Your story-dealer, ink-spinner, scribe, and companion – he clears his throat and says, ‘This business for which you need me . . .’
An excuse, to escape the torment of Bisclavret’s blushes. You pat the bed next to you. ‘Will you sit here,’ you say, ‘and just . . . hold me?’
Often you find some delight in letting him use you, but you have no taste for that today. You lean tentatively against him, and after a while he puts his arms around you. Very gradually, you shift into a horizontal position, tangled in each other’s limbs, breath hot against necks. He says, in a voice so low it’s hardly audible, ‘Is it that bad, how your Bisclavret makes you feel?’
‘I don’t have words for it,’ you confess, and curl tighter against him. ‘Only this . . . sense ofloss, for something I never had.’
You expect him to offer solutions, or some wise or witty line of poetry from one of those old books of his. No doubt they have plenty to offer on the subject of love, and plenty more on thetheme of desire. But he doesn’t. He braids his fingers with yours, holding your hand tightly, and finally whispers, ‘I’m sorry.’
He has nothing to be sorry for. You want to tell him that this is not his place, that you did not invite him here so that he could comfort you, that he has a part to play and this is not it.
But you cannot bring yourself to voice the words, so you pull him a little closer, and let yourself weep for the hollow ache inside you that you cannot understand or fill.
16
Him
The lady again. She helps him with his armour, and the heavy mail turns to light in her hands, shimmering silver between clever fingers. The laces and fastenings of the rest are nothing to her. He should learn the trick of it himself, or else find an eager squire to help him, but he’s loath to lose the simple intimacy of her hands as she binds him into the strange new skin he’s been given.
She has bold, bright eyes, and she watches him intently. Sometimes he catches her staring, and she never flushes and looks away: she holds his gaze, stalwart and steady, waiting for him to react.
He doesn’t know how to react. He doesn’t know what it is that he wants from her.
He wants . . . safety. He rides home each night and finds it in his barred door and the quiet peace of his father’s manor, despite the ever-present sound of rain finding its way through the holes in the roof, the furniture lost to woodworm, the coldness of the bare walls with no hangings to keep out the chill. It helps to know that he has a place to retreat to, a way out when everything becomes overwhelming. But still it’s lonely, to turn his back on the lights of the castle and make his daily pilgrimage to a place that has yet to start feeling like his own. Each morningwhen he rides out, he thinks to himself:today I will stay. Each night, he feels the wolf in his skin and leaves before it becomes more than a phantom. With enough time alone, enough quiet and stillness, he can persuade it back to sleep, but here amongst the noise and the lights it wakes up and demands attention.
His cousin waits for him most nights – always, ostensibly, with some question or decision to justify the waiting, but it’s clear he is watching to be sure Bisclavret comes back. To be sure he comes back human.
And he does. Mostly. He’s careful. He can do this, if he has his lonely nights away from everyone else, and never pushes the boundaries of his capabilities.
He feels as though he will spend his entire life being careful. He would like, for once, to be free.
And the woman – she’s not freedom, as such. But he feels safe around her. Her touch is gentling; it doesn’t wake the wolf. When he’s with her, he feels as human as he ever does, and when she looks at him, it’s clear that’s all she sees. There’s no sense of being stripped bare the way there is when the king’s gaze rests on him a moment too long.
Maybe that’s why he says, ‘Perhaps this afternoon, we might visit the castle gardens together.’
Her smile is the sun breaking through thick clouds. ‘I would welcome it,’ she says. ‘There are few flowers at this time of year, but there’s beauty still, if you know where to look.’
He looks at her and wonders where else he could possibly turn his eye. ‘Then you will have to show me.’
And she does. She is chaperoned, as ever, by her kinswoman – an aunt or suchlike, greying hair all but entirely hidden beneath her cap and veil, with a strict enough air, but she seems to approve of Bisclavret, for she always gives them enough distance to feel that they’re alone. Bisclavret assumes, nonetheless,that his behaviour is being observed, and reported to the king, and tries not to examine too closely how he feels about the king watching him by proxy even in these moments of intimacy.
They walk together among the kitchen herbs that fill the air with their sweet scents, and he tells her about the rosemary that his mother grew from a cutting from the local monastery, which like enough still flourishes beside their home, if the servants have remembered to tend it. She tells him about her own mother, and the loom she inherited from her; about her weaving, and the colours that make her happiest. By the time they pass from the kitchen gardens to the orchard, her smile has grown into laughter like daylight, and his own smile creeps unaccustomed across his lips.
This late in the year, there are no apples left clinging to the branches, nor any other fruit that he might offer her, so in place of such sweetness, he finds himself telling her stories he has long kept close to his chest. About his father the knight, whose legacy loomed over the family long after he was gone, and in whose shadow he has always lived without knowing the man who cast it. About his mother and the strain that exile put on her – second only to the strain of being mother to a monster, which was what undid her, in the end, as it would anybody who looked into a cradle and felt only horror at what they saw there. He may as well have killed her himself.
Bisclavret refrains from mentioning that part, though something about the lady invites his confidences. Nevertheless, he thinks she understands the true nature of what he is telling her, the loneliness and the love and the resentment all, though her own stories sound different resonances.
By the time they hear the church bells ringing for Vespers, they are no longer strangers to each other. Bisclavret walks her to her chamber – up a small stair, at the other end of the hallfrom the king’s own room – as though he is courting her, and perhaps he is. He knows not if this is friendship or something else, nor what she wants it to be, and he will not humiliate himself by asking.
‘Wait here for a moment,’ she tells him, and he does. She returns with a long, woven strip, such that she might have worn as a belt, made in all the colours she said brought her joy. Carefully, she wraps it around his own waist; it is just long enough, over his winter layers, to tie. ‘There. Now you may wear my handiwork and my colours.’
He swallows the lump in his throat and takes her hand that he might kiss it. ‘You do me too great an honour.’
‘I have spied you at training,’ she says, with a small smile, ‘and more than that I have heard tell from the grooms and the servants how well it is that you acquit yourself. So it seems to me I best make known my favour now, before you have the whole kingdom in love with you.’
In love. The words hang half-spoken in the air between them, though she neither confirms them as her own feelings nor makes to deny them. Bisclavret looks at the gift she has given him – tablet woven, he thinks; his mother taught him, once, to occupy his idle hands, but he never had the knack of patterning like this – and his hopes and affections and fears flood through him all at once, tangled in each other, becausehe can’t do this, but something about her makes him believe that he could. She sees only his humanity and, in her presence, so does he.
‘I will wear it with pride,’ he tells her.
