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Anne’s heart twisted on itself, envy biting like a stoat with its little poison fangs.

This was love, pure and true. And it wasn’t the mannered love of the courtly songs of old or the maddening desire of the ballads, which were ever driving a fair maid to self-harm.

This was a love like in that poem by William Blake that had so struck her, the one where the lovers were twining trees with streams flowing at their feet and turtledoves nesting in their branches.

A root-deep sweetness that bore flowers, then fruit, and endured steady days and nights together.

A love that would survive storms and accusations and a hostile world, because the lovers leaned on one another.

Anne couldn’t imagine Calvin Vaughn being a nest for anyone or anything.

But Hewitt Vaughn … there was a man with deep roots. There was a man who could offer shelter.

“Did you know him?” The words tumbled out before she could stop them, and the rain, caught on a gust beneath her hat, stung teasingly on Anne’s cheeks. “Hewitt—Captain Vaughn.” She tried to gulp down the urge to confide, but it wouldn’t abate. She wanted so much to be seen.

“I wanted to break from Calvin,” Anne said, “and Hew stepped forward to declare for me. I’m sure he doesn’t mean anything but honor by it. Now I’ve got us both in a tangle and I don’t know how to get free.”

“The question is, I suppose, if you want to marry him.” Dovey pulled a tall bush toward her and stripped off several leaves.

“Yes,” Anne said, taking a fistful from her own branch and stuffing it into her heaping basket. “That is the question.”

They took their full baskets inside and set to soaking, then crushing nettle leaves.

Evans returned with a clutch of tall stems waving long green spikes, which the Widow Jones said was horsetail, and hung it to dry in the stillroom at once.

Cerys, with her nymph-like grace, strode into the kitchen with the fat hen in her arms, her hair tousled, a scratch on her cheek, and an expression of serene triumph on her face.

Tomos welcomed his beloved pet without an ounce of acrimony for its earlier bad temper.

He sat crooning to the hen, smoothing her feathers while Cyw clucked and accepted the homage she was due.

Anne paused to look about her. Were she home at Vine Court, she’d be in the drawing room with her mother, practicing on the spinet or embroidering a dainty design. Ready to chat with callers about the weather and the coming harvest and who had worn what to church the week before.

Here, among the residents of St. Sefin’s, she felt again that unfamiliar tug of purpose.

Of belonging. As if she stood poised on the precipice of something made just for her.

And her work mattered, for before long, Eilian had a wooden cup full of green, strong-smelling juice which she handed to Anne.

“This will do for Leah,” she said, “and you can hold the baby while I see to her. We’ll likely need another set of sheets.”

Without protest, Anne followed the other woman down the hall to the wide room they called the mothers’ ward, once a dormitory for women travelers seeking hospitality at the priory.

Eilian was scarcely older than she was, Anne thought, about Hew’s age, and yet the woman already had a store of useful knowledge about herbs and midwifery and doctoring.

She was calm and capable and could be called upon in a pinch.

Anne wanted to be such a woman. She knew that now.

Leah looked poorly, her olive skin sallow, her hair hanging in damp strands. The high windows let in the gray clouds, casting a quiet shadow over the broad room. Leah gave Anne a tired smile as she handed over baby Daniel.

“Miss Sutton. Mrs. Lambe. I’m afraid I’ve become such a trial to you.”

Anne read her face; her fear was greater than that. Leah had other children at home in Merthr Tydfil, and she needed to return with the son and heir of the house so her husband’s parents would provide for them.

“I came here expressly to hold little Daniel. I see no trial in that.” Anne took the baby to the table and laid out the fresh clouts she’d brought.

She also laid out a fresh swaddling cloth, scented with rosemary and chamomile.

She feared she’d fumble, with the mother watching, but she did a rather creditable job of cleaning the child, folding his bottom into a clean clout, then swaddling him as Eilian had shown her.

She was rewarded by Daniel opening his eyes and peering at her, his eyes as dark and bright with interest as a baby bird’s.

Eilian performed a brief examination of her patient, then gave Leah the cup of nettle juice. “Your bleeding is heavier than most, Leah, but not the worst I’ve seen. We’ll give you fresh nettle juice twice a day and keep on with the blackberry tea.”

Leah gripped her hand. “Am I dying? Please. If I am, I must prepare.”

“ Nac wyt , little mother, you aren’t in danger,” Eilian said lightly. “Your body is shedding all that it made to nourish wee Daniel here. ’Twill take some time to move it all out, a month or more.”

