“I can’t deceive him. Dovey—I won’t be able to keep up a pretense.” This wasn’t a little white lie to Cerys that there was not in fact a rat in the cellar or that the man leading a calf to the butcher’s was taking his pet for a stroll. She wasn’t capable of even those beneficial lies that might make someone feel better.
“My darling, darling dear.” Dovey gripped Gwen’s wrists. “Listen to me. He needs us right now. He needs our help. It may take him a day or two to recover his memory. And when he does—he’ll have seen our ways, as you said. He’ll understand what we do here. He’ll realize what he owes us, and if he’s a gentleman, he’ll pay that debt.” She squeezed Gwen’s hands until the blood left them. “All you have to do is not tell him who he is.”
Gwen stared into her friend’s eyes. She understood. Gwen could walk away from St. Sefin’s. She could strap her traveling harp to her back and wrap her few bits of clothing in the shawl at her waist and she could go anywhere. But Dovey had a child to think about, and Dovey couldn’t go just anywhere. Not every town welcomed a face that wasn’t the same color as all the rest.
Gwen swallowed and waited until her dinner was back where it was supposed to be. “Just tell him nothing,” she said.
Dovey nodded in encouragement and loosened her grip. “Let him remember on his own. It won’t hurt him.”
“It won’t hurt him,” Gwen repeated.
Dovey squeezed her hands again, but gently this time. “That’s my dear girl.” She walked back into the infirmary, and Gwen followed.
Late afternoon light slanted across the floor. It lit strands of Pen’s hair to gold and burnished his skin. There was a remarkable calm in his voice for a man who had just consulted his memory box and found it empty.
“How did you know my name was Pen?”
“Muttered it in your sleep,” Dovey lied blithely.
Gwen’s first test came immediately. The hazelnut eyes swung on her. “Do I know you?” he demanded. “You seem—familiar.”
Gwen’s stomach plopped straight into her worn out shoes. She ran her hands along the fringe of her shawl and prayed to St. Gwladys for strength.
“We are not acquaintances,” she answered. “Remember anything else, mi—mmm?” She narrowly remembered not to call him milord.
“Nothing.” His throat tensed as he swallowed his panic. Of course he would feel helpless and alarmed. Everything he had, he’d been given because of his name, and now he didn’t know what that name was. He was strong, healthy, in the prime of his life, and yet he was reduced to nothing, not knowing who he was, where he belonged, where he might go for help.
She knew exactly how that felt.
“You can stay here, Pen,” she said gently. How bold, to address a lord so familiarly. Only his peers were allowed to do that. “As long as you need to.”
His eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Because,” Gwen said, “that is what we do.”
The wolf was loose in the sheepfold now, she thought. And she had put him there. How long did they have before his head cleared and the jaws of the wolf snapped shut?
CHAPTERFIVE
Penrydd might have injured his memory, but whatever happened to land him in the dory at the Newport wharf didn’t change his personality one whit. He was surly and demanding and insulted everyone and everything.
He didn’t like the fish stew that Gwen brought him for a light supper. “As if I’d eat barnacles someone scraped off a ship’s hull and boiled!”
“How do you know you haven’t?” Gwen challenged him, picking up the wooden spoon he’d tossed onto the floor. She had half a mind to hit him over the head with it. He was sitting up in bed by this point, with pillows she’d helped tuck behind his back, which had required leaning far too close to him and smelling his warm, spicy, male scent again. He ought to have a foul odor and a hideous face to match his temper.
His brows snapped together. “I know ships and sailing. And I don’t eat fish.”
“How do you know you don’t eat fish if you don’t remember anything?”
“I just know. And what the devil is in this bread? Seaweed?” He shoved the tray back at her. “God’s teeth, I can’t eat this! Is this how you treat your patients? By starving them?” With his right hand he rubbed his left shoulder, caught up in a sling. “I need a drink. Something potent. Whisky? Brandy?” He seemed to be searching his mind. “Rum?”
“We’ve nothing here but what we make ourselves. Cider, small beer, and a bottle or two of rhubarb wine.”
“Cow’s piss!” Pen spat. “Where’s the tavern?”
“There are several down by the wharves, and you’re welcome to go there,” Gwen snapped. “You’ve coin to pay for a meal, of a sudden?”
He glared at her. “God, you’re a harpy.”
