The reeve’s wife is caught in a caper
“One–two-three, one–two-three—other foot, other foot! One–two-three, one–two-three—”
Amlyn wailed, “I keep getting my feet crossed!”
“That’s the next step!” Gunnora panted. “One–cross-three, one–cross-three—”
“No, Mama, no, slow down!” Amlyn pleaded, giggling.
Gunnora only picked up the pace and broke into a proper dance, leaving her boy behind: “One-two-three, one-two-three!”
She left off counting and skipped and bounced until Amlyn finally flung himself at her legs and wrapped his arms around her flapping skirts. Hilda laughed and laughed. Even the poor baby in the cradle let out a giggle.
“Mama, you’re too good for me!” Amlyn moaned, defeated.
“That’s why I’m trying to teach you, barmpot! I mean to raise the finest dancer in Nothelm, if not the whole kingdom!”
“I’d rather be the best sword fighter!” Amlyn said. “Unless you think I could be both?”
Gunnora took his head between her hands and kneaded his curly scalp like a mound of dough. “You kids have nothing but swords and staves on the brain these days! I must tell the Duke to hold some dancing tournaments! Who cares about winning some silly sword tournament and taking home a ham as a prize?”
Amlyn clapped his hands over his head to protect his curls. “There’s gonna be some better prizes than ham!” he protested. “Ham is just the third prize!”
“Maybe so,” Gunnora countered, “but is there going to be a real live pretty girl for a prize?”
Amlyn grimaced, for his mother had struck upon the one thing still more disgusting than ham. Gunnora laughed. Oh, he was young yet!
She said, “Your sword-fighting men can win nothing but cuts and scrapes, and maybe a ham, or a live pig if they’re lucky. But it’s the best dancer who wins the prettiest girl!”
She planted her fists on her hips and executed one bounce and spin, making her skirts flare. The poor little mite in the cradle smiled at her as her face flashed by.
But Amlyn asked, “Was my Da the best dancer?”
Gunnora stopped on the brink of another turn. “Bless you, child! You think your Mama was the prettiest girl?”
“Weren’t you?”
Oh, he was young indeed! But Gunnora did not laugh at him. Instead, thoughtful, she fell into the simple one-two-three step that still came naturally as walking to her shapely feet.
She had rarely been called pretty, but in her youth she had possessed an effervescent something more. And how she had loved to dance! She might have been the finest dancer. She might have had the handsomest boy.
But she had aimed higher still and won first prize: the reeve’s son.
Only it was funny—and she laughed over it sometimes, and sometimes cried—how her popularity with boys and girls alike had launched her into such a lofty sphere that only a handful of men and women were now fit to associate with her. It was funny how the pranks and jokes and capers that had so attracted the reeve’s son could be so unbecoming on the part of the wife of the reeve.
“I was better than pretty,” she told Amlyn. “I was fun!”
Amlyn gaped at her. At last Gunnora laughed. She took his hands and swung them side to side, sweeping him up in her rhythm.
“One–two-three, one–two-three,” she chanted.
She released Amlyn’s hands to clap in time with her prancing feet.
“Clap, Butterbaby!” she commanded, offering Hilda a way to join the merriment. Her little girl clapped her hands and gurgled with laughter, and even the baby sat up and swayed in the cradle, grinning with his tiny teeth.
“I will sing and I’ll be merry since I know my love is lost,” Gunnora sang, her voice breathless and jerky but still sweet as a maiden’s. “I will sing and I’ll be merry when occasion I do see—”
A slam sounded up from beneath her feet, and Gunnora thudded back to earth. Amlyn stopped after another step or two, but Hilda clapped and laughed all the harder.
“Hush, hush, Hilda,” Gunnora cautioned. “Dada’s home!”
Hilda’s laughter died off into uncertain giggles. Gunnora wiped Amlyn’s sweaty face with a napkin and saw her own fear reflected back at her.
“Hope we didn’t scramble our insides with all this hopping around!” she confided. “You know how your Da gets if we spoil our appetites!”
Amlyn appeared relieved that her fear was only of this ordinary kind. “Don’t worry, Ma, I’m so hungry I could eat a whole cow!”
“Then I’ll slip you bites if I can’t clean my plate,” Gunnora promised him, still mothering with half a mind while the wife in her was preparing for battle.
Eohric’s boot soles scraped and scuffled up the stairs. Gunnora stooped to stroke Hilda’s head and sent her toddling into the room to join Amlyn. She tucked her straggling hair behind her ears and wiped the sweat from her cheeks. Her heart was thudding harder now than it had while she had danced.
Eohric’s head rose up from below. Gunnora tried to read his face, but his head hung low, and he watched his feet as closely as Amlyn learning a new step.
“Here you are!” she blurted, though she had been determined not to speak the first word. “Just in time for supper!”
Eohric’s head reached the level of her own and then rose another step higher. He stopped at the top of the stairs, turned majestically, and stared down at her until she could no longer meet the frost of his gaze.
“I guess it’ll have to wait a bit,” he said. Without turning his eyes from her face he said, “Amlyn, go play with Hilda in your room till supper’s ready.”
Nobody moved. Gunnora feared Amlyn was figuring out his Da was displeased about something more than dancing.
“I know what!” she said, turning to the children. She fished into her purse for a penny. “Why don’t you go get us a half-dozen sweet rolls for dessert? How many in a half-dozen?” she quizzed Amlyn, hoping to stave off any protest from her husband about the penny or about Lent.
