When Henry was born, he was promised to God and commanded to be innocent under threat of an unknown but existential punishment. His two black-haired brothers were given swords and titles, but Henry was special in his own way, destined to become literate and learned, draped in the splendid vestments of a high-ranking priest, spotless in appearance and in deed. He saw himself that way, too, as pure and clean, and this made him fastidious, especially about his body and his manners, in contrast to the life of secular luxury that had long rendered him shiftless.
Henry reached for a small bell on the bedside table and rang it. The two attendants waiting outside entered. His was a tall-celinged room spanned by wood trusses. A tapestry depicting a courtly dance adorned one white wall and a crucifix the other. Sun alighted onto suspended dust. Henry stood impatiently as the women dressed him, their fleshy hands pulling his linens over his head, silken rust-colored braies over his legs, tying them neatly around his waist, hoisted up his tight stockings, buckled his brown leather shoes. They laced Henry into a green, gold-trimmed tunic with long, billowy sleeves in which he appeared unquestionably beautiful. Certainly, he was not quite yet a little bishopling.
A knock on the door. Henry did not need to enquire who it could be. With a wave of his hand, he dismissed the attendants who scattered like doves. He walked closer to the small, glassless window from which little could be seen, as the window had to be so small no man could squeeze through it in a siege. Still, he searched for world below and was greeted only with treetops. Footsteps behind him, a slender arm around his shoulder, a soft nose pressed against his cheek. Expressionlessly, he took the hand presented to him in his own, toyed with the ring on its pointer finger with the absentminded entitlement of a small child.
"Which mantle do you wish to wear today, Henry?"
"Nothing too warm."
She left him. He waited, listened to the opening of the chest, the rustling of its contents, her footsteps. A flash of fabric. Oh, the yellow silk one. Of course. She draped it around him, and then, to his surprise, produced a clasp he hadn't seen before. A large, white chalcedony set in gold. He took it from her, examined it. The light seemed to swirl in the stone, trapped opaquely beneath its smooth surface. The stiff, gold pins that secured it were nothing to scoff at either.
"Well, that is lovely," he said, pursed lips curling into a smile. "Fasten it, won't you? I'm terrible at it." He peered down and watched her hands join the mantle together with the pin, the sight half blurred by the shadow of his nose.
"Happy Birthday," she murmured into his shoulder, enjoying the sensation of the cool fabric against her face, though her breath quickly warmed it. Henry touched her fingers.
"To you as well, Tilde. And I have something for you, also." Through the cloth, he could feel Clothilde's expression change, a familiar, taut glee. She released him, pleased that her brother enjoyed his gift, pleased that he had acquired one for her (and he always gave such good gifts), pleased, too, that he wore green that day, and almost the same shade at that. On the table where the candelabra and psalter sat, was a small wooden box. He'd used it to give her gifts many times, and she knew that the inside boasted a plush scarlet lining. Taking it from him, she removed the lid. Inside, a narrow leather girdle with a gleaming golden buckle, all meticulously engraved with a florid, decorative pattern. Its braided tail culminated in a well-fashioned gold tip.
"Henry!" she exclaimed, fingers rushing to remove her current belt, cinched high on her waist. Without it, her dress unfurled like a flag, swallowed entirely her slender form. Henry took the new girdle and encircled his sister from behind, knowing precisely how tight to fasten it and how to manipulate the fabric so that it fell in the correct, flattering fashion.
"Beautiful, how beautiful..." These words pleased her brother, as he had commissioned the girdle himself. Clothilde kept his arms around her waist, squeezed them playfully. Four indistinguishable limbs.
"Faroald is to arrange us a wonderful feast tonight," she continued, resting her head doglike on his shoulder.
"Not Sigismund?" Asked Henry archly.
"He's out with the haymaking, you know that."
"And with his son, who's too good to make hay." They did not always need to laugh. Instead, they sensed laughter in the other, and this laughter radiated silently in their breasts.
