Gunnilda prescribes the appropriate remedy

“How was the cake?” Gunnilda asked.

Her work-​worn hands fluttered, and her skirts swished the floor as she rocked her weight from toes to heels. She looked as nervous as an apprentice pastry cook presenting her dainties for inspection.

But Gunnilda knew her cakes never fell far short of heavenly. Thus she was nervous about something else. Could she have asked about the cake if she had found something wrong with the baby?

“My dear woman,” Alred said, “your apple spice cakes redeem the apple its role in the Fall of mankind. Will you have a seat?”

“Yes, I—”

Alred passed his arm lightly around her shoulders and guided her towards the bench. “Can I offer you a drink? I may have some of your own cider at hand…”

Gunnilda twisted out from beneath his arm and turned to face him. “No, thank you. I just had a sip of wine in Her Grace’s room, and it left a queer taste in my mouth.”

Little Gunnilda had a way of stating facts that turned them into questions requiring an answer.

Alred bowed slightly. “I see. It might well have. But Hattie ought not to have allowed you to drink of her lady’s wine.”

Alred tried to step around her, but she turned to follow him. “She didn’t want to. But it’s a funny thing—the more someone tells me I can’t do a thing, the more I want to do it. You ever feel that way?”

Alred took her hand and bent over her to help her be seated, ready or not. Gunnilda sat, but she was silent, still expecting an answer.

“At times I suppose we all do,” he said. He began to stroll towards the fire.

“What was in that wine?”

Alred stopped. “You would have to ask Joseph for the precise recipe.”

“I see.”

Gunnilda’s voice was shaking. Alred flattered himself that his own was remarkably cool.

Gunnilda asked, “Well, what’s it for?”

Alred settled in beside her on the creaking bench. “It is to help her rest, my dear, nothing more. It is of vital importance that she rest now. She might be confined at any time.”

Gunnilda snorted. “If you or your Joseph had ever carried around a big belly like that for nine months, you might understand a woman doesn’t need potions to rest. She’ll get off her own feet when she’s tired.”

“Ah, but you are not acquainted with my wife. We have a number of very young children in our nursery who cannot be made to understand that Mama or Auntie needs to rest now. And it would never occur to Hetty to refuse any appeal for attention. I will not allow her to make a martyr of herself. Now, how do you find the baby? Can you tell which end is up?”

He gave her a teasing smile, but Gunnilda frowned at him.

“It hasn’t dropped yet. But Her Grace thinks she feels it pushing up with its little feet, so I’m not too worried just now. But I think you should…”

Her voice broke and weakened, and her expression lost all its matronly self-​assurance.

“You should let her out of her room, Alred. She seems awfully cooped up in there. That’s not good for anybody, especially not an expecting mother, all shut up in there with nothing to take her mind off her little pains and cares. It’s not good for anyone to have nothing to do but think.”

A familiar, brooding nausea woke and stretched in Alred’s belly.

“I believe,” he said, “that there are times in one’s life when one wants nothing more than to get away from others and think, and revel in one’s thoughts.”

Oh, it was beautifully said. Gunnilda would think he meant one thing, and he could hug the other to himself, gloating like a miser over his misery.

Gunnilda said, “Well, I don’t know but I guess a woman likes to talk about her baby with her friends just as much as she likes to think about it by herself.”

Alred did not respond to that. He did not think Hetty was thinking much about her baby.

He asked, “When do you expect it will come? Mother Duna said it might be any day now, but the poor old dear is getting so blind.”

“Well, like I said it hasn’t dropped yet, so I wouldn’t be looking for it tonight. But you never can be sure with babies. And yours do have a way of showing up at the oddest times.”

“Boy or girl?”

Gunnilda laughed. “Oh, pish! I think it’s sitting like a boy, but you know, I’m never right more than half the time. So I told her I thought it was a girl, ’cause she was calling it ‘she’ and I thought that’s what she wanted to hear.”

Alred smiled. “I thank you for your kind deception. Hetty must not be distressed. And I thank you for coming to see her. It must be reassuring to her to know that you’ll be there when the time comes.” He scooted to the edge of the bench, preparing to rise. “And I thank you most especially for the cake! Sublime, my dear.”

Gunnilda saw him getting up and stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Alred, I—want to talk to you about something.”

Alred’s worry sharpened. Had she noticed something about the baby? He let himself slide back against the pillows.

“It’s—about you and Her Grace,” Gunnilda faltered, “if I may presume on our old friendship and speak my mind.”

“Speak, by all means.”

Gunnilda folded her hands. “Well… I was wondering, how come you took a separate room? I guess you don’t sleep in the same room any more.”

“I told you, Hetty needs to rest.”

His cool, clear voice was going reedy, and Gunnilda’s was growing strong.

“Well,” she said, “what about after the baby’s here? Are you planning on going back?”

His nausea stretched up, crowding against his diaphragm until his breath came in sharp puffs.

“My dear, I’m afraid that Hetty may need to rest for a long, long time. She is a little troubled in her mind, you see.”

“Don’t you think her troubles might be less if she had her husband back in her bed?”

Alred took a deep breath and crowded his nausea back down. “Gunnilda, I love you dearly and always will, and you have rendered me such services that I may never sufficiently repay you, for you saved the lives of two of my children. But I do not, for all that, believe that you have the right to speak to me on such intimate matters as these.”

