Under the cut is the comic I drew for this year’s 24 hour comics day/48 hour comics weekend! This is an adult horror comic, and it comes with some content warnings: miscarriage, child loss, violence, death, and nudity.
If you saw an earlier version of this post and couldn’t read the images, my apologies! This is real beast of a comic, clocking in at 24 pages, so it takes a little extra work figuring out how to get around tumblr’s image limits. I think it should hopefully read a little better with all the images under a cut, though. ENJOY!
I wanted to do a timeline of where Marie was (at least reportedly) during her exile so I typed “Queen of Naples” in the British Newspaper Archive and started going through a bunch of journals; imagine my surprise when this news came up:
The ex-Queen of Naples, Maria Sofia, who resides near Munich, in a chateau which her sister, the Empress of Austria, made her a present of, has just had fall from her horse, the accident causing the miscarriage of a male child. Her Majesty had already a daughter at Rome, who died at a very early age.
London Evening Standard, September 7, 1872
This alleged fall and miscarriage was first reported by the London Evening Standard September 7 and then repeated in at least other 29 newspapers from Britain and Ireland during the rest of the month. I would have discarded it as fake news since an accident like this wouldn’t have gone unnoticed (and because Victorian journalism was bad. Like really bad), but as I was told by historian Martina Winkelhofer, Marie did suffer from miscarriages during the 1870s. Which means that something like this hasalready gone unnoticed.
My analysis/speculation (aka rambling) of this under the cut!
However, that Marie miscarried during the 1870s doesn’t mean that this report is true. First, if they could identify the sex of the fetus then her pregnancy should have been advanced, in that case it definitely wouldn’t have gone unrecorded. Second, I also find hard to believe that a pregnant woman would have rode a horse in the first place, since it was believed to be one of the main causes of miscarriage (although given Marie’s love for riding maybe she would?). Third, in September of 1872 Elisabeth went to Possenhofen with her lady-in-waiting Marie Festetics and reunited with all her siblings, Marie included. Festetics doesn’t mention the fall nor miscarriage in her diary; I kinda feel that if such an accident had happened only ten days prior they would have talked about it (disclaimer: I haven’t read her full diary, just the fragments that were quoted in Elisabeth’s biographies. I assume that she doesn’t mention it because that seems like something that you just wouldn’t omit in your book even if the former Queen of Naples isn’t the main subject of it).
All that being said, Marie couldhave been pregnant in September of 1872: despite the common belief that she and her husband separated after their daughter’s death in 1870 they in fact still spent a lot of time together during the 1870s (after this decade it’s harder to track where they were at). From February to April of 1872 Marie and Francesco reportedly were staying in France, first in Pau and then in Paris in a hotel; it’s not a reach to think that they may have tried to have another child if they were in terms good enough to live together for at least three months.
So this leaves us with these options: a) this is fake news; b) Marie did fell from her horse, but she wasn’t pregnant; c) Marie did fell and miscarried, but it wasn’t a very advanced pregnancy; d) It happened exactly as the news says but no one talked about it for some reason??
Lastly, not only the UK press reported this news: I found that the Spanish newspaper La Época (which in turn was repeating the news from the journal La Correspondencia) also informed of the alleged fall of the Queen of Naples:
We read in LA CORRESPONDENCIA:
“The ex-queen of Naples, Maria Sofia, who lives near Munich, has suffered from a fall from [her] horse, and in consequence of this a wound. The ex-queen, who was pregnant, has given birth prematurely, and because of this accident, a liveless child”
La Época, September 8, 1872
It’s very similar to the British news so it likely came from the same source (whatever it was); “has given birth prematurely” could suggest an advanced pregnancy, but perhaps that simply was the way they talked about miscarriages in general in 19th century Spain (I should check later).
If I find something more on this subject I’ll add it, personally I don’t believe it, but still Marie’s historiography it’s so bad that maybe something like this did completely went under the radar.
