“A delicious meal.”
We stood in silence for several moments unable to make conversation. Finally, she suggested: “Shall we take a turn around the room?”
Reluctantly, I allowed her to take my arm and pull me away from the window. We passed Mary, squinting over her hoop. Sigrid whispered: “My sister is to be married—a third cousin of the king. But she has always been uninteresting and I doubt it will improve her much in that regard.”
I glanced backward to ensure we had not been overheard. Mary was using a fingernail to scratch her chin. Satisfied, I looked over at Sigrid, who employed one of her brilliant smiles. “I,” she continued, “have had six proposals already. One of them I suppose does not count, for he died before he could actually propose. But I am told it was his intention.”
“How awful—”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Awful.”
I felt we might have different meanings. “It seems you have many opportunities for happiness.”
“One of the offers came in a letter. There is talk of my beauty even in faraway kingdoms.” She laid her other hand on my arm. “I mean that modestly, of course. One cannot control their looks any more than they can choose which way they come out of the womb.”
We had reached the end of the room and had to turn to reverse direction. “Very contrary to personality, which can be shaped and molded with effort.”
“Yes, and we must be thankful for that,” she said, missing my point. “Mary has never met her betrothed. We both sat for portraits so hers could be sent ahead. Hers was, I’m afraid, a bit overdone. Sir William, to whom she is promised, may be surprised when he sees her. And somehow, in mine, the artist did not quite manage to render me justly.”
“It is a challenge to accurately capture a person’s likeness.”
She looked over at me. “You are quite good-looking.”
I paused before saying: “You do me a kindness.” Whatever tier she had placed me on, it was, in her estimation, beneath her own, and so the compliment could be given with warmth and generosity.
“You have thick hair and sharp cheekbones and big eyes. But you’d benefit from lighter skin. Have you tried paint? I’ll tell you my secrets.” She held out her fingers, as she listed them. “Curl papers at night. Rouge in the morning. Always use two maidservants to pull the strings of your undergarments—don’t settle for the strength of one. Raw eggs for complexion. A beer-based hair tonic. When in a pinch, you can use a drop of belladonna to dilate your pupils.” She narrowed her eyes, looking at me. “You might try a veil in the sun, and gloves. And I don’t mean that old falconry one.”
“I fear if I incorporated those steps into my morning routine, I’d only manage to finish as the sun sets.”
“Do you mean to say you do nothing? Why, it’s remarkable you look as you do!”
“I suppose I am happy with being a bit remarkable,” I mused. “It is better than the opposite.”
“Oh,” she said with a chuckle. “You have given me a laugh.”
I laughed with her. But in that moment, Sigrid became a mirror: What was I compared to her? She was blond and I brunette. She was blue-eyed and I brown. She grew up surrounded by women and nursemaids and governesses and knew how to do artistic stitches and make velvet roses and play the harp and sing songs in a golden voice that felt like drowning in intolerable honey. (This, she had demonstrated to Henry and I, earlier in the clearing. Her voice, I acknowledged, was quite pretty, and had served an unintended purpose of flushing out the birds for Miriam.)
“Ethel,” she admonished. “You must not think me vapid. Countenance impacts marriage and marriage is freedom. Before I came here, I thought:I’ll marry the eldest one. And get an heir! But it turned out the eldest is Edmund. And, well—you’ve seen him. And I would be stuck coming tothisplace every year.” One of her smiles. “Not to mention I fancy one of his brothers. Much better looking. You always end up wanting what you shouldn’t have.” She mouthed, noiselessly:Henry.
I didn’t respond. The men began to enter the drawing room. The doors opened and they streamed forth, in pairs and trios, and then, alone, there was Henry, watched carefully by our two sets of eyes from across the room.
It had been clear, during our days together, that Sigrid had wanted Henry to pay attention to her. But she expected the world to conform to her whims and I had assumed, or hoped, that Henry was just a part of that. The idea of them marrying curdled my stomach—casting each glance and approving nod from their parents all throughout supper in a new light.
In all the talk of men and marriage—the matchmaking and trading of women, the planning of lineage and futures and dowries—there had been nothing to prepare me for wanting Henry. Desire was not a determinant in the outcomes of women. But I had felt it the past weeks, every gesture of his threaded to mine, every flick of his eyebrow, turn of his wrist. (His wrists! Which I had only just noticed, the hair on the backs golden, the skin nutty and roasted, and surely tasting of salt. I had licked my own in the privacy of my room, imagining.)
I had started to piece together the parts of him that I had been watching, unknowingly, all along. He was kind, to others and to animals. (He had, that very day, fished a drowning bumblebee from a barrel of water.) He was patient, waiting for hours for the birds, or sitting at gatherings with his father while the men droned on about trade and taxation and the state of the coffers. He was always ready to laugh—delighted in turn by the littlest things around him. And, above all, he was interested—in the world, and in me, and in all that I had to say. He asked for my thoughts. He responded in turn. That he did the same with Sigrid, I had been willing and ready to ignore.
“And you?” Sigrid asked, as we neared the men. “Are you promised to some village local?”
“Something like that,” I said, without taking my eyes off Henry. I didn’t just want to lick his wrists, I wanted to eat them, to make him a part of me, forever.
That night, I drank a raw egg, straight from the shell.
A few days later, we were out, once more, with the birds. Henry had let me take a well-trained tiercel from the mews, and we exercised both falcons in a scrubby thicket of pine. Sigrid sat on a small rock and watched us, bored.
“Henry,” she called. “You have a wonderful walk.”
“Excuse me?” he said, over his shoulder.
