Page 252

But someone had attacked and killed the Jewish man from Merthyr Tydfil, and they still didn’t know who had attacked Pen.

The reports continued of rough men from Cardiff starting quarrels at the wharves and hectoring ships’ captains about their cargoes.

Gwen kept an eye on the darkest corners as she walked, pulling her shawl tightly around her.

St. Sefin’s was a refuge for those who would otherwise be left without relief. She had made it so. She would tear Calvin Vaughn’s guts out and dance on his entrails if he took this sanctuary away from them.

Her own rage astonished her. It wasn’t like her to be vengeful. But somehow, of all the English gentry in Wales, he knew the Suttons. And with that name he raised all her ghosts. They capered about her, mocking, screeching, tormenting her with what she had lost.

She’d put them in danger already, by deciding to take in Penrydd and then lie to him. When the wolf awoke, he would swallow them all. Penrydd had far greater power to destroy them than Calvin Vaughn.

Something was wrong at St. Sefin’s. A candle bobbed along the upper passage, where the women had their rooms. Everyone should be abed at this hour.

Gwen stepped into the kitchen, her heart still beating erratically from her confrontation with Calvin Vaughn.

A keening cry came from above, and a cold shiver ran down Gwen’s spine.

Dovey met her at the bottom of the night stair leading to the women’s dormitory.

“Who—?” Gwen started.

“Mathry.” The shadows hollowed her cheekbones and thinned her lips, turning Dovey’s beautiful face into a frozen death’s mask, like those on Egyptian mummies. “She tried to purge the babe.”

“She went to the midwife?” Gwen gasped and tossed her cloak on its peg.

“Not ours. She went to the cunning woman in Bassaleg, and now she’s convinced the woman laid a curse on her and she’s going to die.”

She led Gwen to the source of the keening. Another candle burned in Mathry’s room. The girl lay in bed, her gown drenched and stuck to her with sweat. She struggled to her elbows and stared at Gwen with wide, terrified eyes.

“Don’t let it die.”

“Mathry, dynan .” Gwen hurried to her, pressing a hand to her brow. The girl was clammy, but not feverish. “Dearie. What did you do?”

“He told me to get rid of it.” Mathry burrowed her forehead into Gwen’s palm, her face crumpling.

“He said he’d take me back if I did. So I went to the woman he told me of—another maid at Greenfield went there, and she was free after, and found work again.

But the place was so horrid, Gwen, and she said some awful spell with smoke and incantations, and she made me drink a brew, so bitter… I’m sure she poisoned me.”

Mathry shook her head and sobbed. “As soon as I drank, I knew—I don’t want to lose it. I don’t want it gone.” She reached out both hands, tears running freely down her face. “Please help me.”

Gwen met Dovey’s eyes, her stomach slithering with fear. They didn’t need to speak. If the woman knew her herbs, she would have given Mathry something highly effective, something that could not be reversed.

“Are you bleeding? Vomiting? Voiding?” Gwen pressed Mathry’s cold hands between her own.

Mathry’s soft, dumpling face drew taut with pain. “Me belly feels like there are snakes in it. And I’ve been puking me guts out.” She nodded toward the chamber pot near Gwen’s feet, which exuded a noxious aroma.

“But bleeding,” Gwen said, just as Mathry leaned over the side of the bed to add to the contents of the chamber pot. Gwen held back her hair as she heaved. Dovey rubbed her shuddering back.

“No.” Mathry wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her shift. “Not yet.”

“Then there’s a chance,” Gwen said. “She might have only given you a purgative. Or a laxative, if she didn’t know better. Did she say what was in the brew?”

Mathry shook her head in misery. “She only asked if I had quickened. I told her no.”

“We might be able to stop you throwing, but only if she gave you something for the bowels and not the womb.” Gwen scooped her hand under Mathry’s trembling arm and Dovey moved to her other side. “We will make a tea. And walk. And pray.”

“ Ein Tad ,” Mathry began obediently, swinging her legs over the bed and sliding on her slippers. “ Yn y nefoedd, sancteiddier dy new …”

“Not the Lord’s Prayer,” Gwen said. “Pray to St. Elen, mother of Constantine. And we will go light a candle to St Gwladys, mother of Cadog the Wise.”

Dovey grabbed Mathry’s wrapper off its peg and they shuffled down to the kitchen, the girl between them moaning with every few steps.

In the kitchen, Mathry ran into the scullery to puke into the sink, then collapsed in a chair while Dovey built up the fire in the stove to heat water.

Gwen ducked into her stillroom, blessing again the housekeeper at Vine Court who had imparted her knowledge of herbs.

