Where was Hastings?
He was nearly finished breaking his fast when there was a sudden silence in the great hall. He looked up to see Hastings standing beside his mother-aye, it was his mother, but he would not have believed it except Hastings was there as well. She was clean, her hair was combed and braided loosely about her head. She was wearing a gown that fitted at the waist, the arms fitting tightly to the elbows, then flaring out so that they touched the ground when her arms were lowered. There was a set of keys on the gold chain about her waist. She was smiling. Then she looked up at Hastings and laughed at something she said. It wasn’t a mad laugh, but a sweet, bright laugh.
She didn’t look at all mad.
He felt a spurt of optimism, then shook his head. No, he remembered that she could be like this following those deep, long sleeps of hers. It was just a matter of time before her mind faded again and she would look at him as she would look at a stranger. He noticed she was limping slightly.
His mother smiled at everyone until she saw Glenda. She shrank against Hastings. Severin rose and strode to them.
“Mother?”
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“Aye. My Severin. Is it really you? ” She raised a thin, white hand and ; lightly stroked his face. “All the others are dead, your father, your brother, but you are not, thank the gracious Lord. You are very handsome, my son. I am glad you are home.”
He hugged her, saying in her ear, “Don’t be afraid of that plump wench over there. I will see to it that she never comes near you again.”
“She is not a nice girl,” Lady Moraine said, and hugged her son. “I am very hungry. Have you eaten everything or is there a heel of bread left for your poor mother?”
She was jesting with him. He looked over at Hastings, whose expression was unreadable. Why wasn’t she smiling like a loon? What was wrong?
He escorted his mother to the high trestle table and sat her in the lady’s chair beside him, a chair she had sat in her entire married life. He himself served her. He looked down and saw that Sir Roger was staring at her as if she were a ghost come to plague him. Clearly his mother had not done well here under his care. Had he never allowed her to eat in the great hall?
As for Glenda, that wench didn’t seem to be paying any attention at all to the high table, her eyes on her wooden plate, her knife stabbing at the thick slice of bread. He would ask Hastings to get to the bottom of
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this. What had Glenda really done to his mother?
He himself found out the answer to that question that same afternoon when he chanced to leave the men who were working on the western outer wall to have Hastings bathe and bandage a cut he had on his thumb. Actually, it was Gwent who had told him to seek out his wife. “Aye, my lord,” he had said, looking at that bleeding thumb, “your wife would have my toes for mulch were I not to send you to her.”
And so here he was, standing in front of the open door to the lord’s bedchamber. He heard voices from within. He started to open the door and stride in when he recognized his mother’s voice, but not her voice !
from the previous evening. No, this voice was low and thin, a thread of fear in it, and it raised the hair on the back of his neck.
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“I knew Sir Roger as a boy. He was sweet and slow and his father forced him to learn to be a knight. He had no chance against you. You have made a fool of him. You shan’t have him. My son will not allow it. You thought I would die, didn’t you, when you forced me into the forest with no cloak and no slippers?”