Chapter 13
Thirteen
HARPER
The first brisk morning came in the third week of August. I woke to a cold nose and no fire in the hearth.
Maud arrived carrying a heavier gown before breakfast. The wool was deep russet, the color of horse chestnuts after rain, and cut differently through the shoulders to allow for an underdress I still hadn’t mastered without assistance.
She watched me fight my way into the layers with the composed patience of a woman whose orderly life had been interrupted by someone completely unequipped for sleeves.
“You will be quicker by Christmas,” she said, fastening one cuff.
“I absolutely will not.”
“Then by Easter.”
“Possibly.”
Though I doubted it.
Easter.
Would I still be here then? Would I have a choice to go back before then, or had that single glowing moment in the chapel been my only chance? Did I even want to go back to my own time?
Nowadays, everyone was replaceable. After a few weeks, a month at most, my job had probably been listed, interviewed for, and given to someone with better grant-writing skills and fewer opinions about manuscript humidity.
Did my co-workers think I’d had a breakdown and quit without a word? Didn’t anyone wonder why my cardigan was still hanging on the back of my chair in the conservation room?
Maud adjusted the linen at my throat, stepped back, and appeared to decide I was acceptable for public viewing as lady of the castle.
Not lady of the castle in any real official sense. Just the woman everyone had quietly started looking at when linen went missing, the chapel smelled odd, or the Baron required arguing with.
The river beyond the gallery windows had turned silver-grey overnight, the grass along the bank gone gold at the tips.
Down in the kitchens somebody burned the oats, a dog barked in the yard, and the whole household was awake before the sun had properly cleared the trees, because war had turned every arrival at the gate into an event.
The first reports from Nottingham came in pieces.
One courier arrived before noon with news of the skirmish.
Another appeared two hours later soaked through to the skin and carrying casualty counts wrapped in oilcloth.
A third came near supper with corrections to the second, because apparently even in the thirteenth century bureaucracy had discovered the joy of making everything worse in triplicate.
The Baron read every report in order at the long desk in his study while I stood beside him pretending not to hover. I wasn’t very good at pretending.
His master sheet lay open beneath his hand. Columns of names. Dates. Movements. Private marks in the margins, only some of which I had learned to interpret. The Nottingham raids had not gone the way the alliance intended.
The Baron’s face gave away nothing. That was how I knew the news was bad.
“He is alive,” he said at last without looking up.
My stomach unclenched so abruptly I almost sat down on the floor out of gratitude.
“Aldwin?”
“Aldwin,” he confirmed.
He turned one parchment toward me. “He took a wound to the leg during the second engagement. Not from a blade. A horse went down beneath him and trapped him under the saddle.”
I exhaled slowly. “He’ll recover?”
“The report says the bone is intact.” The Baron dipped his quill again. “And Aldwin is too stubborn to die from being inconvenienced by a horse.”
I sat down in the chair across from the desk, because over the weeks it had become my chair. It even had an embroidered cushion. Someone had put it there without comment, which was how affection worked in this house. No one admitted anything. They simply furnished around it.
The Baron continued reading. His eyes moved steadily down the page, then stopped.
“What?” I asked.
He didn’t answer immediately which was never good.
“What?” I repeated.
“Aldwin writes that the names on the second sheet are accurate.” The Baron took up the smaller page and angled it toward the candlelight. “He also says Lord Beaumont was not present at the engagement.”
The room seemed to narrow.
“He was supposed to be there.”
“Yes.”
I reached for the master sheet and ran my finger down the column of names.
There.
Beaumont.
The Baron’s small notation beside it had originally marked him expected. Now a faint second mark sat beside it in darker ink.
A question.
My pulse began climbing unpleasantly. I knew this campaign. Not one battle specifically. Worse than that. The long collapse afterward. Failed supply seizures. Fractured alliances. Smaller lords abandoning the coalition one negotiation at a time.
Beaumont had been at Nottingham, had been wounded there. And his injury had mattered because he was the negotiator holding three smaller Midlands lords inside the alliance. If Beaumont had not been there at all—
“Harper.”
“Give me a minute.”
He sat quietly across the desk while rain tapped softly against the study windows and servants moved through the corridor outside carrying trenchers toward supper.
