Chapter 12
Twelve
HARPER
I wrote back to Geoffrey that same evening, sitting at the small writing desk Maud had rearranged twice in pursuit of the best light.
The seamstress’s newest gown hung from the door behind me in deep summer blue, half-pinned and waiting on its final fitting.
I had already unfastened the cuffs of the sleeves of the dress I was wearing, because women’s medieval fashion had been designed by people who had never attempted correspondence.
The chamber smelled faintly of lavender water and warm wax. Outside the narrow window, the last light of evening spread gold across the river below Thames.
I dipped the quill again.
4 July, at Thames
To Sir Geoffrey, wherever the court has dragged you this week.
I received your letter four days after you wrote it. The pies were a success.
Your father is in good health and bad temper.
He writes letters at the speed of a man who has decided to outwork every messenger in England.
I sit with him most mornings now. We work through the household accounts and then a stack of correspondence he reads aloud while demanding my opinion on men I have never met.
Yesterday I gave an opinion regarding the Bishop of Coventry. Your father accepted it. I remain uncertain whether to feel flattered or deeply alarmed.
The bay mare in the lower stable foaled two nights ago. A colt. He arrived backward, which caused panic among the grooms and language I suspect would concern the Church. He was standing before dawn with the kind of offended determination that suggests he intends to become a difficult horse.
Yesterday morning a chicken came shrieking out of the privy in the kitchen yard while Maud was using it.
She emerged at speed. The chicken cleared the kitchen wall entirely.
Maud has not recovered, the chicken has not been seen since, and the kitchen staff now suspect the responsible bird has been taken by faeries.
I will continue to monitor the situation.
Your father wishes me to inform you that Lord Mowbray’s wife has died. He believes you should express regret publicly and within the King’s hearing if possible.
The chapel remains quiet.
I find myself thinking, while writing this, that I do not know what to call you in a letter. We have not properly agreed on what we are.
Until we do, I will sign as instructed by your father.
— Lady Harper of Thames
I stared at the last paragraph for nearly a full minute after finishing it.
Then, because cowardice occasionally arrives disguised as practicality, I sanded the ink, sealed the parchment before I could rewrite it, and handed it to the Baron’s morning courier at dawn.
He looked at the seal with the expression of a man who recognized a private matter and intended to be discreet for additional coin.
I gave him the coin as the Baron had started providing me with an allowance for small things. Then the household swallowed me whole again.
* * *
A courier from the north reached Thames a day before Aldwin did.
The Baron read the message during supper beside a platter of roasted trout and new peas drowning in butter. Candlelight caught the frown lines beside his mouth as he finished the page.
“He is being sent home for consultation,” he said at last. “The northern command refuses to trust certain matters to parchment.”
“Is he injured?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly.
“How long?”
“Two days.” He tapped his fingers against the table.
“Only two?”
“He arrives tomorrow. Leaves the morning after.”
“That is brutal riding.”
“He will manage.”
* * *
Aldwin arrived near dusk beneath a sky the color of hammered pewter.
I was in the gallery above the great hall when Maud hurried up the stairs with the unmistakable expression of someone carrying either scandal or catastrophe.
“He’s here.”
I crossed to the window in time to see him ride through the gatehouse. The horse beneath him was foam-dark along the neck and trembling with exhaustion. Aldwin swung down before the stable boys properly reached him, moving with the stiff economy of a man who had spent too many days in the saddle.
Rain silvered the shoulders of his cloak.
Mud darkened the hem nearly black. One leather glove had split across the knuckles.
His dark hair had grown longer since I last saw him, damp curls brushing the collar of his tunic, and a fading bruise yellowed one side of his jaw beneath several days’ worth of stubble.
The horse he had ridden out on was gone. He must have changed mounts twice and abandoned the second without hesitation.
Not handsome like Geoffrey.
Harder than that. Like a castle wall after a siege.
He handed the reins to a stable boy without ceremony and glanced once toward the hall windows before disappearing inside to find his father.
They remained shut inside the study for more than an hour while rain rattled against the narrow windows and servants hurried through the corridors carrying trenchers, blankets, wine, fresh candles.
When Aldwin finally came to find me, I was sitting in the great hall pretending to review household accounts.
