Chapter Twelve #3
But Penelope would not be discouraged. From tears one moment to demands the next, she would not let him discourage her. “I must go,” she insisted. “The children will be fine with their nurses. I must do this, Bhrodi. I must see for myself if it is James.”
“Do you not trust me to discover the truth?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “But you do not know my brother on sight. I would recognize him in an instant.”
Bhrodi sighed heavily, mostly because she was right.
She would know her brother on sight, and he had a feeling she wouldn’t rest until she did.
This was the chance he’d taken by telling her the contents of the missives, and now he was facing that which he feared – she was demanding to come with him.
He didn’t want her to, but he knew he couldn’t keep her away.
If he denied her, she would only follow him.
Eyeing her, he stood up.
“You are not going to give me a choice, are you?” he asked.
Penelope could see that he was displeased. Standing up, she went to him, putting her hands on his arm. It was, perhaps, the most important thing that had ever happened to the de Wolfe family, and he had to know just how serious she was about this.
The loss of James was an event in her family’s history that had shaped all of them and changed them forever.
They’d lost James, the gentle but fierce brother, and Penelope had such fond memories of him.
He would ride her around on his war horse when she was younger and receive his mother’s wrath because of it.
He was easily bent to her will, and would play with her or give her sweets, and then pretend to fight his brother, Patrick, for the title of Favored Brother.
Penelope remembered very well that they would trade off “killing” one another for her favor.
God, she had loved him. If there was even a chance James had survived Llandeilo, then she had to know.
They all had to know.
“I am giving you a choice,” she said after a moment, “but I am begging you to allow me to come. Bhrodi… I loved my brother very much. He was kind and generous and humorous, and I miss him every day. Please do not deny me the chance to see him again if, in fact, it is really him. You cannot know what this means to me.”
Bhrodi rolled his eyes in defeat. “As I said, I have no choice,” he said, but he wasn’t angry about it. Simply resigned. “You had better hurry and pack, then. We will travel light and swift, so keep that in mind. I plan to make it to Lioncross in just a few days, so the travel will be difficult.”
Penelope was very eager to go and relieved he wasn’t giving her grief about it. In truth, she knew he understood her need to know the truth.
“I will endure, I promise,” she said.
“You had better endure,” he said. “One complaint and I shall send you home.”
Penelope knew he wasn’t serious, but she also knew he wasn’t keen on her going. Throwing her arms around his neck, she kissed him swiftly and fled the solar before he could change his mind.
Bhrodi watched her go, thinking on the journey ahead and the wife he was now bringing along. After the shock and tears had faded, he could see the hope in her eyes, hope that the rumors were true and it really was her brother.
Still, Bhrodi was leery about it. Men had been wrong before and he would hate to see her so disappointed. But something told him that in any case, disappointment would be inevitable for one very good reason – a man who let his family believe he was dead was not a man who wanted to be found.
As Bhrodi prepared the escort party for the trip to Lioncross, Penelope was doing something he’d asked her not to do.
He’d told her not to tell her father about any of this until they could confirm that James de Wolfe was, indeed, alive, but all Penelope could think of was how devastated her father had been when James had been killed.
Penelope knew, as the entire family knew, that it was something her father had never recovered from.
Having two small sons of her own, Penelope could only imagine how she would feel if one of her sons had been killed.
She also knew that if there was even a chance he had not been killed, and that he was still alive somewhere, she would desperately want to know.
It simply wasn’t fair to keep her father in the dark in a matter of such importance, especially when it came to James.
Sweet James.
Therefore, against her husband’s wishes, Penelope wrote a missive to her father while Bhrodi was busy with preparations for their departure to Lioncross.
She paid one of the stable grooms handsomely to take the missive north to Castle Questing, and the young man was more than happy to do it, slipping from Rhydilian’s postern gate, following the River Nodwydd until he came to a road that would take him towards the mainland.
It was going to take him a week at the very least to reach Castle Questing, and Lady de Shera had insisted it was a matter of life or death.
When Penelope left with her husband and Rees de Lohr the next morning in the early dawn hours, it was with the knowledge that her father would soon know what she knew.
James had risen from the dead.