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Gwen pondered the incredible exchange, and hopeless ways to raise fifteen hundred pounds, while she crumbled chopped rosemary atop the molds filled with simmering soap.

They’d dry in an aromatic top layer and, when used, soothe the skin.

At least there was one task she could manage, right now, while everything else was tumbling about in her head.

“Brought you something.”

She startled as Pen appeared at her elbow. He had changed into a suit of Evan’s old clothes. His hair was damp, curling over his forehead, and he smelled like her soap. He held out a canvas sack.

“Evans and I mucked out Trett’s stables, then went to the butcher’s and moved some offal about for him. His wife sent this. She says a proper Welsh soup must have salted bacon. And swedes.”

Gwen unwrapped the paper to find a thick packet of bacon. Her mouth watered. “This is…” Astonishment bound her tongue.

“You’re welcome.” He looked smug, so pleased with himself for bringing something to the table. She had expected nothing but complaints over the task he’d been assigned.

“Trett says Gossett hasn’t been back in since he trounced me. But Mrs. Gossett’s been seen at the miller’s, with two perfectly sound eyes.” He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck and grinned at her.

Gwen hauled out the frying pan with unsteady hands. He had mucked the innyard’s stables, performed a service for the butcher, and brought home food. And he had known she would want to hear that Mrs. Gossett was enjoying a reprieve from her husband’s fists.

He hadn’t recognized Barlow the solicitor. And Barlow hadn’t recognized him.

“That’s good news, it is.” She sliced the bacon while Widow Jones stepped into the cellar.

“Swedes!” Pen called after her, rolling his left shoulder. “I’ve a hankering to try them.”

“I think we have some left from last autumn.” Gwen kept her eyes on her knife.

She wondered if the day’s work had been a strain on his injuries.

She’d make him a rub for his sore muscles before bed, though she doubted the wisdom of offering to apply it herself.

He was so large, so clean-smelling. So confident.

She’d seen a sweet, calm side of him when she awoke on the side of his cot and listened to birdsong while the morning sun fell through the window.

The moment bound her like a golden net, catching her every time she turned, tapping at some deep, soft space in her heart that had long been buried.

“Have they found who murdered the Jewish man from Merthyr Tydfil?” Dovey asked.

“No news, but Trett says there’ve been reports of ark ruffians and knights of the blade lurking about the wharves and the common houses, robbing and threatening and bullying people.

Some gang from Cardiff or Bristol, not sure where.

I’ve not found yet how I got caught up in it, but to be sure there’s some cloven foot in the business. ”

“Cloven foot?” Gwen asked. If he was asking around town about who attacked him, he would eventually find out who he was. Her knife wobbled and veered over the meat on her cutting board.

“The devil’s in it,” Pen said. “Hey now, don’t be stingy! I earned that bacon, and I’ll have nice thick rashers, if you please.”

He reached for her knife, sliding his hand over hers, and the contact rattled her to her core. She leaned back, bumped into his shoulder, and leapt away.

“I wonder what they want. These ruffians,” Gwen gasped.

There were new elements coming in droves into sleepy Newport, immigrants seeking work in the coal fields and mines, but most found honest if brutally demanding employment.

“There are always some who will try thievery, but in the past the men have settled it.”

“Could be the crimps again.” Evans entered, he too having cleaned up from his day. “They’re the ones as kidnap men for the East India ships and the African slavers.”

“ Twpsyn! ” Dovey cried, shaking a wooden spoon at him. “You’re tracking your muddy boots all about my clean kitchen, you are! Cerys has more sense than you do!” She made shooing motions and Evans ducked into the storeroom, where Widow Jones scolded him for stepping on the swedes.

“Better him than me,” Pen whispered in her ear, and Gwen smothered a laugh.

This light-heartedness was absurd in her, not at all suitable.

Her emotions were such a tangled skein—the panic with Barlow, her confusion when the solicitor didn’t recognize his employer, the entwined hope and despair that Pen had offered her St. Sefin’s, and his being with them now, at ease with the crowd in the kitchen, though he owned this place and held sway over all of them.

She couldn’t find her feet. She retreated to the stove, and he followed her.

“Do I stink?” he asked, leaning close.