"But listen, Henry, you'll be delighted at what I've heard. Pheasant instead of chicken. Dates mother procured from some wayward merchant, and fruit with spices. That dreadful green herb bread you so enjoy which to me tastes like an apothecary."
"Lovely, yes," agreed Henry. "Is anyone of note coming? And perhaps, clever girl, you could devise a means of keeping Arnold with Ewald at St. George's? You know how I loathe the way he hovers over us wherever we go, fat little thing, brandishing tears as a weapon. Oppressive, oppressive."
"You know mother shan't hear of it."
"Mother should introduce him to restraint. No one likes a fat priest."
"Henry, be nice," she half-chastised, for she agreed with him. "As for who's coming, you'll have to ask Frederick."
Her hair fell in waves over their shoulders, mingled seamlessly with his, tickled Henry's nose. He grew restless. He released himself from her, her weight growing irksome, her warmth increasingly unbearable to him, the way his mother's warmth always was, but different. Not awkward and embarrassing, but placeless and uncomfortable. All touch was becoming like this to him now. Such discomfort made Henry feel guilty, as though he'd done something wrong just by thinking such thoughts. Parted, they looked at one another with that same searching stare, developed at the beginning of their existence. Blue-eyed, it said, You are me and I am you, one and the same, forever and always.
But now she was laced tightly into a well-fitting dress, her hair concealing a blossoming figure, that once-boyish waist, her narrow shoulders, gone. Different from him, the opposite of him, or his perfect complement, Henry couldn't tell. Upon acknowledging these details, his nameless despair. He wished for all of life to stop, down to the blood in his veins. He rued change, this much was true. Something about his birthday. But, inarticulately, another feeling lingered somewhere deep down. It expressed itself only in a latent dread. All Henry could admit to himself in that moment - watching his sister watch him - was that he merely wanted things to be as they had always been between them, each doubly ensouled, moving through the world as one, sheltered by a shared language. To all others, unknowable and inaccessible. He, to become a bishop, and she, bound by the propriety of a young lady, always and forever pure. As it should be. As it had to be.
Another year at least, Tilde.
"Can you believe we are already fifteen, Henry?" Clothilde said quietly, peering into the mirror of his eyes. All the joy from moments ago had vanished from the room. Her despair was simpler and more urgent: Henry was to leave her soon. This, she could not bear.
Rending their mother's body to pieces, the twins were born, Henry first, then Clothilde, around mid-day. The first sound ever heard by these tiny ears was the shrill life-cry of the other. From birth, they suckled at the same wet nurse, one tucked in the left arm, one tucked in the right. They slept in the same large basket side by side, comforted in their blind infancy by the closeness of the other's warmth. Their small movements proved that each was alive and neither was alone. As babies on their tummies, they recognized one another, not knowing yet that what they were seeing was their own face. Adults were charmed when the twins were placed in front of one another, after which they immediately burst into smiles, coos, and laughs, wrinkled little hand reaching for the wrinkled little hand that looked like it. Touching and responding. "Ba!" Henry would shout, forcing those first non-crying sounds out of his lungs and into the world, and, eyes wide, "Ba!" Clothilde would answer, already sensing that they were mirrored, that something uttered was to be reciprocated.
Soon, they sat up. They waved their arms and hands at one another. When one imitated the other, it made both smile. A game. They mimicked the speech of adults, babbling in conversation, sounds not yet attached to subjects, merely the form. They cried as a pair until Clothilde discovered that if Henry started crying, she could crawl over to him and, through an unknown mechanism, stare and bother him into silence, and if this didn't work, join him in tears. They quietly observed their nurse's or their mother's patting and stroking, and soon, side by side on the floor, there there, patted Henry with his ungainly baby arms, there there, patted Clothilde, a little too hard. When mother held one and father the other, the twins stared at one another from afar like guards atop two separate towers. When dexterity formed, one dropped an object, the other picked it up and handed it to them. This, too, became a game.
