*
What did I do? Well, as I was saying, I could hear the groans of the boards, the shuffling of his feet as he crossed the floor. I lay there, as still as anything, clutching the knife in my hand, hardly daring to breathe as I watched the door and listened. At one point he seemed to pause, and everything was so silent that I thought maybe he’d gone away, but then I heard the footsteps again, closer this time, and a fumbling at the latch.
I lay stiff as a board, my whole body gripped by fear. If I screamed, who would hear me? The door swung open, and he ducked beneath the lintel into the room. It was so dark I could barely make him out.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ I told him before he could take another step.
‘I didn’t mean to wake you,’ he mumbled. His words were slow and uneven. It looked like he had something in his hand. A flagon, probably.
‘Get out,’ I said.
He didn’t seem to hear me, or if he did he chose to ignore me. I sat up, one hand drawing the blankets up around me because the night was cold. He came closer, and beneath the covers my fingers curled more tightly around the knife’s hilt, but he stopped at the foot of the bed, sitting down with a sigh, facing away from me. I heard the splash of something that I took to be ale, or more likely mead; he favoured stronger drinks when he could lay his hands on them. There was a sourness on him that even from the other end of the bed I could smell, like he’d been sick over himself.
‘They hate me,’ he said quietly but with an edge to his voice. There was a twinge in my gut as I was reminded of Skalpi. He’d said much the same, if not those exact words, that time all those months ago.
I didn’t know if he wanted me to answer and decided it was better to stay quiet and wait to see what he did next. If I just let him say what he wanted, I thought, then maybe he would leave.
‘They hate me,’ Orm repeated, in case I hadn’t heard or because he’d forgotten having already said it. ‘All of them. Even Ketil, worm that he is. He used to be my friend, but now they’ve poisoned him against me. He’ll hardly speak a word to my face. They think I don’t know the things they say about me. They think they’re so clever and that I’m stupid. They think I don’t see what’s really happening. But I do. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Of course,’ I said, trying not to let my voice tremble. Better just to agree, even if I didn’t entirely understand what it was I was supposed to be agreeing with.
‘Whatever I do, it’s never enough for them. They want me to be like Skalpi. Well, I’m not him, and I never will be. And he’s not coming back.’
You don’t know that, I wanted to say, and was going to tell him that if Skalpi had been captured there was a chance King Wilelm might sell him back to us. But I decided against contradicting him, and it was a good thing I did, because if I hadn’t then I might never have heard him say what he did, and then we might not be here now.
‘It’s because of me that he’s dead,’ he said. ‘It’s all my fault.’
And then something else happened that I wasn’t expecting: he started sobbing.
‘No, it isn’t,’ I said, and even then I remember asking myself why I was trying to comfort him, but I was scared and didn’t know what else to do. ‘It’s not your fault. How could it be?’
The tears kept coming. ‘It was me,’ he said. ‘There was never any Norman scouting party.’
He broke off, and it was then that I realised what he was saying. I couldn’t feel my limbs any more, could barely breathe. The room was swirling and the darkness was rising all around me.
‘What did you do?’ I asked, almost choking on the words, but I had to get them out. It couldn’t be true, surely? But what else could he mean?
He killed him, I thought. His own father. My husband.
And now he was here, in my chamber, and I knew that I had to get away from him. I wanted to get up and run, out the door and down the stairs and into the yard, and lose myself in the night, but fear held me. Even drunk he was probably still faster on his feet than me, and besides I had to pass him in order to reach the door.
‘He never loved you,’ he said as if he hadn’t heard me. The tears were gone and his voice was hard. ‘Not like I love you. He never cared for you as a man should.’ His weight shifted on the end of the bed as he turned towards me. ‘But I can.’
‘You don’t love me,’ I said as my blood ran cold. ‘You don’t.’
Just hearing him say that made me feel I’d done something I shouldn’t, something shameful.