Leofric counts the years

Leofric spread out his hands on his thighs and counted his fingers. When he ran out of fingers, he began counting the gaps between them. He stopped at thirteen.

Fifty years and thirteen days he had lived. One might think that for a man who had lived fifty years, thirteen days would seem a mere moment in time. But it might have been that for a man who had so few years left to live, thirteen days could count for much.

Thirteen days earlier, he had left Raegiming, and since then so much had changed that it might as well have been for the last time. The man who had left it would never return.

Eight days earlier, he had seen Matilda speaking through Alred’s features – Matilda’s daughter, hating him for Alred’s sake – and then he had truly known how little she had loved him, and how utterly she was gone.

Eight days earlier, too, he had held Hetty in his arms for the first time, and nothing but a child could have made him let go.

He was in love with Hetty: that was everything and all. He had not gone soft in the head at fifty. He had not lost control of his lust. It was not a troubling, unhealthy obsession to think of a woman night and day even when one had not seen her for months – not when one was in love.

He was in love with Alred’s wife, but unlike Matilda, Hetty did not belong to Alred. A man did not marry a woman because he loved her sister – else his marriage were forfeit. A man did not marry a woman because he was too much a coward to break her heart cleanly and preferred to grind it into shards – else his vows were null.

It was up to Hetty now – to her sensitivity, to her heart’s wisdom. He had said he was her “one man” – had he truly said it? – and did she truly understand?

Would she understand merely that he was the one man who loved her more than Lili – thereby only demonstrating Lili’s superiority in the eyes of every other man on earth?

Or had she understood that he was the one man who loved her? That to one man she was everything and all?

Fifty years and thirteen days of living had come down to this. The rest of his life stood balanced like a coin on the edge of a blade: in a moment it would fall to one side or the other, and it was Hetty who would decide.

If she did not come, he would leave before dawn, and he would make a brief moment of the rest of his life, living it recklessly, battering himself to death against it in blind rage.

If she came, he would make every instant left to him count for more than everything that had gone before. He would find a way. If she and he knew she was his, then she was, by manifest evidence – by divine right.

Certainly, he made the half hour he waited in his room count – it seemed to take a toll of years on his body.

But at last he heard a faint scrabbling at the door, like a tall mouse trying to dig her way in; then the thump of a small body against the wood, a rustling of stiff cloth dragged across it, and at last a timid knock. She had come.