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“Gibraltar,” Evans said. “I joined the British Army as a lad, which was a laugh since I grew up on the water, but I wanted to see the Americas. Instead I was sent to Gibraltar and eventually made a gunner at the fort. Took some heavy fire from the Spanish and French.” He rolled his wounded shoulder, remembering.

“The Siege of ’82,” Pen guessed. “When the French came in with their floating batteries, armored warships they were? I heard it was a rain of hellfire, days upon days of it. But they didn’t take the strait.”

“Nay,” Evans said, rubbing his injured leg. “They didn’t.”

“Then what?”

“I came back to Pembrokeshire. Rented a farm in Angle. My sweetheart took me back, just as I was. Many grand and happy years we had, with the babanod . Five of them, sweet lads and lasses.” He stared reflectively into the fire. “Then the typhus came.”

Dovey put down her knitting and stared at Evans as if she had never seen him before. “You lost someone,” Gwen said softly.

He bowed his head. “I lost them all.”

A heavy silence fell across the room. Cerys sniffled. Evans shrugged. “So I wandered east, looking for a good place to drown myself. And I found Miss Gwen and Dah—Mrs. Van der Welle here in Newport, trying to rebuild this gloomy old pile, and thought, I have one good hand to give them.”

Dovey stared at her lap. “But to lose your family,” she whispered.

“There’s not many as have one year that happy, much less ten,” Evans answered.

“Well!” Pen adopted a bluff tone, but Gwen saw the story had affected him. “Anyone care to top that tale?”

“Mine’s obvious.” Mathry sat beneath the mullioned window, the setting sun casting a gold nimbus about her head. She pouted and pointed at her belly. “He said he loved me and would always take care of me, and I, like a tymffat, believed him.”

“My spineless son turned me out because his wife didn’t like me,” Widow Jones said. “I thought I had raised him better, with a shred of sense. But his loyalty is to her now.”

“Mother Morris? What about you?” Pen watched as the older woman bit off a length of string.

“ Twll din pob Saes, ” Mother Morris cried. She leaned forward and muttered a musical cadence of Welsh, her mouth turned down at the corners.

“An Englishman came after her husband died and took her farm for the coal,” Widow Jones told them.

“The Saes said the land belonged to him. Her sons were put to work like animals and the mines killed all three of them—cave in, poisoned air, lung fever.” The widow shook her head while Mother Morris hugged herself and rocked in her chair.

“The Saes never paid a penny to their families when they died. She lost one daughter to childbed, and the rest found new husbands. Mother was sent to the workhouse here, and that’s where Miss Gwen found her.”

Widow Jones turned to the older woman. “Not all Saes are like that, Mother,” she said, indicating Pen.

“ Dim , he’s Cymry,” Mother nodded. “One of us.”

Gwen, startled, glanced at Pen to see what he made of this acknowledgement. But he simply turned to survey the boys at their game, his face thoughtful.

“Ifor was brought to St. Woolos when he was three,” Gwen said. “He’d gone blind by then. His mother served the sailors at the wharves and caught the English pox.”

Pen scowled at her. “The pox is the French disease.”

“And the French call it the Spanish disease.” Evans managed a smile. “At any rate, it’s rare that the children survive. Ifor’s a fighter.”

“Mr. Stanley couldn’t raise him, of course. A bachelor priest? But we could,” Gwen said.

“Me,” Tomos said, looking up from the board.

“Ah, bachgen. Tomos’s mother brought him here because—” She hesitated. “They had so many mouths to feed, and he’s a strapping boy, isn’t he? She asked if he could work here for his keep.”

“ Bwyd, ” Tomos said happily, separating his game pieces from Ifor’s, which were carved with a mark.

“Yes, you earn your food and more,” Gwen told him.

“And Dovey.” Pen’s eyes settled on her. Cerys stilled, listening.

Dovey focused on her needles, her long lashes hiding her eyes.

“My mother was born on a sugar plantation in the West Indies. She was given to the planter’s daughter as her companion and went with her at her marriage.

Turns out the husband liked my mother as well as he liked his wife.

He, my father, brought them both to England when he retired from his government post, and I was raised in Bristol. ”

She paused, turning the needles in her hand to begin a new row of stitches.

