Chapter 12 #2
To my Geoffrey, who has now scandalized at least one bishop.
Your father was lecturing two stewards regarding grain storage with the intensity of a military campaign when he mentioned how competent you are with numbers. I made the mistake of smiling.
He noticed immediately. I dislike that both of you appear to believe my emotions are now a household matter.
I have new dresses, a gift from your father so I look the part of Lady of the Castle.
The seamstress insists I stop rolling the sleeves while working because it “ruins the line.” I informed her better the sleeves wrinkled than ink-stained.
She rolled her eyes, muttering under her breath about odd women.
Thames feels strange without you in it. Quieter. Your father pretends otherwise, but he asks every courier for news before the poor man has fully dismounted.
I rode at dawn this morning before the heat worsened. The lower fields smell of clover now. Your difficult colt has apparently begun biting stable boys.
And because you were brave enough to say one honest thing plainly, I will say one in return.
I have begun waiting for your letters, wishing for your imminent return.
Yours,
Harper
I reread the final line three times.
Then sealed it before courage failed me entirely.
* * *
A messenger arrived from the north on the final night of July.
The Baron read the report twice. “The alliance is moving south again,” he said at last. “Three companies. They intend to harry the royal supply lines near Nottingham before autumn.”
I crossed the room immediately. The names on the parchment tightened something cold inside my chest. I knew this phase of the war. Not one battle. Worse than that. The long unraveling afterward.
The desperate campaigns. Raids. Sieges. Men trying to reclaim momentum already slipping through their hands.
I had taught this once in a fluorescent university classroom while undergraduates pretended to care about medieval logistics while watching videos on their phones.
History remembered the victories cleanly. It remembered the losing only in casualty lists.
“Aldwin,” I said quietly.
The Baron tapped one of the names on the parchment. Beside it he had made a small mark in the margin. The mark meaning, we may lose this man. My knees abruptly decided sitting would be preferable to standing.
“What do we do?”
“We write,” he said. “Tonight.”
“And if he ignores us?”
He looked at me steadily across the desk.
“The gambit was made knowing the risk.”
He pushed fresh parchment toward me while taking up his own quill. And so we sat together through the lengthening summer evening writing letters to a violent man riding toward a battle I already knew might destroy him.
I wrote separately to Geoffrey afterward.
The Baron was still at the desk beside me, bent over correspondence by candlelight while summer rain whispered faintly against the shutters. I took a fresh piece of parchment before I could lose my nerve.
To Geoffrey, wherever this finds you.
Be careful.
I find I have become rather attached to you.
Yours,
Harper
I stared at it exactly one minute, then folded the parchment before common sense could intervene, sealed it in wax, and handed it to a second courier at dawn with instructions to ride south through weather, mud, or hell itself.
Only afterward did I go to the chapel for the first time in over a week. The air inside smelled faintly of incense and old stone cooled by evening. I sat alone in the front pew. The psalter rested silent upon its lectern. Dark. Watching.
* * *
The storm arrived just after midnight.
Not dramatic thunder in the theatrical sense. Just relentless summer rain rolling across the riverlands in grey sheets while the castle settled into uneasy sleep around it.
I was still awake. Partly because I had made the catastrophic decision to write I find I have become rather attached to you to a man currently wandering through armed political collapse.
Partly because once the words had left my hands attached to wax and courier, my brain had immediately begun replaying them in increasingly humiliating detail.
I was considering whether death from embarrassment was medically possible when hooves sounded suddenly in the lower yard.
Fast.
Urgent.
Not the measured rhythm of a scheduled arrival.
I crossed immediately to the window.
Torchlight moved below through rain and darkness. Men crossed the courtyard at speed. One of the stable boys nearly lost his footing in the mud while reaching for a foam-dark horse.
And then the rider swung down. My heart stopped so abruptly it actually hurt.
Geoffrey.
Even from above I could see exhaustion in the way he moved. Rain silvered his shoulders and plastered dark hair against his forehead. Mud covered both boots nearly to the knee. One glove was missing entirely.
The horse beneath him looked moments from collapse. Geoffrey handed the reins off without argument, which terrified me more than if he had started issuing orders. He only surrendered control when he was truly exhausted.
The Baron appeared in the lower hall moments later already dressed, because apparently fathers developed supernatural abilities where sons and danger were concerned. The two exchanged several rapid words I couldn’t hear over the rain.
Then Geoffrey looked up. Straight toward my window. The courtyard disappeared around me for one suspended moment. Relief hit so hard I had to grip the stone ledge beneath the window.
Alive.
He was alive.
The Baron followed Geoffrey’s gaze upward. Then, with the weary expression of a man personally offended by romance occurring during wartime, he pointed toward the stairs.
A moment later someone knocked at my chamber door. Not Maud or a servant.
Three quiet knocks, sending my pulse immediately into overdrive.
I crossed the chamber before common sense could intervene and opened the door.
Geoffrey stood there dripping rainwater onto the rushes.
For one absurd moment all I could think was that he looked exactly like the kind of medieval knight women in museums quietly lose their minds over. Exhausted. Dangerous. Beautiful in the way of men who have not slept properly in days and are too tired to remember they are supposed to be charming.
Rain darkened his cloak nearly black. Wet curls clung to his forehead and temples. Mud streaked one sleeve where he had clearly either fallen or caught himself against stone. His gloves were soaked through. One was missing entirely.
And beneath the exhaustion there was something else in his face.
Relief.
Not because he had reached safety. Because he had reached me.
“Your father sent you?” I asked softly.
“He informed me,” Geoffrey said, “that if I tracked mud through his hall and did not at least allow someone to stop me freezing to death, he would personally resurrect the law of filial obedience.”
“That sounds like him.”
I stepped aside.
The moment he crossed the threshold, cold rain and wet wool followed him into the room. The chamber suddenly smelled like stormwater, horse, smoke, leather, and the sharp mineral scent of summer rain on stone.
I shut the door behind him. For several seconds neither of us spoke. The silence felt different now.
Candles glowed low around the room. Firelight from the hearth flickered gold across the damp stone walls and caught on the rainwater still sliding from Geoffrey’s hair.
“You’re freezing,” I said.
“I am English. We call this weather.”
“You are shivering.”
“That is patriotism.”
I laughed despite myself. The sound softened something in his expression immediately. There it was again. That look he got sometimes now, as though my laughter surprised him every single time it happened.
“You should sit down,” I said.
“I may not get up again if I do.”
“That does seem inconvenient.”
“Especially since I leave again before dawn.”
The words landed hard enough that I felt them physically.
Before dawn.
Of course. This wasn’t Geoffrey returning home for good. Something in my face must have shifted because his expression gentled immediately.
“Harper—”
“Sit down before you fall down.”
The corner of his mouth moved faintly.
“Yes, Lady Harper of Thames.”
I ignored the entirely unreasonable effect that title now had on me and pointed toward the chair beside the hearth.
He lowered himself into it with the careful slowness of a man whose body had stopped reporting injuries to his brain several days ago.
Up close the exhaustion was worse. His eyes were shadowed. Stubble darkened his jaw. One shoulder moved stiffly beneath the soaked cloak. The wool gloves had gone nearly black with rain.