Chapter 14
Fourteen
HARPER
Geoffrey’s next letter came eleven days after the Baron started moving men.
The courier was new. The seal was a different wax, pale grey instead of the dark blue Geoffrey had been using at court. Maud brought it up to me as soon as it arrived.
12 September, somewhere in the Midlands
My Dearest Harper —
The plausible errand worked. I am not naming the house in this letter, because the letter may be opened and read. Suffice it to say I am fed, dry, and surrounded by men whose names you would know if I wrote them.
Do not reply to this letter through the same courier.
I have given him a different instruction for the next leg.
The next letter you receive from me will arrive by a man who will introduce himself only as Hugh of Banbury, and who will ask whether the kitchen’s chickens have settled their theological dispute.
If he does not ask that, do not give him a letter.
Tell my father I am well.
I am thinking of you in inappropriate proportions for a man supposed to be in hiding.
Yours,
Geoffrey
I read it three times in fast succession and went down to the Baron’s study.
He absorbed the news without expression and returned to his correspondence.
That evening over supper he said, “He used the chicken.”
“He did.”
“I will permit one full minute of pleasure at this. After which we must continue.”
* * *
Autumn closed around Thames Castle. The river ran higher and colder. The kitchen put up apples. The seamstress returned to make me two cloaks and did not, this time, complain about my sleeves, on the grounds that I had successfully not stained them with ink.
I rode out with the Baron one morning to inspect a property he had bought from a coalition lord who needed gold quickly.
It was the first time I had been outside the walls in three months.
The gallop along the river road was startling.
The wind smelled of leaves and cold. There was no car exhaust, no humans for miles in any direction.
I cried briefly without entirely understanding why.
The Baron rode beside me without comment. When I finished and was sniffing, he handed me a cloth from his saddlebag, which had clearly been put there by someone who had anticipated weeping.
“Maud,” I said.
“Maud.”
The ride did me good and I found I’d come to like riding, though I missed pop music, and sometimes caught myself humming a few of my favorites.
* * *
One morning while helping Maud inventory dried apples and sacks of barley in preparation for colder weather, I realized Thanksgiving would have been the following Thursday back home.
For the last several years my friends and I had held what Lauren insisted on calling “historically irresponsible Thanksgiving.” We cooked too much food, drank alarming quantities of wine, and arrived dressed as our favorite historical figures.
Two years ago Jen had appeared as Anne Boleyn carrying a fake severed head in her purse.
Last year Mark arrived in full Roman senatorial robes and spent an hour dramatically denouncing the stuffing.
I had gone as Eleanor of Aquitaine because I admired competence and intimidation in equal measure.
Now I was standing in a thirteenth-century storeroom holding onions while actual medieval people prepared for winter around me.
The absurdity nearly flattened me.
“You look sad,” Maud observed from across the table.
“I was thinking about a feast from home.”
“A funeral feast?”
“No.”
“A marriage feast?”
“More… friends drinking too much wine while arguing about dead people.”
Maud considered this.
“That sounds like every feast.”
I laughed unexpectedly. And realized with a pang that this was the first Thanksgiving in years where I hadn’t felt quietly lonely beforehand. The realization unsettled me more than I wanted to admit.
Outside, the castle had already begun preparing for Christmastide.
Extra candles arrived from the chandlers. Evergreen boughs appeared gradually in the hall despite the Baron pretending not to notice them. The kitchens salted more meat while Father William muttered darkly about Advent and simultaneously stole honey cakes cooling near the ovens.
The whole household felt poised on the edge of winter.
Waiting.
For snow.
For peace.
For letters.
For the war to finally decide what remained afterward.
And increasingly disastrously, for Geoffrey.
* * *
Letters came less often through the winter. Geoffrey moved twice. The chicken-sentence courier became Hugh of Banbury, who became an old man with a cleft in his chin who introduced himself by asking after the colt.
Aldwin rode from one campaign into the next and, against the medical advice of two surgeons, refused to stay in any camp longer than five days.
