Conrad was forced to pounce at the last minute, having previously let slip a dozen opportunities to simply bend his head to Margaret’s and ask. But the great doors were opening, and once inside she would surely attach herself to Hetty, his father, or – God forbid – Father Matthew, or to any person who would make too embarrassing a witness to his attempts to steal her away, however subtle henceforth.
“C’mere, Maggot!” he whispered gruffly, in a last, hopeless attempt to make himself seem less awkward.
“What?” she whined.
“Come in here! I want to talk to you.”
“Where? Aie!” She slapped away the hand that was attempting to pinch her off course.
Pinching would not do, it seemed, and time was running short. Dared he tickle her? He feared the only sure way to guide this suddenly skittish girl through the portal of his choosing would be to hang mistletoe in the arch of every other door.
“In here!” he whispered, tentatively tickling her with the tip of one finger in the direction of the unfinished chapel.
“Not now!” she gasped in shock. “Not there!”
“Your father said I might!” he whispered. Before her wide-eyed look of horror he added limply, “…speak with you after Mass.”
Margaret’s look of horror remained unchanged, and Conrad began to doubt his English. Was “speaking with” a girl as serious a matter as “speaking with” the girl’s father? And yet was that not, in a manner of speaking, what he intended to do?
At the last minute he realized that her shocked speechlessness was the perfect opportunity. Just as Hetty and Cearball passed through the great door, Conrad hooked his elbow under hers and pulled her subtly through the small.
Margaret was a subtle girl herself, however, and rather than kick and struggle, she fell gracefully into step beside him as if it had always been her own idea. Margaret-like, she did not scream, but rather cackled wickedly and warned him: “If you’re lying about my father, you’re a dead man…”
“I’m not!”
“And if you’re lying about the ‘speaking’…”
“I’m not!”
“And Osh will hear us, you know…” she cooed as she slipped subtly off his arm.
“Osh and Flann are only stopping to get Kraaia’s things and take her to Paul’s,” Conrad sighed. “You know that! Any other objections?”
Margaret crossed her arms roughly over her chest and stuck out her tongue at him.
“Don’t tempt me!” he warned her.
She clapped her hand over her mouth, but her startled eyes betrayed her discomposure.
A tingling thrill ran up Conrad’s back and out along his arms. For the effect it had on her, threatening her with kisses was almost as agreeable as kissing her truly – much like his newfound pastime of steering her towards mistletoe for the thrill of watching her scamper away.
He leaned slightly towards her to test his power, and she shuffled backwards, blindly scuffing her boots through the litter and leaves until her heel thudded against the stave of a low barrel. She thumped herself down upon its dusty lid as if it had always been her idea to sit.
“Speak with me,” she said haughtily.
Conrad felt another thrill – but this one was more like icy water pouring down his back. Now he would have to speak.
To hide his awkwardness he clapped his hands and rubbed them briskly together, recalling an instant too late that it was precisely the gesture his father made upon sitting down to a hearty meal.
“So, Maggot,” he blurted, forgetting the speech he had prepared, “I wanted to ask you something.”
Margaret crossed her legs and folded her hands prettily over her knee. “I am not telling you what I want for Christmas,” she smirked.
“Mags!”
“Or perhaps I shall tell you exactly the opposite of what I should like and steer you wrong…” she mused.
Conrad hesitated. Last year he had scarcely allowed the matter any thought and given her what his mother had suggested. This year he stalked the market from one end to the other and still could not decide.
He countered, “Then I shall get you exactly the opposite of what you say.”
Margaret nodded as though she had been expecting his reply. “Unless I already started saying the opposite of what I mean precisely one sentence ago.”
Conrad backtracked in his mind and recalculated. “In which case… you will tell me…”
“Unless every second sentence I say is a lie,” she taunted. “If only you knew whether even or odd!”
“Mags!” he groaned.
Margaret gripped the rim of the barrel in both hands and swayed from side to side, shaking with the breathless giggling of a little girl. “Except on Tuesdays!” she crowed.
“Maggot!” Conrad reached out his hands threateningly, his fingers already crooked into a convenient shape for strangling her.
