Did I love William, then?
Was my sitting there like an idiot child, silent and stupid some kind of confirmation that I was in love with him?
If I'm honest - really honest - I've never really thought about it before. He asked me a couple of months ago, actually, if I ever really love him, and I said no, more out of instinct than anything. But did I? Logically, I must have at some point, on some level. Of course marriage had nothing to do with love in those days. Romance was barely a word, and only silly fanciful young girls dreamed of being handsome princes or knights in shining armour. When he asked me to marry him, I wasn't worried that my heart didn't beat faster when I saw him, or that I got a little chill down my spine when he said my name. Nonsense like that didn't even enter my consciousness. He was good looking; I knew that - hair the colour of dark sand and eyes the colour of the sky. And he was rich, which was, truthfully my main reason for accepting his proposal. Call me a superficial gold-digger, but hell. I was one, and if I hadn't been, I'd have starved...and I was pretty damned good one, at that. William was, for all intents and purposes, perfect husband material: hot, rich, dressed well and, until that day in the church, had never been less than a perfect gentleman towards me. I hated his facial hair, of course, but part of being perfect was having a flaw I could fix up. But did any of that amount to love?
I suppose it must have. But not in the way you're imaging, not in some fairytale happy-ending way. God no. I may have wanted that when I was a child, but after my father died and I found myself abandoned in London, that child grew up into a calculating bitch. I loved William the way you might love a creepy, incestuous older brother. And I never considered for a second he saw me as anything other as a good move for his career. He was nouveau riche - or as nouveau riche as you could be in those days, anyway - and I was old money. He didn't have a title, I was something like tenth in line to the throne. I;d never even considered that he might genuinely be in love with me. Which I suppose says something more about my self-esteem, than anything. And if I had suspected he was, I don't think I'd have thought of our betrothal in quite the same way. We talked about this quite recently and it turns out he's still quite put out I thought of our relationship as little more than a business arrangement, whilst he had us pegged as the Scarlet O'Hara and Rhett Butler of the 1190s. Actually, I'm quite proud of that, subverting gender stereotypes and everything.
It's quite sad to think that our pseudo-incestuous party was about to be crashed by the unannounced arrival of the rest of my life.
The market was always my favourite place in the world. I suppose that means that no matter what time period or society I'm dropped in, I'm naturally a shopaholic. I can't pretend this doesn't offer cold comfort when the vintage shop has a sale on. I should try that excuse on my dad. "Okay, I might have maxed out your debit card on what amounts to old, second hand clothes, raided from the wardrobes of dead old ladies - but I can't help it, it's my primal essence!" God. I sort of miss the market...shopping isn't quite the same, when you can't haggle someone down to a quarter of the original price (I've tried this in Primark - not only difficult but also embarrassing and fruitless). The market still exists, of course...I was using the flower stall to flirt from across the square with the reincarnation of William last Saturday. I guess human nature doesn't really change. Actually, it was doing the exact same thing eight hundred years previously that got us into our whole predicament in the first place.
As far as I can remember, it was raining, and I'd intended to be as quick as I could at the market-place, not wanting to have sniffles on my wedding day. But I suppose that could have been any time I'd been out shopping before my wedding day, and I'm putting two and two together. Anyway. I was negotiating the price of bread (I've always lead the life of a glamorous legendary heroine) with some tubby bald guy...who I think may have been super-imposed into my memory from the film Ever After...anyway, and I'd got him right the way down, when Rob assailed me from nowhere. By which I mean, came up, grinned and fell on his ass.
Yep. The gorgeous and idealistic boy who'd had me crying into my pillow since the night he left had swaggered back into the dreary landscape of my life. Pissed out of his tiny stable-boy brain.
Thanks for that Rob, thanks a whole lot.
Unfortunately, we didn't have a lot of time for the bleary-eyed and touching reunion that seemed so inevitable, because William clocked him, and in some Jungian reaction to the time-space continuum must have realised on some deep unconscious level that he was meeting his arch nemesis (as he'd later - by which I mean, in this lifetime - describe Rob, because he's a twit) - or maybe just saw me, saw the drunk peasant rolling around on the floor in front of me, and got a little worried. But personally, I prefer the latter explanation.
Anyway, the inevitable wackiness ensued, what with William trying to arrest Rob and Rob virulently resisting, yelling about his rights (I think...I might have later decided that's what he was saying...it was all fairly unintelligible). So one minute I'm sort-of enjoying this and the next, I've got a drunk peasant holding a knife to my throat.
Which, you know, ruined the shopping trip a bit.