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2017-01-21
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2021-07-26
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The Nightwatchman Doesn't Kill

Chapter 14: I Won't Leave You Alone

Chapter Text

She hadn’t noticed that Guy was awake, and he didn’t talk to her. He didn’t stir, watching her in silence.
The girl was holding a tray of food, and she put it on the table, then she searched the room with her eyes until she spotted the little table near the window, that Guy and Sir Edward used to place the chessboard. Now the little table was empty, and Marian dragged it near the bed.
It was only then that she realized that Guy was looking at her.
"Sir Guy," said Marian, adding a shy smile, "you are awake, do you feel better? Matilda's remedy is helping you enough? I can give you some more of it if your pain is still so strong."
Guy gave her an uncertain glance.
He had been harsh with her in the last few days, he had been harsh with everyone actually, sending them away and asking to be left alone.
After he told her that it wasn’t proper for her to stay in his room at night, Marian had glared at him, coldly bidding him a good night, and she didn’t come back until now.
Guy nodded, shyly.
“The pain is bearable now, thank you.”
He talked in a polite tone, not sure of what to say.
Once he had hoped that she could learn to love him, that she could begin to be pleased by him, if he only could show her how well he could provide for her and her father. He had tried to show her that he had enough power and money to give her a good life if she would become his wife.
Now he had nothing to offer.
He was nothing.
He didn’t dare to look at her, and he just stared at his own hands, resting on the blanket.
Marian was surprised by the resigned tone with which Guy talked to her, but it was the undertone of sadness she had heard in those few words that she didn’t like. For the first time since she knew him, Marian wished Guy to feel better, not only because this would have made her responsibilities lighter, but simply because she wanted it. Marian wanted Guy to regain his health, to feel better, just because he was Guy. And she didn’t want to see him so closed in himself, so knocked down, so defeated.
She approached the knight further. Her hands trembled, almost imperceptibly. She had thought to give him a caress, but something blocked her: the thought of his past crimes, which clashed fiercely with the present vulnerability of the man in front of her. The need he had of her, against the fear of him that Marian still felt, despite everything.
In a strange compromise between consolation and fear, Marian gently put her hand under his chin, drawing, for a fleeting instant, his gaze, tense and deep, before he lowered his eyes again, never leaving the physical contact with her hand.
"Sir Guy, please look at me. Please," Marian said.
Seeing him being still silent, she spoke again.
"Forgive me, Sir Guy, it was my fault if you've been treated shamefully. I was... I was tired, and you no longer wanted to be with me. I didn’t know what to think. I have neglected you, I've left you alone in a difficult time. I shouldn’t have done so, but I didn't know what to say to you, which words could make you feel better, how to give some relief to your pain. I didn’t know what to say. Vaisey... Vaisey is a monster, he has hurt my family, he has damaged a whole lot of people and now he hurts you, ungrateful human being as he is. You had to expect, from such a perverse person, ingratitude."
Guy looked at her.
He could still feel her touch under his chin, as if her fingers had marked him with a firebrand.
Once he would have been happy and excited to be touched by her, but now her touch was almost painful and it filled him with sadness. It was the pitiful caress given to a mangy, starving dog.
“I guess I deserved what I got,” he said, bitterly.
Something, maybe the bitter tone of the knight's words, struck Marian, as if she had felt his suffering on her skin.
She would never have imagined that she could feel, even for a moment, so close to him.
Moreover, his gaze, directed at her eyes, made her feel an unexpected, strange, unimaginable heat inside. Marian looked down at his lips, then looked back at his eyes, but at the same time, she regained a physical distance from him.
Marian recovered.
It had been like looking down from the tallest bastion of Nottingham Castle to the ground below.
That sensation of dizziness that pushes the mind to wonder how would it feel falling from there, how would it feel to let the body to be free, into the air, before the violent end.
Flying, for a moment
"No one deserves to be abandoned in the worst time of their lives. No one deserves to be left in pain and in disease. Not even you, Sir Guy. In spite of your sins, and your wrongs. We won’t leave you alone." Then, she added, with even more fervor, "I won’t leave you alone, ever."
Marian turned her back for a moment to the knight, struck by an indefinable emotion, as if she had said too much and too quickly.
Guy frowned, looking at her back, wondering about the meaning of her last sentence. She sounded almost passionate, as if she really cared for him.
Impossible.
She was just being kind to a wounded man, because her soul was pure and gentle. Guy repressed a sigh and he thought that he had to be grateful to her.
Her kindness was painful and strangely comforting at the same time.
He weakly smiled at the girl.
“Thank you, I owe my life to your family. Sir Edward has been very kind to me.”
Marian turned back to the knight. His voice was deep now, but kind. A velvet note in it. She liked it.
Marian felt embarrassed about this last thought.
"Please, Sir Guy. No formalities, no obligations. I'm glad that you appreciate my family's efforts to bring you back to health. But perhaps I should feel jealous, if you have my father more dear to your heart than me," Marian said, accompanying her words with a vaguely mischievous smile.
Then she went on, with a more serious tone.
"I'm still your betrothed, am I not? Our... engagement... was sudden  , for me, and maybe I'm not the most suitable person to be close to you. To help you, to console you... I know little of you, and you know little about me. Sir Guy: you saw a pretty girl, coming from a noble family, and you have chosen her, knowing nothing about her. You know nothing of her disposition, what she wants, what she thinks. We are promised, and we do not know almost anything of each other. I had imagined my engagement in a very different way when I was a girl, but now we are here. You and I.”
