Lady Eadgith comes to the rescue

It was not the nurse’s dark head bent over his baby but Eadgith’s blonde. He fought back his initial urge to knock her down and sweep Leia away to safety, and so he only gasped, “What is this?”

“Oh, Leofric – ” Eadgith looked up at him, cringing slightly – out of guilt or out of fear of him he could not tell.

Leia lifted her arms to him and cried, “Ah!”

“Go get him!” Eadgith said. “Go on, lazy girl! I’ve seen you scoot!”

Leofric crossed the room himself and picked her up. Eadgith rose and laughed awkwardly as she smoothed her skirts. Now she seemed frightened. He stood between her and the door.

“This is my room,” he said.

“I know, it’s – ”

“Where is the nurse?”

“Well! The nurse!” she huffed, recovering her composure in her indignation. “Do you know where I found that girl? Standing out in the corridor flirting with one of Sigefrith’s grooms, that’s where! She ran back in here and had the baby in her arms by the time I got here, but she couldn’t hide the fact that the baby’s face and hands were simply black with soot!”

“What?” he gasped.

“That girl left her alone in here long enough for her to get into the fireplace, that’s your what! God be thanked that there was no fire!”

Leofric held his baby safe against his heart. He had never liked that girl, but Leia’s regular nurse was too old to make the journey. And Leila had thought that girl “good enough” for his baby! Suppose Leila was hoping Leia would come to harm?

“Once I saw she was safe,” Eadgith continued, “and had sent that girl away, I had to laugh at her, Leof.” She giggled hesitantly. “She had been putting her hands in her mouth, so it was only her chin that was black. She looked as if she had been trying to give herself a beard like Papa.”

“She mustn’t call me Papa,” he muttered. Oh! but it had warmed his heart to hear someone say it!

“Of course,” Eadgith said, chastened. “I beg your pardon.”

They stood in silence for a moment, while Leia had pushed herself far enough away from him that she could look up into his face and babble at him.

“She certainly is a talkative girl, isn’t she?” Eadgith smiled. “She was telling me all about her toys today. And she does like her bath!”

“You bathed her?”

“She was all covered in ashes and soot. And she was so funny – she would frown and squint her face up and splash the water – splash splash splash,” Eadgith said in a pantomime of the baby’s splashing, “and then she would stop suddenly and laugh and laugh! And then start splashing again, deadly serious.”

Leofric began to chuckle, not only at his baby’s cunning, with which he was already quite familiar, but also at Eadgith laughing and squinting and pretending to splash.

“She doesn’t like getting water in her eyes,” he said, “but she does like to splash. Did you get her good and wet, my dove?” he asked the baby, who gave a victorious squeal in reply. “Did you give her a good bath too?”

“We had a good bath, and then a good nap in the chair, and then a good snack, and we were just in the middle of a good conversation when you came in.”

“You had her all this time?” he asked, touched by such generosity: Drage was upstairs, and she had Blithe and Dora and Haakon at home.

“Since just after dinner. Someone had to,” she said dismissively. “Did you eat anything at all? You look tired.”

“I had a bite at Bernwald.”

“Shall I leave you with her? Will you stay long?”

“I can’t. I only stepped in for a moment. Hush a while, dove,” he said to the clamorous baby. “Listen,” he said to Eadgith, but then he stopped, thoroughly confused.

In the first place, he had expected Eadgith to hate the child as Leila did, for many of the same reasons and for others as well. And yet, so far, to the baby she had shown only sympathy and affection, and she had not asked him a single question about Matilda. Indeed, now that he looked back over the weeks since Drage’s birth, sympathy and affection were all she had shown him as well.

And, on the one hand, he was grateful she had found the baby unattended before Leia had had a chance to hurt herself, but on the other, it seemed that Eadgith had spent the entire afternoon in his room. Her presence among his boots and shirts and razors seemed a return to an intimacy they had not shared in fourteen years, and, more awkward still, it meant she must now realize that it was an intimacy he was not sharing with Leila either.

“The nurse, you mean,” Eadgith said when the silence between them had grown too heavy for even the baby’s babbling to ease.

“Oh, the nurse…”

“I told her not to go far, as I was certain you would wish to speak with her. But I think that might have been the wrong thing to say if I wanted to keep her around,” she said with a wry half-​​smile.

“Oh, her – she’s nothing,” he growled. “Leila picked her. Her own dear old nursie is at home.”

“You might ask Edris. Now that Ceolred is toddling around, she might loan you her baby nurse until you find a new one.”

He grunted. Leia was squirming wildly by now. He did not know what to do with her.

Eadgith finally approached him, stroked the baby’s head, and said, “You tell Pa – Leofric all about how much fun you had getting dirty and how much fun you had getting clean today. And I shall see you later. Until the nurse comes, of course,” she added for his benefit.

“I shall go see Edris as soon as I leave here,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said as she walked past him.

“Wait – ”

She stopped in the doorway and turned back to him.

Now that it was without the bitter expression she always wore before him – now that he truly looked at it – he could see that her face had taken on a gentle dignity over the years, despite her freckles. Perhaps she had grown wise. Certainly she had suffered. Through him! And yet she had been a good mother to his children, a good grandmother to his grandchildren.

Now she stood before him without bitterness, and had been kind to this child who should have been only a further insult to her.

“It is I who should be thanking you,” he said.

“Then do,” she said with her half-​​smile.

“Thank you.”

She inclined her head graciously. “You are welcome.”