Amlyn snatched up the penny. “Six! What kind should I get?”
“You pick! I just feel like something sweet. Put Hilda’s cloak on her and make sure you tie her hood on tight!”
“I will!” He started to turn but glanced up at his father, and something he saw there checked his enthusiasm. “May we, Da?”
Eohric hesitated but finally grunted and waved him off. “Don’t accept any tidbits from the baker,” he warned. “You still have your supper to eat.”
“I know, I know!” Amlyn heaved his little sister up into his arms and went thumping down the stairs.
Eohric stared at Gunnora and waited. Did he expect her to go first? Was he waiting for the door to slam downstairs before he yelled at her?
Gunnora turned away. Her feet were still light from the dance, but it took effort to make her voice airy to match.
“I know it’s Lent,” she said, “but I’ve been having such cravings for sweets!”
There, that would remind him about the baby. He would not be rough with her. At least not with his hands.
“Are you going to confess,” he asked, “or are you going to make this difficult?”
Gunnora pointed her toe and slid her slipper along a crack between two floorboards as she took a graceful step. “Are you going to interrogate me?”
“Don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you!”
Gunnora froze, balanced on one heel and a pointed toe. Eohric stepped up behind her and grabbed her arm to whip her around.
“You told Gewis I said to let you in there! And I had to act like I did so Gewis wouldn’t know my wife’s a scheming liar!”
Gunnora fought to keep her voice calm. “I told him that because I thought you would have said I could, if you knew.”
“Are you out of your head? Let you in there with a murderer?”
Gunnora’s elbow banged into the chair as she shuffled back, and the scrape of wooden legs over wood made her jump.
“She is not a murderer.”
“She killed a man with her bare hands!”
Eohric stepped closer, and Gunnora dodged around him, putting herself between him and the baby.
“She killed a man who was raping a little girl!” she shouted. “Hypocrite! You’re all hypocrites! You would have done the same thing! And if you wouldn’t, you’re all cowards!”
Eohric shoved the chair beneath the table as if to give himself room to swing. “You don’t have to kill a man to stop him! It ain’t cowardly to respect the rule of law!”
“Where was the law when Graybeard was terrorizing those kids?” Gunnora demanded. “Where was the law when the steward was taking bribes to stay away from that house?”
“Now listen here! That ain’t proven yet, and if it is, he’ll be punished, don’t you worry. But this ain’t about that. I’m talking about you and that elf girl. What were you thinking, Nora? What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking she must be missing her baby, that’s what!”
“You took that baby in there? It ain’t even her baby!”
“It’s hers now! I can’t believe you mean to take him away from her!”
“She’s a killer, Nora, don’t you get that? Where were the kids all this time?”
“I left ’em with Godgyth, what do you think? I knew you wouldn’t…” Gunnora lowered her head in confusion, but Eohric grasped her arm and startled her into flinging it up again.
“You knew I wouldn’t like it if you shut my kids up with a killer,” he concluded for her. His fingers bit into her arm. “Well, what about my youngest, eh?”
He gave her a slight shake and stepped closer to her until his belly was pressed against hers and she had to crane her neck to look up at him.
“What if she’d strangled you right there? She would’ve killed you and the baby too.”
“That’s—that’s absurd!” Gunnora stammered past the shivering of her jaw. “She’s about the gentlest creature I ever saw. She’s hardly more than a girl herself!”
“She killed a man! I know ugly, vicious criminals who haven’t gone so far as that. And for all we know she killed that baby’s mother to steal the baby. All we have is her word for it, and after what just happened I don’t know why we should believe her. What if she killed you to take Hilda?”
His hand spasmed around her arm, and he turned his face away from the sight he had conjured up, with a sharp cry of “God!”
As if to make up for this sign of weakness, he took both her arms in his big fists and held her squarely before him.
“Now let’s get one thing straight here, since you claim you thought I wouldn’t mind. My wife does not pay visits to murderers. My wife does not pay visits to heathen whores. My wife does not lie to the Duke’s guard. Got that?”
He waited. His heavy breathing fluttered the hair that drooped from her bun.
Gunnora whispered, “That’s three things.”
“Damn it, Nora!” He slung her off. “Why you, of all people? The reeve’s wife shuns criminals and respects the law!”
Gunnora hung her head. She would not try to make him understand. Of course she had known he would not approve. She knew she would only get in there once. But for Lena’s sake she had wanted to give Aia a chance to say goodbye to her baby. If she never saw Wendel again, she would at least have the memory of those tearful last kisses. Lena and Benedict had not had that.
“You’re not going back in there,” he said. “I forbid it, do you hear?”
“Yes.”
“And we’re going to show ourselves at Mass tomorrow, and then we’re going to figure out what to do with this kid. We’re not keeping it, so if that’s what you were thinking, you can get that idea out of your little head. This is the last night it spends in this house.”
He stepped past her and headed back towards the fire, but he slowed as he neared the cradle. The baby lifted his arms to be picked up, then thought better of it and shrank away.
“And she’s going to be out of there on Monday,” Eohric said without looking around. “So don’t bother with any more of your scheming. You’re not going to see her again.”
Gunnora winced. That poor, pretty girl. Her crippled body would never dance except at the end of a rope. If she was allowed to live, her glossy, glowing beauty would be mutilated by a smoking brand.
“Please, Eohric… what are they going to do with her?”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your affair,” Eohric muttered. “You’re the reeve’s wife. All you care about is knowing justice will be done.”