One day, both burst into speech. Clothilde cooing, Mama, Mama. Then, from a single primitive utterance, the first by her brother, she became Tilde to him then, and never stopped. He said something, she repeated it. They created words to describe things they didn't know, words they quickly forgot. Mogog was horse. Hul was flower. Tert was ball. These had a temporary use, communicating meaning only between them until their objects' true universal noun became known. Walking, following, carrying, whispering, singing, playing, all these things came to one first, who then gifted it to the other.
More often than the other Pettau children, the two were left to the wavering care of attendants. The twins were of course aware of their older siblings, but Kunigunde was already approaching late girlhood, and Frederick and Otto had no use for babies. They behaved instead in the more rote way of older and younger brother, which is to say, full of combative energy inflicted on one another. The dramas of older sister and brothers preoccupied their parents, followed by the unexpected birth of Arnold. A chasm opened up in the family into which Henry and Clothilde disappeared and all were relieved that they kept one another happy and occupied.
Once they could command language, they spent countless amounts of time in imaginative play. He the prince, she the princess. He the horse, she the rider. It was boring for both of them for her to always be the helpless girl, and so sometimes they would both be knights, both be wolves in the forest, both be bards. War waged around their insular child-world, and so sometimes they became German and Hungarian, and whoever the Hungarian was had the more fun task of running around the great hall, stick between their legs, screaming at the top of their lungs like an animal. The twins narrated their actions and thoughts and finished each other's narration. They learned to speak through glances and gestures, shared knowing smiles of mutual conspiracy, much to the annoyance of their guardians and parents. Their hands were entwined constantly. They helped one another, soothed one another, cleaned and preened one another, tucked one another's hair behind one another's ears, held things for the other, his cup, her train, his mantle, her sleeves. They did this always without either asking or thinking.
Other people remarked on their condition. That they were twins, that they were the same or looked alike. A rare miracle. Bereft of mirrors, each saw one another and reckoned, that must be what I look like. As is the case with all children of similar age, they were puzzled at bathtime by their single difference, the useless punctuations between their legs, the only thing reminding them that they were their own separate people. Curious, they poked and prodded, incurring the panicked wrath of adults. And through this wrath, they learned shame; shame and to hide certain things from one another, both for the very first time.
Soon, however, they merrily forgot about the parts that were different, and delighted in those that were alike. Hands, feet, eyes, hair, voices. Sometimes, as a trick, they would go up to the bedroom, dig through the chest, and dress in one another's clothes, laughing when it sometimes took hours for people to notice, even their own mother. Many times they disappeared from sight, ran wild through the cellars and on the curtain wall, counted the birds on the wing, created small dramas, were the same as any other children. And then, always, they would reappear at court, him sitting on the couch, her head on his lap as she looked up at him, a curl of her blond hair wrapped soothingly around his thumb.
They grew older. When they fought, which they did, they reconciled quickly. It was reiterated once more that others were strangers who had very little interest in them. They needed one another. Absences and anger made them afraid and repentant. The sight of one twin crying upset the other greatly. Often both felt as though they were linked magically so that whenever one felt pain or fear, the other did too. Then there was the matter of this outside world, constantly intruding, something to tolerate in order to earn more privacy. Well-bred, well-spoken, they interfaced with those around them efficiently when needed, but no one truly knew them beyond the other. Of this connectedness, many people were silently jealous. Even adults.
The twins enshrouded themselves in an air of mystery. They forged a shared inner world defined by insular references, circling dialogue, observation, physical closeness, and introspection. They spent extensive amounts of time merely sitting close together, their rapt eyes taking in the details of the world and its situations so that they could be discussed extensively in private later. These evolved into rather withering dialogues, as Henry and Clothilde quickly established themselves to be superior to everyone else in the household. Only they were twins. Only they had someone God made for them. When they thought things, they thought them relative and in service to one another.
