Being an Account of the Return of His Lordship, Remus Archer Varana, by Arthur Cordle

Winter. A harsh one, at that, if I remember correctly. The cattle froze to death before the midwinter feasts could even begin, and the people were burning bodies of the dead to keep warm. A cruel time.

Our Lord had been gone for six months. The longest period away he had endured, and certainly the least favourable. Our Lady had become depressed in his absence, and ceased her usual distractions in favour of writing to him (twice a day, religiously) in front of the fire in the second sitting room. If we couldn’t hear the sound of quill on paper, it was the melancholy melodies she began composing on his Lordship’s ivory keyed piano.

For two months, there was no reply. She still wrote. She still awaited the military messengers by the front door at dawn. And nothing, for two months. We all suspected the worst, but she seemed adamant that it was merely a delay.

“Perhaps they’ve run out of paper,” she mused. “It’s terribly expensive these days. Or the ship might be caught in ice, I hear there are whole sheets of it metres thick on the sea.”

We smiled, and agreed with her.

But there came one night where her manner changed. I had been feeding the Master’s hawks in the garden, when I noticed her standing in the middle of the hallway, in her night robe, staring vacantly out at the courtyard. I closed up the falcon hut, and made my way into the building.

She didn’t look at me, simply stared. Outside the glass panes of the heraldry-painted window in the door, the snow hurled itself in flurries and shrieking twists, and gathered itself like diamond dust in the corners of the stables. Beyond the gate, black. Nothing but black. Almost midnight, and not a person in sight.

“He’s not coming home,” she eventually stated. Her tone was so painfully numb that I turned to look at her. She carried on staring with vacant, hollow eyes at the courtyard.

I couldn’t say anything. I simply kept watching her for a good ten minutes. She didn’t do anything. Anything, but look out at something that wasn’t there. Or perhaps something I couldn’t see.

Eventually, I carefully took hold of her shoulders, and guided her back up the stairs to her bedchamber. I put her into bed and stoked her fire, and warmed her bedpan. She said nothing, and turned her head to stare with that same sunken emptiness at the window. Black and fluttering white.

The next morning, she was up and ready, as usual, to wait for the messenger. She had dressed in black brocade. Silver fleur-de-lys, as I recall. She waited for half an hour. And was rewarded.

The gates to the Manor Varana opened with a slow, steady creak. But there was no messenger, no mounted herald that might explain the long silence. Instead, two oxen, lumbering on through the snow and wrapped in furs, with a yoke above their hunched spines. Behind them, a cart made of oak.

Her skin drained of all colour. Two scrawny boys drew the beasts more fully into the courtyard, and the closer it came, the more the cart’s contents became agonisingly obvious. A white sheet, and a six-foot-something mass beneath. The oxen stopped, and one of the boys came forward. He tried to bow, but the cold in his legs seemed to stiffen him. He had very blue eyes. They met hers shortly after, and he opened his mouth to say something. He didn’t manage it. She didn’t need to hear it.

Down the ice littered steps she went, regally and slowly, until her hand extended to draw back the top of that sheet.

Blue and dead as a doornail, there was my Lord; unlike himself in his silence and unmoving lifelessness.

I watched her very carefully. Decorum said she mustn’t react. The whole household had come out to look. And, to my great shock, she didn’t. Her face remained expressionless, her hand trembled for only a moment before she caught it and ceased its evidence. But something in her eyes broke. They say it’s the heart. I say it’s life. I say, there comes a point where one can still be alive, and yet not at the same time. Whatever it was, in that instant, one of those metre-deep coverings of ice she’d hoped on, shattered entirely.

She remained like the weather until the day after. We kept his body in the ice cellar, waiting for her to recover enough to make funeral arrangements.

I had been tending to the white lilies she has always kept on a table in the hallway when I heard it. The most anguished sound of bare suffering my ears have ever endured. I dropped the flowers, and ran to the first sitting room, only to find my Lady clutching a piece of parchment to her bodice, curled up quite foetal on the divan, with her features crushed into an unbearable expression of agony.

I only found out much later what the letter, that had arrived that very morning, said.

‘My dearest love,

I am coming home.’

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