He sent fragments — we held the ford; lost six; Beaumont is in Northampton with a fever, which is interesting — and the Baron and I assembled them into something we used as an understanding of what was happening. It was fascinating and it was terrifying.
The colt grew bigger and meaner. I learned to ride well enough to stop bruising and feel like I’d been run over by a truck.
The Baron taught me to read a campaign map the way he read it. I learned that a map was an argument. I’d not, in any of my museum training, ever been told this.
* * *
By late November the roads had become nearly impassable after rain and snow.
Couriers arrived half-frozen. Horses went lame in the mud. The kitchens smelled constantly of onions, smoke, damp wool, and bread rising near the hearths while servants carried heated stones through the corridors before bed.
The war slowed, and Geoffrey came and went through it like a man refusing to admit exhaustion existed.
Sometimes he appeared at Thames after midnight and vanished again before dawn. Sometimes weeks passed with nothing but letters and rumors and the occasional dispatch carried under false names through hostile territory.
And every time the gate horn sounded unexpectedly, my pulse immediately abandoned all reason.
The Baron noticed. Naturally. One evening in December he looked up from a campaign ledger and said, “If you stare at the gate every time a horse arrives, eventually the household will assume you are expecting a lover.”
I kept writing, a smile tugging at the corner of my mouth.
“That seems unlikely.”
“You are blushing.”
“It’s cold in here.”
“You are almost sitting in the fire.”
“I object to this entire conversation.”
“So noted.”
* * *
Three nights later Geoffrey arrived bleeding.
He came through the lower hall after midnight with mud to his knees, a split riding glove, and blood dried stiff along one sleeve where a knife had apparently glanced across his forearm during an argument involving grain shipments and men too tired to remain civilized.
“The grain nearly killed you?” I said.
“The grain was extremely hostile.”
The Baron looked at the cut once and said, “Sit down before you fall down.”
“I am perfectly capable of remaining upright.”
“You are swaying.”
“That is tactical balance.”
“It is blood loss.”
Father William appeared with bandages and wine, which suggested long clerical experience with aristocratic nonsense.
Later, after the Baron had finally gone to bully the quartermasters and Father William had declared Geoffrey “annoyingly alive,” I found him alone in the study beside the fire.
His injured arm rested across the table while candlelight flickered gold against scattered maps and correspondence.
“You shouldn’t be moving it,” I said quietly.
“I had hoped to impress you with my stoicism.”
I crossed the room before overthinking it and sat beside him with the fresh bandage Father William had left behind.
Geoffrey watched me silently while I untied the earlier wrapping.
The cut was shallow, thank goodness. Still, something inside me tightened unpleasantly at the sight of blood against his skin.
“You frightened me,” I admitted softly.
His gaze lifted immediately to mine. For a moment neither of us spoke. Outside, snow whispered softly against the shutters.
Very conscious of infection and no antibiotics, I cleaned the cut carefully with wine while Geoffrey tried very hard not to react to the sting.
“You are making that face again,” I said.
“What face?”
“The one heroic men make when pretending pain is a personal insult.”
“I am extraordinarily brave.”
“You nearly passed out in the hall.” I smiled at him.
He sniffed. “I did so with dignity.”
“That feels historically unverifiable.”
A tired laugh escaped him. My fingers brushed his wrist while tying the clean linen in place. Geoffrey looked down at my hands for a long moment.
“When I left court,” he said quietly, “I regretted leaving you more than I regretted leaving the king.”
Something inside my chest simply stopped functioning.
He seemed almost surprised he had said it aloud. He was looking at me like coming back to Thames had become the closest thing he possessed to rest.
My hand still rested lightly against his wrist.
Outside, winter pressed quietly against the castle walls while somewhere beyond Thames the war continued grinding men into history.
But inside the study there was only candlelight, damp wool steaming near the hearth, Geoffrey’s pulse beneath my fingertips, and the terrifying realization that I no longer knew whether I wanted the psalter to send me home at all.