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S he hadn’t spent the hours planning. She spent the day nursing Ifor and preventing Tomos from gnawing the bandage off his hurt hand. She was already exhausted and unraveled when the boy came running up from town to fetch her.

“Mr. Stanley sent me, Miss Gwen. Said you’re wanted at the King’s Head.”

Gwen rose heavily from the side of Ifor’s cot, where he’d at last succumbed to a troubled sleep.

The King’s Head was both coaching inn and public house, a fit place for a reckoning.

Pen had found someone who knew him and summoned her to pass sentence.

She considered dressing in her finest, but it wouldn’t change the outcome.

She wrapped her checked red shawl about her and set out.

It was Pen, but he hadn’t summoned her to a reckoning. He lay stretched out prone along one side of the stable yard, with Mr. Stanley watching over him.

“A fair handsome lad, or he was, I’m guessing.” The vicar scratched his chin. “I mean, underneath the blood and such. The same one you took in, Miss Gwen?”

“Just yesterday morn.” Gwen knelt and felt for a pulse.

The French had an expression for that eerie sense that one had lived this moment already.

Pen was not dead from internal bleeding or some result of his head wound, as she’d first feared.

But here he was again, still the viscount who held her fate in his hands, once again unconscious, and in the name of all the saints she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with him.

“What happened to him, Mr. Trett?” Gwen asked the innkeeper.

Pen was considerably more battered than when he’d left, his face encrusted with blood from a cut on his arrogant cheekbone, the dark circles beneath his eyes suggesting he’d been punched in the nose.

His hair was mussed, his neckcloth crumpled and untied, his coat had been smudged with dirt, and his breeches had a tear at the knee.

They’d barely gotten him cleaned up from yesterday, and now she had to do it all over again.

And who knew what internal injuries he’d sustained.

“He’s been here since mid-day, giving hisself the barrel fever,” Mr. Trett reported.

“But I didn’t baste ’im. Gossett was in, the great bully, and they was on a spree together until along come Gossett’s wife, trying to chivvy him home.

The tiff you heard then! The beau didn’t like Gossett raising his fists to a woman, and Gossett didn’t like the beau in ’is business, so he brings him out ’ere for a brushing.

” Mr. Trett shook his ginger-haired head.

“No more chance than a cat in hell without claws, with a man Gossett’s size. And neither paid their shot, too.”

Gwen knew of Mrs. Gossett’s circumstances.

She had hinted more than once that Mrs. Gossett might come to St. Sefin’s and bring her children with her.

“Oh, he just gets in his cups and his back up, is all. Says I’m not an easy yoke, I am,” Mrs. Gossett would answer in an apologetic tone, and then turn up to church the next Sunday with a deep-brimmed bonnet hiding her face and eyes.

Gwen sighed. For such a belligerent man, Pen really ought to learn how to better defend himself.

“Did Gossett beat your memory back into you, then?” She resisted the urge to nudge Penrydd with her boot and instead poked him in the arm.

One did not kick viscounts in the ribs no matter how much they might deserve it.

“You.” His eyes fluttered open, and he fisted a hand in the straw beneath him.

The knuckles were scraped and bloody. “Gwenllian ap Ewyas.” He slurred the words through a swollen lower lip.

“Kicked me off her doorstep this morn,” he said to Mr. Stanley, who peered at him with interest. “Prettiest harridan I’ve ever seen. ”

Gwen propped her hands on her hips. “Well? Did you find your answers?”

“Moses in his basket,” he mumbled. “An infant cast upon the sea. What’s that old tale? The Fair Unknown? Take me in, princess, and raise me aright, and someday I will rise up and free my people.”

Gwen’s conscience prodded her. She had to take him in. She had to convince him to look kindly on St. Sefin’s and not cast them all into the marsh, which he would be well within his rights to do.

But to continue the deception, to lie to him about who he was—no, they were not deceiving him, exactly. Her stomach boiled at the thought. She was simply—withholding some rather vital information. For Dovey’s sake. She gathered her nerve.

“Back to St. Sefin’s with you, then. It’s right you were to fetch me, Mr. Stanley, but now I must ask if you can help me with this one.”

“A shame we can’t find where he belongs,” the vicar said, hauling Penrydd to his feet. “His family must be terribly worried.”

Guilt bit hard as she stepped close to help. Penrydd mumbled and sagged against her, stinking of rum.

“As drunk as David’s sow,” she said in disgust.

