Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honour. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground, and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God.

--Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)--

Margery and Guilhabert had only one child, shortly after their marriage. She was a child of love and as such bore all the signs of a blessed conception, though her birth was a ragged and bloody affair. Her eyes were bright and alert, her small hands curious and slim-fingered, her complexion pink and flawless. Every inch of her was perfect. Margery would sit in the garden, beside the flowering herbs and the small apple tree they had planted on the day of Gauzia’s birth, and sing her the few songs she knew. Guilhabert doted on her, as fathers often do. He would pick flowers for his two best beloveds, and for me, each day. He would wander into Gauzia’s room before daybreak and place a small posy of wildflowers and sweet herbs by her sleeping face, touching her flushed cheek with the tip of his finger.

At four years of age she fell ill and we had to confine her to her bed for a month while she was fed milksop, broth and wine. We gave her every remedy we could think of and she slowly recovered, though the illness stole some of the vibrant lustre from her cheeks. During the second week of her confinement, restless and banned from the kitchens where Margery slept while Guilhabert tended their sleeping daughter, I wandered to the study and set myself small tasks. I tidied the diagrams and models Margery and I had been working on, copied Guilhabert’s scraps and notes into a fresh, bound notebook. Finally I set upon a plan to make Gauzia a small toy; something to entertain her during the long sickbed hours when she neither slept nor woke, but dozed in the half-dreaming world of the ill. She had always exclaimed over the birds that sang in her mother’s gardens and so I determined to make her a musical instrument that would imitate their trilling. The first model was too bulky and ugly—its metallic parts rough and somehow sinister. I was searching for a length of supple wire when I looked down and saw the light reflecting on the carvings on my left hand.

During an idle winter Eloise had removed my left hand to repair it, replacing it temporarily with a wooden dummy. This was the early years, before she came to despise and fear me. In the late afternoons, while I stitched and drew, she had spent her time engraving my metal skin, covering the palm, the insides of the fingers and the wrist with a delicate, shell-edged pattern of apple-blossoms and dragonflies. Eloise had had an eye for beauty and it was her craftsmanship I recalled as I sculpted the little bird for Gauzia. Each of its feathers I modelled from a different material; the darker feathers were brass, others milky stone, some of the breast feathers were so finely carved they seemed real, even to my imperfect eye. The beak was constructed of two arced pieces of lapis lazuli and the eyes of amber. When completed, it was small enough to be held in the palm of my hand, though heavier than any true bird. When I whistled it would tip its head and chirrup a reply, when tapped gently on the beak it would spread its wings, revealing the rainbow of carmine, white and brass feathers underneath, and sing a pretty tune.

Gauzia had been in bed for three weeks when I brought it to her. I set it on her counterpane and she tentatively reached out a finger to touch its cool chest. Its feathers  ruffled as the mechanism stirred within its breast. "Whistle to it," I said, and Gauzia hesitated a moment. When she offered a timid half-note the bird trilled in reply and Gauzia started, though she also reached out to ensure the toy didn’t fall. As she lifted it in her hand it tipped its head and she smiled at me uncertainly. Had I made a mistake? I wondered then. But Gauzia brought the bird level with her face and smiled into its yellow eyes. She stroked its blue beak and, as the mechanism whirred and its wings spread open, she gasped with delight. It began to warble a tune familiar to her ears; the song her mother had sung for her in her cradle, the lullaby her father still crooned when she curled up on his lap to sleep. She named the bird Perihan, after a character in a story, and kept it with her night and day.

When she was better and out of bed I worked on its legs and feet so that she could settle the creature on her shoulder and it would not fall as she walked. It would never fly, though I contemplated the mechanics of such a thing often enough, its body was simply too heavy and its wings, despite their beauty, too slight to lift it from the ground. Every night, as Gauzia lay down to sleep, she would settle it at the head of her bed and stroke its beak and it would trill the soft lullaby she loved.

Margery, too, was much enamoured of Perihan, particularly of the Troparian of Kassiani, which it would sing only for her. When Guilhabert left for Carcassone to visit his ailing sister she set Perihan singing while we sat before the fire, stitching new shirts for Gauzia. When Perihan fell silent we could hear Gauzia laugh in her sleep, as if she were chasing the moon or climbing apple trees with angels. "Do you think she knows?" Margery said. She was staring into the soft flames and it seemed there were tears waiting in her eyes.

"Knows?" I asked.

Margery frowned slightly. "About you. About ..."

