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“Yes, you’ll want extra. The girl will need feeding until you find her a place.

” Mrs. Harries took a key from the ring at her belt and unlocked a small drawer of her desk, pulling forth a leather bag.

“I’ll drop Lady Vaughn a hint that you earned more this evening. She’ll understand all too well why.”

“Perhaps she will have a word with her son about his behavior,” Gwen said as Mrs. Harries withdrew several sovereigns from the purse.

“When has that ever availed us?” The housekeeper squeezed Gwen’s hand as she transferred the coins. “Mathry doesn’t know what you’ve saved her from, Miss Ewyas. As you’ve saved so many.”

Gwen hunched her shoulders as memory loomed. A dark sty. The stench of animals, the warmth keeping her alive. Blood on the straw, enough to fill buckets. The frosted ground resisting her small shovel. The silent thing she laid to rest there, wet with tears.

She pushed the shadows away before they overtook her.

Mathry, God willing, would carry no such memory to haunt her through her days.

Gwen tucked the sovereigns into her pocket, tracing the king’s profile with sore fingertips.

She hoped by all the saints that these coins would go straight to the pocket of the Viscount Penrydd and win her St. Sefin’s.

She’d spend the rest of her life paying for it, if need be. She was paying for so much already.

Mathry sputtered with tears as the weary gelding pulled them gently over the hills and vales toward the River Usk.

A bright moon silvered the land and the life upon it, a strange, silent glow unseen in the light of the workaday world.

Wales lay draped in a veil of magic, but Gwen had not fully seen that until she came here.

Seven years ago, she had arrived in Newport ready to throw herself into the water, or board a boat and sail away from everything.

But atop a green hill she’d glimpsed the sun hanging low over a glassy sheet of water which, she’d learn, was the winding Usk pouring into the mouth of the Severn.

It seemed she’d reached the edge of the world.

The town reminded her of her long-forsaken home, with the medieval castle looming over an ancient port, the ruins of a Roman fort nearby.

She stayed, decided to look for a way to live. And then she found Dovey.

Who was waiting up, a candle in the window to light Gwen home, and in short order the two women had a bed in the old nun’s dormitory dressed with fresh linens, a pitcher of warm water poured for the exhausted Mathry, and a candle in its holder placed on the small wooden shelf.

Rare for a medieval nunnery, the sisters of St. Sefin’s had occupied individual cells, the tiny rooms warmed by the kitchens below.

It was a far sight better than the workhouse, but poor Mathry sat slumped on the edge of her cot, hair brushed and braided for the night, teeth cleaned, a worn bedgown hanging from her shoulders.

“I can’t stay here,” she said numbly. “But I’ve nowhere else to go, have I?” She rubbed her reddened eyes. “Not unless I rid meself of it. No one takes a maid with a baban .”

Gwen gripped the holder of her candle. “You are welcome to stay here as long as you need, Mathry. We will look after you and any child as well. And if need be, you may leave the child here when you go.”

The girl put a hand to a cheek stained with tears. “It’s not true what they say, is it? That you…that children disappear here. That you have feasts for the devil, and?—”

“Saint Dwynwen’s toes!” Gwen cried. “Is that what they say? We foster infants until they are taken in by families! Who else around here does that?”

“But you’re women alone.” Mathry’s gaze shifted between them. “And the men come and go, and…you’ve no one to answer to, and…”

Dovey’s face gentled. “And we look after one another and ourselves, just as we please.”

Mathry fell back upon the bed, letting out a whoosh of breath. “I’ve never come and gone as I wished.”

“We pay a price for it, don’t we?” Dovey reflected as they closed the door on the disconsolate girl. “Well, will the Vaughns turn up our good angels for this, or have they given us naught but another mouth to feed?”

“Mrs. Harries gave me extra, but I don’t know if it’s enough.

” Gwen told Dovey the whole of it as they walked through the dormitory and down the night stair that led to the small chapel beside the old church.

Out of superstition, or unarticulated faith, Gwen lit the stub of a candle each night in the small niche dedicated to St. Gwladys.

This was where she’d found herself on that first night, leveled to her knees by loss, and she took comfort in the story of the ancient saint, a powerful mother and queen, who had given up everything for seclusion with her God.

“But how can we approach a viscount?” Dovey asked as they made their way back to the old prioress’s suite of rooms. “Mr. Barlow isn’t likely to make an introduction.”

“I’ll think of something,” Gwen said. “I’ll find where he’s staying and demand an audience, or…I’ll strap my harp to my back and go wherever he’s carousing that evening and pose as his musical entertainment, if need be.”

“And hope he hasn’t heard the same outrageous stories reaching Mathry’s ears.” Dovey helped Gwen out of her gown and stays, then braided her hair for the night. In Dovey’s small bed Cerys slept peacefully, her lips shaped in a smile, undisturbed by their soft rustling or their low, worried talk.

Gwen blew out the candle and crawled onto the straw tick that served as her mattress.

Her mind whirled like the eddies one saw in the summer river.

She had two weeks to plan how to win Penrydd’s mercy, to keep the world she had built here from washing away.

But how? What did one penniless Welsh woman offer an English lord?

The leering face of Calvin Vaughn and echoes of Mathry’s sobs followed her into sleep while the silver moon sailed the sky in its ancient path, far above human sorrows and fears.