Page 45 of The Ladies Least Likely
“Mathry, child.” Dovey took a cup from the shelf. “No mother has a simple path. And no one, man or woman, should judge you until they’re in your slippers.” She reached across the table and squeezed Mathry’s hand. “What it is, is not easy.”
“But you knew. You wanted Cerys.”
“I did, but I had a home and a husband who loved me. Neither he nor I knew I’d be raising her alone.” She looked at Gwen. “I don’t mean?—”
“I know,enaid,” Gwen said softly. “You’ve had me and Evans, but we’re not a husband and father.”
Mathry dropped her head into her hands, moaning. “I’ll be punished. The babe will be taken, or come out—come out like Ifor, or Tomos. I’ve brought a curse on it, haven’t I?”
Gwen turned to the fire, preparing the tea. “You cannot think that. If wishing made it so, then every wanted babe would comeout whole and perfect and—and nothing bad,” she ended lamely, her throat closing.
Mathry looked up, blinking in surprise. “You speak as if you’ve carried.”
Dovey stirred. “Gwen’s never?—”
“I have,” Gwen said quietly.
She met both their stunned faces, then turned to Dovey. “I never meant to lie to you. I simply—could not speak of it. The hurt…I was blind with it, when I came here. And you had Cerys, so small and fragile, and I couldn’t bring that shadow on you. Or her.”
Dovey’s face softened. She placed a warm hand on Gwen’s arm. “Ah, dearling.”
“Will you tell me what happened?” Mathry said, her eyes wide and dark. “Please.”
“’Tis not a happy tale, Mathry.”
“But I want to hear it. I don’t knowanything, and it’s so much—I want to know what might go wrong, so I can stop it.” She clutched her belly. “If I have the chance.”
Gwen nodded. The others had shared themselves, after all. And perhaps she could lay these ghosts dancing around her, mocking her with their terrible cries. Perhaps she could keep her past from reaching out and strangling what she had here.
“Drink,” she said. “We will visit St. Gwladys. And then we will walk, to hasten the purging and help the work of the herbs.”
The old medieval church was cool and quiet, the grey stones holding the chill of the spring night. Doves cooed and shifted in the timber beams of the ceiling. In the small chapel, in the section that still had an intact roof, St. Gwladys smiled from her narrow window. The lead cames that held the stained glass showed through her red-blue gown and the green hill behind her, where stood a lamb and a Celtic cross.
“Were you married?” Mathry asked. They walked the church laid out in its cross pattern, down the length of the empty nave, around the short arms of the side chapels, then back to the stone altar, long stripped of its valuables. “Or were you like me?”
“Exactly like you, lass. After my mother died, my father sent me to live with an English family in Llanfyllin. They were rich from lead mines and wanted a companion for their daughter. I was tutored with her and treated as one of the family. Her brother…”
Her throat grew tight. The skirts of their gowns swished on the cold stone floor, and the candle in Dovey’s holder flickered. Every so often Mathry put a hand to her belly, as if willing any movement there to halt.
“He was a few years older, but headstrong, selfish. Swore he loved me. Insisted his family would allow us to wed, once they knew how he felt. I ought to have been wiser, but with no mother, no guidance, and having been raised the equal of his sister…”
“You believed him,” Mathry said grimly.
“He might have meant it,” Gwen said. “But when his family disapproved and cast me out—he did nothing. I couldn’t go back to my father. He’d married again, a woman quite young, and forgot all about me. I went to stay with a friend of the family, outside of town. I wrote him, the brother, to say where I was so he might come claim me and his child. I heard nothing from him except—” She swallowed hard. “Except the news he was betrothed to another. I knew her. She was English as well, the daughter of a baronet, with a dowry almost a large as Anne’s. That was the girl, my sis—almost sister.”
“She did nothing?” Mathry asked, wincing at another cramp.
“She may have wanted to, but she was even younger than I am, and about to come out in society, as the English do. When it was clear I was increasing, I had to leave my friend’s. I hadnowhere to go, so I tried to find work. But when you are a young woman with a belly?—”
“Yes,” Mathry said, nodding. “Did you cast it, then?”
“No. I wanted her. I wanted her more than my life. I had no one else to love me, you see, but my own mam had loved me so fiercely, and I’d been so devoted to her. Anne’s mother was cold. I vowed I would do better. But I had nothing—no help. No home.”
Dovey’s eyes were a deeper black than the darkness, and the candle picked out the sheen of tears. “What happened?”
“It was winter. I was staying in the sty of a kind farmer who let me bed with his animals. She came early, and I was alone, and I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do. It was—a difficult birth. She came out feet first, with the cord wrapped around her neck.”
Gwen drew a deep breath, reliving that pain turning her inside out. It seared to the core. Dovey reached around Mathry to touch her shoulder.
