Sophie is still

Sophie had tried so hard to stay awake for Stein that she had succeeded. Now, paradoxically, she found herself pretending to sleep.

He had spoken her name when he had come into the bedroom, and she was certain he had made more noise than necessary as he undressed. Meanwhile she lay as still as a marble effigy of herself, and not at all soft and relaxed like a sleeping woman. She feared he would notice the difference. She also hoped he would.

“Sophie!” he whispered, as loudly as he could whisper, like a man who was trying not to be heard and hoping he would be.

He had created for her a moment in which she could have pretended to wake. The moment was short, however, and once it had passed she had to go on pretending to sleep.

He thumped around the bed in his bare feet, rubbing his arms briskly and blowing through his lips like a man coming in from the cold. Still, once he had reached the bed, he was as gentle and quiet as a man could be, creeping between the blankets carefully enough to prevent a rush of chill air at her back.

Could she pretend to wake up now, when he seemed to be trying not to wake her? Would it not seem odd that he had not woken her before, with his scuffing of boots and clanking of belts?

Cautiously he lifted the blankets and pulled them over himself so that they both lay together beneath them, separated only by a hollow filled with the air she had warmed with her body.

He paused for a moment, and she wondered again whether it was the right moment to wake. She hesitated, and she thought he too was hesitating, and she began to fear they would out-​​hesitate one another until they fell asleep.

In fact, it seemed the soldier in him had simply been calculating his next move. With a perfectly coordinated motion of elbows and hips and knees, he crept neatly up beside her, sliding effortlessly across the fine sheets she had ordered laid upon the bed that afternoon when she had learned he was coming home.

He was near enough for her to feel his heat, alive and radiant as the warm air alone was not, but he was not quite touching her.

Then, suddenly, he was.

His arm slipped over her side and draped itself over her body, just below her breasts. He did not pull her against him nor himself against her, but he had calculated even this step: he had only to relax his body, and he rolled forward into the hollow her body made in the mattress, bringing himself snugly up against her back.

Now she could truly feel the heat of his body, as well as its strength.

She felt something else, too: something to which she, with her precocious and unfeigned interest in matters of sex, had become attuned. It was something that men like Lord Leofric and Sir Egelric unconsciously threw off like a seething cloud of sparks; that gentle men like the Duke could suppress in the company of ladies too shy to bear it; and that some men did not possess at all. Sophie had never yet felt it from Stein, but she had often suspected its presence. Now it was enveloping her like the blankets and the warm air.

No woman so attuned could have slept through it. Sophie could not even pretend to sleep through it. She gasped and turned her head to him, and he immediately pulled his arm back and rolled away from her again.

“Pardon me,” he said sheepishly. “I did not think to wake thee. Thou wert so warm…”

Sophie was too stunned to reply in any language. Of course – he had just spent weeks in her own country – but he had not spoken a word to her in her dialect all evening. She spoke it often with her little boys and with Astrid at times, but those conversations were on such a different register from this that it seemed she had forgotten how her own language sounded.

“It is no matter,” she mumbled. “Thou mayest…”

“Wake thee?” he asked, smiling.

“Or warm thee.”

It was all a part of a deeper intimacy than she had ever shared with him: the darkness, the silence of the night, the bed and blankets, their nearly naked bodies; and he was speaking to her in her own language, slipping beneath all the bulky layers of translation and misinterpretation to reach her directly, as he might slip his hand beneath her nightgown to touch her bare skin – as she hoped he might…

But he did not. She felt him drawing his arms up against his chest, and he rolled slightly away from her so that he was no longer balanced on his side but settled into his own hollow in the feather-​​filled mattress. He was near, and she could feel his warmth, but the rest of what she had felt died away in him like a fire retreating into its embers.

“Good night, God rest thee,” he whispered.

She could not imagine where he had learned to say this ancient phrase, and for a moment her heart was clenched by jealousy of some Saxon girl. Then she realized he must have simply heard her whispering it to her children, and he had remembered it through all these months.

“Good night, Silver-​​White Knight,” she replied.

He snorted, but the next sound he made, some time later, was a soft snore.

For a long while, Sophie tried so hard to sleep that she failed.