Ethelmund understands

The wedding had been everything a bride could desire. Though it was the second marriage for both parties, still a gentleman’s second wedding was far finer than what young Gunnilda had had when she had married Alwy Hogge.

It was also far finer than anything her sisters had had, and if her own memory had not been enough to tell her so, her two surviving sisters were there to remind her. Indeed, instead of helping her to undress, they were wandering about the bedroom and exclaiming over how fine everything was.

It was the first time Gunnilda had seen the room since Ethelmund had had it furnished. It was, of course, very fine, as was to be expected from the man who made the furniture for the King and all the lords. There were splendid cabinets of oak for all of her dresses – for she was to have many dresses now – and there were handsome tables, a real mirror of glass with silver on the back, and a soft couch of the kind that Ethelmund had first made according to the instructions of Lord Hingwar’s Saracen wife, and which had made his reputation among the nobles.

Gunnilda’s sisters exclaimed over all of these things, but to Gunnilda’s eyes there was only a single piece of furniture in the room: the great bed in the center of it.

She knew that Ethelmund had made it with his own hands, and she knew that he had not begun work on it until she had agreed to be his wife. He had made it for her. And as far as she knew, he had thought of her as he worked, and of the bed, and of what they would do in it.

They would do it very soon now, for her sisters were supposed to be helping her into her nightgown and into the bed to await the bridegroom. The men would not be long.

But Gyfu and Elfie were as yet too busy exclaiming, and so Gunnilda herself began unbraiding her hair. She intended to be in the bed with the blankets pulled up to her chin by the time her husband arrived.

Her husband!

“Wait, Gunnie!” Gyfu laughed. “We’re supposed to do that for you.”

“If I ‘wait, Gunnie’ for you two,” Gunnilda muttered, “I might as well ask Ethelmund to do it when he comes.”

Her sisters seemed to find this idea very funny.

“I don’t know but I guess we’d better do your hair, anyway,” Elfie laughed. “But I guess he might like to help undress you.”

“I don’t know but I guess that’s all he was thinking about through supper,” Gyfu added. “Figuring out the quickest way to get this off of you. Would be easier without all the ribbons!”

“I don’t think Ethelmund thinks like that,” Gunnilda said.

“Don’t he?” Elfie cried. “He’s a man, isn’t he?”

“Well, if he don’t,” Gyfu said, “there’s plenty what did, I think. I saw some of the men figuring, and I bet some of them would even know what to do about the ribbons.”

“I guess that Sir Egelric does, if he hasn’t forgotten,” Elfie laughed wickedly. “Remember him, Gyf? Isn’t he fine?”

“I only wonder if he remembers me! Not that I would mind if he needed me to remind him.”

“He wouldn’t look twice at you, Gyf. He’s got a real lady now, don’t he, Gunnie?”

“I didn’t see her,” Gyfu huffed. “Anyway, he’s not too fine for our Gunnie, if he comes to her wedding.”

“He’ll look twice and even thrice at a pretty little morsel like this!” Elfie said and pinched Gunnilda’s hip. “I don’t know, Gyf, but I guess Gunnie turned out the prettiest of all of us after all.”

“I don’t know but I guess it’s easy when your man’s as prosperous as Alwy was.”

“I guess he turned out real clever after all!”

“I don’t think we should be talking about Alwy tonight,” Gunnilda said.

“Pish!” Gyfu scoffed. “He won’t care. There isn’t no marrying nor giving in marriage where old Alwy is.”

“A shame, that!” Elfie said. “Heaven won’t be much fun without a few weddings every summer.”

“And babies,” Gyfu added.

“And everything what goes in between!” Elfie laughed.

“Or before, in some cases,” Gyfu winked. “Eh, Gunnie? Don’t tell me Ethelmund isn’t the sort of man to take a mare through her paces before offering to buy her.”

“I am not a horse,” Gunnilda growled.

“No! And here’s the proof!” Elfie said as she pulled Gunnilda’s shift off over her head and left her standing naked before the real glass mirror with silver on the back.

“Well, I don’t know but I guess I would never guess you had eight babies,” Gyfu said after looking her sister over. “Would you?” she asked Elfie.

