Page 39 of The Ladies Least Likely
“Gone,” Tomos whispered, his eyes equally wide.
“Stolen already.” Pen nodded.
“No, Mr. Pen, it was never found! The nuns hid it away. That’s what the poem says. And it’s not anywhere here, or I’d have discovered it by now, since I’ve been searching foryears. So I think it might be hidden at St. Woolos. And when I find the treasure, Mam and Miss Gwen can pay the lord and we can all stay here and have a roof over our heads and not be thrown into the workhouse or the street.” She beamed, pleased with her logic and the scope of her dreams.
Penrydd’s gaze met Gwen’s as she and Dovey took seats next to the older women. Gwen looked away from the question in his eyes.
She’d ceased her visits to his room after his talk about comfort. His nightmares still troubled him, but she made him a tea each evening to help him sleep. There would be no more coming again in the dark to soothe him, no chance of falling asleep again on his cot or, worse yet, falling prey to his charms. Fortunately—so she told herself—he’d ceased with his teasing looks and seductive invitations.
Instead, he watched her. And listened. When she mentioned she needed a pot or a barrel fetched from a storeroom, it was sitting on the table when she next entered the kitchen. She’d caught him once, early morning, helping Tomos with his chore of fetching the water, cautioning the boy against getting his hand caught again in the winch. He helped Ifor turn out the goats and he helped Cerys gather hay for their feed.
He carried baskets of wet laundry for Widow Jones. And he could often be spotted about the grounds of St. Sefin’s, working on some task with Evans, the two of them tossing masculine banter back and forth. There were no more sneers at Evans’ lank sleeve, but instead a steady extra hand when he needed one. When men came from the wharves needing help to free a ship stranded in a sandbar at the mouth of the Usk, Pen went with them, speaking rather knowledgeably about draught and ballast.
She hadn’t once had to empty his chamber pot.
One morning, when his nightmares struck just before dawn, he gave up on sleep and came into the kitchen to find her starting the morning bread. Pen ate a bun at the table and talked with her while she mixed Mother Morris’s favorite gripe water and found she’d used the last of the dried fennel. She’d looked around to find him gone and was surprised at her own disappointment. She was coming to enjoy their conversations in the times when he was quiet and serious, or as serious as he could be. Just as she chided herself for foolishness, feeling a sense of loss at his departure—he didn’t have to declare his business to her!—he’d come through the back door, tall and calm and shaking morning dew from his hair, bearing a fistful of fennel.
Those marks of attention and companionship were more seductive, and touched her more deeply, than any innuendo or talk of cavorting. She didn’t dare tell him that.
But she felt he knew.
“How’d you lose your arm, Evans?” Pen asked one night as they sat around the fire in the chapter house, all disposed to their different tasks. Cerys sat at her mother’s knee, her hands spooled with yarn for the scarf Dovey was knitting. Mother Morris made stockings, Widow Jones mended a shawl. Gwen sorted through a box of donations that had been left on the porch, separating the clothes that needed to be mendedfrom what could be used right away. Ifor and Tomos played backgammon, and Mathry sat with a barely begun infant gown on which she was making little progress. Everyone stared at Pen in the wake of this question as if he had suddenly proposed a country dance.
He stared back. “What? Is he your household brownie who turns into a boggart does anyone mention he’s missing a limb?”
“Nay, we simply don’t—talk of our pasts here,” Dovey said, her voice carefully neutral.
Pen shrugged and sprawled in his seat. By silent agreement everyone had given him the bishop’s chair, a huge oak piece with ornate carvings along its arms, legs, and high back. It looked as if a canopy of cloth of gold should be erected over it, and Pen lounged as naturally there as if something in him remembered he was a lord.
“I can’t bore you all by prating about my past,” he said. “So I want to hear yours.”
Gwen set aside a men’s shirt that might be cut down for Tomos. She couldn’t imagine the Penrydd she’d met in Bristol caring a whit for anyone’s life beyond his own. But now everyone watched Evans to see what he might say.
“Gibraltar,” Evans said. “I joined the British Army as a lad, which was a laugh since I grew up on the water, but I wanted to see the Americas. Instead I was sent to Gibraltar and eventually made a gunner at the fort. Took some heavy fire from the Spanish and French.” He rolled his wounded shoulder, remembering.
“The Siege of ’82,” Pen guessed. “When the French came in with their floating batteries, armored warships they were? I heard it was a rain of hellfire, days upon days of it. But they didn’t take the strait.”
“Nay,” Evans said, rubbing his injured leg. “They didn’t.”
“Then what?”
“I came back to Pembrokeshire. Rented a farm in Angle. My sweetheart took me back, just as I was. Many grand and happy years we had, with thebabanod. Five of them, sweet lads and lasses.” He stared reflectively into the fire. “Then the typhus came.”
Dovey put down her knitting and stared at Evans as if she had never seen him before. “You lost someone,” Gwen said softly.
He bowed his head. “I lost them all.”
A heavy silence fell across the room. Cerys sniffled. Evans shrugged. “So I wandered east, looking for a good place to drown myself. And I found Miss Gwen and Dah—Mrs. Van der Welle here in Newport, trying to rebuild this gloomy old pile, and thought, I have one good hand to give them.”
Dovey stared at her lap. “But to lose your family,” she whispered.
“There’s not many as have one year that happy, much less ten,” Evans answered.
“Well!” Pen adopted a bluff tone, but Gwen saw the story had affected him. “Anyone care to top that tale?”
“Mine’s obvious.” Mathry sat beneath the mullioned window, the setting sun casting a gold nimbus about her head. She pouted and pointed at her belly. “He said he loved me and would always take care of me, and I, like atymffat,believed him.”
“My spineless son turned me out because his wife didn’t like me,” Widow Jones said. “I thought I had raised him better, with a shred of sense. But his loyalty is to her now.”
