The Lord's Inconvenient Vow

‘Are you about to be sick?’

‘No. Head.’

Head. A flash of memory returned, of her mother retreating into the darkness of her room. The doctor, a venerable man from Padua, proclaimed hemicrania in the name of science and grief in the name of the soul. He’d prescribed a list of tonics, but admitted that silence, darkness and rest were the only cures he’d found to be universally effective. Sometimes her mother would be violently ill and only then settle into the agonised pain of darkness, but the worst usually passed in a day or so. As in many things Sam and her brothers learned to provide whatever alleviated the symptoms of their mother’s grief, knowing they could never chase it away completely.

Sam inspected the rigid statue seated on her cot as if in the docks awaiting judgement and sighed.

He winced.

She was about to debate taking off his boots when she realised he wasn’t wearing any.

‘When did this start?’ she whispered.

‘S’morning.’

‘It’s noon. Why didn’t you come sooner?’

He didn’t bother answering. She put her arm around his shoulders and guided him down on to the pillow. He was about as helpful as one of the statues he resembled, but she persevered. When his head settled on the pillow he groaned as if she was disembowelling him and she prepared to grab the basin, but he merely grimaced.

‘Too much noise. People.’

Meaning he would not have come even now unless he’d been desperate. She stifled another frustrated sigh; keeping quiet wasn’t her forte but she’d try.

She took the linen strip she used to clean her brushes, dipped it in water and very gently placed it on his forehead. A rivulet ran over his temple and into his hair. His whole body stiffened, but after a moment he seemed to abandon all hope of salvation and gave himself over to agony. She sat beside him, measuring every movement and sound. Even in the dark she could see the flickering of the muscles along his jaw, the tense straining of the tendons of his neck.

She had no idea how much time passed until his body began relaxing. She saw it in the lines about his eyes first, and then his jaw, softening the deep grooves by his mouth. His lips parted a little as if about to speak, but closed again, not quite as tense.

He had a beautiful mouth, drawn with confidence and skill, a mouth a Michelangelo would have paid good money to draw. She reached for her pad, but realised even the sound of pencil on paper might feel like a cannonade to him.

He finally slept, his hands uncurling from their death grips. One arm slipped off the narrow bed and he mumbled, but didn’t wake as she gently draped it back over him. After a while she braved covering him and still later she turned her chair back to the table and began sketching as quietly as she could in the shifting gold glow of the lamp.

* * *

‘Sam...’

She put down her pencil very gently and turned. He was watching her and the fact that his eyes were open without squinting was a very good sign. She smiled.

‘A little better?’

‘Leagues better. I’m sorry.’

‘You’re an idiot. Don’t rise. You need to sleep still.’

‘I should return...’

‘You should sleep. Everyone else is.’

‘What? What time is it?’

‘Some time near dawn, I think they just rang two bells.’

‘I’ve slept...a whole day?’ He sounded appalled. He levered himself very warily into a sitting position and rubbed at his left temple. Hastily she placed a clean sheet of paper over her drawing. She preferred he not know she sketched him while he was unconscious.

‘Still bad?’

‘No, just echoes.’

‘Have you always had megrims?’

He scowled and winced.

‘I do not have megrims. Megrims are what women have when they wish to keep their husband at bay. It was merely a headache.’

‘That is not only very unfair to bedevilled wives but also inaccurate. Megrims are a documented ailment. Doctor Carlucci was an authority on them and he said hemicranias were written about by Galen himself. My mother had them. Did you have these during the war?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Why of course not? Lucas and Chase told me the war did bad things to many soldiers.’

‘True, but it started long after that. About a year after Jacob died. It does not happen often. You need not fear you have wed an invalid.’

‘I fear I have wed the stubbornest man this side of the equator.’

His mouth relaxed and he leaned against the wall, flexing his legs carefully before him. He was so big, he had to angle his stockinged feet away so they wouldn’t slide under her chair. Her own toes curled in against the urge to extend her feet to meet his.