Beatrice wasn’t sure whether it had been one day or two since the doctor had come. She’d seen the look in his eyes, heard the hushed tones with which he murmured to Lyle over in the corner, and with Lyle cursing as he left the wagon and the pallet where she lay, she’d known what she already felt deep in her bones.
The fever and the pain that had once consumed her had faded, felt now at some peculiar remove like hearing music from another room. It would all be over soon, and that was a relief. The vultures might be circling, so to speak, and she’d seen so many of them in the five years since they’d arrived in America. She felt them watching her now just at the edge of her vision, not certain whether they were real or phantoms, and not certain whether it mattered. Exhausted as she was, she could only accept it. This was her end.
A part of her wondered whether she had caused this by her thoughts. The nervousness and sometimes despair over being pregnant again, worrying what she would do. David and Arthur both had readily crossed Lyle’s temper, for all David had been just a baby yet when he died. Having lost two already, she knew the signs. But this time, the bleeding hadn’t stopped. Maybe it was being four months along this time that had done it.
We go together then, you and me, she thought towards that child that would never be, now finally able to offer them nothing but love and tenderness rather than having it mingled so heavily with trepidation and fear. Perhaps we shall see David, and your other brothers or sisters.
But peaceful as that notion was, that still left Arthur. He’d be alone with Lyle after this. Lyle had gone to town hours ago, awkwardly grunting something about getting supplies. She suspected it was only that he couldn’t sit here and watch her die, and that he’d be at the saloon nursing his sorrow. Hard-handed and angry as he sometimes was, there was a peculiar vulnerable and tender streak in him all the same. She was only thankful Lyle had taken Arthur with him. He’d chased Arthur off most of the time since Beatrice took to bed, growling for him to go find something useful to do. Sparing him the experience of it, she supposed. She thanked him for that.
She’d managed to talk to Arthur last night, though, when he’d crept in after Lyle went to sleep. Given him the portrait of her taken earlier that year in Wyoming, and showed him the papers she’d hidden behind it. Papers neither of them could read, but papers that would hopefully be the key to a better future all the same. The ones that officially made him an American boy, not just another immigrant child. He would belong here. He already sounded far more American than Welsh, and she was grateful for that. She could only hope he’d have the chances she’d wanted for him, even if she wouldn’t be here to see it.
In the end, that was all she could do for him. It seemed so little, and she was afraid for him all the same.
Hearing the creak of someone climbing in the wagon, she couldn’t help her surprise. Lyle had come back so soon? No, that couldn’t be. But she heard footsteps approaching, and she heard the scrape of glass and the hiss of a match, saw the brightening behind her closed eyes as someone lit the lantern that had gone out awhile ago. It hadn’t mattered to her, but now that there was light again, she opened her eyes to look at who had come to call.
She didn’t know either of them by sight, fair-haired and well past her own twenty-eight years. Neighbors? No, they were far from anyone. Lyle had made certain of it. Who else would simply climb up into the wagon like this? KInd strangers, perhaps. “Are you looking for Lyle?” It always seemed to come down to that. She closed her eyes again. “He isn’t here just now, and I’m sorry for whatever he’s done, but I’m afraid we don’t have much for the taking.” Money ran through her man’s fingers like water, fast as his quicksilver dreams of riches.
“Should we…” The woman spoke, her voice soft.
She was too tired for this. “Are you missionaries, then? I suppose the saving of a soul becomes even more important at the very end. There’s no need of that. I’ve made what peace I might with my God, I assure you.” Even if she’d come so far from the girl who’d attended chapel so faithfully back in Aberdare.
The man finally spoke up, his deep voice low and gentle. “No. You don’t need to worry about missionaries.” The words in Welsh, no less, and the familiar lilt of it lifted her spirits in spite of herself. “Mam, it’s me. It’s Arthur.”