In the image of the other, they developed the same disposition, a kind of self-obsessed indolence. Henry slightly more morose, Clothilde more prone to fantasy. Everyone who visited the Pettaus became taken by the twins' demure politeness, found them the paragon of children. All their lives the word beautiful was levied upon them, and they believed it about themselves, searched for it in the other. Once granted a bit more independence, they loved to go down to the river on a day with no wind and stare at their reflections, stare at one another, and then the reflections again. Laughing, marvelling, they would watch themselves walk, standing in the place the other stood, one, the other, neither changing much in the eyes of the river. Neither was allowed to change. That was the unspoken rule.
But they would, inevitably change. Their father died. Frederick went off to Graz. Benedicta was born. At eleven, their voices diverged. Hers higher, his lower. At twelve, Clothilde woke up to linens stained with red, and after that, her family sheltered her more from the world, for she was becoming a young woman. No more romps down to the river, no more lazy courtyard afternoons where she could be subjected to wandering and malevolent gazes. During her bleeding, she was kept separate from all the other children because, her mother insisted, the blood would make them sick.
Often she wept, felt unclean and unsightly. In buckets of water, she picked at her face, newly concerned with it as its own visage. People started talking about her differently. Now she was no longer a little girl, half of a set of two, but a prize to be won at the fair, a piece of furniture to be moved around, a sum of money. The urge to succumb utterly to melancholy was ameliorated only by Henry, who, not quite understanding this new boundary, sat on the other side of the door and gossiped with her about what was happening in the rest of the house. His little satirical plays. He did a great impression of Sigismund, a passable one of Ermenrich. She liked it best when he gave his hysterical rendition of Faroald and Lothar arguing about barrels of wine and table settings. Do you know how to add, Faroald, you mawkish little dog? Two plus two? Is that so difficult? Should we call Sigismund? Should we sound the horn right now? Always she would laugh and laugh, wiping the lingering tears on her sleeves. At her saddest, she would slide her fingers through the space beneath the door, and Henry would cover them with his own.
Then, another separation. The time had come for them to be banished from the other's room, told to sleep in separate beds. Cold, trapped with fidgety Benedicta and her snoring mother, the dark lashed at Clothilde. Every sound rang with a note of menace, and the window seemed an open door for anyone who wished to do her harm, which, in her state seemed like everyone unknown to her. Clothilde began having the nightmares. Dreams about being dragged by her hair, her clothes ripped, sharp fingernails leaving meandering scars down her stomach. When Sigismund told his son about these dreams, he failed to include that despite Ewald's priestly machinations, the only time the girl slept soundly was when she snuck into the other room, begging her brother to let her under the covers even though it meant heavy, sometimes physical reprisal for both of them.
And despite such consequences, Henry always let her in. He despaired at her shivering, her tears, how directionlessly frightened she seemed. There, there, he thought, as he thought once as a baby. He stroked her hair, wrapped his arm around her waist. He reassured her with his voice, his closeness. It was the last year their bodies would ever be so similar. "No kicking, no squirming," he muttered irritably, in part to hide his own protective tenderness. But what protection could he offer her? For the first time, he started to regret being the third son. Seeing Otto grow big and powerful, being constantly surrounded by men at war, men who drew blood and were men, Henry found himself ever-more aware of his own effete uselessness - to his twin or to anyone. And yet, here they were, together, he the one she came to for comfort. Safety. Swordless or otherwise. Still, he could never sleep until she slept.
All their lives, they had been one way, which was close, and people praised them for it. Years and years passed in which countless voices said, "What beautiful children!" "How well-behaved!" "How sweet they are to each other!" Then, out of nowhere, everyone began to scold them. "It's not ladylike to sit with a man like that, brother or not." "Get your head out of your sister's lap!" "Stop all that preening!" "If you leave that bedroom one more time, you'll be greeted by the switch in the morning!" "Where are you two off to?" Hounded by new propriety, their parallel existence grew fraught. Clothilde, the victim, Henry, not so much a little boy anymore, his every action pathologized within the context of sudden manhood. When he behaved as he once did, he now felt he was doing something wrong, something vile, and shied away.