“He left papers freeing my mother and I when he died, but he didn’t leave any money, and his widow didn’t see it her place to look out for us, though my mother had served her so long.

Maman took in sewing and I worked for a hatmaker, as a hairdresser, as a lady’s maid. ”

Her needles clicked steadily. Gwen continued sorting clothes, knowing this story already, but the others listened, rapt. Only Evans seemed detached, staring out the window above Mathry’s head. Pen was as riveted as Cerys.

“My husband was a Dutchman who came to Bristol to learn English shipbuilding and help the Dutch Navy rebuild its fleet. It didn’t take him long to win me.

We married in Bristol and took a small set of rooms.” Dovey’s gaze settled on her daughter, and she smiled.

“He was wild about you, my darling. He boasted that you have his eyes.”

Cerys’s green eyes shone, but Dovey looked back at her work as if she couldn’t, for the moment, bear the sight of her daughter’s glowing face.

“Because he knew the Baltic Sea, Jan was hired to help take a ship filled with riches to Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, in St. Peterburg. So many riches—artwork, fabrics, fancy metalwork. I’d never seen such fine things.

They promised a commission that would have bought us a house. ”

“But it didn’t,” Pen said somberly.

Tears gathered on Dovey’s lashes. “They sailed too late in autumn and the storms blew them into the Archipelago Sea. It’s known as a graveyard for ships.

Hundreds have gone down there. Including Jan.

His friends in the navy searched, they told me.

But they’ve never found a trace of his ship.

Not a bolt, not a plate. Not a man.” She fell silent.

“Full fathom five thy love lies,” Pen said in a low voice, “and of his bones are coral made.”

Evans’s head swung round, his expression darkening in rebuke, but Gwen recognized the poetry.

“Nothing of him doth fade, but doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange,” she murmured.

At Dovey’s small frown, she explained. “When we read The Tempest, remember? Ariel sings a lament to Ferdinand to tell him his father has been lost at sea.”

“And where did you learn Shakespeare, Miss Gwen?” Pen asked, his voice soft but somehow dangerous. “You haven’t told us your tale.”

“Ah.” She lifted a shift from the box, a woman’s gown, nearly new. She ran a hand over the fine linen, soft as silk. “Does anyone care?”

“Everyone else shared their histories,” Pen said. “Those of us who could.”

Gwen nodded and put the gown aside. A shift that fine would have been prized by its owner, worn as often as possible. It could only be sorrow that brought it to St. Sefin’s barely worn.

She cleared her throat and kept her eyes on her task, aware of how the late golden light in the room fell in thick shafts, catching the dust motes in their dance. Outside the songbirds began their evening chorus.

“I was born in Merionethshire, to the north. When the family I was living with turned me out, I traveled south, moving lake to lake, following the rivers. I don’t know what I thought—of drowning myself, perhaps?

Or sailing away. When I came to Brynglas, the rise above Newport, I stopped and saw the Usk where it emptied into the Severn, and the sea spreading beyond, and I… I thought, ‘I will lose myself there.’”

She pulled out the next item, a child’s shirt, and quickly set it aside.

Too small for Ifor. “But I needed a place to stay for the night, and I saw spires and towers, so I made my way here. St. Woolos was locked, but St. Sefin’s was open.

Abandoned. Anyone could just walk in. I couldn’t believe a place so grand, so holy, had been left to crumble. ”

She didn’t look at Pen. She didn’t want him to remember this later as a rebuke against his family. “And I found St. Gwladys. You’ve seen her chapel downstairs. How intact the stained glass is, and all the carvings. I sat with her, and I—I prayed, if you could call it that. And she…spoke to me.”

She looked around at their intent faces.

“If anyone sneers at me, just one of you—” She looked pointedly at Pen—“I’ll forget to boil the nettles before I put them in your soup.

But I had a vision. Gwladys said to me, ‘I found peace here. And you shall, too.’” She wiped beneath her eyes and bent to her task, unfolding a woolen petticoat. “The next day I met Dovey.”

Dovey nodded. “I’d come to Newport looking for work. Heard one too many comments in Bristol about my missing husband and my half-breed child. I thought Wales might be better.”

