The life and feats of the knight Josephine—dedicated to Selvatrice, esquired by she, published in anonymity

Desidora sleeps in her gambeson. Skin hugging close to her bones, she reckons herself already dead, each breath she draws a promise to she of damnatio memoriae, whose scent fades from the gambeson each day, replaced by Desidora’s own. But what can she do? She cannot sleep without the thing wrapped around her skeletal frame, and she cannot eat those tasteless meals without knowing she has the gambeson to return to each night.

In her paranoia, she checks on the article of clothing, wedged under her straw mattress, every afternoon between her duties. She pulls it forth, cold from the stone floor, and buttons the stalk-green garment about her torso, the chill that clings to it all she has to remind herself she is still alive.

She can never wear the gambeson outside of her bedchamber, of course. The dogs would tear it from her back, if not to sell, to burn, especially if they knew who it belonged to. If they recognised the threadwork—and they would, for Josephine had visited her at the castle library periodically—and cried wolf, she would lose this most solid remnant of the knight she has. Everything else has been taken, scrubbed of her name and fingerprints, her armour, sword, horse, and even her spurs. It had stung Desidora’s pride the most that she had been unable to retrieve the spurs before the knight’s belongings were confiscated. Josephine had told such stories about the day she was gifted them.

Desidora would not have been able to keep the gambeson if Josephine hadn’t given it to her the night before her death. Now, there is only her. She who has borne the most of Josephine’s touches and stories. Desidora gathers as much proof of the knight’s life as she can find, kept hidden amongst her belongings. The gambeson, a gritty clay jug stamped with flowers they had shared wine from, and bronze belt buckle embellished with decorative whorls and arches. She prays to this trinity of objects every night for recollections of Josephine by candlelight.

Conversations, debates, and arguments, too, Desidora picks her brain clean of them to place into the book. That she wakes every morning, she takes as the saints’ permittance to continue filling out these pages, her strength to rise after a night awash in tears.

There are gaps in her memory. She cannot remember everything perfectly and hadn’t thought she would need to revisit her memories with such a harsh, omnipresent ferocity. Sometimes, trawling through the details of who said what first, how they stood, and where their hands were—not to mention the expressions that were made, which gave colour and meaning to the tone of one’s voice—she feels as if she may wring the hair out of her scalp from frustration. Her mind hisses cruel things to her, that her words will not encapsulate the woman Josephine was, only a poor representation of her like a figure reflected in a steamed mirror. The candle gutters to spite her.

“I need a squire,” the knight said to me. I firmly rejected the proposal, committed to my responsibility at the library, wanting none of the mud, bloodshed, and war Josephine carried on her shoulders wherever she went. She continued to visit and talk with me.

She spills a pot of ink that splashes the gambeson. The stain seems so ironically poetic, blemishing the fabric beyond repair, Desidora slaps herself across the face to keep from screaming in rage, but while trying to wash out the blotch, she remembers when Josephine had split her thumb open sharpening a quill with her knife. She had missed the nib entirely. Desidora recalls the delicious cursing that followed. Josephine’s rich voice booms through the bedchamber as if she is there again, not in Desidora’s head, and she clambers over her mattress to her writing desk, the stain forgotten about, to put those thoughts to paper. While bandaging that thumb, the knight’s eyes had drunk her in, fascinated by the lightness of her fussing touches.

Josephine was the herald of progress and receptacle for honour, though each bestowment of pageantry seemed to bore her. She assumed a stonier mask on her return from one victorious campaign after another. The way she carried herself, her tread, it was hard to describe…she began to move more heavily, dragging her body along. She knelt before the King’s throne, nodded her head as she ought to when she was addressed, and after, sank backwards into a lineup of her comrades, hands folded over the pommel of her sword, posed like a reticent statue rather than a person with a beating heart. Desidora had done her utmost to animate her. She could not always distract Josephine from certain paths of thought that clouded her eyes and marked her in the minds of others.

More and more of herself, Desidora offered for Josephine to delight in if only it would steer her from that path. She overshadowed it for a while, absorbing the knight’s curiosity to explore such a trajectory of thought like so many before her, seeing how far she dared to wander before the jaws she was aware of but unable to see clamped shut and swallowed her up. Desidora cradled her head at night, whispering that repentance was not too late, but she could not keep Josephine from danger. How does one dissuade a hound from meat thrown before it?

Against her better judgement, she had fed that hunger with torn pages of books the King and Queen ordered to be burned, giving them to the knight for her to pore over. Josephine praised her bravery and read them aloud. Desidora didn’t care what they contained. Although she grasped the tales of shamed kings and counsellors fallen from grace, uprisings by villagers whose homes were razed in retribution, unmentioned on their maps, it was Josephine’s tongue working its way drunkenly around the syllables and the knight’s arm behind her head she valued these escapades for most. She would hold a candle, both of them lying on their backs as Josephine’s finger dragged across the page.

Josephine did take a squire. A bright-eyed girl, Selvatrice, who excelled at all of the lessons the knight put to her—swordsmanship, hawking, and archery—though she was hesitant to learn at first, her parents having paid for Josephine’s tutelage. In teaching her, an enthusiasm invigorated Josephine’s movements, the like of which Desidora hadn’t seen since they met. Josephine became fond of the girl, but when the time came for Selvatrice to accoutre herself with a sword on her first campaign, she fled the field of battle. Josephine spoke in defence of her squire at court, citing that cowardice in one’s first conflict did not promise the same reaction thereafter, which any knight could attest to.

“My King, my Queen, for the love you bear your loyal servant, spare her!”

Josephine went on to threaten, after the sentence of death was passed on to her squire, she would kill whoever assumed the role of executioner. So, the knight was ordered to kill Selvatrice instead.