“This could be one changed detail,” I said finally. “Or it could be the first loose thread in something larger.”
“Yes.”
“And if it’s larger—”
“Then we shall adjust.”
He said it calmly enough to make me want to throw something at him. Possibly the inkpot.
“You are alarmingly calm about this.”
“I am three score,” he said dryly. “At my age calmness is mostly exhaustion wearing respectable clothing.”
That startled a laugh out of me despite everything. One corner of his mouth moved faintly in satisfaction.
“Neither side wins cleanly. The Crown bleeds money. The charter survives in altered form. If individual moments shift, we adapt.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“It is not easy.” He folded one report carefully. “It is merely necessary.” He reached for Aldwin’s letter again, and something in his expression shifted.
The Baron’s emotions did not burst through the door waving banners. They looked through a crack in the wall, decided the weather was poor, and retreated. But I had learned to notice.
“What else?” I asked.
He looked at the parchment for another moment before answering.
“There is a message.”
“For Geoffrey?”
“For me.” A pause. “And a courtesy toward you.”
That made my spine straighten slightly.
The Baron adjusted the parchment in the candlelight.
“The names on the second sheet are accurate. Lord Beaumont was not present at the engagement, which I believe significant. Lady Harper’s earlier warning regarding Sheppey was correct.
I judged her unfairly in certain matters and would have you convey my respect, if you deem it proper. ”
The Baron lowered the letter. Rain tapped softly against the windows.
“That is all?”
“For Aldwin,” the Baron said dryly, “this borders on emotional recklessness.”
I laughed despite myself.
“He apologized?”
“He acknowledged the existence of another person’s competence. We must not ask too much of him all at once.”
“That sounds dangerous for his health.”
“Extremely.”
The Baron folded the letter carefully. There was something unexpectedly moving in the restraint of it. Aldwin had not written to me directly. Of course he had not. Whatever existed between us now was understanding, not friendship, and he was far too aware of appearances to blur the distinction.
Especially now with Geoffrey away. The realization settled strangely in my chest. Not disappointment. Something steadier than that. Trust, perhaps.
Aldwin had finally stopped looking at me like a possible catastrophe wrapped in suspiciously modern footwear. Considering the circumstances, it was probably the closest thing we were ever going to achieve to friendship.
The Baron drew a fresh sheet of parchment toward him.
“You’ll answer tonight?” I asked.
“I will.”
The room quieted again except for the rain and the soft scrape of quill against parchment.
I watched him write for a moment. There was no hesitation in him once a decision had been made. Fear did not stop the machinery. Love did not stop it either. Everything he felt simply fed the work already in motion.
It occurred to me suddenly that this was how the Baron survived the war. Not by feeling less than other people. But by never allowing himself the luxury of stopping.
“Sheppey mattered,” he said without looking up.
I glanced at him.
“You know it did.”
“I guessed.”
For months I had been trying to understand what the psalter wanted from me.
Whether it had sent me here to save Geoffrey, or the Baron, or some thread of history so small no one in my century had thought to footnote it.
Every time I thought I had found the edge of the pattern, the whole thing shifted beneath my hands.
But Aldwin going to Sheppey had changed something. And now the consequences were spreading outward through the war like cracks through ice.
“I don’t want to ruin anything,” I said quietly.
The Baron’s quill stilled. “My dear,” he said, and the gentleness of it nearly undid me, “everything is already ruined. That is what war is. The question is whether one can preserve enough that something decent may grow afterward.”
I looked down at my hands. The wool of my gown felt warm beneath my fingers. Real. Heavy.
“What if I make the wrong thing grow?”
“Then someone will tell you.”
“You?”
“Immediately.”
I laughed softly. “That is comforting in a terrible way.”
“I specialize in terrible comfort.”
“You really do.”
He sealed the letter after supper.
I stood beside the study fire while he pressed his signet into the wax, thinking not about Aldwin in the north, but Geoffrey somewhere near the King’s court, surrounded by frightened men pretending loyalty was still a stable thing. Outside, thunder rolled faintly beyond the river.
The courier rode out at dawn beneath a low grey sky carrying dispatches, casualty reports, warnings, and whatever fragile hope men still attempted to send through wartime England.
* * *