She shivered. He smelled good . She wanted to press her nose into his neck. Heat crept down her back and she focused on arranging the rashers of bacon on the griddle.

“That’s an outrage, woman!” She sucked in air when he wrapped his hand about hers, taking possession of her wooden spatula.

“You can’t cook the bacon that hot, you’ll burn it.

You want to build the heat, slow and easy, and then bring her to a nice, hot sizzle.

Just like handling a—” He cast her a sidewise look. “Never mind.”

Gwen bit back an infatuated smile. She didn’t want him to see she’d grasped the innuendo, that his flirtatiousness made her bloom like a daffodil. “And when did you become an expert in preparing pork, mm—Mr. Pen?”

“I can’t say. Perhaps while I was soldiering? It’s a skill women admire, isn’t it?” Aware she was watching, he slid the spatula along the pink curves of the bacon as if he were caressing the body of a lover.

She swallowed again, this time fighting embarrassment. Curse the man and his ability to unsettle her. It had been easy to dismiss him when he was rude and presumptuous. This Pen, with his mesmerizing smile, relaxed confidence, and messily tied neckcloth, was impossible to ignore.

That night the residents of St. Sefin’s, still buzzing with the gossip over Mr. Barlow’s offer, watched in shared surprise as Pen dished and passed round bowls of cawl brimming with thick chunks of bacon and braised vegetables, with fresh, hot laverbread served alongside.

He accepted the praise and exclamations as if he’d made the meal himself.

Gwen opened a jug of last fall’s apple cider and they feasted merrily and long. For the first time in weeks, Gwen felt free from the fear that Barlow would turn them out at any moment. Pen had named his price, and it was in respectable pounds sterling, not sexual services.

She watched him, drawn into his good humor as he boasted of how he’d beat Evans in filling the wheelbarrow, telling lively stories of what they’d seen at the tavern, who had been at the butcher’s, what ships had tied up at the wharf.

He was amusing and held the center of attention with careless ease.

But he didn’t flirt with any of the others, and he avoided Mathry’s sultry, come-hither looks.

It was only Gwen who was the target of his probing stares and seductive smiles.

She couldn’t reconcile this man with the sulking, snappish Penrydd she’d met in the Bristol tavern, the arrogant lord who moved as if he were in pain and assumed she was for sale.

Nor could she square him with the demanding, quarrelsome knave she’d patched up after a beating, twice. This was a new side of him entirely.

“You don’t have the money, do you?” Pen asked quietly when Gwen came to his door at bedtime.

He’d moved into the men’s wing, a short hall of tiny rooms that had once housed travelers and visitors to the priory.

He’d claimed the chamber furthest from where Evans slept, explaining that he didn’t want to wake the man in the night with his screaming.

“I don’t have one tenth of it,” she answered. She stepped into the room, following him as he shed his coat, then began unbuttoning his waistcoat. The sturdy wool, cut for a smaller man than he was, outlined the planes of his shoulders and the lean length of his back.

“Then what will you do?”

“Ask about for loans, I suppose.”

Though who had money to back her, she didn’t know.

The Vaughns wouldn’t support a place for the poor.

She could try the Morgans of Tredegar; Charles Morgan was respected in the area, a soldier in the Coldstream Guards who had been a prisoner at Yorktown during the trouble with the American colonies.

But she suspected he would prefer to invest his money in his lands and the support of his young family, and he was not at home to apply to.

Other great houses nearby, like Caldicot Castle or Llancaiach Fawr, their landlords had rented out as farms. There would be no rich benefactors there.

The great castles of Chepstow and Abergavenny were no more than stops on tours of picturesque Wales, the glories of the Norman Marcher lords and Tudor barons now a ruined memory.

And the Marquess of Bute, who owned a number of castles in Cardiff and Caerphilly, might want St. Sefin’s for himself as he seemed to have an affection for ruined monuments.

She didn’t dare approach him for help. A marquess, ranking above a viscount, was even further from her orbit.

“There’s the money I earn harping,” she said. Pen cast his waistcoat aside and began untwisting his neckcloth, and she swallowed through a suddenly dry throat. His ease at revealing his body to her was almost more intimate than his becoming disrobed.

“We’ll find the money somehow. I only hope—we have the time.” Her stomach skittered about. It was so strange trying to barter with him when he didn’t know the hand he held.