The first time I thought he must be ill. He let me hold his hand when I knelt by his bedside, but he wouldn’t tell me what was ailing him. His skin wasn’t clammy, his brow wasn’t running with sweat, he didn’t have a fever, he wasn’t coughing or sneezing or finding it hard to breathe, but in spite of all that he looked in some sort of pain. I feared he might be dying and wondered whether I should call the wise woman or the priest, but when I asked him he said they could do nothing for him. I asked him whether I could bring him anything, whether I could recite for him some of the poetry that he liked, which I’d learned at the hearth in my father’s hall, and whether that might help. He said he wanted only to be alone and that I needn’t worry about him. But I did worry, especially when the same thing happened a few nights later, and a third time the night after that. I might not have loved him the way he had hoped, but over time I’d grown to care for him. The last thing I wanted was for him to die, because where would that leave me then?
Nothing I could say, though, would stir him, so I had no choice but to do as he asked and leave him alone with his thoughts. The first couple of times a night’s rest was enough to see him right, and the next day he would rise with the cock’s first crow and be smiling and laughing once more. The third time, however, he failed to appear at dawn. At the second hour I went up to his chamber with what was left of the previous day’s bread and some slices of sausage and a jug of well water, to find him not sleeping but beneath the blankets, lying on his side in the same position he had been the night before, hollow-eyed as he stared at the wall. He didn’t look up as I came in, nor as I set down the victuals by his bedside and drew up a stool.
I must have sat with him for an hour or more, not saying anything because it was impossible to get any sort of reply from him. He would talk if he wanted, and if he didn’t he wouldn’t. And so I stroked his wiry hair and noticed for the first time how there was a bald patch at the back of his head where the skin was discoloured, and I wondered whether that was a war scar from his younger days, and realised how much he had yet to tell me about his life. Was it because he simply didn’t want to bring those memories to mind, or because he thought I wasn’t interested? Either way it made me sad. And I ate some of the bread and poured myself a cup of water, and I closed my eyes and listened to the birdsong outside and the clink-clink-clink of the smith at his forge.
He said, ‘They hate me.’
He spoke quietly, but even so he startled me. It took me a while to find my voice. I asked him what he meant, but of course I already knew the answer.
‘Orm and Ketil,’ he said. ‘?lfric too, but it’s my sons I care most about. They despise me. Orm especially.’
‘They don’t hate you,’ I said, trying to soothe him, and it was partly true. I was fairly sure that Ketil bore no grudge against his father, and if he sometimes appeared to it was only because, being younger, he tended to follow Orm’s example in everything.
Skalpi, though, told me not to be foolish. He knew well what was happening, he said, and if I didn’t see it then I was either blind or lying, and that if I had taken to lying to him then that meant I hated him too.
‘No, Lord,’ I protested. ‘That’s not true.’
‘Then you resent me at least. I know you do, before you try to deny it.’
I supposed I did, in a small way, but not for anything he had done. He’d always been kind to me, after all, and had given me freedoms I’d never enjoyed at home, even while my father still lived. If there was anything I resented him for, it was for not being the husband I had hoped for, and there was nothing he could do about that.
He knew from my silence that he was right.
He said, ‘At least you’re honest with me. Not like the others.’
And he told me everything. About his first wife, ?lfswith, and her faithlessness towards him. How he longed for the companionship that she had given him. Not the sort that his bed-warmers gave him, that wasn’t what he meant, before you say anything. He wanted a woman who was learned, who knew her letters and could read to him in the long winter evenings, whom he could engage in conversation and in the table games he liked to play, who shared his love of poetry and of music and perhaps had some skill with harp or flute. A wife who was pleasing to the eye and whom he could proudly show off. Yes, he wanted that too, of course he did, because every man does. But he had no desire for more children, not at his age, and besides he doubted that he could any more. If he lived another ten years he would be lucky, he told me. His health was not what it had once been; each winter was harder than the last. It was his intention to spend whatever time God allowed him in peace. He had enough woes with the two children he had, and wouldn’t want Orm and Ketil to think that he was trying to rob them of their inheritance.
And as I listened I couldn’t help but feel guilty. All these weeks and months he had tried to please me and to show me his affection, and what had I done for him in return? No wonder he thought everyone was against him. He felt alone, he said, in a way he’d not felt since he was nine winters old and his father sent him to be fostered in the house of his uncle across the sea, where they spoke a tongue he didn’t properly understand and they laughed at him for his English ways.
But it wasn’t just that which was troubling him. There was more, something that had been pressing on his mind and he was reluctant to tell anyone, even though we would probably have learned it soon enough.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
The foreigners were marching, he said. King Wilelm was coming north, and he didn’t know what was going to happen.
‘He’s coming north?’