She pulled out the next item, a child’s shirt, and quickly set it aside. Too small for Ifor. “But I needed a place to stay for the night, and I saw spires and towers, so I made my way here. St. Woolos was locked, but St. Sefin’s was open. Abandoned. Anyone could just walk in. I couldn’t believe a place so grand, so holy, had been left to crumble.”
She didn’t look at Pen. She didn’t want him to remember this later as a rebuke against his family. “And I found St. Gwladys. You’ve seen her chapel downstairs. How intact the stained glass is, and all the carvings. I sat with her, and I—I prayed, if you could call it that. And she…spoke to me.”
She looked around at their intent faces. “If anyone sneers at me, just one of you—” She looked pointedly at Pen—“I’ll forget to boil the nettles before I put them in your soup. But I had a vision. Gwladys said to me, ‘I found peace here. And you shall, too.’” She wiped beneath her eyes and bent to her task, unfolding a woolen petticoat. “The next day I met Dovey.”
Dovey nodded. “I’d come to Newport looking for work. Heard one too many comments in Bristol about my missing husband and my half-breed child. I thought Wales might be better.”
“So you simply moved in,” Pen said, curious but not accusing. “And found out later someone else owns the place.”
She met his eyes, her heart sinking. Was this the moment that everything ended? Perhaps their sharing their pasts had drawn back the veil on his. “So it seems.”
He twisted his mouth in thought. “And you don’t have fifteen hundred pounds between you. You don’t have half that.”
Dovey shifted slightly. She knew to the ha’penny their savings, the small bit they’d hoarded from Gwen’s fees, like the coins Mrs. Harries had paid her to take Mathry. It wasn’t one tenth his asking price.
What else could she do? “I’m earning what I can harping,” Gwen said. “In fact, I’m engaged at Greenfield tomorrow evening. Shall I practice for you tonight?”
To distract Pen and his sharp, considering gaze she took up her traveling harp, the small instrument she’d brought with her on her flight south. The only thing she’d brought with her, having lost or left everything else. The music soothed away the hurts and sorrows they’d bared to each other, knitting them more deeply with what they now knew.
And it was Pen, of all people, who had brought forth these confessions. He had united them before as Viscount Penrydd, the threatening landlord whose black-clad solicitor had called for their eviction, but that was a union of fear and mistrust. Now he had opened their eyes to one another.
When would it be safe to confess to him who he was? He was softening, just as she’d hoped. But every moment she delayed gave him more with which to accuse her, for taking up this deceit in the first place. For denying him his name, his place in the world, and all the power and wealth that came with it.
He foundher in the stillroom later that night, sorting through her jars for willow bark for his tea. A thrill shot down her back when he spoke at her shoulder—how did the man manage to tread as soft as a cat when he was so large and solid?
“You didn’t explain where you learned Shakespeare.”
She fumbled with the cloth stopper in the jar. “The house I was in for a while—they had a tutor.”
“For an education like that, you’d have had some birth and breeding,” Pen said. “You didn’t learn Plato or Shakespeare from a Methodist minister’s traveling school.”
She poured the hot water over the bark and other herbs and let it steep. She’d told him enough already. Not that it mattered; no one was looking for her. She’d closed the door on her past when she came south, and she didn’t need anything that might lie behind it.
Unlike Pen, who desperately wanted to unlock that closed door in his head, and deserved to. He was a viscount, and she had him herding goats and mucking stables.
She looked for the tea strainer and found him holding it. “You were right, what you said.” His hazelnut eyes burned in their intensity. “I should wonder if I can trust you.”
Her breath caught.
“Everyone else, they’re an open book.” He handed her the strainer, and their fingers touched. A tingle surged up her arm. “But not you. Gwenllian ap Ewyas. Keeper of secrets.”
“We’ve only ever tried to help you, mi—Pen.”
He must not resent her too much when the time came. It had been good, tonight, for him to learn their histories. She ought to have suggested it before.
“You don’t trust me, either,” he said. His voice sent a shiver down her nape, as potent as a caress. She poured the tea, spooned in honey, and handed the cup to him. He closed his fingers around her hand, heat pressing from both sides. “You trust no one.”
A hard lesson, but she’d learned it well. “Do you think you might trust me?” she breathed, unable to withdraw her hand. He was so close she felt the heat of his body, reaching out to embrace her. A weakness wove through her knees.
“I don’t have a choice.” He drew the cup from her fingers, but his eyes held hers, and his body loomed. “With no memory, no possessions, no name? I’m completely at your mercy. It’s strange, though.”
He touched her cheek with a finger, pushing back a strand of hair stuck to her face. His hands had grown callused from work. She hadn’t missed his flirtatious remarks and teasing; shehadn’t.But she leaned into his touch as if he were an anchor holding her ashore.
“I don’t believe you’re being honest with anyone,” he murmured. “Not with me. Not with your closest friends. But I trust,” he said slowly, “that you will show mercy.”
And he left the room.
That night, when she heard the hoarse shouts in the wee hours, Gwen curled her fists into her pillow and pulled it over her head. She would not go to him. There was nothing she could do for him, she told herself.
