by Joanna Bell
"Oh, fine!" Heather snapped a tea towel at me. "Not pregnant. Well what is it then? What's got you so –"
That was the precise moment I lost the ability to contain myself for one more second. I put the glass I was holding down on the counter and turned to the older woman as she waited, tapping an impatient foot, for an explanation.
"It's the dagger!" I began, taking her by the shoulders. "Your husband's dagger – it's – Heather, it's worth a lot of money! It's worth a lot more money than either of us thought and that means you don't have to worry about –"
"How much?"
I leaned in closer, as if about to impart a great secret. I even looked around suspiciously, although I wasn't sure why. Who was I looking for? Archeologists lurking in the shadows? "Millions. Professor Foxwell said millions. Not a million. Millions. Millions! Can you believe it?! Heather? Hey – are you – are you OK?"
She stumbled forward, one hand on her forehead and an expression of disbelief on her face. Quickly, I pulled out a chair and urged her to sit. "I'm sorry, I probably should have made you sit down before I told you."
Heather put her hands to her mouth and made a strange sound – was she crying? Laughing? Even when she looked up at me, her eyes glimmering, I still couldn't tell what specific emotion it was that animated the softly worn features of her face. "Millions?" She whispered.
I nodded. "Yes. Enough for you to buy a nice house in the country, with land – and livestock if you like – because you'll have enough to pay someone to help look after them. You won't need to get a job, you won't need to go on welfare – you can live how you like now, for the rest of your life!"
And then she really was crying. Softly at first and then harder. I reached down and put my arms around her shoulders.
"What's that?" I asked, when I couldn't quite make out the whispered, teary words she was speaking.
"He said he would take care of me always. Before he left to go to the next world, when I held his hands as he went, he swore it. He called me Eltha – that was my name to the people then – and he swore that his love would reach through the worlds to protect me. And for a time – for a long time – it seemed to. As others sickened, or found themselves injured or dead, I kept on. And then the Northmen took me as a slave and eventually I just accepted it, Sophie, because that's what you do in that world! You accept things because you know you cannot change them. And just when I was beginning to be sure that I would die a toothless old woman, unknown and unmissed, you showed up and you took me home. And now I find myself here in a third world – because believe me, this is not the same world I left behind – and you're telling me that my husband, my Magnus, kept his promise? That his dagger will keep me in comfort until the time comes to join him?"
I nodded as tears sprang up in my eyes at the thought of Heather's Viking husband, lost now to time, to everything except his wife's memory, swearing on his deathbed to care for her even after he was gone. How wonderful it must have been to be loved like that.
Heather reached up, suddenly, as if reading my mind. "Don't let him go, girl! He wants to be convinced, I see it in his eyes. But you must appeal to his honor – he is a man. Not just a man – a Jarl. You must make him think he stays for duty – for his duty to you."
I sat down in a chair beside Heather, feeling strangely empty. "It won't be the same," I told her. "It won't be the same as what you and – Magnus?"
"Magnus, yes."
"It won't be the same as what you and Magnus had, not if I have to manipulate him into doing it! Not if I have to play the helpless little woman just so he'll stay with –"
"You care too much for your own honor," Heather said gently. "It's alright, I do not condemn you, all young people do it. But I want you to think tonight, before you sleep, about what is worth more. Will your honor keep you warm into old age? Will it sit across the breakfast table from you, with love in its eyes? He loves you – and I think you love him, too –"
I opened my mouth, once again, to protest – to list the reasons why neither I nor the Viking Jarl could possibly be in love – but the old woman just held up her hand.
"Just think, girl. Just think on it. As impossible as I know it is for you to imagine being old, or truly alone, you must try. Look at me – me with no teeth and cramped hands. The East Angles respect the elderly, you know. The Northmen do, too. If someone makes it to my age in that place, people listen to them! So please, listen to me. Think about what you want for your life, think about love. Do not think about what love asks of you, think about what it brings. Because I can tell you, it brings more than it takes. Much more."
"OK," I said quietly, a few moments later. "I will. And Heather, you can get those teeth fixed now, you know. As soon as the dagger is sold."
"And then I'll have a mouthful of perfect white choppers, just like everybody else here!" She laughed.
Twenty-Three
Ivar
I found that I was in some ways a different man during my time with Sophie in the dwelling in the woods. It seemed that when I wasn't failing completely to understand some new object or concept that I could see from her face she believed I should be understanding, I was angry. And up until that time, I had not considered myself a particularly angry man.
Anger was a tool, a spur, it was not a state to remain in indefinitely, lest it wear one down like a sickness. Sophie didn't know what to do about my anger, I knew that. And sometimes her attempts to assuage or soothe it just made it worse.
My arm continued to heal – quickly, Heather said – although it did not seem quick to me. The injury was deep in the flesh, hidden from sight, and the limb as stiff and useless as an old man's. The women reassured me it would heal, but what if it didn't? Jarls with permanent injures did not remain Jarls for long. Was I to return to Thetford to face winter with only the use of a single arm? And if so, how long until that bastard Valdir was going behind my back, speaking in concerned tones about my ability to lead?
