Chapter 13 #3
The study went very still. “She would have started calling you Lady Harper of Thames in her own correspondence within the first month,” he added. “And refused absolutely to stop doing it.”
I smiled despite myself.
“What will you do?” I asked.
“Get Geoffrey away from court.”
“How?”
“With subtlety, planning, and at least one lie so respectable it may wear a hat.”
“That sounds legal.”
“It is feudal politics. Legal is a matter of who survives long enough to write the record.”
I sank into the chair. My chair. The one with the embroidered cushion. The one someone had placed near his desk because I kept ending up there.
“What if he cannot leave?” I asked.
“Then I will send someone to fetch him.”
“Who?”
The Baron gave me a look.
I thought of Aldwin, lying somewhere north of Nottingham with his ruined leg, probably insulting surgeons and terrifying squires.
“Not Aldwin,” I said.
“Not unless his horse has learned to carry him while he argues from a stretcher.”
“That does sound possible.”
“With Aldwin, regrettably, many absurdities are possible.”
He stood and went to the wall where a map hung pinned between two shelves.
It was not the clean, printed map my brain wanted.
It was inked by hand, full of odd proportions and local certainties.
Roads thickened where men used them often.
Rivers curved with the confidence of people who had crossed them in bad weather.
Villages appeared or vanished according to loyalty, usefulness, or whether the cartographer had been paid.
The Baron touched Marlborough with one finger. Then Thames and then the roads between.
“Geoffrey is right,” he said. “He needs a plausible errand.”
“What kind?”
“One that appears to serve the Crown without leaving him in its hand.”
“That sounds impossible.”
“Most useful things do.”
He was already thinking.
I could see it happen even as the grief and fear didn’t leave his face. By morning there would be letters. By noon there would be riders. By nightfall half a dozen men would be moving through the country on orders they only partly understood.
This was how the Baron loved his sons. Not with speeches but with logistics.
“I hate this,” I said. “I hate that the King can just take people in the night.”
The Baron looked at the map.
“So do I.”
There was iron under the words. The kind that had been heated, hammered, cooled, and sharpened over years.
I went to the chapel after supper. Candles flickered low beside the altar. Father William was standing near the communion table holding the wine cup in a manner that made me smile.
He straightened too quickly when he saw me. “I was polishing it.”
“With wine?”
“I was checking for damage.”
“With your mouth?”
“That is one accepted method.”
“In medieval England, perhaps.”
He gestured vaguely at the surrounding architecture. “Where exactly do you believe you currently are?”
I laughed before I could help it.
He looked unbearably pleased with himself.
Father William was wearing a dark wool cassock belted at the waist with a plain cord, the hem damp where he had walked through the wet courtyard.
His sleeves were too long for practical work, which had not stopped him from doing any of it.
A small ink stain marked one finger, and his hair had escaped its tonsure in several directions, giving him the air of a holy man recently attacked by a manuscript.
I moved to the front pew and sat down. The heavier sleeves of my gown pooled around my hands as I folded them together.
The chapel smelled of beeswax and old stone. The psalter rested on its lectern. Outside, somewhere beyond Thames, the war kept moving.
Aldwin was north with a ruined leg, a dead horse, and a talent for surviving things he should not survive. Geoffrey was somewhere near the King’s court inventing a plausible reason to flee armed politics before said politics decided to imprison him.
And I—
I had started waiting for people. That was the thing I couldn’t quite explain to myself. Boston had been my life. My apartment, my great job. Delicious coffee.
But Thames had become the place where the day felt unfinished until everyone came home.
Months ago I would have sat in this chapel wondering whether the psalter might send me back.
Now I found myself wondering what would happen to this household if Geoffrey never returned.
Whether the Baron would simply go silent one morning and never entirely recover from it. Whether Aldwin would laugh again if the war finally managed to take something from him he could not survive losing. I couldn’t bear to think what I would do.
Father William lowered himself onto the altar step beside the wine cup with a sigh.
“You are thinking loudly again,” he observed.
I looked toward the dark manuscript.
“I want them to come home,” I said quietly.
The chapel fell quiet again.
I closed my eyes and simply sat there in the candlelight with Father William, the manuscript, the smell of old stone and wine and beeswax, and let myself want openly for everyone I cared about to survive the year.