Hetty is taken

There was a short passage between the King’s new hall and the tiled sitting room, almost wider than it was long. Had the doors at the two ends not been grander than the third door leading onto the cloister, it would have seemed more an antechamber than a corridor.

To Hetty, it was not nearly long enough. Even with her pregnant waddle – even with her swollen ankles and her fatigue – it would take her no more than ten seconds to cross. Between the moment she closed the door on the children who laughed and played in the sitting room, and the moment she rejoined her husband and friends in the hall, she would have no more than ten seconds to relax the corners of her mouth.

She was too honest a soul to spend more than those ten seconds on the walk, but she could bend enough to let the door drift slowly shut behind her, putting off the first of them for as long as possible.

She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the clink that would signal her start. The children’s laughter faded, until the creaking of the hinges was louder than anything – until the children could scarcely be heard – until the door stepped out behind her.

Its deep, oaken voice was in her ear, speaking her name; its breadth was at her back, and its ponderous weight was pushing her along.

Hetty lived in such mortal terror of being a bother that it would have taken a mortal terror to truly make her scream. She only squeaked, “Leof!”

“Come with me, Hetty,” he murmured. There was more breath than voice in the words. She felt it blowing warm on the back of her neck.

“Yes – let us go back,” she said weakly.

She tried to turn towards the second great door, but he stopped her with a touch: with a hand that embodied a command.

“We shan’t be gone long.”

The small cloister door opened silently at the touch of his other hand.

He drove her along ahead of him, not by shoving her, but by looming over her. Though he was behind her, she was not fleeing but following.

“Leof!” she squeaked as she ran. “Leof! Leof!”

“Yes, yes, yes,” he whispered.

Before that moment she, a foreigner, had never heard in his English name the word it meant: Love, Love, Love.

So this was how it felt to be kidnapped, she thought. He would have horses waiting – or perhaps but the one, and he would take her up before him, and seat her between his legs, and he would hold her fast with one powerful arm until she gave up struggling and fainted away against his chest – dead away, dead away.

In their youth, she and Lili had often acted out such dramatic departures from their convent – more rescue than rape to their naive little minds. Lili would leap from bed to bed, her pigtails flying, swinging a candlestick sword until Hetty’s invisible defenders – all the sour-​​mouthed Sisters they most despised – had been slain.

Then she would tie Hetty up in the most artful ways, or lock her in the narrow closet, or pile the blankets on her and sit on her, until Hetty would be sick and giddy with an excitement that smoldered in her for hours after her younger sister was soundly snoring.

Now Lili was dead and in a place where pigtails never flew.

And Leofric took Hetty no farther than the Yellow Room.