On the contrary, the accusations only made Clothilde more defiant, and when she acted upon this defiance, Henry supported her as he'd always done. They argued with their mother. They tormented the attendants. They hid from authority. They defended themselves and their way of being. Through malice and guile, they wrested back some autonomy from those who wished to take it. Their mother lamented the day she let her twins grow so attached to one another. She found them embarrassing, like children who suckled at the breast for too long. For her, the two became an exasperating waiting game. Soon they would grow up by necessity. Henry would be off to be received in Gurkfeld, where there would be piety waiting for him, or at least less revelry. Clothilde, if all went to plan, would thankfully soon be married off.
Clothilde herself began thinking about the latter, woke up one day with the image of the word love in her mind's eye. She became aware, very suddenly, of men. She smiled at the sons of the garrison, though to her they seemed boyish, graceless and crude. Like all young women who alight upon the alluring yet still foreign potential of love, she roamed the world expectantly, searching for its first target. Of all the men in her proximity, the one she decided on was Sigismund. Ewald found her on her knees one Saturday begging for forgiveness. When asked, she admitted to a curiosity about him, and was dealt a heavy penance.
While fasting ruefully at dinner, hand in Henry's under the table, she watched Sigismund eat, talk, wipe his mouth. She tried to form salient definitions of his eyes (she settled on 'sparkling.') She wondered about the texture of his palms, pointedly ignoring his wife and the disparity in age between them. It was easy for her to love a man she trusted and had already known her whole life. Sigismund, for his part, was none the wiser of the attention of a thirteen year old girl. He seemed rather distracted by other things at the time. Once he couldn't even be found for a whole day. Someone said he'd gone out to the border, but when asked became evasive.
While Henry played chess, Clothilde taking to her embroidery beside him, she invented treacly stories about the steward. She convinced herself that in his (not very discreetly) loveless marriage, Sigismund had never known a lady's true love, which struck her as tragic beyond measure. She imagined him, all at once, alighting upon her and discovering that she was beautiful. What are you doing alone in the kitchen at this hour? Clothilde, long considered lazy by the adults who knew her, soon took an urgent and surprising interest in matters of household management, obsequiously following her mother and Sigismund around the kitchen, the cellar, the grounds. All the while, she asked the steward questions far below her intelligence just to see a flicker of pride on Sigismund's face as he answered them.
One day, her head on Henry's lap, she said, "Mother will soon start finding suitors for me. I confess to being curious about what they will be like."
Nervous, Henry knotted his fingers further in her hair. "A bunch of warrior-brutes sure to be too old for you. And besides, I thought you wanted to be like me, seek similar vows, become learned." We always said that, Tilde. We've made that promise for years.
"Oh, but Henry," Clothilde murmured. She loosened his hand, kissed his palm, "Mother has already said no. And you already know why. The closest convent is in the Lungau and is run by St. Paul, our father's bitterest enemies."
"A silly excuse. Why not tell our mother, let me be a salve for old wounds, a reconciliation?" He sounded harsher than he expected.
"It's possible that I could fall in love," said the girl then, barely audible. This was a deeply concealed hope, revealed only to Henry, whom she trusted above all others. And for the first time. The confession shocked her brother. Thought Henry wildly, What is this I'm hearing? All of a sudden?
"It's more possible the opposite will be true, Tilde," he argued. "It's possible you could be held captive into a life of shame and ruination. Yours is not a big dowry - only Bene's is smaller. What kind of man will that attract? You have less choice in this matter than you wish to believe." Do you want to be like mother? Held down by big hands? Bearing children every year you're able?
"I don't think mother would be so cruel."
"In that case," continued Henry shrilly, "What kind of man are you hoping for? Who on earth do you think is worth giving yourself up for?" He hoped she would answer, "No one, now that you convey it as such."
"Well, I should hope he is handsome, brave, kind, has a fine way with speech," she answered wistfully. "A good man, with good manners, and even some gentleness."
"And what, pray tell, is handsome to you?"
"I don't know. Tall, blonde. Perhaps rather like Sigismund, you know, when he was younger."
