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F our days had passed. Three to go, and then Penrydd would be upon them. Gwen imagined the scenario as she filled her sack with her latest batch of soaps, scented waters, and remedies. He would come with a pitchfork, like men used to pursue witches.

No, he was a titled lord, arrogant and indolent. He’d hire someone else to brandish the pitchfork. Like the sly secretary who had sat and witnessed their interview with great amusement, knowing the whole time what Penrydd was asking her was far, far different from what she was offering him.

Would it be any less embarrassing if they hadn’t had a witness? It would have been no less infuriating. No less crushing a disappointment. She would be left in the same quandary.

Become his mistress. Save St. Sefin’s. And be taken away to the most enormous and filthy of English cities, far from the hills and rivers of Wales, to become a kept woman, subject to a man’s whims and compelled to submit to whatever he demanded of her.

A strange, uncomfortable heat snaked through her innards at the very thought.

Or deny him, preserve her virtue, and let them all be cast into the street without shelter or sustenance. Was her virtue really worth that much?

“I won’t let you do it.” Dovey waited outside the kitchen door, morning sunlight lending her hair and face the high gloss of finished silk.

“Do what? Go to harbor and trade our goat’s milk for seaweed? I’ve been meaning to make laverbread,” Gwen answered. “And if the butcher has lamb to give away this week—roast lamb with laver sauce! Wouldn’t that be a treat?”

“You won’t go back and bargain with that devil,” Dovey said.

Gwen picked up the long yoke and settled the curve over her shoulders, and Dovey set a crock of goat’s milk, stoppered with cloth, in one basket. Gwen swung the yoke towards her, and Dovey set a wrapped cheese in the second basket. “That’s not too heavy, that is?” she asked.

Gwen shifted to balance the weight. With the sack on her back to carry goods home and a few coins tucked into the shawl wrapped at her waist, she was ready for market. “I don’t mean to bargain with him. I won’t meet his terms.”

Dovey blew a stream of air, ruffling the curls at her brow. “All right, then.”

“You thought I would?” Gwen exclaimed.

“I expect you considered it,” Dovey said, a sharp edge to her tone.

She scanned the sky, and Gwen turned to join her, sniffing the air.

Mist rose from the low-lying river, bumping at the knees of Stow Hill, where St. Sefin’s shared its high prospect with the ancient church of St. Woolos.

Dim through the veil rose the square towers of Newport Castle and the angled supports of the wooden bridge crossing the Usk.

Small boats and slender ships with towering masts floated around the wooden wharves and lined the sandy curves of the river, anchored until the next tide.

Further south, mist crawled over the marshlands that meandered with the river toward the Severn’s mouth and the Bristol Channel.

Close by, the wallflowers blooming along the old stone walls of the priory teased her nose with their heady aroma, and beyond that she smelled fresh-turned earth where Dovey and Widow Jones were preparing the vegetable beds.

He couldn’t take this all away from them. He couldn’t .

“I considered it,” Gwen acknowledged. “But he wouldn’t let me stay here, and to pay him with—in—” The cloth market, he’d called it. The blanket hornpipe.

The heavy, suffocating weight of a man atop her. That strange disassociation of being joined so intimately, and yet knowing the man above one, taking his pleasure, was not connected to one in the least. It was all so—something she’d never subject herself to again.

Not even to save St. Sefin’s.

“I wonder if I could propose something else as a trade,” Gwen said. “He’s still at the Green Man in Bristol, I understand. But he’s due at Greenfield in a day or two, and?—”

“No,” Dovey said.

“But you haven’t heard what I?—”

“No,” Dovey said again. “Make him come to us. Make him turn us out. Let him try.” She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head. “He’ll have to look us all in the eye as he does it, and if he’s the fiend you say, he’ll have it in him. But if he’s not…”

Gwen felt a wee tendril of guilt that her portrayal of Penrydd had led Dovey to view him as a devil incarnate.

He was a self-absorbed brute, coarse and lustful, but those traits were shared by a vast proportion of the male species.

He was too handsome for his own good, that was also true, with a fine-featured face, a large rangy frame, a full head of hair and a full mouth of teeth.

Looks like that no doubt let him cut a swath among susceptible women, so little wonder he assumed she’d tumble into his arms. But there was something about the way he carried himself, a stiffness to his posture, a hitch to his stride, that made her think the man guarded some deep inner pain.