Although we did not speak of it, I think perhaps we both knew that it was Sophie herself I held in a specific kind of angry contempt. It was Sophie I had ridden south to find, the thought of living life without her sending me half mad with passion, wandering in the woods miles away from the place where my people waited. And so in the midst of my confusion and frustration, it became almost a habit to take her tending to my wounded arm, her care in seeing that I had enough to eat and her presence in my bed as my due, as something she owed me.
And of course the truth was that Sophie didn't owe me anything. And she knew it, even as she craved the parts of me that weren't filled with the resentment of a man who sees himself weakened and lacks the ability to fully accept his new circumstances.
"Why do you treat me like this?" She asked one evening after I got up wordlessly from the table and walked from the room.
When I turned and saw that she was weeping, I wanted to take her in my arms, shower her with kisses, apologize to her over and over. But I didn't do any of those things, because I could not allow her to see me even softer than I already was, with my useless arm and my childish inability to understand so much of her world.
"You keep me here like a pig in a sty," I said coldly, refusing to meet her eyes. "And I allow you to do it! You bid me stay here, away from the dangers – the police you speak of, those who would kidnap me and never let me see the light of day again if they knew where it was I came from – and I listen! I listen because I do not know this place. How do I know you speak the truth, woman? How do I know you do not wish to keep me here all to yourself, and to that end you invent dangers? Who do I spend most of my time with here? Fellow warriors? Wise men? No. An old woman."
"Don't talk about Heather like she's –"
"An old woman! While you live your life and tend to the daughter you will not allow me to lay eyes upon, as if you feel that she would somehow be tainted by meeting a man like myself, brought so low that –"
"That's not why I don't want Ashley to meet you," Sophie said, and her vo
ice was low and steady and not free of warning tones. "That's – where are you even getting these things, Ivar? You think I don't want her to meet you because you have an injury? Is that it? That doesn't even makes sense! Why would I keep her –"
"You keep her from me because you are ashamed of me!" I yelled, slamming my good hand down on the table. "Do you think I don't see it, woman?!"
Sophie's eyes widened. She stared at me, shaking her head slowly. "Whoa. Hold on. You don't – you don't really think that, do you? Don't put that on me. You think I'm ashamed of you? Is that why I cook for you, like some kind of 1950s housewife? Is that why I worry every day that someone – Jerry Sawchuk or Dan or someone else – will find you and you'll end up getting yourself charged with a crime and put in prison for the rest of your life? Is that why I spend every night in your arms, Ivar? Is that what you sense from me when we're together? That I'm ashamed of you?!"
I don't know that I'd ever seen a woman as angry as Sophie was that evening, as her whole body shook with it. And the worst of it was I knew what she said made sense. I knew there was no reason for her care, for her tenderness, if she felt little for me. But she wasn't finished with me yet.
"I don't think it's me who's ashamed," she continued, her breath coming quickly. "I think it's you! You're ashamed of yourself. I remember what you said of Jarl Eirik that night after he left the fire early to go to his wife. I remember the look on your face, like you were laughing at him, like you respected him as a warrior, as a fighter – but not as a man. You told me that night, even as you were still inside me, that you had never needed a woman like that. You were proud of it!"
"No," I started to protest, heat rising in my chest at the remembered conversation that I now realized, only days later, must have seemed ridiculous to the woman who seemed to know my heart better than I myself did. "No, Sophie – I –"
"Stop! I'm not finished! I just want you to know that I know what's going on here, Jarl! You need me! You need me like Eirik needs his wife and Ragnar his! And you don't know what to do with needing me, do you? You think it's weakness! Well it isn't! It isn't."
She was right. And, standing there in the bright light of the eating room, I was more taken apart by her words, more exposed by her womanly intuition, than I would have been had she peeled the skin from my body.
"And look at you," I shot back. "The confrontation blazes in your eyes, as if you score some great victory over me by pointing out that I need you! As if you've beaten me, as if –"
"I haven't beaten anyone," she said quietly. "Because I am the same. You speak constantly of returning to the Kingdom, and to your people in Thetford, and you never seem to see the hurt you cause me. Don't misunderstand me, I know you have to go. I won't beg or cajole, and I won't keep you from doing the things you feel you must do. But it hurts to see how little you think of me when you speak of returning to –"
"WOMAN!" I bellowed, "ALL I THINK ABOUT IS YOU!"
She looked up at me then, and the fire was suddenly gone from her eyes. A tear fell down one of her cheeks and she wiped it away, crying openly. "Ivar," she wept. "Don't say things like that unless you mean them. Don't, please – I –"
Whatever spell of madness had been holding us at each other's throats was gone, driven from the room by my admission, the one I had been desperate not to make, that she stood above all other concerns in my heart. I shoved the chair between us aside and took her in my arms, holding her head against my chest and feeling such a torrent of emotion as I had never felt before.
"You dull-wit," I whispered into her ear. "How could you not see? How could you not know that you have my heart in your hands?"