Sigismund? Henry studied the look in those identical eyes, soft and guileless as a newborn child. His nose wrinkled in disgust. What do you know about Sigismund? The thought revolted him. His sister and Sigismund, plenty old enough to be her father. Sigismund with his rough hands and artless speech, his constant brandishing of weapons, his drunkeness at feasts, his hirsute face and limbs, his lurid, broad stance. That Sigismund? Are you mad, Tilde? Mad? Sigismund would break you in half! He hated the thought, he hated that she voiced it aloud, as though to spite him. But because such ill-conceived notions concerned the steward, Henry realized then how to wound his sister as she had so wounded him. He shifted his weight, and intuitively, she sat up to face him, now slightly pink with embarrassment.
"If it is Sigismund you desire, wait a few years, and you can marry his little bastard."
Clothilde's chest tightened. Sigismund? An affair with another woman? Another woman who wasn't her, someone else to fulfill his quest for being loved? And all the implications...No, surely Henry was joking. Teasing her with one of his little fantasy-traps, trying to rile her up. "Don't jest, Henry, about a good man's honor," she chastised.
"Oh, I don't," said Henry with a certain triumph, "I heard it from Walther, the marshal's son, who's just seen the boy himself. Your Sigismund carried on with a laundress from the fields, a Slav no less, for years, I suspect, and she - a beautiful woman, she must have been to so tempt the good and faithful - gave him what that barren shrew of his can't seem to. And now that the other woman's dead, the son reveals himself, dumb as a post, a peasant if there ever was one, unable to speak a lick of German." Henry was panting by the time he finished, so vehement were his words. Once he caught his breath, he added, more compassionately, "I see that look in your eye, Tilde. Since when have I ever lied to you?"
Clothilde, mouth quivering, looked at her brother, who met her eyes with probing resistance. Henry's stare, seeing deep into her as it always had, seeking and being sought. It couldn't be true! Sigismund was trapped and unhappy - everyone knew it. He would have been nothing but honest in marriage with Hilda, even if he didn't love her. He was always my father's best man. And you expect me to believe that a whole child has been living under our noses for years? Our noses? That Sigismund, our steward, a ministerial, dallied with a peasant girl, made her with child. Our steward, a secret lout?
But if it were true...If it were true, what did it mean? Were it true, should he look at me now as I have wanted him to, then his thoughts would perhaps not be so high-minded. No noble kisses on extended hands, no deep confessions. Just another rakish man used to getting what he wants. As mother always warned. Big tears gathered in Clothilde's eyes, spilled down her cheeks. She thought, for the first time in her young woman's life: My heart is breaking. Henry, my heart... The sight of her crying so agonized Henry as it always did, his own breath grew shallow. His features softened, he reached up and wiped the wetness from her face.
"You're right, Henry. Forgive me," she said, and he was not sure what she wanted to be forgiven for, only that she sought his arms and he gave them to her, her damp face forming a small humidity against his neck. He ran his hands through her hair, which in that moment seemed endless, like a field of wheat. He kissed her head, his heart beating wildly from excitement. The way he'd won, secured victory over the steward invigorated Henry. Henry the clever, Henry the good. He'd done his part as a man, steadfast and pure, and now all was right. Always the same as it had been. Please, he thought, I hope so. In silence, he could feel her heartbeat meet with his own through the barrier of their chests.
It was that day he thought of now, for this was when that ugly, nameless fear smothered Henry for the very first time. It came to him at night, when he tossed and turned, wondering endlessly, have I done something wrong? In what? Telling her about Sigismund? Why did I do it? To protect her of course. Don't be silly. Why did I enjoy it, then? Winning, Henry. Being needed. And then the warmth. The warmth that was emerging everywhere, in stares, in hands, in himself, in her also. As he followed his sister down the stairs, carrying the brocaded silk train of her dress, the air aloft already with the herbs of his birthday bread, he remembered that day, that fear. Clothilde cast her head over her shoulder, looked up at her brother admiringly. Unbeknownst to either of them, a great incident simmered, one that would destroy that which seemed indestructable.
