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.
* * *
Geoffrey returned to Thames twelve nights later under circumstances the Baron described as “discreet,” though this appeared to involve six armed riders, two exhausted horses, and Father William pretending not to recognize anyone after midnight.
I heard the gate horn from the western tower and arrived in the lower hall still fastening one sleeve of my gown.
Geoffrey was standing beside the hearth when I entered, rain-dark cloak thrown back from his shoulders while one of the grooms carried in saddlebags behind him. He looked tired again, worn at the edges in the way all of them were becoming now.
His gaze found me immediately. And softened immediately afterward.