Page 22 of The Ladies Least Likely
She hadn’t spent the hours planning. She spent the day nursing Ifor and preventing Tomos from gnawing the bandage off his hurt hand. She was already exhausted and unraveled when the boy came running up from town to fetch her.
“Mr. Stanley sent me, Miss Gwen. Said you’re wanted at the King’s Head.”
Gwen rose heavily from the side of Ifor’s cot, where he’d at last succumbed to a troubled sleep. The King’s Head was both coaching inn and public house, a fit place for a reckoning. Pen had found someone who knew him and summoned her to pass sentence. She considered dressing in her finest, but it wouldn’t change the outcome. She wrapped her checked red shawl about her and set out.
It was Pen, but he hadn’t summoned her to a reckoning. He lay stretched out prone along one side of the stable yard, with Mr. Stanley watching over him.
“A fair handsome lad, or he was, I’m guessing.” The vicar scratched his chin. “I mean, underneath the blood and such. The same one you took in, Miss Gwen?”
“Just yesterday morn.” Gwen knelt and felt for a pulse. The French had an expression for that eerie sense that one had lived this moment already. Pen was not dead from internal bleeding or some result of his head wound, as she’d first feared. But here he was again, still the viscount who held her fate in his hands, once again unconscious, and in the name of all the saints she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with him.
“What happened to him, Mr. Trett?” Gwen asked the innkeeper.
Pen was considerably more batteredthan when he’d left, his face encrusted with blood from a cut on his arrogant cheekbone, the dark circles beneath his eyes suggesting he’d been punched in the nose. His hair was mussed, his neckcloth crumpled and untied, his coat had been smudged with dirt, and his breeches had a tear at the knee. They’d barely gotten him cleaned up from yesterday, and now she had to do it all over again. And who knew what internal injuries he’d sustained.
“He’s been here since mid-day, giving hisself the barrel fever,” Mr. Trett reported. “But I didn’t baste ’im. Gossett was in, the great bully, and they was on a spree together until along come Gossett’s wife, trying to chivvy him home. The tiff you heard then! The beau didn’t like Gossett raising his fists to a woman, and Gossett didn’t like the beau in ’is business, so he brings him out ’ere for a brushing.” Mr. Trett shook his ginger-haired head. “No more chance than a cat in hell without claws, with a man Gossett’s size. And neither paid their shot, too.”
Gwen knew of Mrs. Gossett’s circumstances. She had hinted more than once that Mrs. Gossett might come to St. Sefin’s and bring her children with her. “Oh, he just gets in his cups and his back up, is all. Says I’m not an easy yoke, I am,” Mrs. Gossett would answer in an apologetic tone, and then turn up to churchthe next Sunday with a deep-brimmed bonnet hiding her face and eyes.
Gwen sighed. For such a belligerent man, Pen really ought to learn how to better defend himself. “Did Gossett beat your memory back into you, then?” She resisted the urge to nudge Penrydd with her boot and instead poked him in the arm. One did not kick viscounts in the ribs no matter how much they might deserve it.
“You.” His eyes fluttered open, and he fisted a hand in the straw beneath him. The knuckles were scraped and bloody. “Gwenllian ap Ewyas.” He slurred the words through a swollen lower lip. “Kicked me off her doorstep this morn,” he said to Mr. Stanley, who peered at him with interest. “Prettiest harridan I’ve ever seen.”
Gwen propped her hands on her hips. “Well? Did you find your answers?”
“Moses in his basket,” he mumbled. “An infant cast upon the sea. What’s that old tale? The Fair Unknown? Take me in, princess, and raise me aright, and someday I will rise up and free my people.”
Gwen’s conscience prodded her. She had to take him in. She had to convince him to look kindly on St. Sefin’s and not cast them all into the marsh, which he would be well within his rights to do.
But to continue the deception, to lie to him about who he was—no, they were not deceiving him, exactly. Her stomach boiled at the thought. She was simply—withholding some rather vital information. For Dovey’s sake. She gathered her nerve.
“Back to St. Sefin’s with you, then. It’s right you were to fetch me, Mr. Stanley, but now I must ask if you can help me with this one.”
“A shame we can’t find where he belongs,” the vicar said, hauling Penrydd to his feet. “His family must be terribly worried.”
Guilt bit hard as she stepped close to help. Penrydd mumbled and sagged against her, stinking of rum.
“As drunk as David’s sow,” she said in disgust.
“Cup-shot? Not I.” Penrydd slung his good arm around her shoulders. “A little cut above the head, perhaps. Merely mellow.”
“Owes me a bull, he does!” Mr. Trett said as they steadied Pen between them.
She didn’t have sixpence on her, much less half a crown. “I will have him come repay the debt as soon as he’s able, Mr. Trett,” Gwen called. She stiffened as Pen’s big, firm body brushed against hers.
“You’re completely mauled,” Gwen told him. The man would never heal if he kept undoing all her good work. “What have you beendoing?”
Pen staggered with them as she and the vicar stepped through the arch and onto High Street. “Went to the castle,” Pen slurred. “Not in good form! Ferns and such growing from the top of it. Shame. Could give tours and make coin from it, like that abbey—what’s it called? Twitterstone—Turntun—place that poet wrote about.”
“Tintern Abbey.” Mr. Stanley grunted as Pen careened his way, and tried to hold him upright without grasping his injured shoulder or ribs. “William Wordsworth. Excellent collection, theLyrical Ballads. Quite unlike anything I’ve read.”
“Looked in on a pub they said was the old murenger house, whatever that is,” Pen went on. “Thought I’d hole up there for the night. Not too shabby for rooms.”
“The murenger was responsible for maintaining the town walls, back when we had them. That’s what is left of Westgate.” Gwen pointed to the pile of stone bricks as they passed intoChurch Street, which ended with St. Woolos on one side and St. Sefin’s on the other.
Its new commerce was pushing Newport beyond its medieval footprint, the old structures crumbling to make way for works broader and bigger and new. Another religious house in the area, what was called the Austin Friars, had become home to a cider mill. Pen might do the same to St. Sefin’s, turn out its residents and use the old buildings for new ventures that actually earned money.
“Went to St. Woolly’s,” Pen went on. “Climbed the old Norman tower. Great builders, those Normans. But the pater doesn’t know me, alas.”