Abruptly her face went grim beneath its pink flush. “Beware!” she intoned. “Err at your peril! I hear Cynan was snooping around the market yesterday. I hear he even went to the jeweler!”
“You don’t even like jewelry!” Conrad protested.
Then the full weight of what she had said smacked over them both like sacks full of plaster, silencing her laughter and cutting short his wail.
It was the first time she had ever mentioned Cynan in any tone but mocking. More than that: he believed it was the first time she had ever tried to make him jealous by bringing up another boy.
Conrad felt a new thrill that started as a warmth in his chest and burned out to a desire to smash the unfortunate other boy with his fists. Margaret shrank down into a pale, meek ghost of herself, as though she had seen its flare.
“Forget that, Maggot,” he said gruffly. “This is serious. I mean to ask you a serious question, and I expect you to give it serious consideration and give me your serious opinion.”
Only her eyes moved, and over them flecks of light twinkled like doubtful stars as she tried to decipher the expression of his face – but she did not protest at being commanded. In her meekness Conrad found the courage to begin.
As he had practiced, he began with her name – “Margaret” – and startled himself with his own solemnity. He never called her Margaret except to priests and strangers. She was Meggie to friends and family, her ladyship to servants, and Maggot to him.
When did a man ever speak so formally to a girl he knew so well? He heard himself say, “Margaret, I take you…” with a voice that was like his father’s and a mouth that was rimmed with a beard.
Margaret blinked at him, and in her eyes the starlike reflections of all the high windows winked out and reappeared, slightly shifted. The ephemeral memory of Conrad’s ears still rang with his last words: only his young voice and only her name. He wiped his hand over his mouth to reassure himself about the beard.
“I must make an important decision,” he announced in his most formal English, “and as it will affect you, I wish to have your opinion.”
Her black eyebrows lifted questioningly, opening her eyes wider and revealing in each another star.
“Your father has asked me to be his squire.”
He paused, but Margaret did not even blink. The specks of light in her eyes were steady; she was simply staring at a single point somewhere on his face.
Conrad had rehearsed replies to several reactions, but stony silence he did not know how to meet. He was beginning to feel something like the opposite of a thrill: a slow numbing of all his faculties, beginning with his wits.
He heard himself continue in a voice that was like her ten-year-old brother’s: “So, you know… That means, after Christmas, I would be staying here… and sleeping in the little room off your father’s, and serving him at table, et cetera.”
He smiled pleadingly at her, hoping for at least the nodding encouragement of an attentive listener. Margaret simply stared.
“And holding his bridle, and all that business, and you know how it is. And after…”
Abruptly he stumbled back into the traces of his speech, and to his relief his voice settled likewise into its thirteen-year-old timbre.
“And afterwards… after four or five years or so, when I am grown… he would do everything he could for me. And… if I serve him well,” Conrad added hastily, “he would…”
Conrad tried to speak nonchalantly, hoping to lessen the gravity of what he was saying in case she proved to be horrified by the idea.
“…perhaps allow me the honor of marrying his daughter,” he shrugged. “If he has any daughters who aren’t thoroughly sick of having me around by that time,” he added slyly, as he had rehearsed a dozen times.
He waited. Margaret stared.
His numbness began to reverse itself, and he became acutely aware of everything around him: of the clean, damp cold of the morning air; of the golden hue of the light; of the smell of wet plaster and stone. His body was preparing itself to remember this day with all his senses, and most particularly, like a jewel at its center, the sight of her young face, her young lips, and the sound of the words that they would say.
But Margaret sat like a statue of a stone and plaster, unblinking, unaffected by this astounding idea. Conrad began to panic. Had he simply imagined himself saying all those things? He did not think he could say them again.
Not until he nervously dropped his eyes did she spring to life, with a sharp cry of, “Why now?”
Conrad was startled into gasping stupidly, “What?”
“Why now?” she challenged. “He hasn’t had a squire since Eadwyn left.”