Now that snapped her to attention, and she opened her eyes, finding she had some fury to spare yet for someone who’d tease her like this as she lay there dying. But she saw those eyes looking at her with a sad, knowing tenderness–that familiar blue-tinted green, the eyes she saw whenever she chanced to have a mirror. The ones she saw too every day in her boy, her Arthur. His hair–it was dusted with grey, yes, but the same dark blond as hers. Lyle’s brows for certain, and something of the cast of his cheekbones.
Her boy had just turned seven last month, and yet she’d swear he also sat here beside her now, a man of at least forty, perhaps fifty. She looked at him, and something in her knew him, something deeper than blood and bone, an echo within the soul. “So you are.” She didn’t know how it could be so, only that it was. She drank in the sight of him. Such a large man, tall and broad. He hadn’t gotten that from Lyle, perhaps instead from her own father Dylan, such a large man he’d been permanently stooped long before he died from working in the cramped mine tunnels. Seeing the marks of age on him, the lines etched into his face, and the scars–the small nick on the bridge of his nose, another on his right cheek, and a large one on his chin only somewhat hidden by a short-cropped beard. Child-Arthur was healing a similar cut on his nose even now, earned by tumbling off the wagon while playing out a week ago, and by the look of it she’d known it would scar, just as it had on this man. She glanced past him to the woman. Tawny hair, a riot of freckles, amber eyes, a large scar on her right brow. Watching Beatrice just as carefully as she was watched. She asked, speaking in Welsh and managing some good humor, “Well, my boy, who is this you’ve brought with you?” But she already suspected.
If she hadn’t already believed, that shy smile, that half-lowering of his gaze, would have told her. “This is my wife. Sadie.”
“Pleasure to meet you.” Her Welsh was less polished, her accent more obvious to Beatrice’s ear, but it surprised her all the same to hear it. Had Arthur taught her? There were a thousand other questions.
But she licked her lips, needing now to ask the important question: “Why have you come? And…how?” She switched back to English for it. He was an American, her boy, and she would have him be so to her at the end. She’d fought hard for that. It was good he hadn’t forgotten his Welshness entirely, but some things needed to be kept close and secret. She knew that full well.
“How? I don’t know for sure. There’s some red-headed fella named Sinclair who’s gonna have some explanations for this.” He leaned in, and reached out to take his hand in hers. A large hand, work-roughened, so unlike the small hand she still took sometimes to hold onto him in crowds and the like. “Why? That’s a question that’s got more answers than I know what to do with, really. Cause I…” He sighed, shook his head, and the aching look in his eyes told her too much.
“I know there’s no return from this, <i>fy ngwash i</i>. It’ll be soon enough. I knew it last night when I gave you those papers. Did you have the use of them?”
“Sort of. We ended up in Canada, so uh, proving I was born in Wales actually helped us there.”
“Not America, then?”
“There was better land in Canada.”
“So you’re a farmer?” She couldn’t help but brighten at that. She’d wanted something like that for him. Something peaceful, gentle, nothing like Lyle’s life.
“Horses, mostly. Some sheep, cattle, and the like. It’s a good place. A pretty good life. And the rest, well…”
“You’d best tell her, Arthur,” Sadie said, her voice full of the twanging accent she’d heard in New Austin and some parts of Texas. “She’ll see it eventually anyhow.”
He sighed, shoulders sagging. “I reckon you will at that. It weren’t…all what you hoped for me, Momma. Daddy ain’t gonna live but another four years past this. Gets hanged for horse theft in San Francisco just after Christmas. After that, a lot happened. And it took me a long time to get things right.”
“Then tell me how it was, son.” She heard the tone of both inflexible command and gentle invitation in her words, and knew it for the way she spoke to him sometimes as a mother, asking to know the truth of something. Usually when he’d done some petty mischief or theft that she knew was Lyle’s influence on him. You must tell me, and perhaps I’ll tell you that it was wrong and why, but I won’t hate you for it. Because I love you enough to want you to know what’s right. She saw that conflict in him already, a boy who could steal candy from the store and shrug about it, but who’d come home the next day taking a beating to save a stray cat from being kicked to death by some older boys.