“Never! Two maybe. But I guess it’s real easy when your husband is prosperous and you don’t have to work yourself to an early grave like your sisters.”

“Hurry up,” Gunnilda snapped, “or with my luck the men will come before you get my nightgown on me.”

“Or their luck, you mean!” Gyfu laughed.

But Gunnilda was safely in her nightgown and in the bed by the time the men came. She would have had ample warning of their coming in any case, for the men who accompanied Ethelmund teased him loudly up the stairs, and the wedding guests in the hall below and in the yard had broken out in riotous song as the bridegroom went up to the bride. So it had always been, she thought, throughout all ages, world without end – and even for second marriages.

And yet she did not think she had awaited Alwy with such dread, though she had been but sixteen, and though she had known less of men then.

But no, she thought – she knew no more of men now than she had then. Already on her wedding night she had known all there was to know of Alwy. All she knew she had learned with a man who knew no more than she, and they had discovered very little together since they were married.

There had only been that one, dizzying look into something more profound than she had ever imagined, with Egelric, that one afternoon…

Gunnilda pulled the blankets up as far as she could as the men came in. They were only men she knew – her own brother and Ethelmund’s senior apprentice, and of course Ethelmund himself – but it was excruciatingly embarrassing for her. They laughed and joked over her in her bed, and Ethelmund laughed with them. He did not seem embarrassed at all, and while she thought that should have been reassuring, it only frightened her more.

She kept her eyes averted while his men helped him undress, though her sisters provided commentary, and the three men met the women’s teasing with jokes of their own. Gunnilda was only grateful that they did not take long, and that Ethelmund did not join them in making jokes that involved her.

Her one thought as he climbed into bed beside her was that no unexpected tug on the blankets must reveal any more of her body than was necessary. Her nightgown had seemed so dear and pretty when she had first seen it, but now she only thought of how it draped over her hips and clung to her breasts, and how the embroidered jacket with all its hooks only seemed to beg one to remove it and reveal what was underneath. She had never thought to ask herself how it would look to a man.

Once in the bed, Ethelmund still chuckled over their jokes and replied in kind, but he seemed to sense her distress and quickly sent them away.

As soon as the door was closed behind them, shutting out the songs and laughter from the hall below, Gunnilda felt herself utterly alone with Ethelmund – her husband now. Nothing in the world could come between her and him. She had held up propriety as a shield for the last two months, and he had respectfully done no more to her than caress her hand, which she did not mind.

But the look in his eyes was such that she feared it would have been wiser to have indulged him with a kiss or two in the meantime. His face did not have the careless smile of a man sitting down to his nightly meal, but the hot-​​eyed intensity of a man finding food after a long hunger.

But he sat up after the sound of cheers from below showed that her sisters and the men had returned to the guests.

“Somehow I had expected your sisters would resemble you a little more,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper. “They remind me of Bertie rather.”

“I think Elfie looks a lot like Wynn,” Gunnilda said, grateful to have something to talk about.

“I don’t mean in the face,” he smiled. “They’re rather… boisterous.”

“Oh, well, I don’t know but I guess I grew up to be so quiet because I never got a chance to talk in my house, with all my sisters and their chatter,” she said.

“Then I must thank them. I like you quiet.”

Gunnilda wondered at this. Githa had been a very talkative woman. But as he slipped an arm behind her shoulder and laid the other hand on her hip, she thought that perhaps he only thought so at that moment, because he did not care to talk.

Even kissing she knew nothing about. In all her life she had never kissed any man but Alwy Hogge, besides a mad kiss of joy from the Duke after the birth of his daughter, and that one afternoon with Egelric…

None of these, and certainly not the sort of pecks that Alwy had given her, had prepared her for Ethelmund. He kissed her bottom lip, her upper lip, and the corners of her mouth, and at times he took her lips between his, and gradually he worked her mouth open and, to Gunnilda’s shock, slipped his tongue inside.

Alwy had rather sloppily tried this once or twice, and Gunnilda had not allowed it, and that had been the end of that. Egelric too had attempted it, but she had fought him, and the memory of his teeth scraping against her teeth was one that could still cause her to wake at night, flushed and trembling.

