“I’m doing it,” he says rather drearily. His hand doesn’t stay still in Laertes’s, but it does settle in, fingers tracing the back of knuckles and seeking out the shape of them. “I’m staying away. Believe it or not, I don’t try to be a rake. It’s the same in Elsinore. There are always people who value chastity more than life, who’d consider their daughters as good as dead if they suspected any unchaste action … and young women who’d swallow poison if they lost their family’s good opinion. Galahad’s family happens to include a lout of a father who had him raised in a nunnery, and God.” He’s speaking lightly, trying to frame it in the context of courtly flirtations, but courtly flirtations that end in suicides are no less dire. He laughs with no humor in it. “I just want him to live. And for you to know, I suppose, because …” He still can’t quite explain why, when Galahad didn’t want anyone to see him. “You were a friend of Laurel’s.”