He dropped heavily into the chair across from me without speaking.
Up close he smelled of horse, wet wool, smoke, and cold rain. Salt marked the shoulders of his tunic where sweat had dried and dried again over days of riding.
“You diverted,” I said.
One corner of his mouth moved faintly. “How did you know?”
“You’re late.”
“That could mean anything.”
“With Geoffrey, yes. With you, no.”
That earned me the ghost of an actual smile before it disappeared again.
“The text?” I asked quietly. “Was it the same?”
“Similar.” He reached for the wine jug beside my elbow and poured himself a cup. “The inscription was similar. I spent two days with it.”
“And?”
“It did not respond.”
He said it flatly without bitterness. Somehow that sounded worse.
“I’m sorry.”
He pressed the heel of his hand once against the table. Then again. The first restless gesture I had ever seen him make.
I studied him for a long moment. The man sitting across from me had crossed half of England chasing the possibility of undoing the past.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Tired men rarely stop you.”
I ignored that. “If it had worked,” I said carefully. “If you had gone back and saved Elise. What then?”
His brow furrowed slightly.
“The next morning,” I continued. “What would your life have been? What would hers?”
Aldwin stared down into his wine. Finally he said, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t mean it as a clever question.”
“I know.”
“I mean… you change the past. Fine. Then what?”
Silence stretched between us. At last he leaned back in the chair.
“I want her alive.”
“I know.”
“That was the entirety of the wish.”
The rain softened outside.
Somewhere deeper in the hall, a servant dropped something and immediately swore.
Aldwin exhaled slowly. “The abbot at Sheppey told me something before I left.”
“What?”
“He said men who come searching for heavenly manuscripts are almost always searching for something that cannot be found there.”
His gaze lowered to the tabletop. “He said manuscripts can tell you what has been. They cannot change it. Only the things done afterward change anything.”
“He sounds wise.”
“He was unbearably tedious.”
I laughed despite myself.
Aldwin stood. “There is a courier in the courtyard,” he said. “He arrived behind me by an hour.”
Something inside me immediately betrayed itself.
“A letter?”
He looked at me then with sudden exhaustion and something gentler underneath it.
“You should smile more often,” he said quietly. “You look less lonely when you do.”
Then he left me sitting speechless beside the accounts while rain whispered against the hall roof.
The letter waited on the desk in my chamber by the time I climbed the stairs.
Maud had placed it carefully atop a folded linen cloth as though Geoffrey’s handwriting itself required presentation.
I washed my hands first. Then sat and looked at the seal for a ridiculous amount of time before finally breaking it.
14 July, in the King’s encampment near St. Albans
To Harper, at Thames.
Your chicken has damaged my standing with three royal advisors and one bishop.
I attempted to read your letter with dignity. This failed almost immediately.
The bishop asked whether I had received military intelligence. I told him no, only news involving poultry and a privy. He looked at me as though I had become a danger to the realm.
You should know I have thought of your laugh more times than is reasonable for a man presently surrounded by politics and very poor wine.
The monastery where we are quartered smells of wet stone, lamp smoke, and too many exhausted men. This morning sunlight struck the eastern glass during Mass and turned the chapel gold for one brief moment.
I found myself wishing you had seen it. You would have liked the colors. I think often now of strange things.
The blue sleeves you wore at supper before I left. The expression you make before disagreeing with someone. I do not remember when this began.
Only that the court grows louder each day, and somehow my thoughts grow quieter whenever I write to you.
My father tells me I am meant to woo you properly.
I suspect I have been for months.
Yours,
Geoffrey
I read the letter once. Then again, then a third time while pressing my fingers against my mouth like that might somehow hide my smile.
Outside my window the river moved silver beneath the dark.
A tear escaped. Not because I was sad. But because until that moment, I had not fully understood how badly I wanted the Baron to be right when he claimed Geoffrey intended to woo me, that the moments we’d shared since I’d arrived were not just in my imagination.
I placed the letter carefully inside the carved wooden box on the desk beside the first one. Then immediately took it back out again.
* * *
I answered his letter before bed.
The candles had burned low by the time I returned to my chamber after supper. It glowed amber around me from the candles while summer insects sang beyond the open shutters.
19 July, Thames Castle