There was resentment there, clearly. ‘I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.’
She was quiet for a moment. ‘I am content,’ she repeated. ‘That is enough for me. Of course I wish that things were different, but if we spend our lives forever craving that which we don’t and can never have, then we condemn ourselves to years of misery, and we will never find happiness.’
There was good sense in that, I supposed. Father Erchembald was forever offering me similar pieces of wisdom, and he was usually right.
‘Besides,’ she said, ‘in another few months I will have reason to be joyful again, for I will have a new life to take care of, to hold in my arms.’
‘You’re with child?’ I asked, surprised. It didn’t show – not yet, at any rate.
‘I think so,’ Beatrice said. ‘Don’t mention it to my husband, should you see him before I do. I want him to hear it from me first.’
‘You’re with his child but you haven’t told him?’
‘Not yet. He’ll be pleased with the news, won’t he?’
From the little I’d seen of him, I reckoned it would take more than news of his impending fatherhood to please that man, but it would be unkind of me to say so.
‘What husband wouldn’t be?’ I said instead. ‘Especially if the child turns out to be a son to whom he can teach the skills for battle and the pleasures of the hunt.’
We sat in silence for a while as the mist closed in. The sun’s rim was almost upon the horizon and the cold of dusk surrounded us.
‘It seems to me that an oath is much like a marriage,’ Beatrice mused after a while. A smile crossed her face and her golden hair glimmered in the evening light. ‘I am sworn to my husband, while you’re married to my brother.’
I laughed at the comparison, which had never before crossed my mind.
‘It’s true, though, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘In their own way they bind us both, and prevent us from pursuing our own ambitions and desires.’
‘Only if we allow them to do so,’ I replied, although the words seemed hollow. For the purpose of oaths was to maintain order in the world. If men and women were free to do as they would and go wherever they pleased, all would quickly become ungovernable. Oaths help ensure that people follow the laws of the land; they offer protection and security to both parties. For just as a knight swears to defend his lord’s life with his own, so the lord in return pledges to furnish him with the arms and equipment to do so, a roof to sleep beneath and a stipend by which he may live, or else with lands and their rents sufficient to support him. Or so, at least, it went in principle.
‘When we first met you told me that you were married only to your sword,’ Beatrice said. ‘You should follow where it takes you.’
Indeed I remembered saying that, and I’d meant it too. In those weeks and months of despair after losing Oswynn and my former lord and so many of my brothers-in-arms in the ambush at Dunholm, I’d had no one to fight for, nothing to lose.
‘Things are different now,’ I said. ‘I have responsibilities. To Robert, to my own knights, to the people of Earnford. They depend on me.’
Beatrice was silent for a while, as if lost in thought.
‘Do what you think is right, not what Robert expects of you,’ she said eventually. ‘That is my advice. He’ll respect you all the more for it; if not at first, then in time.’
I nodded, though in truth I wasn’t entirely persuaded. ‘You came to give me comfort on the day that we buried your father,’ I said, and managed a smile. ‘I should be offering you words of consolation, not the other way around.’
‘We all knew his time was coming.’ She spoke softly, looking down at the ground. ‘He was so weak, and in such pain by the end. When he finally passed away I was as much relieved as I was saddened, because I knew then that he wouldn’t have to suffer any longer, but instead would be with God. Does that sound strange?’
‘Not at all.’
Beatrice nodded, and I hoped she was reassured. ‘There’s to be a feast tonight in his memory,’ she said after a while. ‘You’ll come, won’t you?’
‘Perhaps,’ I replied, although it wasn’t as if I had much choice. To refuse the invitation would seem disrespectful. Despite our many differences and all the frustrations I’d felt in recent months, I still admired Robert as a lord and valued him as a friend, one of the few that it seemed I had in those days. The last thing I wanted was for that friendship to sour. Yet he could not forever ask these things of me and expect me to remain content.
Beatrice understood that. Why couldn’t he understand it, too?