Stein sees another Sophie

Lady Sophie’s household had never been especially well-​run, but Stein and his bride had been kept waiting even longer than usual. Stranger still was Sophie’s arrival: she did not spring upon them with a whoop, as he had told Lathir to expect, but waddled in so quietly that they saw her before they heard her.

Stein stumbled up from his seat, pink in the face from not having been on his feet sooner.

“Soph! L-​l-​l-​look at you!”

“I came down here to look at you,” Sophie said.

“But, look at you!” Stein babbled, trying to recover his poise with a joke. “I go away for five months and look what happens!”

He meant to speak of her enormous belly. She had apparently been pregnant already when he had left, but he had not known it then. However, he was neither looking at nor truly thinking of her belly when he spoke.

Sophie’s face had changed more than her silhouette. All the merry devilment had drained out of it, leaving a slack and vacant expression behind. Her eyes were puffy and dark-​rimmed, her lips chapped, and her skin was oddly spotted.

Stein’s first thought was of a pox, but at closer inspection he realized the spots were only coppery freckles. Sophie was freckled, and he had never known it. But he was less surprised to learn that she had always powdered her face than to see that she given up the powder.

Her hair, too, was unlike Sophie: she had always ironed her hair into neat rows of spiral curls, but this ragged mop upon her head must have been either her natural curls, or else hair painstakingly curled several days ago and slept on and mussed up since.

It was not Sophie’s expression, it was not Sophie’s face, it was not Sophie’s hair… It was not Sophie. And yet it was.

“It would be more useful if you could go away for nine months,” she muttered. “Then Leof would at least know it wasn’t yours.”

“Sophie!” Stein wagged a finger at her and tried to laugh. “I wasn’t married to her when I left, but even so you must not shock my poor bride. You remember Lathir? She says she met you once.”

The old Sophie flared up briefly like a dying ember in a breath of wind. “How are you, dear?” she drawled. “Couldn’t shake off this barnacle after all?”

“Barnacle!” Stein whined.

“I am very well, thank you,” Lathir replied. “How are you?”

The old Sophie went dark. “Tired, my dear. I hope you won’t mind if I sit down…”

Stein hopped to her side and helped her to a chair. “Please do, Soph. You do look awfully tired.”

Sophie lay back in the chair and sighed. “Tired, I look?”

“So, I…” Stein supposed it was not gallant to say so, but Sophie was his friend. “I think you look unwell. I hope it’s only…”

“Only this baby?” She sat up and shook her finger at Lathir. “You hurry up and get pregnant, my dear. It’s dreadful enough as it is, but in the summer it’s unbearable.”

Stein took Lathir’s hand, though it was too late to feel any thrill that might have gone through it at the words. His superstitious wife was not likely to tell him anything until she had felt the baby move—and probably performed some arcane rite of protection as well—so he was left guessing meanwhile.

“Of course,” Sophie sighed, “if the baby’s born in the summer then you have that to deal with. They don’t sleep if they’re hot, and they get rashes and so on… Of course, if they’re born in the winter they’re more likely to get sick and die…”

Stein felt his wife’s hand quiver beneath his own. “Soph!” he whimpered.

“Sorry. What was I saying?”

Stein remembered they had been talking about how tired she appeared, but he did not want to talk about that, either.

“So,” he smiled, “we just returned last Tuesday, and we’ve still a lot of visiting around to do before we may finally stop wandering. Eirik’s here, too.”

“I know. Leof told me.”

“He’ll come by. He wants to hurry home, though. Sigi just had her baby. Did you hear?”

“Leof told me.”

“Another boy! A poor, fat, red little thing. We were there when he was born, weren’t we?” he asked his wife, who smiled in reply.

“I heard,” Sophie said.

“We were all over, weren’t we? We visited her brother and Synne, and we saw their little baby, too. And we stopped to see her uncle Enna. That’s where we were married.”

“He thought it was a shame to marry a Norseman,” Lathir told her, “but if my mother could marry a Scot then he supposed anything was possible.”

“And now we’re on our way to stop at Baldwin’s for a few days.”

“That sounds delightful,” Sophie said dully.

“I think so.”

Stein’s nod was more enthusiastic than his words: he was looking forward to spending a few days with a couple who was obviously happy—or so he hoped they still were. So much had changed in the five months he had been away.

So far in the course of their bridal visits, he had the sickening feeling that he was giving Lathir a tour of what depressing turns marriage could take after a few years.

He had come home to find Brede positively, literally drunk, which had been unthinkable five months before. He and Estrid, alone together at last with only their children for company, had ceased conversing in anything softer than a shout or sweeter than a snarl.

Fortunately Stein and Lathir would not have to stay with Brede as he had originally planned. Lathir’s half-​sister Maire had offered them a home until their own house was built, but even that was likely to be uncomfortable: Aengus had not recovered his old good humor after his ordeal, and at Maire’s house there was an atmosphere such as that following a death.

Then they had chosen the easternmost reach of the valley to begin their visiting. At Raegiming they had been treated to Lady Eadgith’s nagging and Lord Hingwar’s roaring, and then they had passed on to Acanweald, where they could observe the continuing corrosion of Lord Britmar’s cheerfulness beneath the slow drip of acid from Lady Judith’s tongue. Relations were pleasant enough at Sir Godefroy’s manor, but Lady Leila had recently suffered another miscarriage, and there too the mood was grim.

Only at the castle of the King had matters changed for the better, and there the atmosphere was so ostentatiously merry that Stein found it troubling, too. He told himself that he was beginning to take after his superstitious wife: Lathir had assured him that so much rejoicing before a birth surely boded ill.

As for Sophie, she was clearly not rejoicing over her coming child, to the point that less-​superstitious Stein thought her mood a bad sign. Could a difficult pregnancy alone be enough to explain her decline? Stein had a new reason to be sorry he had never paid much attention to the condition of pregnant women before.

Sophie did not stay long with them, and Stein spoke more in that half hour than he had ever before been permitted to speak with his chatty friend. She did not even invite them for a visit following their trip to Baldwin’s, although Stein admitted himself relieved after seeing what Sophie had become. Leofwine’s mother and siblings were only comestible when accompanied by a hearty helping of Sophie’s joviality.

“She seems so unhappy,” Lathir murmured to him after Sophie had gone.

“Do you think so?”

“She sat like she never noticed her baby at all. She never laid her hands on her belly once.”

Stein caught her hands in his. “Is that what ladies do when they are expecting?”

Lathir smiled back at him and blushed.

“I shall have to pay attention to these two.”

“It’s in my pockets I shall be keeping them,” she threatened.

Stein grinned at her, but he truly did want to know what she thought of Sophie. “Did you notice that all by your little self? After only meeting her once before?”

“I did not think she was happy then. I did not like her husband, and my brother said I was right not to.”

“Hmm.”

“I am sorry, if he is a friend of you.”

“Never mind, dear. So, we shall try to make Sophie a little happier, anyway, or? Perhaps she’s lonely out here now that her friends have babies of their own and can’t visit.”

“It is a long ride from our house, when it will be built.”

“But you like to ride, don’t you? Or will there be a little something preventing you?”

She smiled a slow, warning smile to prove she had not been tricked, but her face grew very pink in spite of her.

“You can’t hide your cheeks in your pockets,” he laughed.

“You may look all you like, but it’s as still as a brood hen I shall be until my chicks hatch!”