“Well…” Conrad began hesitantly, “perhaps he simply thought of it now since he has me around…”
The specks of light darted dizzily around the darks of her eyes. “You’re lying!” she snarled.
“What?”
“Tu mens!” she repeated in French.
She straightened her arms and leapt at him, and only the difference in their weights prevented her from shoving him down.
“Mon père est mourant!” she sobbed.
She pounded her fists on Conrad’s shoulders, but it was her words that struck him dumb. “My father is dying” was a phrase he could easily parry, but the raw edge of the French speared him straight through.
One of his earliest memories was of his four-year-old voice explaining to his toys, foregathered in great solemnity for the announcement: “Maman est mourante.” It was the only voice on which he had ever heard it said; his father had never admitted his mother was dying until she was dead and he could no longer tell his comforting lies. And yet little Conrad had mysteriously known the truth all along.
A new fear clutched at his gut with cold hands: Did Margaret?
He pulled her body tightly against his belly to warm it, and incidentally to bring himself behind the range of her fists.
“Your father is not dying, you silly child,” he sighed.
“Then he’s hurt or something,” she blubbered in clumsy French. “I know there’s something! Why now?”
“I told you: because he decided he likes having me around and wants to keep me.”
“No!”
He tried to laugh. “Is that so impossible to believe? Simply because you don’t?”
He lifted his hand, only trying to stroke her tangled hair, but she laid her chin on his shoulder as though she believed he had meant to pull her head down.
“Chut!” he whispered. “There’s nothing wrong with your father, ‘tite Marguerite, ‘tite fleur…”
The lies came more easily in French, and even seemed more true. Her name, too.
“Then why does he walk all the way across the downs if he can ride?” she challenged. “Why doesn’t he toss David up in the air any longer, or spar with the Old Man?”
“Perhaps he’s a little sore yet, but who wouldn’t be? He’ll feel better soon,” he murmured, as his father always had.
“Then what was wrong with him last night?” she demanded.
Conrad hesitated. He did not yet know himself.
She sniffled. “If he wasn’t hurt or sick? I don’t believe he was simply upset!” she declared, repeating the English word her father had sent downstairs as an explanation, by way of Paul.
“Don’t forget who Cedric’s father is,” Conrad said grimly. “That would be enough to upset him, don’t you think? If Cedric was behaving badly in his own castle, where his precious daughters are?”
Margaret paused, and her stiff back softened slightly. Conrad slid his hand up beneath her hair, pressing her chest against his chest.
“When did he ask you?” she asked petulantly, finally taking care enough to assume a reasonable accent for her French, though she did not lift her face from the shoulder that was smashing her lips into a childish, mumbling pout.
“Yesterday afternoon,” he murmured soothingly. “Before all that. Do you see?”
She slid her hands up between them and shoved herself as far away as she could, given that he held her in the crook of his arm. It was not far.
“Then it’s because he’s afraid he’ll do it again! That’s why! Why now! Because he hopes you’ll stop him!”
She tried to scowl and tried to glare, but she could not help her anxious nibbling on her lower lip, and she could not help the tears that were welling up in her eyes. This, he realized, was what she truly believed. Margaret-like, she was going at it by four ways and trying to be furious to hide her fear.
“Then I shall stop him, if he tries,” he whispered. “Else what good were a squire?”
Her stiffly-crooked arms relaxed, and she stared doubtfully up at him. The starry reflections of the high windows shimmered over her wet eyes, their constellations all undone. She appeared surprised that he had not told a comforting lie, and Margaret-like she was wary.
“You will?” she asked in English.
Conrad closed his eyes and tried to backtrack in his mind, disoriented by the change of language. Which part of what he had said did she mean? Which part of all that had gone before, and of all that would come after?
Then he realized that – for now – it did not matter. His every answer would be the same.
“I will,” he whispered.
“You will?” she repeated, with the breathless solemnity of a young woman.
He heard his voice say, “I will.”
Chapters
Oh man I'm now an even bigger fan of ConRAD. Does anyone else see the humor of the Block going to the jeweler? I was in a fit of giggles when I read that. But poor Mags. I fell for her tears. She's usually so strong.