Leah rolled to one side as Eilian stripped away the soiled linens. The new mother smiled at the sight of Daniel intently studying Anne’s face.

“He’s taken a liking to you, Miss Sutton.”

Eilian nodded. “Knows you’re one of those saw him into the world. Almost like a godmother.”

Anne froze. “Do you—have godparents in your—?” She fumbled the question, feeling again the weight of her ignorance.

Leah gave a small chuckle. “No, not like you gentiles do. But at his bris he will have the sandek to hold him during the circumcision, so perhaps that is something like a godfather.”

“Every babe needs a hut full of aunties to help raise him, and Daniel will always have us,” Eilian said, and again Anne felt humbled at how easily she was drawn in to this circle.

Exactly as if she had a part to play, something to contribute.

Eilian gave Leah a sponge bath, and Anne watched and learned about postpartum care while performing her role, holding the baby and crooning softly to him.

“I feel so much better,” Leah said after she was dressed in a fresh shift and new bedding laid, her hair brushed and braided, and a bit of bone broth to follow the nettle juice.

She looked better, refortified. The care from others at this tender time would help her be strong for her baby, and Eilian had known just the cure to help her.

Those things could be taught. Anne could learn them.

“You’ve a lovely voice, Miss Sutton.”

Anne looked up to find both women staring at her. She’d chosen a silly little ballad, something about a fairy child and a forest, she scarce knew half the words she crooned to the baby. It was a tune Pym sang to her, and Anne had always liked it.

“Thank you,” Anne said. She was often complimented on her voice.

Could this be her purpose, what she was made to do?

Run away to the English stage and try to make her fortune, singing for strangers, turning herself out in her finery to be judged and dismissed by cold foreign eyes?

The thought made her blood run like the rain out of doors.

Perhaps there was no place for her paltry skills, no place at all, and she must simply go into the future she was led to, like a fish caught on a hook.

“And you’ve a lovely boy,” Anne added, peering back at wee Daniel, who had tired of his examination of her face and was trying to focus beyond her head.

Holding the child now felt—strange. She no longer feared she would break him.

Rather the small, warm weight in her arms was an anchor.

She could understand, suddenly, the fuss people made over these tiny beings.

She could see herself, for the first time, holding her own child in her arms.

“I don’t know how you face it.” The words tipped out of her, exactly like the other confessions she couldn’t keep holding in. Somehow she had found herself again in a realm where she had friends, where people listened to her, and she could not stop drinking in the goodness of that.

“The bearing and the raising, I mean,” she said, cradling Daniel. “So much can go wrong. I never really thought how difficult it must be.”

Leah gave a little laugh. “It becomes easier in time. Though one becomes more tired, perhaps.”

“But women do it,” Anne said. “Again and again.”

“For look what comes of it.” Leah’s smile at her son held wonder and fondness and the fear only a mother could feel when she held a newborn babe up to the cold, hard world. “The raising is its own pleasure, as is the making of them,” she teased. “And now, I have something of my husband for always.”

Not always, Anne thought, thinking of Gwen’s lost babe. Human life was so frail and so brittle, could be snuffed in an instant.

And yet the having. She saw again the look on Hewitt’s face when he heard Anne sing.

When he saw her standing on the terrace last night.

When he raised his head after their embrace and looked into her eyes and she felt like the most important person in the world, like she had discovered something more beautiful than anyone in history had ever known, that what rose up between them was a delight and a mystery and a sacred power as old as human time.

More than just the urge to kiss. Much more, but what it was, she hadn’t any way to frame or understand. She’d never seen anything close to what she felt for Hew, unless it was the sweet devotion she saw on the face of Evans as he smiled on his wife.

“The best things come at the highest cost,” Eilian said simply, washing her hands in the basin she’d brought.

Leah nodded. “That they do.”

Anne handed Daniel back to his mother, watching the way they turned toward one another instinctively.

The strings of her very being thrummed with a knowledge much like what had come over her when she lay caught in Hewitt’s arms last night, her body sated, her heart moving in ways she didn’t expect.

She wanted these things that could bring her pain.

She wanted love, and children, and a home of her own to look after, and friends she might disappoint at any moment, and a pet that might bite her if it took a scare.

She didn’t want to tread the safe paths of decorum any longer.

But there was so much she didn’t know, the first being how to go about addressing her feelings for Hewitt Vaughn. It was like stepping off a cliff with her arms full of rocks.

But if she didn’t take the plunge, she’d never know if she could fly.