"Perhaps." I felt something flutter in me, a kind of fear. I had grown used to the Wynding, to the life I shared with the Reni women. Over the years since my construction, my birth if you like, I had learned to dread this conversation. Each of the Reni women had come to it sooner or later. I could not forget Eloise’s cool anger, or Elisabetta’s innocent confusion. Beatrice, Elisabetta’s daughter, had been a curious child and queried my presence in the midst of her family from a young age, so she had learned early what I was, and the choice she and her mother would one day make. One night, when Elisabetta was an old woman, Beatrice had come to me with the key in her small hand. She had stolen it from her mother’s chatelaine while she slept, and come to the study determined to know what it was like. I had tried to talk her out of it, of course. Elisabetta and I had agreed that the key—the Wynding—would pass to the next of the Reni women only upon her mother’s death, and then only if her daughter was willing. That night, as Beatrice stood in the study, her determined face already losing its prettiness, I had acquiesced and—when she pressed her hand into my chest cavity—felt a queer horror meld with the kick of a young Wynder.

And Margery. Margery I loved, what other word was there for it? Our Wyndings were easy and comforting. A kind of spring-like gentility coloured the evenings when we sat in companionable silence, and she smiled in that soft, strange manner as she pressed her hand to my polished, double-chambered heart. I had asked her once what it felt like, for her, and she had smiled and kissed me, a small tear beading on her lashes. I had promised her then, once again, as I had promised Elisabetta when Beatrice was born, and Beatrice when Margery came, that it was her choice. I had decided, after Eloise, after the first Wynding with Elisabetta, that it would be in the hands of the old Wynder to end the cycle. I had asked them each, when their time came, to think on it, to take as long as they needed before coming to me. If any of them decided their daughter should not become, like them, a twinned heart, then that would be an end of it and I would sink again into the quiet debility I had suffered after Eloise’s passing. I would wind down, perhaps, unto death. If it would only come.

I did not tell them of my despair, of my fear that death would never come to me, that instead I would be condemned to a perpetual decline with no real end. I did not tell them that I feared the turning away more than death because, unlike themselves, I was never sure that death would come.

And so, that night, when Margery turned to me, fear leapt in my heart like a fish.

"She will turn four next week, the feast of Mary Magdalene," she said.

I nodded, not sure what to say.

"Do you think we should tell her? She has never seen us ... together."

"It is for you to decide, Margery," I said.

"I feared for you when she was ill, as much as for her. The death that stood at her bedside would have claimed you both."

"Perhaps," I said, picking up the needlework that had fallen idle in my hands.

"I would not want that," Margery said. "But I cannot bear another child."

"I understand."

"Do you?" Her gaze was sad and filled with a despair I had never seen in her before. "I love you, Rupetta," she said. "I love Guilhabert too, of course, and Gauzia, but you are my own heart. Is that wrong?"

"I don’t know."

"Do you think it a disease, this love? A betrayal of God?  A result of the Wynding?"

I looked into the fire, having never considered this. Could love be a disease? A disfigurement more serious than the tiny chinks and rusted wheels that sometimes afflicted me, something that could not be repaired or removed? "I don’t think so. Eloise did not always love me, nor did your own mother."

"I didn’t know that."

"She thought the Wynding would give her—give us both—something more, some power she could not name."

"It has given me ... something." Margery looked towards the door to Gauzia’s room. "I hope it will give her the same thing."

"What?" I said, hoping in that quiet moment she might tell me the secret she seemed to be keeping.

"I don’t quite know," she said.

"How can you not know?"

"It is God’s will," she reminded me. "What is it the Abbess of Bingen wrote? ‘Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God’."

"Would you have wanted another life?"

"No," she met my gaze squarely. "I wish the same life for Gauzia. She will be a Wynder if she chooses it."

Despite the darkness and the stillness of my features, something in me must have signalled my relief to Margery, because she laughed. Her laugh was clipped and seemed a little forced, though she continued to smile afterwards and came around the table to take my hand. "Don’t be afraid," she said, though what I had to fear I did not know. She opened the door that revealed my mechanical heart and pressed her hand to its grooves. They were worn smooth from the daily touch of her fingers and quickly warmed to her skin. We sat a moment, the springlike warmth of the Wynding embracing us both, before she lay her head on my lap. "I love you," she said again, quietly, before she drifted into sleep.

*

Guilhabert returned on July 21^st, the day before Gauzia’s fourth birthday. He looked pale and tired, though we thought little of it at the time. He talked briefly about  his visit to Carcassone; he had bought some beautiful blue cloth in the market, which Margery exclaimed over. It had the soft feel of new grass. That evening Gauzia fell asleep in her father’s lap, cradling Perihan in her hands. When Guilhabert rose to carry her to her bed he blanched visibly and I stepped forward to take her from his arms. I had never seen him look so pale. Margery waited until I had left the room before she questioned him.