Marian continued: “In this house, with you in my bed, I'm trying to take care of you as best I can, probably in the wrong way, but I'm not used to all this. To stand beside a man, all day long, all night long. To adjust my life in service of another life as well as to myself. Sharing my life with a man... We are here, me and you, no regard to conventions, customs, mores. Thinking not of what people will say. Please, Guy, no formalisms. We're already over this, you and me. Sometimes I just don’t know how to help you, I just don’t know how to be close to you..."
Guy looked at her face, trying to understand if she was really meaning what she had just said.
Marian was talking of their engagement as if she still believed that they were going to be married, she was trying to do her duty as his future wife, taking care of him, trying to know him better.
He couldn’t believe it.
Since he knew the girl, he had often been blinded by love, but now he could see perfectly well: in their future there couldn’t be any marriage.
How could he marry a noblewoman like her, when he had nothing to offer? He knew that he couldn’t drag her in a life of misery.
Guy had to tell her that she was free, that their betrothal had to be broken, but he couldn’t. If she hadn’t talked like that, maybe he’d find the courage to set her free, but now he just couldn’t.
Her words were a balm for his broken soul, a little ray of hope in the darkness.
She can really save me. She is an angel of salvation.
Sooner or later, Sir Edward would step in to break their engagement, Guy was sure of that. The elderly lord could be kind to him, but for sure he wouldn’t allow his only daughter to marry a penniless cripple.
Marian was looking at him, waiting for his answer. She was right, he loved her, but he didn’t know her well, they rarely talked and he had no idea of what she liked or what she thought.
She doesn’t know me, as well, and this maybe is for the best.
He was about to say something polite and impersonal, but he couldn’t, not when she had just opened her heart to him.
“Just stay,” he answered in a low voice. “It makes all this bearable.”
Marian smiled, and passed Guy the bowl with soup for him to eat. She noticed that it wasn’t warm enough, now, and she was about to bring it back to the kitchen to warm it up, but Guy stopped her arm and shook his head as if to say he didn’t care.
Marian let Guy begin eating his meal. As she looked at him, the girl thought she had exposed herself too much, saying things that just until a few days ago she would not even have imagined to say.
What engagement?
Had she forgotten how Guy had forced her into their engagement?
Had she forgotten his contemptuous, defiant attitude, his continuous pressure to her, his violent acts?
But now, the man who ate slowly, comfortably, his meal in front of her looked like a different person.
A person she didn’t know.
Matilda seemed to know things about him that she didn’t know. And she was amazed and felt hurt for that, partly.
If there was one thing she felt to be able to do was to observe: things, people, facts.
Guy seemed now to have escaped her ability to observe, to evaluate, to understand.
Matilda had shown her a different image of him.
Despite this, Marian feared that once Guy returned to be strong, he would return to be the man he was before.
Or maybe not.
Then she thought that the fact that Vaisey had fired him could be her opportunity to change things, to help him to be different.
A guide.
Matilda had said that Vaisey had been a bad guide.
Guy needed a good guide, and maybe he would be different, as a result.
A better man.
She did not know if she would succeed, or why she thought it was so important for her.
She felt she had a debt to him: if Guy was there now, it was her fault.
She would compensate him that way, she would help him to understand his mistakes, to repent.
Then maybe he would be the one to choose to put an end to their engagement. He would withdraw from it.
She would be free again. She’d have back her bed, her room, her things, the freedom to be what she wanted to be.
At that moment she thought that no man would let her to be free.
Ever.
No one would love her enough for that. Her father, neither, could completely understand her.
She passed a slice of bread to Guy.
She poured his wine.
Guy looked at her, silently.
Yet that silence did not embarrass her, she felt free to think.
She felt hungry too, her hand touched her stomach. She was about to get up when Guy gave her a slice of bread.
Marian took it instinctively, and, when she did, she touched his hand.
She had taken his hand into hers so many times when he was lost in the fever's delirium, in the agony of his pain. But he did not know how many times it had happened. A gesture born from urgency. From necessity. No value.
Now he was there, awake, probably still very suffering, for a pain that was no longer just a physical one.
He was aware, and seemed to need her even more, now, much more than before.
Marian didn’t know if she would be able to fill that need, if she wouldn’t run away, at the end of everything. Run away from him.
His gestures now had another value. His words had now another value.
Everything she could say or do for him could have tied her closer to him when she could easily dissolve an unwanted bond with him, instead.
She thought that the shudder she had felt touching his hand was only because of fear. She tried not to think to the subtle suspicion that instead it could have happened because of a feeling.
She thought about what he had said, the real meaning of his few words.
Stay... Remain, just stay here, don't run away, don't avoid him, don't deceive him, don't put a distance from him, don't leave him, because, if you stay, when you stay close to him, all this, the pain of the body and the pain of the mind, of the soul becomes bearable, acceptable to him.
It seemed to her that in those few words he had conveyed a whole world that she didn’t know if she could or would accept, but for the first time since she knew him, Marian felt that Guy really felt something more for her and something different from the simple man's desire to possess a woman.
She couldn't do anything else at that moment but stay with him.
She re-assembled the tray with the empty bowls, but instead of taking it away using that as an excuse to leave Guy to himself, she took her sewing work and sat on the edge of the bed.
Ironically, she was sewing a tunic for him.
As she slowly sewed, with uneven stitches, Guy slid into sleep beside her.