Matilda lies in a lonely bed

Matilda drew her knees up to her chest, hoping that would ease some of the pain in her heart, but it only drove the small of her back up against the the wall, and she squirmed in discomfort. After the first few nights of miserable loneliness in a giant, empty bed, she had begged Githa for a narrow bed meant for one. Now she regretted it.

The big bed had reminded her again and again of her solitude, every time she had rolled over and found that Alred was not there. She had even tried sleeping on his side of the bed, thinking that the disorientation would prevent her from looking for him – or at least prevent her from believing for a dreamy moment that he was there. It had not helped much.

But the narrow bed was worse. The big bed had told her she was a woman whose husband was absent. The narrow bed told her she was a girl whose husband was not. The narrow bed reminded her that she had wanted to feel like a girl again. The posts of the narrow bed reared up in the dark and whispered, “A girl now, an old girl, and no wife. That’s what you are. That’s what you wanted,” taunting her.

How she had hated bedposts when she was a little girl, and the masses of curtains! They always seemed to take on human form in the dark and lean in towards her, leering at her, taunting her… like Leofric in the dark. Had she already dreamt of Leofric as a child? A mass of man, taunting her and leering at her in the dark? Rearing up in the dark and whispering, “We are what we are”?

She sat up and hung her legs over the edge of the tall bed, trembling with a girl’s terror. She wanted Alred as she had never wanted her father. She dreamt for a moment that she could scream like a child, and he would hear and come to comfort her. But she was a woman, and she knew, she knew that he was far away, and he was far away because she had left him behind. But she knew where he was.

She pushed herself off of the bed and landed heavily on her bare feet. Nearly whimpering, she fumbled to the door in the dark, and found to her relief that the hall was lit. Here in the light she was safe from bedposts and curtains, and safe from massive, taunting men.

She sat a moment on a bench, wondering how she could manage… and then she saw a great commotion in the shadows down the hall, as from a candle held in a trembling hand. She rose to all her meager height and stood queenlike, as if she were not in her bare feet and her nightgown, and prepared to strike anyone who would suggest otherwise.

But it was only Theobald’s ancient valet.

“Is there any service I may render Your Grace?” he quavered. He was too wise an old servant to express the least surprise at finding her thus in the corridor at midnight.

“I should like to return home,” she said imperiously.

“At once, my lady, or in the morning?”

“At once.”