Page 36 of The Ladies Least Likely
She swallowed again, this time fighting embarrassment. Curse the man and his ability to unsettle her. It had been easy to dismiss him when he was rude and presumptuous. This Pen, with his mesmerizing smile, relaxed confidence, and messily tied neckcloth, was impossible to ignore.
That night the residents of St. Sefin’s, still buzzing with the gossip over Mr. Barlow’s offer, watched in shared surprise as Pen dished and passed round bowls ofcawlbrimming with thick chunks of bacon and braised vegetables, with fresh, hot laverbread served alongside. He accepted the praise and exclamations as if he’d made the meal himself.
Gwen opened a jug of last fall’s apple cider and they feasted merrily and long. For the first time in weeks, Gwen felt free from the fear that Barlow would turn them out at any moment. Pen had named his price, and it was in respectable pounds sterling, not sexual services.
She watched him, drawn into his good humor as he boasted of how he’d beat Evans in filling the wheelbarrow, telling lively stories of what they’d seen at the tavern, who had been at the butcher’s, what ships had tied up at the wharf. He was amusing and held the center of attention with careless ease. But he didn’t flirt with any of the others, and he avoided Mathry’s sultry, come-hither looks. It was only Gwen who was the target of his probing stares and seductive smiles.
She couldn’t reconcile this man with the sulking, snappish Penrydd she’d met in the Bristol tavern, the arrogant lord who moved as if he were in pain and assumed she was for sale. Norcould she square him with the demanding, quarrelsome knave she’d patched up after a beating, twice. This was a new side of him entirely.
“You don’t have the money, do you?” Pen asked quietly when Gwen came to his door at bedtime. He’d moved into the men’s wing, a short hall of tiny rooms that had once housed travelers and visitors to the priory. He’d claimed the chamber furthest from where Evans slept, explaining that he didn’t want to wake the man in the night with his screaming.
“I don’t have one tenth of it,” she answered. She stepped into the room, following him as he shed his coat, then began unbuttoning his waistcoat. The sturdy wool, cut for a smaller man than he was, outlined the planes of his shoulders and the lean length of his back.
“Then what will you do?”
“Ask about for loans, I suppose.”
Though who had money to back her, she didn’t know. The Vaughns wouldn’t support a place for the poor. She could try the Morgans of Tredegar; Charles Morgan was respected in the area, a soldier in the Coldstream Guards who had been a prisoner at Yorktown during the trouble with the American colonies. But she suspected he would prefer to invest his money in his lands and the support of his young family, and he was not at home to apply to.
Other great houses nearby, like Caldicot Castle or Llancaiach Fawr, their landlords had rented out as farms. There would be no rich benefactors there. The great castles of Chepstow and Abergavenny were no more than stops on tours of picturesque Wales, the glories of the Norman Marcher lords and Tudor barons now a ruined memory. And the Marquess of Bute, who owned a number of castles in Cardiff and Caerphilly, might want St. Sefin’s for himself as he seemed to have an affection for ruined monuments. She didn’t dare approach him for help. Amarquess, ranking above a viscount, was even further from her orbit.
“There’s the money I earn harping,” she said. Pen cast his waistcoat aside and began untwisting his neckcloth, and she swallowed through a suddenly dry throat. His ease at revealing his body to her was almost more intimate than his becoming disrobed.
“We’ll find the money somehow. I only hope—we have the time.” Her stomach skittered about. It was so strange trying to barter with him when he didn’t know the hand he held.
She startled as he shed his shirt and sat on the bed, back to her. They’d done this a dozen times, and yet the sight of his strong straight back, webbed with scars, made her throat go dry again. The man was all muscle, strengthened by his recent physical labor. He’d been working hard in support of St. Sefin’s. For them all.
“He called me filth.” His voice held hurt and outrage.
She unscrewed the jar of camphor liniment and dipped her fingers into the balm. “Of course, you’re not. None of us are.” She needed him to remember that when the time of reckoning came.
“Just because I had a wheelbarrow of manure.”
She smoothed the ointment over his injured shoulder and side. The treatment was working; he was healing from the attack at the wharves, and she wondered if he were finally healing from his war injuries too. At St. Sefin’s his days were spent in active labor, his nights in rest. His food was simple, not at all like what rich folk ate, and his alcohol consumption was less. He’d been an absolute bear to live with in the first days of withdrawal, but he’d stopped demanding rum.
With a return to health would come the return of memory. She had to be prepared for that to happen.
“I hope I’m more important than he is in my real life. I’ll cut him down to size.”
Pen still sounded affronted, though his voice was muffled. He dropped his head and she massaged his neck, the muscles warm and pliable. All this strength and power beneath her hands, but leashed for the moment, and quiet. Even without his name and title, he was a powerful man. A twist of something—apprehension, perhaps—snaked low through her belly. The candle on the shelf flickered in a small draft.
“Why has no one come looking for me?”
Now he simply sounded baffled. And hurt. Guilt bit at her heart. Barlow, a man he employed, had likely never met the current Lord Penrydd in person, given he’d looked him in the eye and didn’t know who he was. Who else in his own life might not recognize him, lowered as he was? And he was at this disadvantage—as much at Barlow’s mercy as any of them, really—because of her. Because she continued to lie to him.
The snaking feeling twisted and hissed.
“Maybe no one misses me. Maybe they’re happy I’m gone. Maybe my wife and children are relieved to be shot of me, and—” He paused. “Though I’m certain I don’t have a wife or children. Yet.”
Her stomach turned over as she moved to his ribs, gently rubbing ointment over his old scars. “What about Arwen?” The woman he’d called for from the depths of his first nightmare, though he hadn’t asked for her since.
A long silence unspooled. Gwen moved back to his shoulder and started working down his arm.
“I lost her.” His voice was low and tense. “I don’t know how. I can see her face—small and pale, like a pixie. I canfeelthat I cared for her, and when she died, I was in a rage of guilt and grief—but I can’t remember her last name, or what she was to me,or how she died. Nothing.” His voice switched to outrage, the cornered animal again. “How is that possible?”
Gwen worked a thick scar on his upper arm that extended across his shoulder and chest. “Did you know the ancient Celtic bards memorized hundreds, if not thousands of verses? Histories, genealogies, tales of valor and war and romance, and they could sing any one of them on command.”
“Blah blah blah, the Welsh are wonderful, blah blah,” Pen grumbled. “The English have long poems, too.”