"What’s wrong?" she said. "Have you injured yourself in some fool joust?"

"They were ill when I arrived there. I fear I have brought the sickness into our home, Margery."

"What kind of sickness?"

Guilhabert gave no answer. As I returned to the room he was already sinking into sleep as Margery, her face pinched with concern, wrapped him in a clean blanket. "What is it?" she asked me, but I couldn’t tell her. He was pale, his breathing laboured. His eyes were sinking in their sockets and dark-ringed. His skin was clammy and over-heated. It could have been the ride from Carcassone – the cold air, the chilled late-winter roads—but there was something else in his manner, in the weakness of his limbs as he roused himself and stumbled to the cot in the corner of the room. When Margery put her hand to his elbow to assist him she inhaled sharply. He was hot enough to boil water and his shirt clung to his side and back, to a large patch of skin was dark and swollen. " Iâ henne," she said, and then again, though it was barely audible, and her whole body seemed to fold into itself as she held out her stained palm to me.

She pressed me from the room, though she would not touch me, and locked the door. I heard her sink to the floor once she was alone and stood on the other side wondering what to make of it all. "Keep her well," she said. "Keep her away from us, but don’t go into town and don’t allow any to come near. A month at least," she said.

"But it’s her birthday tomorrow!" I cried, remembering the fine, white linen smock Margery had worked on for the past two weeks, the ride we had planned to the river, the new skates I had fashioned over the last several days, with a pattern of ivy leaves and holly carved in their blades.

"Rupetta," she said, her voice filled with all the force and insistence she could muster, "you must keep her alone. Guilhabert and I will stay here—we have food enough and water—but you must keep her away from us. Do you understand?"

"No!" I said, as I felt her weight fall against the door.

"He’s dying," she said. "I’ll die with him, but she must not, for both of your sakes. You must keep her away from us, away from anyone who comes. Tie a black cloth to the door and don’t answer it."

"Her grandfather, her uncle are coming ..."

"Nobody!" she cried, and made me promise.

*

I let nobody in, though they came one after another. Some of the women left baskets of food, blankets and bundles of bitter herbs. Gauzia’s grandfather knelt and prayed for two days, despite his arthritic knees. Gauzia watched them from the windows, her pert face glowing with health and impatient for the gifts lying piled on the doorstep. Late at night I crept down and opened the door to retrieve them. We ate the sweetcakes, perched on her bed, and I read her the stories her uncle had written down during his travels in the East.

One night she left her trencher of food untouched and fell into a fretful sleep, tossing and moaning long into the night. I went down and knocked on the kitchen door. For a long time there was no reply, but then there was a slow scrabbling and I heard Margery’s voice—a mere scratch. "Is she well?" she asked.

How could I tell her the truth? I could hear in her voice that she was ailing—there was more than tiredness in the heave and rattle of her breath. "She’s well," I said.

"Keep her away," Margery insisted. "Promise me."

I nodded, though she could not see me. I could not bring myself to compound the lie.

"Do you need ... The key is with you?"

"Yes," I answered.

"You’ll have to show her," she said.

"You’ll be well soon."

She laughed, and I heard a low moan from somewhere else in the room; Guilhabert is still with us, I thought, surprised.

Upstairs Gauzia lay on her bed, the sheets pushed down to her feet. She had torn her thin gown from her body and lay breathing slowly and heavily in the cold room. I sponged her down and she asked me to bring Perihan to her. Her dry lips could not summon a whistle so I tapped its beak and it spread its bright wings in the wintry light and sang for her. Did she smile? I would like to think so, though memory may play false.

I lifted her from the bed to change the sheets. She had soiled them in my absence and, despite the fresh straw and lavender I had strewn on the floor, I could not cleanse the room of the reek of rot and vinegar. Her body was thin; a small bundle of dry skin and brittle bones that seemed hot enough to strike flame from the straw I lay her on. When her bed was made I dragged it closer to the window, hoping the cold afternoon air would cool her flesh.

I sat by her constantly, dampening her hot skin with a wet cloth, applying plasters to the blue-black swellings, and pressing bowls of bitter teas to her lips. Nothing helped. I scoured our little library for clues as to what to do. Pray, the pages urged me. Hope. I watched her eyes glaze as she slipped between consciousness and sleep. She held Perihan in her tiny hands and stroked its bright, cool feathers as it responded faithfully with tune after tune.

