True-Love Tears

Griete has seen an abundance of naked men in her lifetime. This man is no different and no more bare than any other –- her cursory glance informs that he’s behaving himself, not slopping around in the tub or breaking up the sponges or fouling the water. His hair has come uncovered, and his shoulders are very white, and this is all that really catches her eye – in the absence of bristles or raw patches there’s little to remark on otherwise. Kings’ backs are no better looking than other men’s backs; this seems reasonable.

Her own hands are patched with raw flesh, and splitting in places –- Griete feels herself growing old and coarse even as she works, every time she rubs together damp hands or wrings out somebody else’s linen. She has mothered three children, all girls, and lived to see them take on the pinched flushed look of too much coming and going. Mostly going, these days.

The man in the tub does not greet her, exuding a sullen disdain as tangible as an odor, though the sounds of water settling persist even when her back is turned. One man to a tub alone seems like a remarkable indulgence, though the friends of the Duke had paid to allow it –- the relegation of this affair to one of the smoky old back rooms bodes badly – no air and scarcely any light. A drowning here would be bad for business.

Griete glances aside, half-expecting the figure of a man in the doorway. She can’t afford that trouble here. But there’s no such intruder, only the shadow of her head-covering in the periphery of her vision. Still she lingers to hum and smooth the folded towels, to arrange the clothes in the sequence of their wearing, and all the other things a woman might do to dawdle short of interacting with a customer to his face – all with a tight jaw and a heart pounding like a tabor drum. They won’t murder him here for a few coins and a promise of discretion; this is a respectable place. It’s not decent. This man will not be killed under her roof, not for this price. Not with her three girls in the house, all holding their breath.

But she does not look at his face. It is none of her business what the old king looks like.