November 14, 1161
It had been three months, Viridis found as she counted off the days in her head. Three whole months. She hadn't been stressed, nor had she been ill, nor had she slept with her husband within that period of time.Three months. At this point, it was unlikely that it would ever return--not at her age. She was forty-nine years old, and she knew for a fact that there was no way she could be pregnant; now, she knew she never would be again.
Perhaps her son would see fit to give her another grandchild soon, she mused as gently bounced Camaline up and down. She loved the little girl like she would have loved a thousand of Rudolphus's children, of course, but she did hope that her son would, at the very least, stop abstaining from his wife at some point; she did not want Rudolphus to imitate his mother's mistake.
In the mean time, however, the twins were only four, only a year older than her granddaughter. It wasn't as if she no longer had the privilege of being a mother, she knew full well having believed for twenty-five years that Rudolphus would be her only child--she simply no longer had the chance of ever becoming a new mother again.
The twins, she assured herself, would be enough for her--and if they proved otherwise, then there was always Lonriad's year-old daughter. Viridis was already her mother in practice, as the girl's own had fled shortly after recovering from the birth, and she had to admit, she had become quite attached to the little girl. She had already raised and come to love one of Lonriad's bastards; why not do the same for another?
But in spite of it all, she did have her regrets. Maybe she should have eased up on the man, for her own sake; she had been young at the time, and had not known exactly what it was she wanted. It was cruelly ironic that now that she did, she was too old to aspire to it.Ah, but such was life, Viridis supposed--just a collection of cruel ironies.
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