So he told her. And perhaps it wasn’t the worst she could imagine after hearing Lyle was dead when Arthur was eleven. But it made for no pretty picture. Hearing he’d been taken in by criminals, and ones far better and more sophisticated than Lyle could ever be, something broke within her heart. She’d wanted so much better for him. But even as he didn’t quite look at her, he kept talking.
He told her of the gang he’d been in, of seeing no other life or future for himself. Told her of a little boy named Isaac, her first grandchild. You’ll meet him someday, long before you should. He’s such a good kid. I know you’ll love him, and he’ll love you. Told her of nearly three decades of mistakes and failures after this. She might have thought it was a life of only regrets, but then he told her of a new life he’d made, of Sadie, of Canada and the children who had lived, grandchildren she would never see: Beatrice, named for her. Matthew. Susanna. Andrew.
She felt that pull, as if being summoned. Light fading, like a fire dimmed now beyond embers. Arthur must have seen it as well, because he stopped telling her about little things, and reached out to take her hand. Beatrice felt someone else take her other hand–Sadie, then. “I don’t exactly know how we got here,” he said quietly. “But I know how it was that day. I came back with Daddy and you was gone already. And…that always stayed with me. That I wasn’t there. And I know how it is. Nobody ought to die alone like that.” There was some kind of knowing weariness to his voice at that, a question she would never be able to ask and he would never be able to answer for her. “So here we are.”
So much that would be left unsaid, but no matter. She would see in time. She would see all of it, and there was comfort to it, because now she knew her boy would be all right in the end. That he would remember her too, that he loved her. That put her fear to rest, and so now she could rest. There were no vultures now, only the final words of love and farewell spoken, and the reassurance of the hands holding hers as everything faded into peace.
*banner art is this pieceby@xandrei (used w/ artists permission)*
~
fandom: six of crows / kaz brekker x inej ghafa
word count: 6,017
rating: t
c/w: discussion of pregnancy, pregnancy loss, and fertility. (if these are triggering topics for you, proceed with caution).
summary: kaz and inej navigate the rough seas of reproduction.
~
“what if we had one?” he asked, after dancing around the topic for a while.
“what? a baby?” inej just blinked at him.
“i mean… it’s what people do, right? start a family?”
“kaz, are you saying what i think you’re saying?”
they were sitting in the lounge of their new place, half-swallowed in cushions in the second-floor window seat. inej’s legs draped over his and kaz kneaded her thigh to distract from his rising butterflies.
“i—i think so,” he winces
suddenly, his lap was full of inej and she was clutching his face in both her hands.
completely unable to help himself, kaz spread his hands over her thighs, intent on watching the way his fingers splayed over her slender form.
“look at me, kaz.” there were tears in her eyes when he did. “don’t lie to me now. is this really something you want? because i don’t think i could bear it if you’re kidding.”
sliding his hands further up her legs until he clutched her hips and dragged her closer, he said, “i want to start a family with you. i—i want to leave something behind.”
“other than damage?” inej was half crying, half laughing, so close to him he could feel the warm wash of her breath as she spoke.
“other than damage.”
“i love you somuch, kaz.”
“so, is that a yes?” he didn’t know why he wasn’t sure, it seemed like a yes.
“of course, of course, my love—” and then, she was kissing him.
@fixusi said to @ask-drferox: Hey! I read your post on why horse anatomy is quite bad, and it was great. I snooped around online some more about it, and I saw someone mention that cows are really tough, kinda like the opposite of a horse. I was wondering if you could elaborate on what makes cow anatomy so good? I wasn’t able to really find anything online, though I’m not even sure what search terms to use. Thanks for the great blog!!
