Gertrude and Claudius Read Online Free PDF Page A

in their bedchamber for hours, so the space was stiflingly hot. Readily Gerutha shed her heavy hooded cloak lined with miniver, her sleeveless surcoat of gold cloth diapered in a pattern of crosses and florets, her blue tunic with wide flowing sleeves and a band of jewelled embroidery at the throat, under that a white cotte with longer, tighter sleeves, and, lastly, the thin camise worn next to the skin, sweated with much dancing. A thick silent woman with trembling hands undid the laces and cord belt and wrist ties, leaving it to her, in Horwendil’s company alone, to shed the camise. This she did, stepping from the cast-off cloth as from a cleansing pool.
    By the snapping firelight her nakedness felt like a film of thin metal, an ultimate angelic costume. From throat to ankles her skin had never seen the sun. Gerutha was as white as an onion, as smooth as a root fresh-pulled from the earth. She was intact. This beautiful intactness, her life’s treasure, she roused herself—betranced before theleaping fire, the tips of her falling hair reflecting its hearthbound fury—to bestow, as decreed by man and God, upon her husband. She was aroused. She turned to show Horwendil her pure front, vulnerable as his had been when he had bared it, for a famous dangerous moment, to the possibility of Koll’s thrust.
    He was asleep. Her husband, in a coarse-knit boxy nightcap, had collapsed from excessive festivity, and from the three-hours’ bath in winter air followed by this sauna of a bedchamber. One long strong arm lay relaxed upon the blanket as if severed up to the shoulder, where a naked ball of muscle gleamed beneath an epaulette of golden fur. A strand of saliva from his slumped lips glittered like a tiny arrow.
    My poor dear hero
, she thought,
carrying that great soft frame through life with but his wits and a leather shield to keep it from being hacked to death.
Gerutha discovered in this moment a woman’s secret: there is a pleasure in feeling love that answers, as with the heat of two opposing fireplaces, to that of being loved. The flow of a woman’s love, once started, can be stanched but with great pain. A man’s is a spurt in comparison. She hurried her naked, glimmering body to their bed, a single candle lit on the stand beside, and found her own cap, folded like a thick rough love note on the pillow, and fell asleep cupped in the shadow of Horwendil’s sometimes thunderous slumber.
    In the morning, awakening sheepish to one another, they repaired the omission of the bridal night, and the bloodied sheet was displayed solemnly to old Corambus,Rorik’s Lord Chamberlain, who on the deep snow had skied over from Elsinore with a trio of official witnesses: a priest, a doctor, and a royal scribe. Her virginity was a matter of state, for there was little doubt that Horwendil would be the next king, and her son the next after that, if God were kind. Denmark had become a province of her body.
    Days healed the hurt of the deflowering, and the nights brought her a slowly learned delight, but Gerutha could not rid herself of the memory of that first snub, when, aroused by her own bared beauty, she had turned to receive a thrust that was not delivered. An ideal lover would have stayed awake for his prize, however weary and besotted. Horwendil was lusty enough since, with many exclamations of praise falling from his neat lips as they skimmed her flesh, and with enough explosive thrusting to fill a bucket, but, a sensitive princess, she felt something abstract in his passion: it was but an aspect of his general vigor. He would have been lusty with any woman, and of course had been with a number before her. Nor was his devotion of a quality that would keep him, if away from her long enough, from making use of a pretty Pomeranian captive or a Lapp serving maid.
    Horwendil was a Christian. He reverenced Harald Bluetooth, the father of modern Denmark, whose conversion deprived the German emperor of his favorite excuse for