Anne Sutton’s family had given Gwen much, before they robbed her of the things she most wanted.

“What will help me?” Mathry whimpered, clutching her middle. “Anything?”

“Cramp bark and black haw,” Gwen answered, carrying her precious stores into the kitchen. “Here, pwt , chew some fennel. Pen picked it for Mother Morris, but it might help your belly if she gave you a purge.”

“Hedge witch,” Mathry muttered, taking the stalk.

“That’s the Roman church that burned cunning folk for witches,” Gwen said, going through her herbs. “And the English church took up the torch. In Merionethshire, we went to the cunning woman for all our remedies. I don’t know this one in Bassaleg, and I haven’t heard well of her.”

Mathry wrapped her hands around her middle and bent forward. “I don’t want to lose it. Is it terrible that I didn’t know that until now?”

“Mathry, child.” Dovey took a cup from the shelf. “No mother has a simple path. And no one, man or woman, should judge you until they’re in your slippers.” She reached across the table and squeezed Mathry’s hand. “What it is, is not easy.”

“But you knew. You wanted Cerys.”

“I did, but I had a home and a husband who loved me. Neither he nor I knew I’d be raising her alone.” She looked at Gwen. “I don’t mean?—”

“I know, enaid ,” Gwen said softly. “You’ve had me and Evans, but we’re not a husband and father.”

Mathry dropped her head into her hands, moaning. “I’ll be punished. The babe will be taken, or come out—come out like Ifor, or Tomos. I’ve brought a curse on it, haven’t I?”

Gwen turned to the fire, preparing the tea. “You cannot think that. If wishing made it so, then every wanted babe would come out whole and perfect and—and nothing bad,” she ended lamely, her throat closing.

Mathry looked up, blinking in surprise. “You speak as if you’ve carried.”

Dovey stirred. “Gwen’s never?—”

“I have,” Gwen said quietly.

She met both their stunned faces, then turned to Dovey. “I never meant to lie to you. I simply—could not speak of it. The hurt…I was blind with it, when I came here. And you had Cerys, so small and fragile, and I couldn’t bring that shadow on you. Or her.”

Dovey’s face softened. She placed a warm hand on Gwen’s arm. “Ah, dearling.”

“Will you tell me what happened?” Mathry said, her eyes wide and dark. “Please.”

“’Tis not a happy tale, Mathry.”

“But I want to hear it. I don’t know anything , and it’s so much—I want to know what might go wrong, so I can stop it.” She clutched her belly. “If I have the chance.”

Gwen nodded. The others had shared themselves, after all. And perhaps she could lay these ghosts dancing around her, mocking her with their terrible cries. Perhaps she could keep her past from reaching out and strangling what she had here.

“Drink,” she said. “We will visit St. Gwladys. And then we will walk, to hasten the purging and help the work of the herbs.”

The old medieval church was cool and quiet, the grey stones holding the chill of the spring night.

Doves cooed and shifted in the timber beams of the ceiling.

In the small chapel, in the section that still had an intact roof, St. Gwladys smiled from her narrow window.

The lead cames that held the stained glass showed through her red-blue gown and the green hill behind her, where stood a lamb and a Celtic cross.

“Were you married?” Mathry asked. They walked the church laid out in its cross pattern, down the length of the empty nave, around the short arms of the side chapels, then back to the stone altar, long stripped of its valuables. “Or were you like me?”

“Exactly like you, lass. After my mother died, my father sent me to live with an English family in Llanfyllin. They were rich from lead mines and wanted a companion for their daughter. I was tutored with her and treated as one of the family. Her brother…”

Her throat grew tight. The skirts of their gowns swished on the cold stone floor, and the candle in Dovey’s holder flickered. Every so often Mathry put a hand to her belly, as if willing any movement there to halt.

“He was a few years older, but headstrong, selfish. Swore he loved me. Insisted his family would allow us to wed, once they knew how he felt. I ought to have been wiser, but with no mother, no guidance, and having been raised the equal of his sister…”

“You believed him,” Mathry said grimly.

“He might have meant it,” Gwen said. “But when his family disapproved and cast me out—he did nothing. I couldn’t go back to my father.

He’d married again, a woman quite young, and forgot all about me.

I went to stay with a friend of the family, outside of town.

I wrote him, the brother, to say where I was so he might come claim me and his child.

I heard nothing from him except—” She swallowed hard.

“Except the news he was betrothed to another. I knew her. She was English as well, the daughter of a baronet, with a dowry almost a large as Anne’s.

That was the girl, my sis—almost sister. ”

“She did nothing?” Mathry asked, wincing at another cramp.