Gwynn sees a smile

Almost from the start of the dance, there had been spotty outbreaks of snorts and stifled giggles, ostentatious coughs, and even the occasional gust of laughter. But it was all happening at the far end of the line, nearest the fire, and Alred could not see the cause.

“Since when does all the hilarity occur opposite me?” he pretended to complain, but his own smile died on his lips. Dunstan was dancing directly behind him, and if Dunstan had heard, he was probably silently answering the question in his head.

“I think that is why,” Estrid laughed.

Dunstan explained, “Kraaia keeps trying to take Cedric away from Gwynn, preferably when your back is turned.”

“Poor Cedric!” Britamund giggled. “Twelve years old, and already the girls are fighting over him.”

“At twelve years old,” Dunstan said gravely, “as I recall, that is indeed a boy’s worst nightmare.”

“Kraaia alone would be,” Britamund smiled.

Alred snorted ironically. To him, at least, she was already proving so, though she had only arrived in his household two days before.

Iylaine had been a troublesome guest at times, but her problems had always been rooted in her hunger for love, and that was something Alred could give to her. Kraaia was starved for only one thing – Cedric – and she pursued him with a single-​​mindedness that would have seemed sinister in a young lady, and was disturbingly precocious in a girl of twelve.

“If you ask me, it’s ‘Poor Gwynn’,” Dunstan said after another sprinkling of laughter from the far end. “I think she simply wanted to dance.”

“Poor dear,” Estrid cooed. “No one here but married men and little boys. So, Alred, when are you meaning to get a handsome squire or two?”

“Finn is here,” Britamund said. “He’s not married or a little boy.”

“Why isn’t he dancing?” Estrid asked. “Or your squire?”

Then the storm broke. “Stop it!” Gwynn sobbed, loudly enough that even the musicians in the gallery overhead fumbled in their playing. “He was dancing with me! Me! Me!”

“Oh no, no, no,” Alred groaned softly. He looked around for Hetty’s fair head, but it seemed she still had not returned. “Excuse me, my dear,” he said to Estrid. “I or some superior partner will be with you in a moment.”

Gwynn looked up and saw him coming, and in the first instant he saw in her eyes a child’s plea for sympathy, comfort, and a solution to her problem – everything that fatherhood demanded of men and that men demanded of God.

Then her face hardened and her eyes squinted into her mother’s own glare of defiance, in spite of the tears that sparkled on her lashes. She was no longer merely a child.

Alred nodded at the corner even as he walked towards it. Gwynn spun about and stomped over to join him.

“Gwynn…” he sighed.

She threw back her head and put on an expression that she probably believed disdainful and he found endearingly absurd.

“It is an outrageous injustice!” she hissed. “She gets to dance with Cedric as a reward for her rudeness, and you come to yell at me!”

“Am I yelling?” he asked coolly.

Her artificial haughtiness collapsed at his failure to respond in kind. “It’s not fair!” she squeaked. “Cedric asked me! Why are you taking me aside and not her?”

“I shall deal with Kraaia in a moment. I merely wanted to ask you which legal definition of ‘ladylike’ you intend to use to justify your outburst, that I may plan your defense accordingly.”

“Why should I have to be ladylike when she gets to be as rude as she likes?”

The bow of her upper lip was perhaps a little broader, a little fuller, but her pouting bottom lip was precisely her mother’s: the living image of the lip he had kissed and pinched and nibbled and loved.

He did not know whether she was growing more like her mother or whether he was simply noticing it more with Matilda so much on his mind of late, but it was unbearable to think that some other man would one day be the fool for that lip that he had been – and still was. For that lip he would make himself a modern-​​day Herod and slay every man-​​child in the valley between the ages of ten and twenty.

“My dear…” he whispered – to a ghost.

Gwynn spoke and moved, and her face was her own again. “Look at her! Smirking!”

Alred rubbed his hand over his head and eyes to wipe the mist away from both. “Gwynn,” he sighed, “rudeness is not a privilege. It is not something we ‘get to be’.”

“Somebody needs to tell her that!”

“Rudeness is a weakness,” he said calmly. “Graciousness is a virtue and an ornament for a lady, my dear, as courage is for a man. And like courage in the face of danger, it only has meaning if it stands fast in the face of rudeness.”

“I know all that,” she muttered.

“Then tell yourself that Kraaia may not ‘know all that’, as we do not know how she was raised. And next time, ask yourself, what would a gracious lady do in such circumstances?”

“If a rude lady were rudely trying to rudely steal her dancing partner?”

“Precisely.”

“I suppose I should have let her and taken hers, so he would not feel scorned…” she admitted. “But Bertie is so terribly tall!”

Alred smiled at her. “That is undeniable, but irrelevant, my dear. I am certain not a few gracious young ladies danced with me in my day, to their great honor, in spite of my being ‘so terribly small!’”

Gwynn stared wondering at him for a moment before her face slowly blossomed into a smile, as if his own had been a ray of sunlight.

“I wish I were a man, though,” she said slyly. “If I were a man and she were a man, and she tried to take my dancing partner, I think I would have the courage to simply punch her in the face.”

Alred threw back his head and laughed, as he had not laughed in weeks. “Gwynn! You begin to sound like your sister!”

“I think Meggie would do it even as a girl,” Gwynn gushed. “And our mother probably already did it many times. Look! There’s Hetty! Hetty, come see! We were looking for you!”