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S omething had happened to Penrydd.

He’d been puzzling her for days, but Gwen put her finger on it the afternoon he burst into the kitchen with Ifor, both coming in for their dinner. They scraped the mud off their boots and Pen announced, sounding quite pleased with himself, “I learned a Welsh word today.”

Gwen, in the middle of steaming herbs for oil, simply stared.

His face was turning tanned and healthy, no longer the complexion of the pasty lord who slept all day and caroused all night.

His eyes were clear, perceptive, and often glowing with amusement.

His hands didn’t shake in the mornings. His hair was growing long, curling over the collar of the borrowed coat.

He met Gwen’s eyes with a cocky smile. “ Gafr means goat.”

She felt the broad tug of an answering smile cross her face. His delight called up the same warmth within her. “He,” Pen said, turning to gaze at Ifor, “named his goat, Goat.”

Ifor grinned. “He’s a fine goat.”

“Exemplary,” Pen agreed. He picked a burr off the boy’s collar, quite casually, and tossed it aside. “The Platonic ideal of a goat.”

“A plodding what?” Ifor asked.

“Plato, gwashi ,” Gwen said without thinking. “An ancient Greek, one of the three fathers of philosophy.”

Pen stared at her as if taken aback that she knew this.

Of course, they lived in Wales—how did the Welsh know anything of Western intellectual tradition?

Gwen turned back to the stove and busied herself with her steaming apparatus but kept one ear cocked toward the scullery as Pen primed the handpump and washed their hands, explaining Plato’s theory of ideal forms to Ifor.

She met Dovey’s expression of wonderment and shrugged, as surprised as she at Pen’s kindness toward the boy.

The day Barlow insulted him, something had switched in Penrydd.

He’d gone from antagonistic and sullen to cooperative, almost cheerful, and terribly easy to like.

His sarcasm didn’t abate, but his insults did.

Instead of holding himself apart, sneering at the ways of St. Sefin’s and all Welsh, he pitched in to do his share.

She was surprised at how easily he fell into the rhythms of the place. Into life with them.

What would that mean when he found out what she’d done to him?

“What’s dinner?” She jumped as he appeared at her elbow, clean and smelling like soap. He set off those butterflies in her belly, every time.

“We call them St. Sefin’s sausages. Chopped vegetables bound with egg and old breadcrumbs. We’ve no meat.”

“Time to hire myself out as stable mucker again.” He gathered two plates and carried them into the refectory, placing them on the table where Widow Jones and Mother Morris had set their knitting aside. “Mother, my shoulder says we’ll have rain soon. What say your knees?”

“Ah, bydd , bodes the glaw mis tonight.” Mother Morris rubbed her right hip and picked up her knife. “First rain of May. Good for the eyes, and kills the lice on the cattle.”

“May already!” Pen said. “Widow, I would have brought you morels, but Ifor and I have a funny story about that. What do you say again when everything’s gotten cocked up?”

“ Cachu hwch! ” Mother Morris said gleefully, diving into her dinner.

“It’s all pig’s poo,” Ifor translated, bringing Tomos and their plates to the table to join them. Gwen stared as Pen slid along the bench so the boys could sit on either side of him.

“ Cachu hwch !” Tomos chuckled.

“Aye, that describes my mushroom experience, but don’t say that before Mr. Stanley, lad, when we go to clean the bronze tomorrow. He won’t appreciate the sentiment.”

“I want to go.” Cerys, denied a spot next to Pen, claimed the place across from him, burrowing next to Widow Jones. “I want to look for the treasure.”

“Treasure at St. Woolos?” Pen said. “A hair of the saint’s head, or maybe the tip of his ear? I saw St. Alban’s shoulder blade once.” He lowered his knife, his voice changing with surprise. “Though I don’t know where, or how.”

“It’s a real treasure that?—”

“Cerys, little heart,” Dovey said, bringing in a plate piled high with sausages. “Don’t bore Mr. Pen with old legends.” She slapped the plate on the table next to Cerys and then waltzed off with her nose in the air, swishing past Evans and pretending not to see his nod of thanks.

Gwen tsked to herself as she fixed a plate for Mathry. What had Evans done now to offend? But she was more interested in watching Pen, the center of attention at the dinner table, and enjoying the banter with the children.

“St. Sefin’s was wealthy.” Cerys ignored her mother’s warning and assumed an air of self-importance as she explained.

