Dunstan discovers another vanity

There was a girl in Dunstan’s bed, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He had expected her to get up and go away afterwards, but instead she had curled up on her side and appeared already to be sleeping.

And yet of all the times that he had gone to shake Bertie awake at some advanced hour of the morning, Dunstan had never found a girl in bed with him. Did young housemaids rise too early to be seen, like the deer? Did Bertie tell them to go away before they fell asleep? Did Bertie not actually have all of the adventures he claimed to have?

It was a poor time for these questions to have occurred to him. Bertie was not even in the castle that night to give him any advice.

And so he let her sleep, her head nestled deep into the pillow, her body embedded in the blankets as far as her chin. The longer he stared at her, the more loathsome she grew, as if she were some enormous parasite burrowing into his bed. She was not his wife. He did not even love her. She did not belong there, and he was furious at her for being there—forgetting for the moment that he had invited her.

The worst part was that he would have to see her again in the morning. She would come to clear his plate away after he had finished eating his breakfast, and then his dinner, and then his supper, and so on forever.

And after supper she would probably linger again beside his chair, her swaying hip only inches away from his face. She would smile, and if he smiled at her she would lay a hand on the back of his chair and lean over him. She would laugh, and if he laughed with her she would hang her weight from the back of his chair and lean far over the table to pour him another cup of wine with her free hand.

It was no use blaming the wine. He should already have been aware that drunkenness only made any idiocy seem like a startlingly good idea, and why hadn’t he thought of it before?

If he needed more proof of that, he had only to think of the poems and songs he had written while drunk, and which had seemed the apogee of genius at the time, but which the morning had always revealed to be utter nonsense—so dreadful he could never read to the ends of them without tossing them into the fire.

He could not toss this girl into the fire in the morning. However, for an instant, he thought the easiest thing would be to take his sword and hack her head from her neck, since her head was all he could see. Then she would not come to take his plate in the morning, and she would not smile at him. She would not brag to her friends about what she had done, nor make herself seem still more important by belittling him.

But then her headless body would still be lodged in his bed like a reverse tick, trapped beneath the heavy blankets.

The image flashed in his mind with nauseating clarity, and he threw the blankets off his own body and stumbled out of the bed. It was nearly more than his drunken stomach could handle.

He pulled on his underwear and went reeling out of his bedchamber into the small sitting room beside. A few flakes of unseasonal snow had fallen that evening, and a fire still burned on the hearth. It almost seemed that snow upon his body would have been a greater relief to him, but a fire was all he had, and he went to warm himself before it.

He would add this thing too to the growing list of things that had revealed their worthlessness to him. Drunkenness was folly. Poetry and songs were madmen’s raving. Wine was murky swill. Love was a senseless dream. And now he knew that a naked girl was only another sort of vermin for a man’s bed.

What astounded him was that no one else seemed to have noticed. All of his friends drank and sang and slept with girls—even loved them sometimes. All of his friends seemed to be enjoying themselves. Only Dunstan saw that it was all but vanity and chasing after the wind. Decidedly, his friends were all fools and madmen.

Nevertheless they were his friends. He realized suddenly that friendship was the only thing that had revealed itself to be worthwhile. Bertie, Eadwyn, Malcolm, and Stein had always been true to him. Girls were only an unnecessary complication.

But as with wine and poetry, he thought a clever man might even contrive to keep women in his life and still be happy. His father did. Perhaps the problem was simply that Dunstan had not yet found the secret.

He would ask Bertie when he returned. Perhaps Bertie could not tell him the secret to being happy when all was vanity, but he could at least tell him how a man was supposed to get rid of a girl once she had wormed her way into his bed.