She wouldn’t see me for three days after that. I went looking for her. Upon finding Josephine in the undercroft, her breath rancid from wine, she clung to my waist. Terrified, I think, that Selvatrice was a shade of the woman I could have become, had I agreed to be her squire.

“I should have—” she began.

I soothed her, “There was nothing you could’ve done.”

Josephine told me, “I don’t want to hurt anyone else,” and we didn’t speak of it again.

Desidora had been jealous of Selvatrice’s closeness to Josephine for a while and met any of the girl’s attempts at dialogue with curt remarks, not unkind, but hardly as approachable as she ought to have been. All Selvatrice wanted to do was please the knight by delivering missives on her behalf. She frequented the library, devouring books on neighbouring kingdoms and battle stratagem. Desidora began to notice her nervous ticks, how she picked at her lips with her teeth. Selvatrice cried often when she thought she was alone, nose daubing her sleeve. She had met the squire’s gaze across the room once in this state. All Desidora could think to say was, “Mind the books.”

Mind the books. Desidora shudders at her cruelty, and that is not even the worst of it. To vex Josephine, she had called the girl a whore another time in the squire’s hearing. Later, she would justify her remark with the excuse that all her love for Josephine deluded her senses. The knight swore she had not been with Selvatrice in that way, her expression disgusted by Desidora’s brashness.

“You could never be what she is to me, just as she could never be what you are to me.”

I hated that answer, which reminded me of a mother placating her two children as they squabbled over her affections.

Foolishness, all of it. What good are her regrets to the dead now? As penance, she replicates Selvatrice in the book as best she can. Selvatrice had died believing Desidora was joyous of the fact. She cannot absolve herself by relieving the girl of these notions anymore.

Selvatrice stood upright, jutting her chin. “I wouldn’t seek to deprive you of Josephine’s company. I’m sweet on a baker’s boy, ma’am, honest.” Her retort threw me with its innocence.

The squire did not argue for her honour’s sake, but proved it with actions as much as her vessel on this earth allowed. She was a merry soul, her downfall simply that her mind hadn’t been whetted enough to comprehend the scope of the battle she was thrust into. Had she been given five more years to mature under Josephine’s guidance, she would have ridden and fought gloriously at the head of their army.

She feels the girl’s blue eyes boring into her shoulders from behind. If Desidora looks around, she won’t see anyone. With her back turned, she can just hear the moment her breath lapses behind Selvatrice’s. Desidora imagines the shadow the squire’s figure, watching her expectantly from the other side of the bedchamber with her knees tucked up to her chest, cuts out of candlelight against the wall. Desidora asks if Josephine is with her. The girl only trills a laugh. If Selvatrice knows where Josephine is, she will not tell her, and why should she? Desidora had demanded Josephine’s presence as much as possible, winding herself around the knight’s legs. Of course, the squire wants to safeguard Josephine in death.

On scraps of paper by Desidora’s elbow, Josephine’s comrades have written their accounts of the knight for her to transcribe into the book. Charges they made alongside her, sieges Josephine had not spoken to Desidora of, and times she went to pains to succour other knights and nobility from ransom. They describe her with particular, specially chosen words. Commendations that won’t reach Josephine’s ears from this plane of existence. She feeds their messages to the book, then to the candle, wisps of rough-edged handwriting crispening black over the fire, and paints the knights’ opinions in grand letters with thick-spined curves.

She infuriated us with how outspoken she was. Dedicated wholly, perhaps overmuch, to her beliefs, values, and the cause she was primed throughout her upbringing to defend.

On any occasion we, or worse, the old masters she modelled her combat and personal fashion after, were subject to ridicule, just as quickly as Josephine might have begun to exhibit belly-deep laughter, she would barrage the person like a baying dog. If they remained staunch in their disagreement, that was well, she could respect a well-defended opinion. If not, they were at her mercy.

When Josephine blatantly ignored an order from the King and Queen’s firstborn to retrieve a set of armour from the corpse of an enemy, we saw not a knight on horseback, but a living martyr yet to be canonised. She set the banner above her destrier afire and circled back to the castle. The majority of us followed suit.

Desidora had seen the act as selfish. The prince’s debut on the battleground was supposed to signify his transcendence from boy to man. His first taste of warfare ended in a crux between old and young. The prince pointed out the armour of a nameless corpse he wanted. Sat on her horse like a pillar, Josephine, the traditionalism of her age personified, disdained the prince’s disrespect towards the dead. She turned away, abandoning the humiliated ruler-to-be. It should have been the start of an alliance built on trust. To Josephine, this boy, who had been raised on the same lessons and history as she, prophesised a reign she wanted nothing to do with. Perhaps Selvatrice could have dissuaded her from leaving, if the squire was alive.

I screamed to Josephine on her return, “You have damned us!”

“Kiss me,” she asked.

I refused to touch her. “Go and make your apologies to the prince. You don’t need to like him, Josephine! You can mould his character, if only you would smother your pride and stand beside him for a few more years.”

Josephine smiled sadly, unfastening the gambeson from her chest, and held it out. “Would you look after this for me?”

They came for her the next morning, killing the knight in her bed.

This part sickens Desidora most to remember. Feet tangling in bedsheets, Josephine thrashing as she reached for the knife under her pillow. She had not been there, but saw the bedchamber after the fact, where they bled Josephine out over the coverlet.

Once Desidora finishes the original, Josephine’s comrades have agreed to make copies of the book. They will furnish their squires with a copy, and so on, a cycle to see that Josephine’s name survives in the world for generations, kindled by those who loved her best. The original, Desidora intends to conceal behind a panel at the library, to be discovered at a later date.

Then, she will go into the throne room wearing Josephine’s gambeson.