Sir Sigefrith had recommended that they climb up to the top of the tower. He had not been able to resist observing gravely: “It’s quite tall, this time of year,” for which Ethelwyn supposed he had been punished by little feet or little fists as soon as the tower door had closed behind them.
But once on high, Ethelwyn could not help but wonder whether Sir Sigefrith wished him dead: the low wall was at the same height as the wall along the bridge at Nothelm, and if he attempted to squirm away from Mouse as he had last time, he would most likely fall to his death.
“Be careful you don’t fall,” she said.
“I was just thinking the same thing!” he gasped. “I was wondering whether your brother-in-law was hoping to rid himself of me in this manner.”
“No!” she cried. “He likes you. You mustn’t think badly of him – it’s his fault you weren’t invited, but he wouldn’t…”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He wouldn’t – I mean,” she sighed, “Wyn wanted to invite you, but he said it would be silly, since it was quarter day, and you live so far away. So we knew you couldn’t come. And he thought you would feel badly because you couldn’t. And Wyn thought we ought to invite you anyway, and tell you we would understand if you couldn’t come, and so…”
“But I fail to see why I should be invited at all,” he protested, hoping to sound humble but sounding, he thought, only slightly less than annoyed.
“Because I – ” she began, but she stopped when she ran up against the impassable obstacle of his apparent failure to remember her birthday at all.
“I would have come,” he murmured.
“You would have? Then I am very sorry we didn’t invite you. You must have been hurt.”
“It had not even occurred to me to be hurt.” This was the truth. But now that she had mentioned it… “Why should I be?”
“Because you – ”
This time he did not know what had stopped her.
“I came anyway. As you see,” he said with a bow, but he feared the whole sounded slightly sarcastic.
“Yes, but…”
“I came to this house to deliver a message,” he said, as if correcting her unspoken protest, “but I came all the way across the river to wish you a happy birthday. However, you were not at home.”
“Oh…”
Suddenly a laugh broke free from him. “Oh my God! I wish you could have seen the trials I endured to make it to you!”
“What trials?” she smiled.
“First your man laughed at me because he found me polite after all – ”
“Oh no!”
“I wonder where he got the idea that I was otherwise?”
“Oh no!” she laughed.
“And then I went to Sir Malcolm’s house and somehow contrived to get a message out of Mother Curran so that I could have an excuse for showing up here… but then I was too ashamed to intrude, so I tried to give it to the guard, but he was too busy chasing a maid up the ladder of the gatehouse – ”
“Oh no!”
“And then I tried to give it to that de facto doorman your brother-in-law has out there, but he was either too drunk or too deaf to understand me – ”
“Oh no!”
“And then Lord Cynewulf and young Haakon found me and dragged me into the hall, making the flattering announcement: ‘Look who’s here! It’s the Ethelwyn-Wyn!’”
“Oh no!”
“And then your sister kindly pretended I had been invited – ”
“But we wanted to!”
“And you were so pleased I had remembered your birthday that instead of acknowledging that I truly am a very charming, very thoughtful fellow who had come all this way only to offer you that pleasure, I pretended to be a churl who wished he were anywhere else.”
It was, he was finding, much easier to admit these things while laughing, though they had seemed grave enough to him a moment before.
“Which was probably what you wished as well at that moment,” he added.
“Oh no…”
“And I cannot tell you why, unless it be that I should prefer to pass as a churl than as a fool who would ride all this way after working all day, only to wish a happy birthday to a young lady he scarcely knows. Though perhaps I owe you that much after dragging you into the moat with me,” he bowed.
“Oh, now you dragged me in?” she laughed. “Last time I had pushed you in!”
“I think that depends on one’s point of view.”
“It was probably a little of both,” she said.
“Tonight I have been greeted several times as ‘the man who fell into the moat with Mouse’ so perhaps impartial observers are assigning the blame equally.”
“I am willing to admit to that,” she said and held out her hand to be shaken as if they were striking a deal.
Ethelwyn decided he would not miss such an excellent opportunity, and he bent to kiss it instead. Nor would he let it go afterwards.
She seemed dazed for a moment, but then she laughed. “What an adventure you had tonight! I don’t know how you did it.”
“Some combination of pride and determination and foolishness.”
“It’s a good thing Sigefrith doesn’t have a moat.”
“Ah! If he had, I might have jumped into it at the start and saved myself a lot of trouble.”
“It would have gone harder with your hair if you had.”
“That’s true. Oh my God! But I don’t even know what’s going on up there!”
His horror at being reminded of the potentially disastrous state of his curls was enough to cause him to let go of her hand after all, and he began patting at his hair with both of his.
“Are you serious?” she laughed, and her hands followed his up to undo the good work they were doing.
His hair had long served him as bait for ladies’ hands, but he had always endured their ministrations with a shrinking sense of doom at the thought of the havoc they were wreaking among his curls – always before. The tugs and twists of this girl’s fingers, her laughter, and her dark eyes so close to his in the dark made him forget about his hair, and he dropped his hands to let her play.
“It’s soft!” she exclaimed in wonder.
“Did it look hard to you?”
“No, but it always looks too perfect to be real. Like the rest of you, in fact. One is so tempted to mess you up.”
She extracted one hand from his curls and began wiping it over his cheeks in broad strokes. This gesture could serve no practical purpose that he could see, unless it was meant to wipe the perfect off his face. He could only laugh.
“Don’t you ever get messy?” she asked. “Don’t you ever get anything on you?”
“I have already spilled gravy down my shirt. Once, about ten years ago.”
“Oh!” she scoffed. She began rumpling his cloak with what seemed to be the opposite intention of Mother Curran’s earlier tidying-up; and if she had had some bits of dust and straw at hand he thought she might have applied them.
Ethelwyn had to laugh – so funny, so adorable was she – but he was also awed by her boldness. He had not known how he would ever work up the courage to touch so much as her cheek without the excuse of mistletoe, and she had merrily set herself to crinkling his curls between her fingers, pawing at his face, and twisting his cloak all awry.
“Well,” she sighed when his cloak fell stubbornly back into place a third time, “I can only do so much with the outside of you. But at least you’re laughing at yourself now. That’s some improvement.”
She smiled up at him in the dark, and with both of her hands lying on his shoulders, she was close enough to him that he dared lay his hands on her waist and pull her closer. It was all so eerily unfamiliar to him that, at thirty-one, he found himself wondering whether he was doing it right. There was that familiar ache, but it was all in his hands and his arms and his breastbone: this was all he wanted of her then.
“It’s easier when you laugh with me,” he said.
“Oh?” she asked with a laugh that struck him as sorrowful.
He nearly released her in his surprise, but she slipped her arms around him and held him tighter, pressing her face against his shoulder and his cheek against her head. He could not guess what she wanted of him then, so he thought back to what he had wanted.
“Did I wish you a happy birthday, in fact?” he murmured.
“No. You had better,” she laughed sorrowfully again. “You came all this way for that.”
Ethelwyn was bewildered. He thought he must have been doing something wrong, but the more sadly she laughed, the tighter she clung to him.
He whispered, “Happy birthday.”
She was, paradoxically, too close to kiss, so he held her still more tightly than she was holding him. The gesture might have served a number of purposes, but at that moment he was only hoping he could squeeze the sorrowful out of her laugh.
But maybe Mouse is sorrowful knowing that she can't marry him right away? It does cause a problem later.
Chapters
I had only meant to have some fun with poor Ethelwyn (it's so easy with him) but I didn't expect this to end on such a bittersweet note.
And things are about to get intense again, too!