Sigefrith smashes the code

Britamund had not been foolish enough to expect a cozy chat with her father, but she had hoped he had only wanted to discuss some detail of her wedding.

As soon as she saw the little pink casket on his table, she understood. She understood that someone – most likely he – had searched her room. He had found her letters. He had read them.

He did not turn around. She supposed he had heard her come in, but still she was sorry she had not made more noise. Now she crept everywhere she went.

“I am here, Father,” she said.

Then he turned to her. There was the same irony he wore whenever he looked at her.

“I suppose you know why you’re here.”

“I can guess,” she murmured.

“Excellent!”

He smacked the back of his hand into his palm and walked around her in two long strides. Now the candlelight would be on his face, which would only make him appear older and more grim.

“Then we needn’t waste any time,” he snapped. “I want you to tell me how this so-​​called code of yours works! What is it? An acrostic or what?”

Britamund shook her head almost imperceptibly. Already tears were stinging her eyes.

“I’ve looked at them all, and it’s all plain English! The most mundane, God-​​awfully boring letters a man ever wrote to a lady – though God knows I wouldn’t expect any more out of that slack-​​jawed mule. So how does it work? Each one nothing but a lot of gossip about his family, and half a page of blathering about the God damned weather! Do I hold it up to the light or what? Damn!”

He leapt for the casket to try one of the pages against the candle.

Britamund yelped, “No!”

He whirled back to her, nearly swiping her with his long arm. “What is it then?”

“Why does it matter?” she quavered. “We weren’t plotting treason.”

“Plotting to seduce the King’s daughter and betrothed wife of a future Duke? Hmm! That depends on your definition of treason. Just what I would expect from that family! Anyway, I want to find out whether you were plotting an elopement.”

“No.”

“Forgive me, Princess, if I do not take your word for it,” he sneered. “How does it work? Name of God! Shall I call in Malcolm to work it out?”

“No!” she sobbed.

“Shall I ask Alred? He loves that sort of puzzle!”

She did not think he would dare show these letters to Alred. She also wished he would, so that Alred would say to him what she dared not.

“Shall I bring the boy here and horsewhip him until he tells me?” he panted. “Though I shall do it anyway if ever he steps down off his hill, as God is my witness!”

“It’s the weather!” she shrieked, hoping to silence him.

“What?”

Britamund clenched her fists and closed her eyes so she could push herself through the explanation without shattering into tears. “It’s the part about the weather, at the end of the letters. It’s the clouds.”

“What?”

She did not even have to open her eyes to feel his stare on her like a weight, like an enormous thumb planted upon her heart and crushing her against the wall.

“When we were writing about the clouds and sky it was… he was… writing about me…”

She sobbed as soon as she said it, regretting that she could not take it back.

Now her father would read all the letters again, with a different eye. Now he would read about velvety clouds, and blushing skies, and waking to the sound of thunder, and Brinstan’s sorrow at being unable to make the rain stop falling.

He would read it all: her father, who never wrote a poem that did not include at least one rhyme for “duck”. Her father, who never turned his foot aside an inch from his resolute path, even if it meant trampling the only flower in a field. Her father, who had made her mother eat the deer she loved.

Her father, with his aged and experienced eyes, who would surely see things in these mundane metaphors that she never had, and that Brinstan had never intended. Her father’s velvety clouds would be not cheeks but thighs.

“You needn’t read them,” she sniffled. “There’s no plotting in them anywhere.”

“I shall be the judge of that,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t waste your tears on me, Britamund. Go cry to your father-​​in-​​law if you’re subject to the damnable female affliction of weepiness. He thinks you can do no wrong. Though God knows he’ll be singing a different tune when one of his own daughters breaks his heart!”

It seemed he meant to crush the life out of her, since she had not loved him well enough. It was the way of some men, she knew.

“Please let me take them,” she whispered. It was perhaps the last thing she could hope to do for Brinstan. “Please. I shall burn them myself.”

“Will you kiss me for them?” he croaked. “As you always did?”

He wore the hideous, twisted smile of an elderly man struck dumb by a softening of the brain. In the candlelight, the hollows beneath his eyes appeared very dark, very deep, and even a little wet.

The thought of kissing that man revolted her. It was his own fault: she feared he would hold these Judas kisses over her head until he died, and the old, apoplectic, bitter man he would be then would go unkissed to his grave. And she would feel guilty about that too.

“May I go?” she whispered.

He turned away from her to level all the weight of his stare at the casket, which had sat quietly through the entire ordeal, ruby-​​pink and innocent as twilit clouds. She would not have been surprised to see it burst into flames beneath his gaze.

“Go!”

She did not hesitate. She even hurried.

Scarcely had she closed the door behind her when she heard the clatter of wood hurled against stone, followed by the rustling of many folded slips of parchment settling out of the air.

Perhaps, though he had a poor memory for such mundane matters, he had recalled that he himself had given her that pink-​​painted chest many birthdays ago.

Or perhaps it was merely frustration. She had told him the secret of their code, but he must have known that he would never break it. Such a mind as his might see monstrous images in the clouds, but he would never see through to the love they obscured.