Chapter 14: Sybilla

The house stood at the end of a gravel road outside a town in Ohio, with a porch light still on at four in the morning.

Ambrose got out of the car and stood at the bottom of the steps.

I watched him look at the six stairs.

Not a day ago he had faced a court of three hundred, and now he did not move.

"I'll go first," June said.

"No," Ambrose said. "I will."

He knocked.

The door opened on a woman in a grey cardigan with a mug in her hand.

She was sixty-one, and her hair was brown streaked with grey.

She looked up at him, and the mug hit the porch boards and broke.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, you have his chin."

Ambrose said nothing.

His eyes had gone dark, the way they do when he is moved, and they were the same grey-green as hers.

"Sybilla," I said gently. "My name is Linnea. I'm his wife."

She looked from me to him and back.

"You came," she said. "I wrote to that house every month for eleven years. Every letter came back unopened."

"I never saw one," Ambrose said. His voice cracked in the middle.

"I know, sweetheart. I know you didn't."

She opened her arms, and he walked into them.

June took my elbow and steered me into the kitchen.

She put the kettle on without a word and stood at the window for a long time.

Sybilla's kitchen was small and yellow, with a table for two and a radio on the sill.

When they came in, she sat Ambrose down, and she did not let go of his hand.

"Tell me how it happened," he said. "Please. All of it."

"I was twenty-seven," Sybilla said. "I was a nurse in Cleveland, and the king asked me to be bonded to him, and I said yes."

She looked at her hands.

"He was kind to me. That's the thing nobody believes."

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