William the Conqueror: A Private Life

1087, Rouen

The wound has turned the room against me. Fresh linen cannot mask it, nor the herbs, nor the censers, nor the busy hands of servants who have already learned to change bandages without letting horror fully reach their faces. When they raise me even a little, the pain comes white and immediate, and my breath sounds to my own ears like some worn animal labouring in winter. Rouen continues below the window, carts on the streets, bells, merchants, priests, all the traffic of a city that does not pause merely because a king is rotting above it. I do not resent that. I resent the counting. My sons count lands, chances, allies. Clerks count phrases. Priests count signs of repentance, hoping perhaps to polish a rough life into a death more useful to them than the living man ever was. They would prefer gentleness from me now. That preference alone is reason enough to distrust what they mean to preserve once I can no longer forbid it.