Iylaine was sleeping in her bed, with the pale northern light coming in to illuminate her fair hair and the curve of her cheek. To Egelric she looked like his little girl again, and it seemed absurd to believe that there was a baby hiding beneath the tented blankets. She was scarcely more than a baby herself.
“Have a peek!” Malcolm whispered eagerly.
“Merry Christmas!” Egelric beamed.
Malcolm smiled, but he closed his eyes and lolled his head as if he had recently taken the worst of a fistfight.
Malcolm awoke, and Iylaine was not there. He even thought he had awoken because she was not there. Bright flames were still licking over the logs, but there was something like a chill in the room.
Iylaine’s pillow was quite cold, and there was no lingering warmth beneath the blankets on her side of the bed. This was not in itself a troubling thing: she often rose late in the night to eat the little snack that Mother Curran always left for her in the kitchen. But if the logs had not yet burned down to embers, they had not been sleeping long, and she should not have been hungry.
It was the longest night of the year but for one. For some time Dunstan had been feeling that his summer love was dwindling with the daylight, though he fought against the dark as his pagan ancestors had, with the artificial light of great fires. His were lit not by brands but by the tip of his pen.
The tragedy was that his beloved could not read his poetry, no more than a blind thing, and the glow of his fires across the wide darkness was nothing to her. His summer love only knew light by the warmth on her cheek.
Mouse laughed, but Ethelwyn scarcely smiled, and so her laugh died off into sheepish giggles.
She did not know how to talk to this sensitive, serious man. If he had merely been arrogant and rude she would have known how to talk to him—as she had two days before when they had stood dripping before the fire. But there was no fun in teasing a man who was only angry because he was hurt.
Ethelwyn did not know what to say to this incomprehensible, unpredictable girl. He could not even tell whether she meant him well or ill. He did not know what had happened during that dance, and he did not trust her smile. Fortunately this time there was only a wall behind him.
But he was a gentleman and she a lady, and courtesy therefore required that he speak first.
Hetty was a little sorry she could not dance, after all. Her husband’s musicians were excellent, and they possessed the additional charm of playing music that her husband had composed.
There was no doubt she had married a very talented man, and there was no doubt in her fond heart that men would still be speaking his name a thousand years hence, just as men still spoke today of Virgil and other poets of a thousand years before.
It was all as mortifying as Ethelwyn had feared—or not quite, but nearly.
“Oh!” Hetty cried. “There you are hiding, naughty boy. Wyn, I want to introduce you to my friend Mouse, Lady Wynflaed’s sister, whom I mentioned to you earlier. Mouse, this is Ethelwyn Ealstan, who is the nephew of Lord Dyrnemoras, and Egelric’s steward, and my own dear friend.”
Ethelwyn lifted a hand and held it hanging limp and awkward between them. Mouse was unnerved by the gesture.
“My girls? God help their husbands!”
Chapters
Latest Comment