Lady Eadgith sneaks away

Lady Eadgith stood and stared down at the rumpled dress on the floor. It lay with its arms flung wide as in the abandon of joy or of death, but more troubling than this was the realization that she could not lace it up again without her maid. And she had no idea where her hairpins had gone.

She was confused and light-​​headed. Her legs trembled like stems of grass, and she could not feel the muscles of her thighs except as a dull ache. She wondered how the bad women managed it. Perhaps their lovers laced them – perhaps they thought to take care with their hairpins – perhaps their legs had the habit of such exercise. She was not a bad woman. She did not know what to do.

“You could still be twenty from behind,” Leofric said from the bed. In her confusion she had not noticed that she no longer heard his soft snore. “You still have the hips of a girl.”

Eadgith gasped and turned to him, not thinking that it would be but worse for him to see the front of her – and for her to see the front of him.

“And the breasts of a woman,” he chuckled. “Son of a serpent! What more does a man want? Except that she be mute?”

Eadgith scrambled for her shift. That at least she could put on without her maid.

“Where are you going?” he asked, suddenly serious.

“They will be wondering where I am at home.”

“They will think that you are sleeping here.”

“They will still send someone to make sure of me if I don’t come home.”

She thought she could turn to face him now that she had covered herself, but he lay atop the blankets without the least modesty. Still, her pride would not let her turn away from him a second time.

He had surely changed more than she. He was still strong and fit, but he was tired, and she thought his waist had thickened, his beard was growing gray, and his skin had begun to sag over his face.

She had studied him a while in the lamplight at the first, and he had allowed her to examine the flat, triangular scar of the arrow that should have killed him, and he had given her the time she needed to come to terms with the stripes and ridges she felt when she laid her hands on his back. She was ashamed now that she had once held her callused hands before him as a condemnation. She had been wrong even to name his suffering and hers with the same word.

At the time, the sight of him had filled her with a great tenderness. Now, however, his brazen nakedness seemed like an aggression.

“If you don’t come,” he said wearily, “they will send a man to waken me. And I shall put young Hilda’s heart at ease.”

He was not smiling, but she could not believe he was not mocking her. Oh, to be discovered in his room! In his bed! Hilda would never let her forget it.

“I do not think that would be wise,” she said primly.

He snorted and turned his face to the ceiling. “She wants to be wise!” he said to himself or to someone above. He lifted his arm and let it fall so that the hand hung over the edge of the bed, palm upward, beckoning her. “Please stay.”

“I do not think that I should. Would you kindly help me lace my gown?”

“No.”

“What?” she gasped. “Will you force me to stay? Will you refuse a lady’s request?”

“You refused mine.”

She stared at him with a growing outrage. He still thought he was the master of her.

He only stared at the ceiling. After a moment he withdrew his arm and laid it across his eyes. “The nurse is in the next room,” he muttered. “If you are quick in the corridor no one will see you.”

She pulled on her dress without a word. Her hands too trembled now, along with her legs.

“Did you get what you wanted?” he asked.

She turned to him, furious at what she thought he was asking. He still lay with his arm over his face.

“Did you?” she hissed.

“For a little while,” he said dully. He did not seem to be mocking her.

She hesitated now. The tenderness was stealing over her again.

He lifted his arm, and she leaned slightly towards him, awaiting his eyes, awaiting his words. But he moved only to turn himself onto his side, his face to the wall, his back towards her, lurid with its stripes from the lashes of Leila’s people.

Eadgith pulled on her slippers and sneaked away.

In her shame over what she had said once about her callused hands, she believed that he had been trying to condemn her with this display of the marks of his old suffering. In truth he had been trying to hide from her the signs of the new.