My Father Gave the King His Youngest Daughter, and My Sister Chose Which One novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Coat

At lambing his hands cover hers on a ewe in trouble, and her eldest sister arrives with a winter coat and asks to see the study.

Garazi woke me at five by banging on the door with a bottle.

"Iriondo," she said through the wood.

"The lambs don't know you're a bride."

I opened the bolt in my nightgown.

She put a baby bottle of warm milk into my hand and a man's wool coat over my arm.

"Sheepfold," she said, and went away down the stairs.

It was the last hard frost of March.

The yard was gray and silver, the troughs skinned with ice, and the stone walls of the fold steamed with the breath of three hundred ewes.

I had never held a lamb in my life.

I had held a ledger, a coffeepot and my father's keys.

A boy of fifteen with his hat down to his eyebrows showed me where to kneel.

I put the bottle to a lamb no bigger than a loaf of bread.

It butted my wrist and sucked so hard that milk ran down my sleeve, and I laughed.

I hadn't laughed in a year.

"Hold him lower," said a voice behind me.

I did not turn around.

"I'm holding him how the boy said."

"The boy's wrong."

Ximun came into the pen in his work coat with the sleeves rolled and his hat pushed back, and crouched beside me in the straw.

He smelled like cold air and lanolin and coffee.

He put his hand over mine on the bottle and tipped it, and the lamb's whole body went slack with relief.

His hand was big enough to cover both of mine.

It was warm.

His forearm lay along mine, thick and scarred and roped with muscle, and I could feel it was not quite steady.

It shook, very slightly, as if he had been carrying something heavy and had just been asked to set it down.

I told myself it was the cold.

"There," he said, very low.

"That's how."

He did not take his hand away.

I did not move mine.

Across the fold a ewe in the corner began to cry, a thin, ragged sound, and Ximun's head came up.

"Stay," he said, and went.

I watched him kneel behind the ewe with his sleeve shoved up to the shoulder.

He talked to her in Basque, soft and steady, and one word I knew from my grandmother's kitchen.

Maitia.

Love.

It was what you said to a creature in pain.

I turned back to the lamb and told myself I had not heard it.

Idoia came at ten.

I was in the kitchen with milk on my coat when the white SUV came up the drive.

I knew the sound of that engine the way I knew the click of my own pen.

She was out before it stopped, in the camel coat with a long wool scarf, carrying a second coat on a hanger.

"Your winter coat," she said, kissing the air beside my cheek.

"It's still cold down here, Amaia.

"You should have said."

"It's March, Idoia.

"You live twenty minutes from my school."

"I live twenty minutes from your yard," she said lightly.

"Show me the house."

Garazi stood in the kitchen door with her arms folded and a dish towel over one shoulder.

She did not offer coffee.

Idoia walked through the front rooms like a woman pricing them.

She touched the back of a chair, the frame of a photograph, the brass handle of the study door.

"Is this where he works?" she said.

"I think so," I said.

"May I?"

"It's not mine to let you."

"Oh, Amaia," she said.

She put a hand on my arm.

"It's only a room.

"Papa's papers will be in there somewhere, and I'd like to see how bad it is.

"I just want to know what you're up against."

I glanced at Garazi.

Garazi was looking at Idoia with her eyes half shut, like a woman reading small print.

"I'll ask him," I said.

"Please do."

Idoia hung the second coat on the hook in the hall, beside Ximun's.

Her keys were in her hand.

She put them down on the hall table, a silver ring with a brass key on it, tagged with a small letter D, and turned to fix her scarf in the mirror.

I did not think about the key.

I have kept keys all my life.

I pick them up without noticing, to put them where they go.

When she had gone, the keys were still on the table, and I put them on the hook with the coat.

I stood in the empty hall and understood two things.

She had never asked me how I was.

And she had asked to see the study before she asked to see my room.

I went out to the fold.

Ximun was standing at the gate with his hat low and his arms on the top rail, watching the white car go down the drive.

He did not turn his head.

"Your sister asked me one question on the way in," he said.

"I was at the gate."

"What question?" I said.

"She asked if you could read."

He looked at me then.

"I said you read better than anyone in three counties."

I waited.

"She didn't like that," he said.

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