Page 235

Her breath stuck in the top of her chest. “I can’t take him to St. Sefin’s.” Deliver him to the last place she wanted him to be? She’d be giving the executioner the rope to hang them.

“But where else?” asked the laver merchant, inspecting the still man’s face.

Penrydd was growing paler by the moment, his breath inaudible, the rise of his chest a shallow heave.

They couldn’t take him to the workhouse or to a church.

There was a barber-surgeon, who was also the local tailor, but Penrydd didn’t need leeching.

Gwen knew a cunning woman she and Dovey called on for cases they couldn’t nurse, but the woman lived past Langstone. It would take time to fetch her here.

And she didn’t know the extent of Penrydd’s injuries. If he were bleeding inside, he could be dead within the day.

And wouldn’t that solve all your problems , said the devil in her ear.

No saint ever suffered the inner struggle that visited Gwen at that moment.

All she had to do was walk away. Say she didn’t know him, there was naught she could do, and leave him at this pass where fate had brought him.

This man was a threat to her livelihood and all she held dear.

If he disappeared, the threat would disappear with him.

Until the next Viscount Penrydd took inventory of his properties and wondered why he was encumbered with a crumbling priory in Wales.

She wasn’t a saint, but she wasn’t capable of leaving him here. She wouldn’t leave anyone like this, not a sworn enemy, not the devil himself. She would find someone who would see to his care.

“I’ll need help moving him,” she said.

“St. Sefin’s it is, then,” said the crab man with great relief. “Good of you, Miss Gwen.”

“No, I—” Her protest went unheard as the men sprang into action, gratified that the problem was to be taken from their hands.

The fisherman and crab man found a handcart and the laver merchant threw down a dried mass of weed and bracken to form the semblance of a bed.

She held Penrydd’s head, her hands under his neck, while the fishermen and crab men hoisted his legs and transferred him to the cart.

He was exceedingly heavy. He was thoroughly wet and soiled with blood, muck, briny water, and the sharp ammonia smell of urine. How long had he been in this boat?

And how had he arrived here? Mere days ago, he was a cocky, mocking lord demanding she provide him sexual favors.

He’d given her an insolent leer, pawed the lace at her bodice—she felt even now the hot imprint of his fingers on her breast. So much vigor, but also anger and cruelty in him.

And now he was this, broken, bloodied, beaten, and silent.

St. Winifred, preserve us, Gwen prayed as the helpful tradesmen arranged everything.

The fisherman promised to put about word and find the owner of the dory.

The laver merchant arranged her crocks of seaweed in the cart, bracing Penrydd’s body, and laid the yoke alongside.

Two curious boys who’d joined the crowd of onlookers were enjoined to push the cart up the hill to St. Sefin’s and immediately fell to quarreling over which of them should take which handle.

She needed to avoid this man, and now she was bringing him to the very place he had promised to turn her out of. How could she be so foolish? What would Dovey say?

Perhaps he’d be grateful enough for her help that he could be reasoned with.

Gwen drew her shawl around her and thanked the fisherman and the crab man by purchasing some of their wares.

Then she followed the cart and the quarreling boys and the unconscious body of Viscount Penrydd, lord of the British realm, up Stow Hill to the property he had spoken of with scorn and from which he meant to evict her.

Loss pierced her heart as the straight stone walls of the priory came into view.

She loved this place. The steepled roof with its clay tiles, so many missing or broken.

The bell tower empty of a bell. The roof over the north transept had fallen in decades before and they had no means for repair; they simply mopped up after it rained and tried to keep the mold out, since no one used the church anyway.

The men stayed in what had once been the lay sisters’ dorter, built to house the women who lived at the priory without taking religious vows.

On the ground floor, easily accessed from the storerooms and kitchen, was the infirmary, where she would put Penrydd for now.

Until he came to his senses and ordered them to vacate, and she would never see these dignified stone walls again.

She gazed at it all as if for the last time.

There was Ifor, grazing his goats in the churchyard.

The tune of his pipes drifted on a breeze that warmed as the morning advanced.