“So you simply moved in,” Pen said, curious but not accusing. “And found out later someone else owns the place.”

She met his eyes, her heart sinking. Was this the moment that everything ended? Perhaps their sharing their pasts had drawn back the veil on his. “So it seems.”

He twisted his mouth in thought. “And you don’t have fifteen hundred pounds between you. You don’t have half that.”

Dovey shifted slightly. She knew to the ha’penny their savings, the small bit they’d hoarded from Gwen’s fees, like the coins Mrs. Harries had paid her to take Mathry. It wasn’t one tenth his asking price.

What else could she do? “I’m earning what I can harping,” Gwen said. “In fact, I’m engaged at Greenfield tomorrow evening. Shall I practice for you tonight?”

To distract Pen and his sharp, considering gaze she took up her traveling harp, the small instrument she’d brought with her on her flight south.

The only thing she’d brought with her, having lost or left everything else.

The music soothed away the hurts and sorrows they’d bared to each other, knitting them more deeply with what they now knew.

And it was Pen, of all people, who had brought forth these confessions. He had united them before as Viscount Penrydd, the threatening landlord whose black-clad solicitor had called for their eviction, but that was a union of fear and mistrust. Now he had opened their eyes to one another.

When would it be safe to confess to him who he was?

He was softening, just as she’d hoped. But every moment she delayed gave him more with which to accuse her, for taking up this deceit in the first place.

For denying him his name, his place in the world, and all the power and wealth that came with it.

He found her in the stillroom later that night, sorting through her jars for willow bark for his tea. A thrill shot down her back when he spoke at her shoulder—how did the man manage to tread as soft as a cat when he was so large and solid?

“You didn’t explain where you learned Shakespeare.”

She fumbled with the cloth stopper in the jar. “The house I was in for a while—they had a tutor.”

“For an education like that, you’d have had some birth and breeding,” Pen said. “You didn’t learn Plato or Shakespeare from a Methodist minister’s traveling school.”

She poured the hot water over the bark and other herbs and let it steep. She’d told him enough already. Not that it mattered; no one was looking for her. She’d closed the door on her past when she came south, and she didn’t need anything that might lie behind it.

Unlike Pen, who desperately wanted to unlock that closed door in his head, and deserved to. He was a viscount, and she had him herding goats and mucking stables.

She looked for the tea strainer and found him holding it. “You were right, what you said.” His hazelnut eyes burned in their intensity. “I should wonder if I can trust you.”

Her breath caught.

“Everyone else, they’re an open book.” He handed her the strainer, and their fingers touched. A tingle surged up her arm. “But not you. Gwenllian ap Ewyas. Keeper of secrets.”

“We’ve only ever tried to help you, mi—Pen.”

He must not resent her too much when the time came. It had been good, tonight, for him to learn their histories. She ought to have suggested it before.

“You don’t trust me, either,” he said. His voice sent a shiver down her nape, as potent as a caress. She poured the tea, spooned in honey, and handed the cup to him. He closed his fingers around her hand, heat pressing from both sides. “You trust no one.”

A hard lesson, but she’d learned it well. “Do you think you might trust me?” she breathed, unable to withdraw her hand. He was so close she felt the heat of his body, reaching out to embrace her. A weakness wove through her knees.

“I don’t have a choice.” He drew the cup from her fingers, but his eyes held hers, and his body loomed. “With no memory, no possessions, no name? I’m completely at your mercy. It’s strange, though.”

He touched her cheek with a finger, pushing back a strand of hair stuck to her face. His hands had grown callused from work. She hadn’t missed his flirtatious remarks and teasing; she hadn’t. But she leaned into his touch as if he were an anchor holding her ashore.

“I don’t believe you’re being honest with anyone,” he murmured. “Not with me. Not with your closest friends. But I trust,” he said slowly, “that you will show mercy.”

And he left the room.

That night, when she heard the hoarse shouts in the wee hours, Gwen curled her fists into her pillow and pulled it over her head. She would not go to him. There was nothing she could do for him, she told herself.

If she went it would prove nothing but that she wanted him. Wanted to touch him, soothe him, be near him, and every time she drew close to him, it was harder to pull away. But she couldn’t risk exposing herself. She had far too much to lose.