The story so far:
The Plague- 2
by honeygloom
Five years before the starfish incident, in 1342, Amarante was born under much crossing of breasts and uttering of the Lord’s Prayer. Her mother had been violently ill during the entire pregnancy, but not in the usual way one is ill during pregnancy. She was well working around the house or in the garden, she was not squeamish at all butchering chickens for supper, and was hardly ever too tired mend clothes by the fire at night. But all crosses had had to be removed from the house or Madame Le Chateau Rouge would have fits of despair, fainting episodes, and spells of violent retching. Church was another matter altogether. The one time, just after she had missed her monthly blood, Madame Le Chateau Rouge attempted to go to church, she found herself unable to stop beating her own stomach and screaming profanities. During her pregnancy people in the village would give each other looks of quiet concern whenever they saw Captain Le Chateau Rouge at the pier or in their shops. They would tentatively inquire about the health of the Madame and eagerly await dreadful news. But, “She is well and cheerful,” was all the Captain ever said. Which was true enough, except for the dreams. Madame Le Chateau Rouge was cursed with recurring night mares of dead, purple bodies spewing blood from their mouths. Needless to say, the child’s birth was both anticipated and feared. Another such incident, of a mother-to-be behaving in such an inexplicably anti-Christian manner, was told to Madame Le Chateau Rouge by an old woman named Marie Torro living with her son and daughter-in-law. Marie had lived in a neighboring village in her youth and had heard the story from a very old Crusader whose name she could not remember, but who had happened to be very handsome. He had told her that in the town where he grew up, in Lorraine, his sister’s best friend was walking in the woods gathering mushrooms one day and came upon a man dressed very much in the manner of nobility and draped in gold and jewels. She was startled and dropped her basket. The man, with manners befitting his finery, offered to help her pick up her mushrooms and introduced himself as Mr. Percy.“Mr. Percy what? Do you have a surname good Sir?”“None to speak of,” said the man, smiling down at the pretty girl who seemed quite unaware that this was not a good sign of an upright man. She giggled and before long was pinned against a tree in sinful ecstasy.“Needless to say,” said Signora Torro, “her child was born with horns and a tail and was quietly suffocated, beheaded, and buried by the local clergy. Tragic, but there’s a lesson for you.” Madame Le Chateau Rouge, however, veheminantly denied ever having met a man named Percy in all her life. Still, when baby Amarante’s little head crowned, a sigh of relief was expelled from every midwife in the room . There were no horns. And at the other end, no tail. There was something unusual about the baby though, she didn’t cry once, up until the day of her Christening, upon which she wailed like something unearthly, unholy, and altogether unknown. And the holy water left little blisters, like burns all over her body. That was the last time Amarante was ever brought to church but not the last time she ever cried.The opinion of the clergy was that Amarante should share the same fate as the baby in Signora Torro’s story, but Madame Le Chateau Rouge refused to hand her child over and insisted that there was nothing wrong with a child who didn’t want to go to church. “What child enjoys being made to sit quietly. Perhaps if priests could have children they would be more sympathetic,” Madame Le Chateau Rouge told her husband the day after Amarante’s Christening. He stared at his blistered daughter and shook his head. From then on, Amarante was raised with her older brother Matthew, just as any other child would be, despite being decidedly unlike any other child. She was reticent, rarely ever smiled, and was born with an innate knowledge of Latin. The later was a fiercely guarded family secret as her parents were quite certain the clergy would steal her away and have her burned for being born knowing how to read and write their language better than they could. By the time she could walk she could break the neck of a chicken faster than her mother, and by the time she could talk she seemed to have an uncanny ability to predict the future, and “make things happen,” as the Captain so simply put it.
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