Gunnilda’s eyes were bold. “Well, I don’t know, but I guess I do. On account of I am speaking on behalf of someone who does.”

Alred’s heart lurched. Had Hetty spoken to her? But why? He could not believe it. And so he did not.

“Why did this someone not speak to me?”

“I don’t know, but I guess this someone was a little scared.”

A maternal protectiveness settled over her expression, and Alred had another idea.

“Was it my Lady Margaret?”

Gunnilda lifted her pert little nose. “I’m not going to play guessing games with Your Grace. It doesn’t matter who, except it was someone who has a right to worry about you and your wife. So let’s talk about that instead. I asked Her Grace an impertinent question while I was in there, but since I had my arm up her skirts anyway, it seemed like it wouldn’t much matter. I asked her, when was the last time she had relations with her husband, and she told me beginning of December.”

“I see. And did she tell you when was the last time her husband tried and failed?”

Gunnilda pulled away from him and blinked her glittering eyes. She did not seem to have considered that possibility, and there was some slight triumph in it for him, jutting up amidst oceans of humiliation.

“Ah, now, do you see?” he said. “If I and my Joseph do not know what it is to be a woman, you must admit that you and your Hetty do not know what it is to be a man. There was a time, my dear, when I would have lain back and let her have her way with me, if that was what she wanted and my body had been as obliging as a lady’s. But I shall no longer even try. Nor would she desire it. You see, Gunnilda, my wife is in love with another man.”

Gunnilda’s face was pale. “Are you certain of that, Alred?”

“Yea, for I have seen proof.”

He lowered his head and stared at the shadows of his boots wavering besides his feet as the flames leapt and fell. The furnishings had changed somewhat over the years, a few floorboards had been replaced; but Lili had once stood in this very spot and hurled that accursed poem into the fire.

He had raged over it then, but he now knew little Lili had been uncommonly wise. The proper thing to do with a poem, romantic letter, or any written testimony of Love was to burn it upon sight.

He wished her sister had been so wise. Whenever he stared at his boots now, he saw again his proof fluttering down and settling over them like flakes of ash.

“I cannot confront her over it, because I found it, one might say, while snooping. Though I had a fairly good reason at the time. However, I would not particularly care to confront her in any case. You see, I do not particularly care.”

“Oh, honey…”

“If, for her health, she requires a man in her bed, then I shall ask Joseph to prescribe her a dose of her lover when he returns. I daresay Leofric would do it without blushing. But I—I will not go. I will not go in to her, and watch her close her eyes, and know that she is imagining I am Leofric. Blessed among women you are, Gunnilda, but you are only a woman, and you cannot conceive of what surpassing mortification my soul would endure if a woman used my body to make love to a fantasy of that man.”

“Oh, Alred…”

Alred sat up. “However, I forbid you to speak of this to any little someone who asks you for help. If you wish to help, I would ask you to explain that sometimes, for grown people in a marriage, feelings and affections can change. But our love for our children will never change, and they need not be afraid. Hetty is mistress of this castle and the mother of my children—all of my children. And I bear her no ill-​will. After what I have made her endure, I would not expect her to love me. I simply wish to live quietly side-​by-​side, raise our children, and rule our people. Most men and women of our station never ask for more than that in any case.”

Gunnilda twisted her hands helplessly together—her strong, work-​worn hands that in most situations knew what to do with themselves. “But you needn’t lock her up for that…”

“I do not lock her up. She has been prescribed a strict regimen of rest. She has two comfortable rooms to her use, she sees her children every day, and on occasion a few restful visitors. I am no ogre, Gunnilda, locking her in a dungeon. I am caring for the woman who is about to give birth to my child.”

“But the girls will see to it that she’s spared all her tiring duties, Alred. They just want her to come down to the table again, and to see her whenever they like and not only an hour a day in the afternoon. They just want things to seem a little more normal. They know they aren’t, truly—they’re wiser little things than they let on. But just the seeming helps a lot.”

Alred sat back and closed his eyes to stop a pair of tears. “Both of them,” he said.

“Well… yes.”

Now he had a new image to haunt his mind: his girls putting on their little coats and leather boots and going together to ask Gunnilda to speak on their behalf. And he had always loved to see them getting along and agreeing about something.

“They need her,” Gunnilda said. “Girls at that age… their problems are small, but they seem so big without a woman to guide them through. And now Gwynn has her first sweetheart, and Meggie’s even had a marriage proposal…”

“Dare I risk it, Gunnilda? If anything happened to her or the child…”

“Alred, what will be will be. And it won’t be anybody’s fault. Listen to a woman what’s birthed ten babies alive, and helped ever so many more be born. If there was a way to stop bad things from happening, we’d know it, and we’d do it. Don’t listen to some fool man who’s hardly older than a baby himself, and never had a wife of his own, and isn’t even a Christian, though I’d say that’s the least of his flaws.”

Alred snorted and smiled. “I must invite you and Joseph to supper one of these evenings. It will be more fun than seating Father Matthew across from Father Faelan and tossing some theological question in the air for them to shred between them.”

“Don’t look to me to debate theological questions with a Mohammedan!”

“Well, medicine, then. A few years of Greek training versus a lifetime of womanly experience. I shall ask you to diagnose each other and prescribe the appropriate remedies.”

“Pish! I haven’t even seen him, and I know what to prescribe him. That man needs a wife! And then he’ll find out just how little he knows about women!”