She looked up at me, her chin resting on my chest, and searched my eyes with hers, as if still seeking confirmation. "Is it true? You're not just –"
"Of course it's true. Of course it is. Why do you think I act like such an angry fool so often these past few days if not because I sense the power you have over me? You could crush me more efficiently than a thousand mounted Angles, Sophie, and with no more than your words. When you keep your daughter from me it keeps me in torment, it makes me think you wish to hide me from –"
"I keep my daughter from you because I don't want her to see that I'm yours," she replied, without looking away from my gaze. "I don't want her to see you for the man you are, Jarl, because she has no father and I – I don't want her to get attached to you."
Sophie wept and I bent down to kiss the salty tears from her face as something occurred in my heart that made me think of a flower blooming. It was the feeling of having the thing you wanted, all at once – a wish fulfilled. It was also the feeling of finally admitting it to yourself that you actually wanted the thing you were now drowning in joy to receive. That I did, in fact, want nothing more than I wanted Sophie's esteem, her admiration. She wasn't keeping her daughter from me because she was ashamed. She was keeping her from me for the exact opposite reasons.
I looked down into my woman's eyes, marveling at every curve and dimple in the landscape of her face – the one face I could never become tired of.
"I don't want you to leave," she whispered, kissing my bare chest. "I'm not asking you, Ivar, and you think I don't understand about duty but I do. I just want you to know that although I won't stop you, I don't want you to go."
And then it was my turn to look upwards, blinking, because the truth was that leaving her was the very last thing I wanted – the very last. And yet it had to be done. A Jarl doesn't leave his people. Cowards leave their people. I was not a coward, and Sophie would not ask me to be one for her own sake, I knew that.
And yet I could not be without her. It did not feel possible that I could return to Thetford without her and simply go about my life as it had been before she came into it.
She had to come with me. I'd seen her fierceness when she defended her own life, and her own time, as of equal worth to my own. I even understood that in some ways she was right. But there was no other solution, there was no other way around it. Being apart was not a solution, and I saw it in Sophie's eyes as much as I felt it in my own heart. So there was no choice. She was coming with me. The only question then was how to go about it without destroying the place in her heart that I could already see was set aside only for me.
Twenty-Four
Sophie
Heather Renner was officially no longer a person. She'd been declared legally dead in 1991, 8 years after she went missing, and she had no wish to contact the family who had treated her badly enough to make her choice to live in the 9th century an easy one. She also had no wish to be declared living, or to deal with the media and public attention that would come if she outed herself as the pretty girl on the 'Missing' posters from the 1980s.
She told me all this as we drove back to the cabin one day in September, after yet another trip to the grocery store.
"But how will you get a house?" I asked, "when the dagger is sold? You can't buy property if you don't exist. They won't let you –"
"That's where I thought you might come in. Or your mother."
I'd introduced my new friend to my mom and my daughter by then, even as I insisted – mostly for his own good – that Ivar stay out of sight until his arm finished healing.
"How's that?" I asked, as the woods, just beginning their first color turn from the deep green of summer to the bright yellow of early fall, flew past the car. "Do you mean one of us could buy it in our names? And then you could live there?"
I wasn't entirely against the idea – as long as taxes were paid I doubted the state had any real interest in who, specifically, was living in a given house. And the sale of the dagger would surely provide more than enough money to pay taxes on any property Heather could buy.
Heather pulled a carrot out of one of the shopping bags and began to munch on it. She and Ivar were both in the habit of grabbing random vegetables and eating them – a few days previously I'd found the Viking standing on the back porch of the cabin looking out into the woods and eating
a red pepper like it was an apple.
"Yes," she replied. "Yes, that's, uh, that's partially what I mean."
"Partially what you mean? Well what do you not-partially mean, then? I don't want to do anything, you know, illegal."
"Oh it's nothing illegal. But I believe you're going to protest, and I wish you wouldn't."
None of that sounded good. And I was a little surprised – Heather generally seemed nothing but grateful for my actually quite minor help in getting her back to the 21st century and then finding her a place to stay temporarily. What was she about to ask me that she thought I'd be against? I didn't want to have to say no, but I had Ashley to think about, I couldn't go getting involved in any schemes.
"Okaaay..." I said, a tad skeptically.
A few minutes passed as Heather kept her gaze focused outside the car window. We were almost back at the cabin, but I sensed she was figuring out a way to ask me whatever it was she was about to.
"I want to split the money with you," she said finally, and I was so busy expecting to be asked for something it didn't immediately register. "With you and your family – your mother and your little girl. You've done so much for me –"
"What?" I asked, distracted by looking for the mailbox that marked the driveway. "You want to what?"
"Split the money. From the dagger. If it ends up being even half as much as that professor of yours says it will be, that's more than I could spend. I'm an old woman, Sophie! All I want is to live the rest of my years in peace with a little garden, a few cats and hopefully some friends nearby."
It was as we were trundling down the driveway that I realized what Heather was saying, at which point I slammed the brakes on and turned to face her, eyes wide.
"What?! You want – you want to split the money from the – Heather! That's your money! That's your husband's –"
