“And you’re worse than Mother Morris with her tamping.” She was tempted to retort that he hadn’t thought her a harpy when he’d tried to press her to become his mistress. Her tongue was grooved from biting it so often.
“Tamping?” He glared.
“Angry. Quarrelsome. Prone to wrathful rages.”
“Speak English!” Pen barked, then scowled when she answered in a long string of Welsh. It was a verse from an old ballad, the first thing that came to mind, but he didn’t know any better, and it gave her some satisfaction to slam the door of the infirmary behind her.
“I’m going to kill him,” she hissed to Dovey, who was cleaning up the kitchen. “And then the sin will be on my soul.”
“But we’d get to keep St. Sefin’s,” Dovey whispered back.
Pen sneered at Evans later when he came with Gwen for a last visit before retiring. “You’re to help me! Good God, look at you!” He stared at Evans’s empty coat sleeve, caught up and pinned to his side. “Between us we make one whole man.”
“With two heads and one brain,” Gwen snapped. “He’s here to help you out of bed, as your carcass is too heavy for me to lift.”
“Four heads,” Pen said insolently, “unless his manhood went the way of his arm. Christ, I need a piss! Where’s the water closet?”
Gwen pressed her lips together. Even with his memories blurred, Penrydd would figure out from his preferences alone that he was a pampered, high-class dandy. Only fancy homes had water closets. “We have a necessary in the courtyard, where Evans will take you, and there’s a chamber pot beneath your bed, if you’d but look.”
Penrydd was in pain, Gwen noted as he leaned on Evans and limped out the door, but he clenched his teeth and didn’t let a single hiss or moan escape him. Gwen shook out his blankets and lifted the sheets to place a sprig of wormwood on his cot to keep away fleas and bedbugs. She and Dovey had smoked the infirmary after the last occupant had departed, saturating the room with brimstone and sulfur to kill any vermin, but she didn’t know what Penrydd might bring with him. Even fancy lords could have lice, though she hadn’t found nits in his hair when she’d cleaned his head wound.
The necessary wasn’t far, but Pen’s face was white and lined with tension when they returned. “This place is falling to pieces,” he announced as Evans lowered him to sit on the cot. “It’s drafty, it’s old, and it smells like a musty tomb. How can you bear to live here?”
Gwen clamped her jaw shut on the first protest that came to mind. This was her home, and she and Dovey worked hard to make it habitable. “Do you have a suggestion then, where they might go, those who have been turned out by their families, or have no families, no living nor any way to make one, mmm?” By St. Gwladys, the arrogance of the man! But she mustn’t call him milord, not even as an insult.
“I won’t stay here,” Pen argued. “Whether I know my own name or not, I won’t abide a sty.”
Panic gripped her heart. “You haven’t given us a chance yet.”
“A chance for what? To starve me with your peasant’s fare? You can’t ask ransom if you don’t know who I am. I doubt you could hold me here anyway.”
She heard belligerence in his tone, but in his eyes she saw a desperation that matched her own. He knew he had nowhere to go. He was attacking her because he was frightened, lashing out like a cornered animal. She’d seen dogs beaten all their lives that snapped at a hand extended in kindness. Pen’s rage was the same, born of fright and helplessness and his hatred of being vulnerable.
He wouldn’t tolerate her pity, she knew that. And if he wouldn’t accept their help, she couldn’t detain him. Disappointment lined her mouth with a vinegar sting. “You’re free to leave any time.”
“I will.” His gaze roamed over the broad, empty room with its carved beam ceiling and bare walls. “Tomorrow morning. Where’s the bell if I need something in the night?”
“The what?”
“The bell! To ring for servants.”
She wavered between the impulse to douse him with the mug of tea she’d set by his bed or throw her candle onto his bedclothes and light him on fire. “There are no servants here, Pen—” She swallowed the rest of his title before it slipped out. She had to guard herself more carefully lest he goad her into giving something away. “I wish you good night,” she said with a hard-won courtesy.
“You’re not taking the light with you?” His eyes lost their insolent slant.
“You don’t need it, and I won’t have you burning the place down simply because you don’t like the look of it.” She swept out of the room, but not before she had the satisfaction of seeing his mouth tighten into a grimace. She’d steeped his tea with willow bark to help dull the pain and ward off fever, but she didn’t feel like telling him that.
“We tried,” Dovey said when Gwen found her in their rooms and, as they undressed by candlelight, relayed her conversation with Pen. “If he asks about in Newport tomorrow, perhaps he’ll hear good reports of St. Sefin’s, and that will sway him.”
Gwen doubted it. Mathry’s impression of St. Sefin’s before she arrived was no more than what many townsfolk were prone to say. That it was a place for damaged, the not-right. Small wonder Penrydd wanted nothing to do with them.
It would be a relief to turn him out. Someone else could deal with his wrath as he went about reclaiming his memory. But she hadn’t won him over, and the moment he recalled his mission, he’d be back to complete it. She had to do something to change his mind.
The voice calledto her from the vast cavern of sleep. It was huge and dark and she was lost in it, pressed under something heavy. She heard the call again. A man, desperate, in pain.
Gwen threw a wrapper over her shift, found her slippers, and groped for the tin tinderbox. Her fingers fumbled with the flint and steel as the echoing call came again. Finally the splint caught and she lit her chamber stick, then hurried down the stone staircase, shielding the candle flame from drafts. Shadows danced along the high ceiling of the infirmary as she entered, following the call.
Pen tossed on the bed, muscles straining. His face was twisted into a terrifying grimace and the hair over his brow was damp with sweat.