Tomos clung to the roof of one of the outbuildings, Evans on the ladder behind him, teaching the boy to repair the thatch.

Mother Morris and Widow Jones poked wooden tubs full of washing with their long poles.

Dovey walked with Mathry along the far hedge, Cerys’s curly head bobbing between them as they foraged for mallow, sorrel, and the buds and young leaves of hawthorn.

When Dovey spotted Gwen coming up the hill she headed their way and met her in the small open square between the goat shed and the infirmary.

“By St. David! Are we robbing the charnel house now?” Dovey examined Gwen’s passenger with alarm.

“I don’t know what happened. He washed up ashore at the wharves this morning.

Might have been on a boat coming from Bristol.

” The light dories were made for regular crossings of the channel, bringing goods and people back and forth.

But Penrydd had been alone, with no one to steer.

Left alone to die, it would seem. Her heart contracted.

He might be an obnoxious lord, but no one deserved that fate.

“A drunk landlubber knocked over by the bore,” Dovey predicted.

“Or rolled by thieves and left for dead.” Evans joined them, peering curiously into the cart. “A nob, looks like. Do we know ’im?”

They both looked at Gwen. She swallowed hard.

She couldn’t lie to the faces of her dear ones, but if she said who he was, she’d have a fight on her hands.

Dovey would want to know why they should give aid to a man who meant them harm—a man who meant to leave her and her young daughter without shelter or a way to earn their keep.

And Evans would argue with Dovey, and Gwen couldn’t stomach another quarrel between them, not in her state of fear.

“Let’s take him to the infirmary first,” she said.

The boys carried the unconscious man to a cot in the long, open room that housed St. Sefin’s sick and injured.

Gwen let Evans and Dovey tend to the lower portions of their patient, cleaning and clothing him in a pair of loose cotton breeches.

It was laughable that Dovey, a widow, should be allowed to button the fall of a strange man’s breeches where Gwen, with her maiden status, was not, though her experience with men was no less.

Still, Gwen was happy not to have to deal with the nether regions of the man who had proposed she become intimately acquainted with them.

But that left her the more dangerous business of tending to the wound on his head.

Her heart stuck in her throat the whole time she cleaned away the encrusted blood.

She breathed again to find that, while he had a large goose egg on the back of his skull, the scalp wounds that bled freely were not deep.

“No new injuries down here,” Dovey said, unfolding a blanket to pull over their patient’s legs. “But Gwen, look at his scars.”

A thick raised line, still an angry pink, ran from his left thigh to mid-calf.

Gwen’s tongue swelled in her mouth, blocking words.

In reply she pointed to his bare chest, rising and falling with shallow breaths.

His left chest and shoulder were one enormous bruise, and beneath the purpling skin ran a network of raised lines, red and pink and white.

His arms and chest were muscular, virile; he was surprisingly fit for a posh lord.

But the left side of his body from the neck down was pocked with small craters, a cluster of tiny pink divots that looked like the surface of the moon.

“That’s canister shot,” Evans said, pointing to the scar on Penrydd’s leg.

“But that’s grapeshot.” He indicated the web of scars over his chest. “Someone came at him long and close range, from the looks of it, and he didn’t have a scrap of defense.

” He shook his head. “Poor sod. I wonder where he saw action?”

“Tenerife,” Gwen blurted. The sight of his abused body, new injuries upon old, made her stomach feel tangled and sore.

He’d been so strong and commanding with her at the tavern, playing the arrogant lord to the hilt, and underneath he was hiding these wounds.

Beneath the offensive manner was a young man who had endured incredible suffering.

“This is Lord Penrydd. I met him at the Green Man.”

At their shocked faces, she rushed on. “He said he would come turn us out if I didn’t agree to his terms. He must have been traveling to Newport, and was attacked or in some sort of accident, and—I couldn’t leave him like this.”

“The Viscount Penrydd? The one we’ve been writing to? The one you went to see!” Dovey stepped back, watching the man on the bed as if he were a coiled viper ready to strike.

“What terms did he offer?” Evans asked.

“We couldn’t agree,” Gwen answered. “And now I brought him here. I’m so sorry.”