Page 46

“Bring a hat.” Dovey held out a straw hat with a wide, deep brim. “That sweet cap is like to melt in a glaw gochel .”

The hard, splattering raindrops had pulled back to a mizzle as the two women stepped outside.

Dovey led Anne with confidence to the edge of the pasture, beyond the paddock with the animals, where stands of nettles grew in profusion, their deep green leaves gleaming with fat drops of rain.

Along down the row, Tomos and Ifor set to work, Ifor running his hands along the plants and Tomos occasionally tipping the basket at a dangerous angle as he reached for a likely-looking leaf.

“I’ve heard from Gwen,” Dovey said without preamble as they began to gather nettle leaves. “She asked about you.”

“Asked what?” Anne’s conscience pricked her. She could have written to Gwen, in care of the Castle Penrydd, but she hadn’t thought of her friend in days.

“How you were going on. How we were treating you. If you’d managed to get free of Calvin Vaughn.”

“I’ve managed.” Anne wondered what her old friend would say of the methods Anne had chosen, throwing herself into the arms of the better catch—though hadn’t Gwen done the same, when a viscount came her way?

But this was different. Gwen had fallen in love. She knew the man she married, knew who he was without the lordship and the properties and the robes of state.

Anne knew so little of the man whose neck she’d settled her noose around. Oh, she knew his character; he was deep and clear as a well of pure water, that she and anyone could see. He was strong and stubborn and he wore a quiet confidence that came from his own accomplishments, not his birth.

And he kissed like a fallen angel.

“What will you tell Gwen?” Anne asked.

“What ought I tell her?” Dovey replied. She glanced up, then away, and Anne felt that quick gaze like a pinprick on her skin.

This Dovey had become Gwen’s closest friend, taking Anne’s place.

Taking more than Anne’s place, for the Gwen Anne knew had been a kept girl, practicing her harp and her Greek letters with the tutor, buying ribbons in the Llanfyllin shop, perching on the pew beside Anne each Sunday sharing a prayer book.

Blushing and sparkling each time Daron Sutton teased her.

The Gwen Anne found at St. Sefin’s had become a woman, honed by fate and fire.

She knew passion and pain and despair and abandonment, and she’d forged friendships deeper and stronger than she’d ever felt with Anne.

Gwen had saved lives and healed spirits.

She and Dovey took in Ifor and Tomos, gave the widows a place to stay, took in a grieving widow about to give birth and braved whatever the councilmen might say about harboring a pregnant woman who had no man.

Gwen had lived and grown and learned in the years they’d been parted, and Anne had merely trod the same shadowed rooms, having the same conversations with the same friends, watching suitors fall away one by one as her dowry diminished.

She’d been waiting for marriage, for her deep and true life to begin, to make that sacred passage into womanhood.

And now here she was, with nothing to call her own, not even the scraps of her reputation. No life .

“Did Gwen ever speak of me?” Anne pulled handfuls of nettle leaves from the stalks, stuffing her basket. The green left streaks on her dainty gloves that would likely never scrub out. She’d need thicker gloves for this gardening work. “Did she speak of her time in Llanfyllin at all?”

Dovey shook her head, the bow beneath her neck fluttering where she’d tied a hat over her coils of hair. “She never said a word. I had no notion where she’d come from, her people—nothing of that. I hadn’t known she had a babe until we took in Mathry.”

Anne swallowed hard. Daron never spoke of the child he’d fathered, the child who had not lived.

Anne, to her shame, had thought it at first a relief when she’d learned the babe had not survived birth.

She’d thought Daron and Gwen could start fresh.

Their love could reknit them like a grafted plant, and the fruit they bore would be strong this time for the sanctioned union.

Fool that she was. Marriage couldn’t sanctify a union foul at the root. Daron had never given a thought to that child, or Gwen, until he saw the letter saying Gwen’s father had died rich and left her his lands and mines.

Anne’s father would die destitute and leave Daron a burdened estate and Anne nothing. It would look as if she had trapped Hewitt Vaughn to secure her own position, to make herself safe with a gentleman who had a home and pin money to offer her.

And such would be the foundation of their marriage: her desperation, and his honor. Thin soil for love to grow in, to be sure.

“I thought she would be happy with my brother,” Anne blurted as she tore another handful of nettle leaves free.

