Egelric asks a favor

Malcolm and Iylaine intended to stay until Sunday, but Alred and Hetty were returning home in the morning. Soon only Ethelwyn would remain, and even he would eventually want to begin spending his evenings at his own fireside again. Egelric would be alone, as he had not been in years, and no one knew what that would mean.

In spite of the presence of a lady, Egelric dropped himself without ceremony onto the couch. He had not forgotten she was there, however, for he immediately announced, “Hetty, I have a favor to ask of you.”

Hetty slipped between the furniture, pushing Malcolm down into the chair as she went, and waving Ethelwyn into the chair opposite when he approached to help her to her seat.

“Anything, dear,” she chirped.

Egelric stared blearily at his dog and said – without ceremony – “Take the baby with you when you go.”

Hetty was shocked enough to forget her duty to remain calm. “Egelric! No!”

She looked to her husband for guidance, but Alred’s eyes were tightly closed.

Egelric’s deep voice rang hollow these days, like an empty vessel. He rarely spoke, but when he did, he could talk quite calmly of tragedy, with a voice that concealed its ache in its echo. She had not seen him cry since he had come upon her braiding Lili’s hair for the last time.

“Hetty,” he said, quite calmly, “I can’t bear to hear him crying for his Mama.”

Hetty looked to her husband again, and she was desperate enough to whimper, “Alred?”

Alred gripped the mantel with both hands, and he did not look around. “I understand perfectly, old man,” he muttered.

Hetty heard Ethelwyn stirring as he began to rise to come to her aid. She had no choice but to turn herself around and flop herself down onto the couch beside Egelric, startling her poor baby into delivering an anxious kick.

She was panting with the exertion and with the strain of holding back tears, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Ethelwyn settling back onto his chair, though he seemed to have perched himself on its edge.

She could not bear to have him tend to her when Alred was in the room – not because she minded his attentions, but because she did not want him to notice Alred failing her.

“Do you?” Egelric asked thoughtfully. He scarcely seemed to be addressing anyone, and indeed it was Belsar who answered with a bark and an encouraging wag of his stumpy tail.

Alred mumbled something – “Perfectly…” it seemed to Hetty.

But he did not understand, she thought. It had been worse for him – Matilda’s baby had not even been his. Unless…

A terrible thought lit on Hetty’s innocent head: what if Alred still loved Lili? What if he too had lost his true love? What if that was what he meant with his “perfectly”?

She immediately shook the idea off, but she had been greatly weakened by days spent being strong. In that instant the probing thought had had the time to pierce her shell of love and loyalty and lay its clutch of sinister eggs.

“Alred?” she asked bravely, “what say you?”

Alred ran his thumb along the underside of the mantel top and then let his arm drop like a weight. “As you will, my dear.”

Hetty glanced at Ethelwyn before remembering herself, too quickly to read the expression on his face. She looked long enough at Egelric to see the plea in his dark eyes.

She patted the hairy back of his wrist and said, “I wish to do whatever will help you most, dear.”

Egelric closed his eyes and sighed. He looked relieved, as if he believed that it sufficed for her to want to help him, and she was certain to succeed.

“Alred?” she asked. She waited deliberately, willing him to turn around. Just when Ethelwyn began to squirm awkwardly in preparation for making some distraction, Alred at last looked at her.

His dark eyes were cold and crushing, as if he were merely looking on an insect of a sort he did not recognize – or cold and crushed, as if he were a shattered insect himself.

“May I?” she asked meekly.

He turned away and shuffled over to the harp in the alcove. “You may do as you will,” he repeated dully.

“We shall, then,” Hetty said to Egelric. “For just as long as you need us to keep him. We love him already, do not we, dear?”

Alred pinched a harp string between his fingers and slid his hand down the wire, calling forth a low hum like the lingering echo of a song after the last note has been plucked.

“Dearly.”

Egelric lifted his hand enough to wave his fingers at the harp. “You may take that, too.”

Malcolm snorted. “Does he play already? Clever boy.”

Egelric leaned his head to Hetty’s and murmured, “You do, anyway.” His voice warmed as if there were still a trickle of honey to be found at the bottom of the jar. “Perhaps even before they’re born they hear…” His voice drained into a whisper. “…you know some of the same songs…”

Hetty smiled with him, dreaming sadly of comforting Lili’s baby with Lili’s favorite songs, but Alred interrupted their shared reverie.

“I don’t want it,” he said sharply.

Hetty sat back, pink with guilt, like a sensitive child who knows she has done wrong without knowing what.

Ethelwyn twisted his head around to stare boldly at his lord. “No one here can play it.”

“Then young Sigefrith may have it. He plays well enough to deserve a fine harp.”

Ethelwyn looked up at Malcolm, clearly wondering how far he could permit himself to protest.

Hetty carefully avoided his eyes, for she did not trust her own. Everywhere she looked, she was beginning to see the rotten, wormy undersides of everything she had thought fair. The pretty golden harp: not a gift of gallantry but of misbegotten love. And her pretty golden sister – had she known? Had she loved him too?

“You may arrange that between yourselves,” Egelric said in his hollow voice. “But I have a final favor to ask of you.”

Alred licked his fingers and ran them down another string, making it sing mutely with the fading echoes of the first.

Egelric lifted his head high, and his hair fell well back from his jagged face. “I want to name him Alred.”

“Oh, Egelric!” Hetty smiled hopefully and looked between the two men, much like the dog. “How sweet! And I know – ”

Alred snarled, “No!”

Only Belsar moved in the instant that followed. Whether he recognized the word and did not accept that his master be so scolded, or whether he merely recognized the threat in the doglike savagery of the voice, he flung himself between Egelric and Alred, laid back his ears, and growled.

Alred clenched his teeth, doglike, and growled at Egelric, “I will not have it said that Alred killed Lili!”

Again Hetty was horrified enough to forget herself and make a sound: a gulping cheep as she caught a sob in time.

In the instant before he turned it away, she saw Egelric’s face turning pale at the lips and red in the cheeks. He sank back against the cushion, meek and bewildered as a beloved dog whose master has suddenly turned on him with a whip.

Belsar barked something incomprehensible to Hetty’s human ears, but she looked over at him in desperation as the only creature who dared to say anything. There she saw the only pair of eyes that was not caught up in the dance between Alred’s face and Egelric’s, and they were not the dog’s. Ethelwyn was watching her.

She had to act. “Alred, no one would ever say such a terrible thing. No matter his name.”

Alred’s body slumped like a marionette whose strings have been dropped, all but the cord tied to the back of his neck that kept him upright. “Of course you are correct, my dear,” he murmured. “I am a poet; I forget that it is not words that make the world true, but the contrary. Or so it is for most people,” he added softly. “Or for most words.”

In the swelter of Hetty’s mind, the first of the evil eggs were already hatching. Her husband was a poet: his words were never hollow; he meant all he said, and more.

Alred plucked one of the strings, striking one true, proper note at last. “You may name him what you like, of course, old man,” he muttered as it reverberated into silence again. “I would be honored.”

But of course Egelric could not – Hetty was astounded Alred could not see it. After such an outburst, no one in the room would ever be able to call the boy Alred without hearing the lingering echo of the words “killed Lili”.

And then she heard it: not the echo, but the words that made it; and not the words, but the truth they made. Hetty’s wounded love was festering, seething with cankerous thoughts that could never even have entered her mind a month before.

Alred understood perfectly, because he too had once had a wife who had died bearing another man’s child. Alred had killed Lili.