Leila listens to Maud

Leila smiled, for Maud seemed to find what she was saying funny. Leila could understand only every three or four words of the story, and Maud spoke so very quickly when she was excited. All she knew was that it was a story involving the children of some of the servants.

She and the Queen were in the nursery with Prince Colban and her little son Cedric. The two boys were the same age; indeed, they had been born on the same day, which delighted their fathers to no end. They were not of an age to truly play together, but they played well side-​​by-​​side.

She was happy that her little boy would have a friend, but she had been told that Sigefrith’s son would be sent away in a few years to another man whom he had scarcely ever seen, who was called his godfather. This was one of many things that shocked Leila in these barbarian people. Her own husband had grown up far from home, in the household of Sigefrith’s father. She could not understand how a father or a mother could send a child away, knowing they might not meet again for years. Even at her age, now, when she thought about her father…

“Are you cold?” Maud asked her suddenly. She knew what that meant. It was what her husband asked her all the time. These castles of stone were as cold as caves beneath the earth, and outside hung a heavy fog every morning, and rain dripped almost daily from the dying leaves. It was a sorrowful country.

“I’m a little cold,” she replied. It was what she always said.

“I am too,” Maud confided. “I’ve been coughing.” She turned her pretty head and coughed a few times to demonstrate. Then she went off again into something Leila could not understand.

Poor Maud didn’t even seem to be aware that she couldn’t follow her conversation. Maud was an odd woman – she was either cold and proud and silent, or vivacious and animated and – Leila suspected – silly. But she was the only woman she ever saw. She thought that the black-​​haired Duchess might be a more interesting companion, but the Duchess almost never came to the castle, and they were rarely invited to hers.

Of all the people she had met here, though, the one she liked best was the funny little Duke. He always took the time to speak with her, despite her imperfect English and difficulty in understanding. He also knew so many languages that she could substitute a word from one of the other languages she had encountered on her travels through Europe, and he would understand. He had even asked her to teach her a few words in her own language, and it had touched her, for he was the only one to care about that at all.

But the Duke too stayed away most of the time. There was only Maud and Sigefrith, and Maud bored her, and Sigefrith frightened her. She tried to believe he was an agreeable man, for Leofric loved him, but even life with Leofric had not prepared her for Sigefrith – nor for what Leofric became when he was with him.

These Northern people truly were barbarians, and the Danes were the worst. They had so little grace, so little courtesy. They were like small children who had never been taught manners – only they were massive, roaring men. Maud, she had gathered, did not sleep with her husband, and when Leofric came to bed, massive and roaring after sitting up late with Sigefrith, she understood why.

He hadn’t been this way before, and she hoped he would not be this way after they moved to their new home in the spring and he could no longer sit up with Sigefrith in the evening. She hoped that the polish he had acquired in her gracious country had not been permanently scuffed away. When there would be only the three of them – soon the four of them – and she had some hand in the way her household was run, perhaps things could be as they were – or as she had wanted them to be, for they had never yet had a home of their own together.

Maud coughed again. “You see?” she said. “It’s too cold in here.” And she said something about the fire that must have involved servants, for she went to call one.

Leila looked down at her little son. He was half his father’s, and so she had hope that this climate would not prove to be unhealthy for him. His people certainly thrived in it. She only hoped that she herself would learn to love it, for Leofric meant to stay.