“Yes.” He kept staring at the photo, so she went on. “Mum’s name is Allison. Dad is Martin.” There was a pang in her gut at saying his name.
Arthur held it close to his face. “That’s extraordinary,” he said, and then his voice softened. “You look so happy.”
She did. It had been taken after her university graduation some half a year earlier, a girl who would never imagine what was to come sandwiched between Allison and Martin, her arms slung around their necks. Allison gleefully held out Vera’s diploma, and Martin wore her graduation cap lopsided on his head, the tassel dangling down in his face while Vera was caught mid-laugh. She wouldn’t have laughed at all if she’d known about the cancer already growing inside her father on that very day.
“Who made the photo?” Arthur asked.
“Hmm?” Vera said absently.
“You said someone holds the camera and presses a button. Who had the camera?”
She understood why he might be curious. In the photo, Vera seemed like she was staring right through the picture, sharing a private joke with the viewer. Arthur correctly guessed that the moment had been shared between Vera and the photographer.
“I don’t remember,” she mumbled as sadness threatened to overtake her. She felt his eyes on her and deliberately didn’t meet them.
“Shall I start?” she asked, overly brightly.
Vera held the book between them so he could see while she read aloud. Her voice came out more hesitant than it ever had when reading with her parents. But she soon slipped into the story, and out came her voices for each character. At her silliest dwarf voice, Vera felt the deep rumble of Arthur’s laughter reverberating through his shoulder. When the chapter ended, she passed the book to him. He looked at her in confusion.
“It’s your turn.”
Arthur licked his lips and cleared his throat, flustered—but he started reading in his deep timbre. His happened to be the chapter when Gollum showed up. Vera’s jaw fell open in delight as Arthur pitched his voice into a scratchy whisper for the creature.
“That is a splendid Gollum,” she interrupted.
Arthur tucked his chin to his shoulder with a grin. “Aside from my tutor and my parents, I haven’t actually read out loud to anybody.”
“Well, you’re very good at it.”
“My father would be proud,” he said. He found his place and resumed reading.
Arthur’s voice was so soothing. She didn’t remember choosing to close her eyes, nor how her head came to rest on his shoulder. In a half-awake moment of clarity, she realized that her cheek nuzzled into him, but with his steady voice rumbling through her and the heat of his broad shoulder beneath her skin, she couldn’t bear to turn away from such contentment. It almost felt like being with Vincent. She could nearly pretend it. Perhaps he might be able to imagine her as Guinevere—the real Guinevere of his memory. Maybe this would be their way forward … a broken and imperfect way that Vera and Arthur might bring one another comfort.
Eventually, he must have stopped reading. She came around as he was easing her down onto her pillow, and then his weight was gone from the bed. She opened her eyes in time to see him slipping the photo back into the book and setting it on the table before he touched the slab to lower the lights. Vera let her eyes fall shut as she felt the blanket being gingerly laid over her shoulders.
She’d always thought, always assumed, that Matilda was the one who came to check on her during the night, lowering the lights and putting her book away. Now, she wasn’t as sure.
That night marked the start of their careful friendship and an immediate shift in Vera’s life in Camelot.
“It’s probably best to display some affection,” Arthur had said the next day as they headed into town. “May I hold your hand?”
Her heart nearly leapt out of her chest. “That would be fine,” she said.
But by the week’s end, he inclined his head toward her to share private jokes at dinner. She would lay a hand on his arm as she laughed. It was a convincing act partly because there was no pretense in it for Vera. She liked him. His nearness felt like breathing fresh air after being too long in a cellar. And the people of Camelot began to notice.
It wouldn’t all be fixed in a snap, but the change had already begun to undulate out from them. Most of it was surprisingly due to Gawain, who Vera was convinced absolutely loathed her. Lancelot had insisted she was imagining it, but she would swear his scowl darkened with suspicion when he looked at her.
She didn’t have much cause to encounter him, though. Gawain was regularly dispatched to repair magical deficits through Camelot and the neighboring towns. It was a charge he apparently performed well, for the magic complaints in court significantly dropped the next week.
On the loveliest winter morning, Vera and Arthur watched Lancelot and Percival playing a game at the pit as the castle’s cooks prepared ingredients nearby. Yule was two days away with Christmas on its heels, and Vera and Arthur would travel with a small party (as she delightedly learned was customary) to Glastonbury for the Yule festivities the following morning. All seemed right in Camelot. The celebratory boar hunt was underway outside the town walls, and a great horn blasted in the distance, signaling that the party was closing in on the boar. The gates should soon be opened so they could parade the carcass back to the cook site.
Margaret, the head chef at the castle who was sweet and grandmotherly about all things except for the business of running the kitchen, paused her onion chopping at the sound.
“They’ll be back with the beast soon,” she said, gazing off in the general direction. “I thought we’d have a bit longer.” She wiped her hands on her apron and left her chopping post, calling out as she went. “Oy! Call up the butcher’s boy to magic up the meat. Let’s get the fire stoked for the spit!” She gave one final shout over her shoulder, “And for the love of God, someone finish chopping that veg!”
Vera looked to her left and right. All the other castle staff were already occupied. She wasn’t sure anyone else had heard Margaret’s orders.
She left the wall of the pit without a word to Arthur, stepped up to the vacant spot at the table, and took up the knife. She’d not chopped even a turnip in months, but years of kitchen work at the George were not so easily forgotten.
