On their first morning together, he cannot seem to find any words for her. Last night, they pressed close together as a limpet to a rock; today, there is a broad space between them. He thinks of the rhythm of his body against hers, how he wished that she would touch him; thinks that they must do it again, and again, until he fills her belly to bursting. It is what the queen wants, after all; why she found a wife for him.
As he pulls stockings and trunk hose over his legs, hiding their great hairiness, he keeps himself half-turned from her where she stands beside her clothes chest. She is running her fingers over the carvings on its lid; Petrus imagines that she would gather them if she could, hold them to her nose like a bouquet of real flowers, breathe them in until the heady scent so overwhelmed her that there was no room for anything else. He thinks of her strange comment last night about playing the lute; the desperate way she spoke, as if scrabbling for purchase, for something solid. Her father, she had said, told her that he plays.
“Who is your father?” he says, lacing the neck of his shirt. Her hand jerks back from the chest’s lid, her shoulders jump, and he winces. Abrupt; he was too abrupt.
“You mentioned him last night,” he adds, when she merely looks sideways at him. “Her Majesty told me nothing of your family.”
Something about her face seems suddenly creased; Petrus wonders, alarmed, whether she might weep. But she says only, “Anselme Raffelin. He is—he was—a merchant, and draper to the queen and her ladies.”
“I am sorry,” Petrus says. “How long since his death?”
Her eyes dull. “He is very much alive, Monsieur. You must have seen him at church—he gave me to you.”
His brows meet above his nose, and she adds, “He is . . . disgraced. A ship—a ship was lost at sea. Papa had debts, and not even all our fine things could pay them without that cargo.”
It is the longest speech she has made since the moment of their bonding, and the effort seems to leave her rather breathless, a palm to her breastbone, fingers curled inward.
Disgraced. Petrus lets the word roll inside his head a moment. It calms him. The daughter of a disgraced man—no matter how beautiful she is—must have some gratitude for any man who would take her for a wife.
And the queen offered to pay her dowry, if she wed him. “Her Majesty must hold Monsieur Raffelin in great esteem.”
His wife tucks her lips together and glances away.
They eat together, a meal delivered by servants who arch their necks to see the wild man’s bride, who widen their eyes at one another when they see her sitting in one of the chairs before the hearth. She has dressed herself, in a bodice and skirt of stormy blue and a kirtle of gray silk, though her fingers fumbled so with the laces and hooks that, almost, Petrus offered to help her. Only the sight of his hands, the memory of her fright when he spoke earlier, her silence and tucked-in lips, stayed him. She has tugged stockings over her bare legs and feet, but her hair still hangs, a little tangled, down her back.
She is so beautiful that it feels like a jest, a mockery of the reflection Petrus knows he will see if he turns his head toward the small round mirror.
When the servants have left them, she slices neatly into a loaf of bread so fresh it still carries a little oven-warmth. Busies herself with serving them each slices of fig and melon, her eyes on her work, her knife’s movements quick and efficient. She has done this before; she is not unaccustomed to kitchen work, to making even slices of fruit, of vegetables. To serving others. Even if her father was wealthy, as Petrus suspects, she still has not been raised to rely entirely upon servants. Petrus touches the neat slice of bread she has given him, feels the crust and spring of it, the hollow pockets filled with nothing but air. Thinks of how quickly the servant who carried it must have walked to get it from the kitchen to their chamber, still warm.
The words come suddenly, then, in a tone of studied nonchalance. “I was a bread bearer under our king’s father,” he says. “King Henri. He made me so himself, when I was about your age. Daily, I brought loaves warm from the kitchens to his table.”
His wife pauses, a bite of fig halfway to her mouth. He looks at the fruit—the red-purple pulp of it, studded with pale seeds—rather than at her face, her eyes, though he can feel them upon him now. Her confusion thickens the air between them. She does not understand. Why, he imagines her thinking, is he telling me this?
“It was a great honor,” he says, and though they are utterly true, the words sound thin, pathetic. He chances a look at her face and sees only a blank politeness, a little groove between her pale brows, like a line drawn into the earth with a stick.