“The priory took in travelers and ran businesses, probably weaving and brewing, so say me mam and Miss Gwen. There was a poem on the riches of St. Sefin’s some Saes wrote down in his book.

There was silver plate and jeweled caskets and a gold chalice they used for the Eucharist, said to be the same one Jesus used at the Last Supper.

But when the knights of fat King Henry tromped in to take everything, where was the treasure? ” Her green eyes grew wide. “Gone!”

“Gone,” Tomos whispered, his eyes equally wide.

“Stolen already.” Pen nodded.

“No, Mr. Pen, it was never found! The nuns hid it away. That’s what the poem says.

And it’s not anywhere here, or I’d have discovered it by now, since I’ve been searching for years .

So I think it might be hidden at St. Woolos.

And when I find the treasure, Mam and Miss Gwen can pay the lord and we can all stay here and have a roof over our heads and not be thrown into the workhouse or the street.

” She beamed, pleased with her logic and the scope of her dreams.

Penrydd’s gaze met Gwen’s as she and Dovey took seats next to the older women. Gwen looked away from the question in his eyes.

She’d ceased her visits to his room after his talk about comfort.

His nightmares still troubled him, but she made him a tea each evening to help him sleep.

There would be no more coming again in the dark to soothe him, no chance of falling asleep again on his cot or, worse yet, falling prey to his charms. Fortunately—so she told herself—he’d ceased with his teasing looks and seductive invitations.

Instead, he watched her. And listened. When she mentioned she needed a pot or a barrel fetched from a storeroom, it was sitting on the table when she next entered the kitchen.

She’d caught him once, early morning, helping Tomos with his chore of fetching the water, cautioning the boy against getting his hand caught again in the winch.

He helped Ifor turn out the goats and he helped Cerys gather hay for their feed.

He carried baskets of wet laundry for Widow Jones.

And he could often be spotted about the grounds of St. Sefin’s, working on some task with Evans, the two of them tossing masculine banter back and forth.

There were no more sneers at Evans’ lank sleeve, but instead a steady extra hand when he needed one.

When men came from the wharves needing help to free a ship stranded in a sandbar at the mouth of the Usk, Pen went with them, speaking rather knowledgeably about draught and ballast.

She hadn’t once had to empty his chamber pot.

One morning, when his nightmares struck just before dawn, he gave up on sleep and came into the kitchen to find her starting the morning bread.

Pen ate a bun at the table and talked with her while she mixed Mother Morris’s favorite gripe water and found she’d used the last of the dried fennel.

She’d looked around to find him gone and was surprised at her own disappointment.

She was coming to enjoy their conversations in the times when he was quiet and serious, or as serious as he could be.

Just as she chided herself for foolishness, feeling a sense of loss at his departure—he didn’t have to declare his business to her!

—he’d come through the back door, tall and calm and shaking morning dew from his hair, bearing a fistful of fennel.

Those marks of attention and companionship were more seductive, and touched her more deeply, than any innuendo or talk of cavorting. She didn’t dare tell him that.

But she felt he knew.

“How’d you lose your arm, Evans?” Pen asked one night as they sat around the fire in the chapter house, all disposed to their different tasks.

Cerys sat at her mother’s knee, her hands spooled with yarn for the scarf Dovey was knitting.

Mother Morris made stockings, Widow Jones mended a shawl.

Gwen sorted through a box of donations that had been left on the porch, separating the clothes that needed to be mended from what could be used right away.

Ifor and Tomos played backgammon, and Mathry sat with a barely begun infant gown on which she was making little progress.

Everyone stared at Pen in the wake of this question as if he had suddenly proposed a country dance.

He stared back. “What? Is he your household brownie who turns into a boggart does anyone mention he’s missing a limb?”

“Nay, we simply don’t—talk of our pasts here,” Dovey said, her voice carefully neutral.

Pen shrugged and sprawled in his seat. By silent agreement everyone had given him the bishop’s chair, a huge oak piece with ornate carvings along its arms, legs, and high back.

It looked as if a canopy of cloth of gold should be erected over it, and Pen lounged as naturally there as if something in him remembered he was a lord.

“I can’t bore you all by prating about my past,” he said. “So I want to hear yours.”

Gwen set aside a men’s shirt that might be cut down for Tomos. She couldn’t imagine the Penrydd she’d met in Bristol caring a whit for anyone’s life beyond his own. But now everyone watched Evans to see what he might say.