Mouse gets a lesson

Mouse laughed, but Ethelwyn scarcely smiled, and so her laugh died off into sheepish giggles.

She did not know how to talk to this sensitive, serious man. If he had merely been arrogant and rude she would have known how to talk to him – as she had two days before when they had stood dripping before the fire. But there was no fun in teasing a man who was only angry because he was hurt.

And if he was hurt so easily, then Mouse thought she was the last girl who should have been talking to him. She knew herself well-​​qualified for giving lessons in apologizing, for she was ever cleaning up after her impetuous tongue. But she feared she could not permit herself to teach a man like Ethelwyn the art of apologizing by demonstrating on Ethelwyn himself.

“I’m sorry if I seemed to imply that you’re old…” she smiled hesitantly. She guessed that this was what had cost her his own smile.

“I suppose I must seem so to you,” he sighed.

“There was no ‘but’ in that apology.”

“‘But’ I am thirty-​​one. Since Tuesday.”

“Tuesday!” she cried. “Happy birthday!”

He smiled and shook his head dazedly.

“It’s a lucky thing your birthday wasn’t on Thursday!” she said without thinking. “What a present that would have been! ‘Happy birthday! Here, have a swim!’”

To her great relief, he laughed. “‘Have some cake, too!’”

“That’s right! Oh, we gave you the birthday treatment!”

“My own birthday was a much milder affair.”

“Well, I was born on Candlemas, so my birthday always consists of paying the rents and bringing the cows in from the hay fields.”

“At least no one can forget your birthday.”

“Don’t tell me they forgot yours!”

“Oh, no. Her Grace remembered.”

“That’s no surprise. I think Her Grace is just about the sweetest lady I have ever met, after my little mother.”

“Yes,” he said stiffly.

Mouse winced. Truly she did not know how to talk to him. Perhaps he did not think the daughter of a farmer, even if the sister of a lady, had the right to have opinions of a Duchess. She had not forgotten that he was the nephew of a lord – and she supposed he never did.

“Well,” she said awkwardly, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t wish to leave the party early. They don’t mean any harm out there.”

“I shall stay if you will,” he said. “But I think you are not a bad dancer, and I can only assume that you said you were in the hope that you would not be obliged to dance with me.”

She laughed sheepishly. “In truth… that’s the truth.”

“Do you still find the idea objectionable?”

“No, indeed. I find it to be a very good idea.”

“Then shall we return?”

“Then we shall.”

Mouse turned at once and began walking towards the music, though she had another occasion to regret her impetuousness when she realized that if she had waited a moment he would surely have offered her his arm. Worse, such a man might believe she had done so precisely to avoid the service. After three steps he was walking at her side, but the moment had passed, and he did not touch her.

They had walked half the distance back to the line of dancers when Sir Egelric shouted, “Wyn!” and they both stopped short. Every one of the dancers paused and turned to look at them.

Mouse had hoped for Ethelwyn’s sake that they would be allowed to return to the dance without comment. She was a little in awe of Sir Egelric, but she told herself that she would have a word with him as soon as she could get him alone.

“What’s that leering down at you over your curls there, lad?” Egelric called.

“What?” Ethelwyn gasped and began patting at his precisely arranged hair.

“I think he means the mistletoe,” Mouse giggled.

“Oh my God!” he moaned softly.

She had hoped he would merely laugh the foolish laugh of shy men trapped beneath mistletoe with ladies whom they do not find utterly abominable. She had hoped they would exchange a quick peck and return to the dance as if such things were only a matter of course at Christmas time – which, at Nothelm, they certainly were.

But instead he only looked ill.

It was true that everyone in the hall had turned to them, all but the poor flustered Duchess, and if they were not pointing they were laughing, and if they were not laughing they were cheering the two of them on.

Mouse did believe that Ethelwyn could use a few lessons in laughing at himself, for such would serve as a better defense than all his layers of pride and courtesy and stiff-​​necked dignity. But she thought this a rather harsh lesson to begin with.

She cast about to find a joke to shield them both. She would tease Egelric: she thought he was more to blame than any of the others for throwing her and Ethelwyn together on this night, and it was certainly he who had noticed them passing beneath the mistletoe. She would say–

But she did not get a chance to say anything, for Ethelwyn slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her so sharply against him, so suddenly off-​​balance that she had to cling to him only to keep from falling down – although, she thought, this might have been the point. And then she was receiving the first real kiss of her life.

She had kissed several men beneath mistletoe, and she had even kissed a few boys over fences and behind barns, but that rudimentary education availed her little now. This sort of kiss was not merely a matter of course at any time – not even at Nothelm.

She did not know how long it lasted, except that the cheers from the men and Lady Sophie had the time to become riotous and the laughter from the other women to become nervous. She herself was busy reminding herself to breathe, not to fall down, and especially not to laugh.

But Ethelwyn himself was laughing when he finally released her. “I hope I am not too old to be giving lessons,” he murmured to her.

Mouse could only gasp, “Oh my God!”