“Cup-shot? Not I.” Penrydd slung his good arm around her shoulders. “A little cut above the head, perhaps. Merely mellow.”

“Owes me a bull, he does!” Mr. Trett said as they steadied Pen between them.

She didn’t have sixpence on her, much less half a crown. “I will have him come repay the debt as soon as he’s able, Mr. Trett,” Gwen called. She stiffened as Pen’s big, firm body brushed against hers.

“You’re completely mauled,” Gwen told him. The man would never heal if he kept undoing all her good work. “What have you been doing ?”

Pen staggered with them as she and the vicar stepped through the arch and onto High Street.

“Went to the castle,” Pen slurred. “Not in good form! Ferns and such growing from the top of it. Shame. Could give tours and make coin from it, like that abbey—what’s it called?

Twitterstone—Turntun—place that poet wrote about. ”

“Tintern Abbey.” Mr. Stanley grunted as Pen careened his way, and tried to hold him upright without grasping his injured shoulder or ribs. “William Wordsworth. Excellent collection, the Lyrical Ballads . Quite unlike anything I’ve read.”

“Looked in on a pub they said was the old murenger house, whatever that is,” Pen went on. “Thought I’d hole up there for the night. Not too shabby for rooms.”

“The murenger was responsible for maintaining the town walls, back when we had them. That’s what is left of Westgate.” Gwen pointed to the pile of stone bricks as they passed into Church Street, which ended with St. Woolos on one side and St. Sefin’s on the other.

Its new commerce was pushing Newport beyond its medieval footprint, the old structures crumbling to make way for works broader and bigger and new.

Another religious house in the area, what was called the Austin Friars, had become home to a cider mill.

Pen might do the same to St. Sefin’s, turn out its residents and use the old buildings for new ventures that actually earned money.

“Went to St. Woolly’s,” Pen went on. “Climbed the old Norman tower. Great builders, those Normans. But the pater doesn’t know me, alas.”

Mr. Stanley shook his head, and Gwen let out half the breath she’d been holding.

Mr. Stanley, who hailed from an English parish, had interested himself in the great families of the area.

He might not have met Penrydd, but he could place who he was given enough clues.

There was also the possibility that someone who did know him, like Calvin Vaughn, could come strolling down High Street and end the charade in a moment.

Tell him nothing, Dovey warned in her head. Gwen focused on the task of keeping him upright and not on his hand gripping her side, terribly close to her breast.

“Not from around here, am I?” Pen said. “None at the wharf knew me. Said I floated to shore like a selkie.” He frowned. “Some kind of Welsh monster?”

Gwen laughed at his expression. “Selkies are water-folk. They’re born on land but choose to live in the sea. They’re mythical,” she added, in case Penrydd’s sodden brain had not grasped this.

“But the women are excessively beautiful and have exquisite voices.” Mr. Stanley nodded a greeting to the carter driving his mule and wagon up the street.

“If you steal the pelt of a selkie, she has to stay on land as your bride. But she’ll always long for the sea, and if she ever takes her skin back, she will don it and leave you forever. ”

Pen scoffed. “Merfolk.”

“No, the m?r-forwyn is different,” Gwen said, wondering how she had been drawn into this ridiculous conversation.

Pen drunk had a whimsy about him that she much preferred to the glowering, sober Pen.

Or the feckless cad who teased women for sexual favors.

He grunted and squeezed her as his foot turned on a stone, and she braced him, ignoring the awakening sensation in her breasts. A primitive instinct, nothing more.

“The mermaid is half-fish, and born in the sea,” she said, her voice strangely breathless.

She was quite strong; she shouldn’t feel his weight so keenly.

“And they like to lure men to their doom. There’ve been many tales of fisherman and sailors sighting them along the coastline, or there used to be, before the canal brought more sailing traffic to ferry the iron and coal. The ships scare the merfolk away.”

Pen nodded. “A man on my ship swore he sighted one once on watch among the islands.” His brow creased. “Am I a sailor? What islands?”

Gwen’s breath swirled in her chest, and she barely eked out a smile for the mistress of the pie shop, who stared at Pen as they passed. “Is your memory returning?”

“Shreds and pieces, like glimpses in a mirror. And never connected to something I can use.” He swiveled his head and dipped his chin so his nose was practically in her hair. Gwen startled, alarm and awareness shooting through her.

“You, for instance. I know you. I know your scent—bluebells.” He inhaled deeply. Gwen closed her eyes, feeling faint. “So why do names mean nothing? I can’t even remember my own.”