But there was no resisting Ethelmund. She could not even imagine trying. He did not fumble or hesitate, did not wait for a sign from her, but only touched her as if he were master of her own body as well as his – as indeed he was.

Still, when the hand on her hip came up to cup her breast, as if he could not even wait to open all the hooks of her jacket and remove the thin gown, she turned her face away a little, though he held her head close to his, and she caught his wandering hand and held it away from her body.

“What is it?” he asked. Even Alwy could speak to her in a voice so hushed and tight, and she knew what it meant. “Do you want to put out the candles?” he suggested.

“Yes!” she gasped. “I’ll get the one by the mirror.”

She scrambled out of the bed and went to blow out the candle across the room, but she was too frightened to go near his side of the bed. “You get yours and I’ll get mine,” she said as she returned to her own.

“I think we should leave one, for luck,” he said.

The candles had been lit from torches that had carried a flame from the Paschal Candle at the church back to light the wedding feast. For luck, the bedchamber was supposed to be lit by their fire on this night. So it had always been, throughout all ages.

However, Gunnilda could only think of how Alwy had always tried to leave a candle lit so that he might look at her, and how she had always tried to be in the dark so that he could not.

But she knew there would be no resisting Ethelmund. She quickly calculated that it would be better to leave the candle lit on his side of the bed, so that he would be illuminated more than she. She could always close her eyes.

She only realized her error after she had climbed back into the bed and he sat up to embrace her again. With the candle behind him, she could not see his face. He had become a mystery to her, a dark mask – a man she didn’t even know.

“And I should like to look at you,” he murmured. “I looked at you all through the day when you were so beautiful. I don’t want to stop now, when you are more and more and more beautiful. And mine.”

He ran his hand over her hip in a sort of possessive caress, and then he chuckled in his throat and said, “But, by God, I think you would even be beautiful in the dark.”

It was all unwitting, but they were very nearly Egelric’s own words to her, which she had long treasured. Out of his mouth they struck her like a whip, and she gave a soft cry in spite of herself.

But it came just at the moment that the hand slid up to her breast again, and Ethelmund seemed to hear it as a cry of pleasure or of desire. In one easy, unhesitating movement he slid her hips down the bed, laid her down on her back, and moved over her.

He was trying to take her to the deep place Egelric had briefly revealed to her. She did not believe she could go. She thought she could have borne another Alwy, but she could not bear this. A man’s desire was a frightening thing when the man was strong and bold and wore his mastery as a divine right.

In all her life she had only once, and only for the space of a few moments, been at the mercy of a man. Now she was overwhelmed. She was thirty-​​three years old and meeting her second husband, and yet she was afraid.

She twisted her face away and gasped, “Ethelmund!”

Her voice seemed to startle him, and he lifted his head. “Am I hurting you?”

“No, no, no,” she whimpered. “But I can’t.”

“You can’t?”

“I can’t.”

She could fairly hear the mill wheels of his mind grinding away at this statement. Finally he seemed to think he had understood.

“You can, you know,” he said gently. “It doesn’t matter. At least for this one night.”

It took her a moment to understand that he thought she was trying to tell him she was bleeding. “No, no, that isn’t it.”

“What then?”

“I can’t because…” She did not know what to say. Her teeth were chattering. “Alwy was… Alwy was… not like you.”

Again she watched him as he considered this. By the way he tilted his head suddenly in confusion, she thought she could even tell the moment when he reminded himself that she had borne eight children and that she could not possibly be as innocent as she seemed to be claiming.

“Alwy was like a child,” she whispered. “In some ways. You are a man.”

He was silent for a moment, and then he brushed the hair off her forehead with a gentle hand. “Do I frighten you?”

“A little.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I mean – I just need a little time to get used to… the idea. I’m sorry…”

“It’s all right,” he said as he rolled back onto his pillow. “I understand.” He pulled the blankets up over them both.

“You do?”

“Of course I do. Do you mind if I leave the candle lit so I can see your face?”

She could scarcely see his own face in the shadows, but his voice sounded as if he spoke through a smile.

“And for luck,” she said.

She did not mind – and even smiled softly – when he reached under the blankets and brought up her hand so that he could caress it in the candlelight.

“That too,” he said. “But I feel rather lucky already.”