The Abbot lifted his head and barked, “What is it?”
His voice was sharp and snappish out of self-defense; he felt vaguely confused, as if some time had passed without him, and he feared he had been napping in his chair. It was one of the axioms of Abbot Adalbert’s existence that it were better to be found disagreeable than be found at a disadvantage.
“She does almost every afternoon,” Hattie was giggling somewhere far off. She paused, then, as one rarely paused while reading aloud, and in any case she was no longer speaking German. Nevertheless Hetty could not quite bring herself to wonder why.
Maire’s heavy-browed, broad-cheeked face was as round as a copper moon: as like her half-brother’s as the night sky was the same over every sea and shore.
On second glance, however, Cearball was struck by a silken, slant-eyed exoticism, so unlike Murchad that the effect was like seeing the moon rise in a foreign land and finding it changed.
For all the apparent informality of Sigefrith’s court, Malcolm had mapped out a finely-shaded protocol governing the manner in which his subjects were permitted to greet him.
“Hark!” Sigefrith said softly, and he held up a hand to halt Malcolm in mid-sentence.
“You’re too late, Father,” Cedric called.
The feet stopped abruptly, and the black robe swung forward and back against the legs like the stroke of a silent bell.
Egelric thrust the blankets down halfway to his hips, knocking Maire’s hand away in the surge of wool, but he paid her no more heed.
Maire was unaccustomed to sneaking about in her own house. She had not known there was a creaking board in the floor at the end of the hall. She had not known how loudly bare feet slapped on bare wood. She had not known that the door to this room squeaked on its hinges.
In his own house, Godred Whitehand wore fine leather shoes of such softness that any cat would have liked two pair to muffle the sound of his tramping paws.
There were many people whom Cedric did not want to see, but there were few whose knocks he could honestly ignore.
He wiped his nose a last time and hid his handkerchief beneath his pillow before calling, “Enter!” His own voice sounded as gruff as a grown man’s after so many childish tears.
“Ooooh, Estrid’s making K-bies!!”
Chapters
Latest Comment