might transpire on our lonely isle if I am to wed neither Caliban nor Ariel is an almighty mystery—but the mere prospect of it is a wonderment.
’Tis no wonder, then, that there is power in the blood I shed, for it is blood shed in the service of life.
I should like to know how this whole business works. I have not forgotten Ariel’s condescending pity when he learned I imagined that human babies were hatched much in the manner of chicks, nor have I forgotten that it is a business fraught with danger if ’tis true that my own mother died of it. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children …
Sorrow or death.
Yes, I should very much like to know.
But when I raise the topic with Papa—carefully, oh, so tentatively—he says only that I need not trouble myself with such knowledge yet and cautions me against pursuing it.
“It is no fit topic for an unwed virgin,” he says in a stern tone.
Having learned the price of disobedience all too well, I let the matter lie, though it does not stop me from wondering.
And I wonder … I wonder what Caliban knows. When Papa did first summon him, it seemed to me that I should be the wild boy’s teacher in all things always, for he was almost wholly savage and I knew ever so much more than him. In a sense the latter remains true as Caliban can neither read nor write, and knows naught of the multitude of correspondences and imagery that Papa has bade me memorize. As pleased as Papa was with Caliban’s success in mastering language, he gauged it not worth the time and effort it would require to teach him any higher skills.
Yet our roles changed during the long months of my recovery, and they have remained changed.
Is there a sign such as the onset of a woman’s courses that marks a boy’s transition into manhood, I wonder? If so, Caliban has never spoken of it.
Over the years, Papa has taken regular measurements of the growth of Caliban’s limbs and skull and corpus, and refined his initial reckoning of his age, placing it at ten years when he was summoned, which means that Caliban is some four years my elder. At seventeen, surely he must be considered a young man.