Cows are tough, infinitely moreso than horses though it’s not necessarily apparent unless you’re studying their medicine side by side. So have ten facts about cows.
Cattle can eat quite a lot of things that are not food, and aside from the occasional inconvenient potato which might get stuck in their throat, most of it will cruise on down to the massive rumen and just kind of… float there for years. Occasionally pointy metal bits will cause a problem and can actually enter the reticulum, and be pushed forward all the way to the pericardium (heart sack) if they are long and pointy enough. This causes an infectious pericarditis which is not necessarily lethal but is inconvenient.
Seriously the cardiovascular system of cattle is quite durable. With a horse a valid method of emergency euthanasia is to slice open the aorta via the rectum. A horse will be dead in 20-30 seconds. A cow will continue to walk around for several minutes and may even have a snack with a severed aorta.
While the guts of a cow are huge, most of it is the rumen which is really too big to go anywhere. They can displace their abomasum (‘true stomach’) but most of the time this is into a position which only inconveniences the cow a little.
Because they’re a ruminant they don’t colic in the same way horses do, but they will get bloat if they can’t burp (the rumen fills with gas and/or foam). If this happens it is an emergency, and it’s perfectly legitimate for a farmer to stab their affected cattle in the stomach to open it up and let out the gas. The cow will probably wander around and have a snack, with a stab wound into her rumen letting it vent, until the vet can get there to patch it up.
While there is lots that can go wrong with giving birth in cattle, it’s not nearly as dramatic as the horse can be. While with a horse if something goes wrong, it goes wrong fast, cattle can survive having their calf die while giving birth and being stuck, starting to rot, and then being pulled out piece by piece.
Cattle have sturdy skulls with well-built sinuses, which is how it’s possible to shoot one in the head multiple times and still not have it be dead.
Their infection resistance is superb compared to the horse. If a horse has retained fetal membranes after giving birth, it’s an emergency by 24 hours. With a cow you can leave them for days or weeks if you can stand the smell.
If they’ve busted their stitches and eviscerated themselves after a caesarian, you can scoop up those intestines she’s been walking on in the mud, hose them off, put them back in, and with treatment it’s plausible she’ll survive. We do caesarians standing in cattle by the way, under local anaesthetic.
They’re actually pretty good at having their organs outside their body. If cow prolapses her uterus (the whole organ pops inside out through her vagina following the calf after giving birth) then it’s not certain death, so long as she doesn’t run about too much.
Because they have two toes on each foot, instead of one hoof like the horse, if they break a bone in either toe you can reasonably attempt treatment.
In short, when faced with conditions that would devastate another species, cows respond by wandering off and possibly having a snack at the inconvenience.
In addition, cattle can do some seriously weird things. Sometimes they’re born with an extra, non-functional leg. Sometimes you get a schistosoma reflexus. Cattle can throw some weird curve balls and then they just keep going on with life.
That’s not to say they’re bombproof. (Partially bulletproof maybe, but not bombproof). If they don’t burp, they die. They can bloat. They can get anthrax if they eat too much dirt. They can do some serious damage to each other, especially bulls and once they’re down they’re in serious trouble. But compared to the horse, cows want to live.
I feel compelled to tell you all that dairy cattle in particular sometimes sever the freaking enormous vein that runs along their abdomen to their udder. This is a surgical emergency because they lose a lot of blood very quickly, but you can tie it off fairly quickly.
But because they lose a lot of blood, and a cow who is ‘down’ (unable to rise) is quite likely to die if you don’t get her standing reasonably promptly, doing blood transfusions on farms was a thing.
And the very old school way of doing it was:
Find a donor cow, ideally a sibling or half sibling
Put some anticoagulant in a clean bucket
Cut one of her jugular veins and catch the blood in the bucket.
Suture closed the laceration in the donor cow’s jugular
Elevate the bucket of blood to use a gravity line to transfuse it into the recipient cow
Administer antibiotics
And I’m told this succeeded more often than it failed.
