Page 46 of The Ladies Least Likely
“It doesn’t always kill, I know that now,” Gwen managed. “A good midwife might have helped me turn her, or untangle her, or—” She caught Mathry’s horrified eyes. “We’ll have the best we can find when it’s your time. I promise you. But I—as I said, I didn’t have help.” She let out a shuddering sigh, watching the floor. One step at a time, one foot before the other. “I buried her as best I could, in the hard ground, and came south with my heart frozen. All I wanted was to go as far away as possible. To let the sea carry me off.”
“Not you, too,” Dovey said quietly.
Gwen summoned a wavering smile for her friend. “I found St. Gwladys, as I said, and she told me to stay here. And that’s when you found me.”
“And then you found me,” Mathry said. She sighed, her shoulders drooping. “God above, how does any woman survive this? And how does she let a man touch her again, after?”
“Would you want another child, Gwen?” Dovey asked as they circled the church for the dozenth time. The deep shadows felt warmer, safer, with these women at her side. The ghosts had ceased their screaming.
“I don’t know if I can. Something—happened with the birth. Part of my womb collapsed. I shoved it back in, and by some miracle didn’t take a fever,” Gwen said. Dovey flinched at this image, and Mathry made a horrified squeak. “But I imagine something weakened or was broken,” Gwen said. “I won’t bear children again.”
“Cerys is as good as your own,” Dovey said stoutly.
Gwen nodded. “She is, and we could fill St. Sefin’s with babies if we wished. I don’t need a womb to mother.”
“We need that lord to let us stay here,” Mathry said. “I want my babe to have a roof. And mothers.” She leaned her head on Gwen’s shoulder, and a small piece of Gwen’s heart that had been hard for years pained her, though not in a harmful way. It was the pain of a frozen piece of flesh beginning, at long last, to thaw.
“You haven’t bled yet,” Gwen said softly.
Mathry nodded. “And the cramping’s stopped. I think your tea worked.”
“I’ll make another dose, with something to help you sleep. And tomorrow I’ll start you on red raspberry leaf and nettle tea. Do you want someone with you tonight?”
“I’ll stay with her first,” Dovey said. “You’re weary from harping.”
Gwen nodded. She hadn’t told Dovey yet about Calvin Vaughn pressing her into the hedge, or what it meant. Therewould be no more harping fees from the Vaughn family. Now where were they to find money?
The three women stood for a moment, heads bowed, hands pressed together, before the flickering smile of St. Gwladys. Then Dovey led Mathry to bed, smoothing the girl’s hair from her brow in the same gesture she used with Cerys.
Gwen stood a long moment, communing with her saint. She needed guidance. Strength. She’d purged something in finally speaking of her past. She’d been foolish and she’d suffered, but she no longer felt, quite so strongly, that losing her daughter had been a punishment for lying in sin with Daron Sutton. Her child’s death had simply been the way of Nature, of life and of death.
Her heart gulped in her chest when she heard a footstep from above. She reared back, looking up, to see a man’s shadow on the stair leading to the bell tower. No one used that stair; she didn’t imagine it was safe. Was it a ghost? Vengeance come upon her? Was she to pay again for past sins?
Who would take care of St. Sefin’s if a murdered ghost came at her from the dark?
It was Penrydd. He reached out and put his hands on her quivering shoulders. He was warm and solid and she had that odd notion, once again, that he wassafe.
He wasn’t safe. No man was, least of all him.
“I’m sorry I frightened you. I was in the bell tower. I like to go up there when I can’t sleep.”
“You—were all the way up there? And the stair didn’t collapse? I thought those boards were rotten.” She peered into the dark above them.
“Many of them are. I ought to repair it, in the daylight. But one can see a long way from a tower atop a hill. Puts things in perspective.”
He couldn’t sleep because she was no longer helping him fight his nightmares. Guilt squeezed her throat. And shame.
“You heard us?”
“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. But I couldn’t not hear. Mathry seemed in distress, and I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Or stop all our hearts, swooping down like apwca.”
“Like a what?”
A lock of his too-long hair fell over his brow, casting an impish shadow on his face. He adjusted her shawl around her shoulders, snugging it about her neck.
“The Welsh Puck. He leads travelers by night to the edge of a cliff, and then he blows out his lamp and leaves them there. Do you want me to make you a tea for sleep and sweet dreams?”
