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“Help in here!”
    Then Countess Elinor will not stop us any more, we all go in. The Countesses and Duchess Margrethe and Lady Drin and Baroness Reventlow and Bridget Belskat, then all we nurses from pale Annas and Marias to including me. We know this Duke’s story, we know he fall in love with some thing in the water and jumped him self fifty feets to meet her. We fear for our Sophia, what a mad man might do to her.
    Fears ever justify.
    Our girl is lying half off the bed, stiff like a board, with eyes staring at the bed drape. One side curtain come pulled down and puddling on the floor. All the candles blowing wild, like there been a wind, and some gone out.
    We gape a minute. This be some thing never seen before.
    Then she not stiff any more, she curling on her self like a snail, and her mouth foam like a snail too, once it poison with salt. This when she scream again and again, till she straighten out once more with that glass-eye look above her.
    “She was asleep,” say this Duke Magnus of Östergötland. His beard is neat and greasy, so I do n’t know to trust him. He must fixed it before calling us. Madness may be on him again.
    We pull back the sheets, and there am some blood but not much. A little girl can ’t sleep just after That, I know this to be true here as any where else.
    “Too much wine,” say that Magnus. He rubbing his arm in his night shirt, he have an itch like may be she scratch him. “She kept drinking till she went to sleep, and then this. I had some too,” he adds, as if he worry for it now.
    The Countess Elinor send some boy to fetch the Queen and King. She step her self to the bed and try to put a hand to Sophia’s forehead, but the girl curl up again. Countess Elinor snatch her hand away like it be burned.
    “Something’s wrong,” she say, and it is so obvious I want to laugh. Not for meanness but from what a lady call her nerves. But I press my hands like saints, and I put on that face of sorrow that every one wear for the
Morbus,
and I watch the ladies watching Sophia and waiting for the Queen.
    Ladies think a Queen know best all ways, better than her three doctors and all they powders. Even this incomplete Queen. May be they are correct, not for me to say.
    The Princess curl and straighten, curl and straighten, making messy in the bedclothes and pulling down the other curtains. She do n’t fall from bed, though, stay just on the edge and some time pokering off it as if she going to float up to heaven with all the fire in her body. Her whole face flaming red now and her night dress wet in sweat, with the skirt rode up to show some shadow on her leg that might be blood, might be vanished all ready.
    She scream again. And there come a thumping at the door.
    Ladies wave apart, and three doctors walk in, black robes and flat hats and assisters with bowls and things in jars. They all gape too, while the Princess throw back and forth and scatter foam from her mouth.
    “Do you see those sores?” ask Doctor Candenzius, the chief of them. He come close and poke the Princess neck with a stick. “A plague necklace” he call the wounds, though I never seen a necklace from the Lunedie
Morbus.
    The second doctor, Venslov, the old one, say, “That is not the typical presentation.” The third doctor agree, it is not what they expect. They gape some more.
    No body say
poison
out loud. But ladies look at the floor and maids look at each other, all communicate in that perfect-quiet way of this place.
    “Do something,” Countess Elinor say to those doctors.
    “We must wait for Queen Isabel,” say a young lady.
    The Countess cross arms below her bosoms, push them high as they will go, and look down her nose with one eye. This what she do when she most vexed with some body. She say sharp to the doctors, “Don’t wait.”
    More screaming from that bed. I want to slide up and pat the Princess on her brow, but she all ready too far gone. Her necklace (so they call it) bursts, and the blood go