Matilda wonders what she will do

“Are you certain you should be meeting me here when your husband is expected home in a few days?” Leofric asked her, but he did not wait for a reply.

“You heard?” Matilda asked after she had pulled away from his embrace.

“I was at Bernwald. I met Cenwulf.”

“Sigefrith was here to fetch Eadgith home.”

“That’s two who are pleased to find their wives and children again. I suppose I know a third who will be.”

“Oh, Leofric – ”

“We always knew,” he said gently and pressed her face against his breast again, as he loved to do.

“Don’t!”

“What?”

She struggled away from him. “We must talk now,” she said firmly and began to pace across the floor, like a little man. She was all the more adorable so. It was one of the things that made her different from any other woman.

“Let us talk,” he said with an indulgent smile. It was true they could do little more now.

“What shall I do?” she asked, her voice quavering a little at the end, like a woman’s.

“There is nothing left to do, my dove. We haven’t been so foolish as to dream otherwise, have we?”

“But…”

“As long as your husband lives, you know there is nothing we can do.”

“I know,” she muttered. She looked overwhelmed, and it surprised him. He had thought her a braver little woman than that, and more lucid.

“You know I could always tell him the truth,” he said calmly, “and he would fight me, and one of us would die. Most likely I. That would avail you nothing. If not I, then you and I could do what we like, and our friends and families would never forgive us, and we should soon hate one another. I prefer to love you from a distance, and that is what I shall do.”

He waited to see what she would reply.

She stared blankly at the wall for a while. “But what shall I do?” she asked.

He realized he had been holding his breath. “I wonder.”

She turned her eyes on him slowly, as if her gaze were an unwieldy instrument to swing around. He took a deliberate breath.

“I shall have a baby after Candlemas,” she said.

He let his breath out in a slow hiss. “You are telling me this because it’s mine?”

“I believe it is.”

“Are you certain?”

“Very nearly.”

Now he needed to breathe to calm himself. “Is there any chance it is his? Any at all?”

“Very little.”

“Son of a serpent! I mean will he think it’s his? What will he think if you drop a baby twelve months after he went away?”

“Supposing it lives… supposing I do… it is possible he will. I think it happened early.”

“You think it– Fine! Son of a serpent!”

He turned away from her and held his head in his hands for a moment. He would need to calm himself. She was so tiny – and there was a baby–

“I thought it wasn’t possible!” he cried when he trusted himself to speak to her again.

“What?”

“What the hell did you mean, telling me ‘I’m old, I’m old,’ all the time? I thought that’s what you meant! I thought you were too old!”

“What?” she shrieked in indignation. “I’m only thirty-​​seven! Tomorrow!”

“And? How the hell am I supposed to know how old is too old? I’m a man! You’re supposed to know! You’re supposed to tell me to stop! You’re supposed to know what you’re doing!”

“I? What do I know about – what we did?” She was blushing nearly as red as her gown.

“You’re a woman!”

“And you’re a man, and you do this sort of thing all the time! How is it you don’t have fifty children by now?”

“Because the women manage that part of it!”

“I don’t know anything about managing! You knew that! I’ve only ever been with – with my husband!”

He turned away from her again for a moment. Surely she was not so foolish as she now appeared.

“Son of a serpent! What did you expect? Did you not consider this possibility? Did you not suppose this would happen if you did nothing to prevent it?”

She was silent and sullen, like a guilty child. This infuriated him.

“Are you an idiot?” he roared at her, stepping so close to her that she shrank away. “No! I know you’re not such an idiot as that. You planned this all along. This is what you wanted. This is why you wanted me, isn’t it? Bitch! Scheming bitch! Thank your gods I don’t strike pregnant women!”

She had grown pale. “No!” she said, but it was scarcely more than a whisper.

“No, Matilda, no. I don’t believe you. I know you’re a clever little thing. Too clever for me! Quite a fool you made of me, didn’t you? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Wanted to prove to yourself that you still had the power to make men into fools? Still young and beautiful and so on?”

He had pursued her across the room, and she stood with her back to the wall now.

“Bitch! Bitch! When I think of what a fool I have made myself these past weeks! And how you made me dream that a dear old friend might simply die in battle and never come home! That, over a woman! A vulgar little slut such as you!”

“No!” she wailed.

“No? Why did you do it, then? What were you thinking? Why? Why?”

She did not speak, but her little chin trembled. He thought it would stop if he smashed his fist into it. He knew it would never trouble him again if he did. He could sleep in peace, and that chin would never again appear to him in a dream.

“Why?” he cried. “Did you love me?”

He held his breath. She was silent, and it infuriated him. Her eyes were pleading. He did not know what she was asking with those eyes. Such eyes could simply mean that she did not want him to hit her.

He stepped away from her, turned his back to her, and very deliberately opened his right hand and massaged it with the left. He must not let it close again.

“Leofric,” she whispered.

He waited again. Again she was silent.

He walked to the door and stopped with his hand on the latch. He waited a last time. When she did not speak, he said, “I recommend you tell him it is his, and pray that its eyes are brown, or else that it never opens them. If you later think of anything you meant to tell me this afternoon and did not, I shall be at the castle, rejoicing with my daughter – the one woman on earth whom I do not despise – the one woman on earth who is not sunk up to her teeth in sin.”