Dovey lifted her brows. She was an intelligent woman, quick of mind. She knew precisely what Anne meant.

“Did you now?”

“I didn’t know his character,” Anne said. “I hadn’t seen … or perhaps I refused to see?” She shook her head. A small, cold drop of rain rolled down the back of her neck. Setting foot in Newport had changed her, started breaking apart her belief in the world and showing her something new.

“I had thought he would come to save her. Not cause her more distress.”

Dovey simply shrugged. “Water under the bridge now, that is. She’s Lady Penrydd, and she’ll have her coronation robes with her bars of ermine and her three-and-a-quarter-foot train.” Dovey snorted, showing what she thought of the regalia. “Your brother cannot touch her.”

No, but he could still touch Anne. Could still hurt her.

As if she caught the thought, Dovey looked full in Anne’s face. “But you were kidnapped by the Black Hound too. The viscountesses thought they would never recover. How did you?”

Anne offered a rueful smile, recalling how Prunella had treated her nerves with bracing glasses of Canary wine, insisting Anne join her. Those fond confidences with the young dowager viscountess had gone a fair way toward helping Anne ignore her brother’s betrayal.

She wondered where Prunella, the Dowager Viscountess Penrydd was now.

If she were holding to her breezy statement that she might never marry again.

As Penrydd was likely to provide the jointure she was due, no doubt Prunella could live comfortably as an independent woman, keeping her own home, her own company.

Anne couldn’t conceive of such freedom.

“I still dream of it sometimes,” she confessed.

“Of that horrible, huge man who told me he had my brother, and I must bring Gwen to the ship or Daron would die.” She shuddered.

“And the small man with him who told me what the Black Hound had done—who else he had killed. I still think of my fear. And how Gwen poisoned his drink so we might escape.” She tried to laugh, shrugging off the claws of memory that wanted to dig in and shred her.

“Sometimes I think I still smell Penrydd’s dung bombs in my hair.

And your Evans helped make them, did he not? ”

Dovey smiled, and was there a touch of smugness to that smile? She was a woman secure in the knowledge that she was loved, and loved by a good and faithful man. A rare enough thing in this world, from what Anne had seen.

“He’s a hand, my Evans.”

“And you are newly married as well,” Anne observed, feeling shy to probe another woman’s affections. Yet she knew so little about the world, even less of men, and nothing of how to frame what she felt. “I thought Mr. Evans had worked here at St. Sefin’s for some time?”

She might earn herself a reproof, for she hadn’t really spoken with Dovey before.

She’d thought the woman aloof, regarding herself too good for the likes of Anne, who was no more than the daughter of an obscure English gentleman buried on a Welsh estate, when Dovey had traveled oceans and borne a daughter and already buried one husband—more life than Anne had ever lived.

But she saw better now. Dovey was simply reserved by nature, not a woman to wear her heart on her sleeve, too wary of how that heart could be thrown down and trampled by a world where she was marked as different by the color of her skin.

Anne tried to comprehend what that must feel like, and couldn’t.

To always visibly stand out. To be distrusted.

To have every action studied and questioned, to always be given the lesser portion.

As a woman of her class, Anne knew what it was to be watched and judged, but it was not the same.

It could not be. And yet in the teeth of prejudice and fear and the guilt of people like Anne, Dovey lived life on her own terms, helping others, loving her daughter, daring to give her heart to someone new.

Dovey’s was the smile of a woman wholly in love. “Evans was with us almost from the beginning. He’s a Pembrokeshire man, you can hear in his speech. I thought him handsome from the first, that rugged look of a man who’s been dragged to hell and back.”

Anne nodded. Hew gave her that same impression, with the lines around his mouth, the silver at his temples in a man not yet reached thirty years. The way he held himself sometimes as if his back were one giant plank or a shield of steel and wouldn’t bend like other men’s did.

“But I knew going soft would be throwing a stone after him,” Dovey added, grabbing fistfuls of nettle.

“He’d been through so much. Safer to brangle with him rather than follow after like a mooncalf.

But when his lordship came and left, and Gwen was different …

” Dovey examined a handful of greenery, plucked out a stem.

“We talked about what to do, how to keep St. Sefin’s going if Gwen went off with the lord.

And after he told me right full how he felt …

well.” Dovey’s face glowed. “I knew I had nothing to fear, not any longer.”