Chapter 7: Forty-One Names

Edmar asked me to supper the next evening, in the small room off his study where we used to eat when we were first married.

He had set it himself.

Two plates, a single candle, and a bowl of the pears I had liked at nineteen.

A page stood at his elbow with a stack of papers and a stick of red wax.

"For the royal seal, Majesty," the page murmured. "Only the usual."

Edmar pressed his ring into the wax without reading a line, the way he had a thousand times before, and the page bowed and withdrew.

I noticed it.

I was a woman who noticed everything and who had learned not to say so.

"Thank you for coming," Edmar said.

"You asked."

"I haven't asked you for anything in a long time."

He pulled the folded paper out of his coat and smoothed it flat beside his glass.

"I thought I'd try again. I know it's absurd."

I watched him look down the column.

"Is it Isabeau?"

"No."

"Isolde, I've already tried. Ismene?"

"No."

"Isaura. Isadore, that's a man's name, I know. Ysolt?"

"No, Edmar."

He worked through all forty-one, one name at a time, in the shy, dogged voice of a boy reciting for a tutor.

I shook my head at each.

He went red, and then pale.

Then he put the paper down and told me about my hands.

"You hum when you're adding," he said. "Just a few notes. Never a song."

"You tuck your hair behind your left ear and it falls out again in three minutes."

"You always eat the pear skin."

I hadn't known he knew any of it.

"You mended my cuff in the carriage on our wedding day," he said.

"The seam had split, and you said nothing, you just took a needle from your hair."

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