Finally, some time in the early morning, Gauzia stopped breathing.

I went downstairs, looking for something to do. The rooms seemed so small and dark. There had been nobody to sweep or mop or clean for days and the dust had settled on the furniture. The kitchen was silent and, when I cracked open the door, the stench that spilled from it seared the air. Guilhabert lay on the cot where I had last seen him; Margery had sponged his body with clean water and draped a clean sheet over him. Margery herself was propped in a chair by the fire. It had gone out days ago and there was no timber left in the room.

When I touched Margery’s cheek her head turned towards me. Her skin was grey and waxy, her bones seemed to jut through the flesh in places. Her eyes, when they opened, were dull and opaque. Her grey doll’s head rolled against the chair until its eyes met mine and we both stared—in horror—at each other.

"Gauzia?" she rasped and I shook my head.

She closed her eyes and, I believe, willed death to come for her.

I buried them all in the garden, beneath the melting snows; Guilhabert and Margery on either side of Gauzia. I did not put up stones, or mark their graves in any other way, though I buried them with as much ceremony and Godliness as I was able. I cleaned the house and burned most of the linen, though I did not plant the seeds that Margery had harvested the year before. I carried Perihan in my pocket, occasionally slipping a finger onto its beak to hear its song. Soon enough, however, I grew accustomed to the silence of the empty rooms.

How hollow it seemed without them. There was no food to prepare, no fire to bank, no wood to cut, no eggs to collect. I let the beasts go after a few weeks, tethering the horse near the door of a poor neighbour who had come every day, while they were ill, with food and bitter herbs. She would not come out to speak with me so I left the sorrel mare at her door with a small crate of chickens. Weeks later I saw her leading the horse into town and saw her smile as she fed it a bitter apple from her palm.

I fell into a kind of hopelessness. I whitewashed the walls and scrubbed the timbers free of smoke, aired the rooms and washed the shutters. Finally there was nothing left to do, so I sat before the empty fireplace and waited. For what, I could not say. Months passed. Seasons. Once I looked up and saw a sprig of apple blossom tapping at the kitchen window, but the effort it took to lift my chin was so vast that I could not bring myself to look away. I listened inward; to the susurrus of my breath and heart, and outward, to the footfall of the seasons.

There were moments, during that long silence, when I despaired, if that is what it could be called. Things moved around me, the world seemed to flex and then sink; to fade and swell in my mind’s eye. Mice gnawed at my joints and built nests in the cavities of my lungs and belly. I birthed a thousand mice and more; fleas and ants, roaches, rats and beetles. I felt life moving restlessly within my armature, but it was always at a second remove. I watched the windows of the house crack, one by one, in the storms and snows. Later, vagrants hurled rocks through them and ransacked the rooms for food, linen and silver, later for wood to burn.

Someone removed my lower left arm and hand, someone else took my skirts, thinking me an elaborate but decayed dressmaker’s dummy. A young man took my only company, though by then Perihan could not utter a note and its brass fittings were blackened with age. Were its eyes sad as it was carried away? Did it cast a last, longing look at the kitchen, at the fireplace whose flames had once been reflected in its burnished surface, or is that another romantic fancy of my dust-addled memory?

I was lonely, but that passed. It is hard to say what it was replaced with. There were months of anger, of boredom, of philosophy, of a pale, whitewashed silence. I learned not to count the days and nights; what use would it have been? I did not think of the future.

I had achieved a quiet stasis; I was no longer alive and so, I believed, I had expired. I could not move or sing or blink or dance, though I could dream, and I was cursed with hope. I longed for human company, even that of Eloise, the first of my companions, my mother and maker, the woman who had loved me in her youth and cursed me on her deathbed.

Most of all I longed for Margery.

Death had come year after year and taken everything from me; Eloise, Elisabetta, Hélène, Giacinta, Beatrice—generations of Reni women—now Margery and Guilhabert. And Gauzia. The house itself was dying. The windows were broken, the shutters sagged and rotted. The floor grew dusty, then strewn with leaves. The fireplace filled with snow and earth and mouse droppings. My body rotted away; first the dress, which the mice chewed at, then my leather joints and the thin, willow wood frets that supported my skirts, the leather and heavy linen of my lungs. The scaffolding of my torso stayed firm, but the joints rusted until I could not have moved even if I’d had the strength to do so. I looked endlessly towards the window where the apple tree bloomed and faded, bloomed and faded, year after year. I contemplated the infinity of time, the mind of God. I dreamed that we were, indeed, all feathers on His breath; lifting and floating and falling away.