As if his war injuries had not healed aright, and the ache in his limbs was clouding his head.

She shook her head to clear it of fancies. He was the devil made flesh, all right. Promising her what she wanted for a price she couldn’t pay. She’d have the pitchfork ready for him did his shadow fall across the door of St. Sefin’s.

“Mayhap he’s drunk himself into a stupor four nights running, and forgot all about us,” Gwen said.

Perhaps the viscount would turn back to merry old England without giving them another thought.

“Most like he’s unconscious in a bed somewhere, sleeping off a thick head and snoring enough to bring the roof down.

” Leaving them to crouch in St. Sefin’s in worry and fear until the sly secretary or Mr. Barlow made his move, and their safe home tumbled down about their ears.

Milord Penrydd was indeed unconscious. But not in a bed. Gwen stood at the wharf a bare hour later, staring at the small, flat-bottomed dory and its passenger.

“Floated up to me like Moses in his basket,” exclaimed the fisherman who’d been casting his nets at the shore and had gathered a small crowd with his excited shouts. “Came out o’ the mist like a ghost.”

Gwen knelt on the wet, sandy shore and reached inside the light boat that had been drawn up out of the water.

The man within lay still as a post, but when she probed the side of his neck she felt the pulse, faint but steady.

Unconscious, but alive. St. Aled’s head, what had happened to him?

Dried blood matted his brow and pooled beneath his head, leaving his brown hair wet and sticky, but she recognized him.

“He’s alive,” she said, and the cool fog, not quite lifted, touched her neck with a chill. He’d been coming for them.

He was dressed as he’d been during their interview, in buckskin breeches and a clawhammer coat of dark superfine, but his simple blue waistcoat was marred with dirt and the white cloth around his neck stained with blood.

His head was tilted one way, his limbs another.

He likely had cracked ribs if he’d fallen or been thrown into the boat.

It was scarcely a surprise that his wretched conduct might have involved him in an accident or attack.

The only mystery was how he’d survived, and what to do with him next.

“This one has Davy Jones looking after him, he has,” the fisherman said.

Gwen, glancing his way, saw his baskets brimming with roach, pike, and barbel.

On a normal day, she’d have bargained with him.

She’d already traded her goat’s milk for a basket of laver, the local seaweed, before Penrydd’s boat was spotted.

A fish stew with laverbread would make a lovely last meal before they were all turned out to starve.

Unless, of course, she agreed to become this man’s mistress. Though still and injured, the sheer bulk of him made her shiver. He was a powerful man, title aside.

“Couldn’t be out for a row,” reported the crab man, emptying his nets and sorting the cockles, razor clams, and mussels into different baskets. “No oars.”

Cockles with a dash of vinegar and a hearty laverbread would make a fine lunch later, too, Gwen thought. Might as well make their last meal as grand as could be.

“Forked by a buzzman at the docks down river and rolled over the side to keep him quiet,” the laver merchant guessed, coming up with one of his baskets filled with algae. “Then the dory floated up here with the tide, and deuced lucky it caught ’im, if you’ll pardon the language, Miss Gwen.”

“Forked?” she questioned.

“Cleaned by a diver,” he answered. “A sharper. A cut purse. Sure and there ain’t a farthing on him. Even ’is stickpin’s been snaffled.” He pointed at the disheveled neckcloth around the unconscious man’s neck.

“I wager the bore got him,” someone announced.

“Aye,” said the fisherman, brightening. “Did you see it this morn, then? New moon, and the winds just right—big enough to unfoot a land llob , I’d say.”

That sounded unlikely to Gwen. The famous Severn bore was a tidal wave that roared up the river several times a year, born from the ocean and, when throttled into the narrow estuary, could grow taller than a man and move faster than a horse.

But where the mouth of the Severn was wider, as in Avonmouth across the way, the bore made no more than a deep swell, hardly enough to topple an experienced sailor and a former officer of the Royal Navy.

“He needs a doctor.” Gwen sat back on her heels. Damp seeped through her linen petticoat and flannel gown. She needed to send him away while he was still unconscious. The man was on his way to turn her out of her home. “Is anyone headed to Bristol this morning? Cardiff? Anywhere?”

The fisherman drew off his wool cap and scratched his head. “No doctor ’round here, Miss Gwenllian. Ain’t been a hospital in Spitty Lane since the days of Owain Glynd?r.”