* * *
HARPER
The morning after Geoffrey de Warenne proposed marriage to me, I found myself standing alone in the chapel pretending to study a tapestry so I wouldn’t have to fully process the fact that a medieval nobleman had proposed to me.
Cold morning light filtered through the narrow chapel windows, turning the stone floors pale silver beneath my shoes. The dark green wool gown Agnes had insisted suited me best felt heavy against my skin, the fitted sleeves slowly becoming familiar after a lifetime of modern fabrics, zippers, and elastic waistbands. Fine gold embroidery curved around the cuffs in twisting vines and leaves, the thread catching candlelight every time I moved. My veil had already begun slipping backward despite Agnes pinning it with determined optimism earlier thatmorning, and loose strands of dark hair kept escaping around my temples every time I touched them nervously.
Which, unfortunately, was often.
The tapestry in question hung beside the choir stalls along the north wall, faded in places from centuries of candle smoke and damp. At first glance it appeared to depict a noble hunting party. Closer inspection suggested at least three entirely different artistic agendas had collided during its construction. One section featured mounted riders pursuing a stag. Another seemed deeply committed to rendering trees at approximately cathedral scale. Near the lower border, someone had embroidered a dog whose proportions implied either profound symbolic meaning or a complete collapse in medieval spatial reasoning.
I stared at it with intense scholarly concentration. This was, admittedly, easier than thinking about Geoffrey’s mouth. Or him sayingplight your troth to mein the same calm voice most men reserved for discussing grain inventories.
Or the fact that I had said yes immediately.
Chosen deliberately.
My fingers brushed unconsciously against my own wrist, remembering the rough warmth of Geoffrey’s hand there the evening before. The slow movement of his thumb against my skin. The careful restraint that had vanished the moment he kissed me. That part alone could probably sustain several years of emotional instability. But somehow it wasn’t even the kiss currently dismantling me from the inside out. It was what came afterward.
The way he’d looked at me.
Like something extraordinary had happened to him personally and he still wasn’t entirely certain he deserved it.
I pressed both hands against my cheeks. “This is fine,” I informed the tapestry. “Everything is completely fine.”
The tapestry, lacking both conversational ability and emotional investment, declined to respond.
I turned my attention back toward the embroidery with the determination of a woman attempting to survive her own feelings through textile analysis. And honestly? It worked a little.
The repairs fascinated me once I began noticing them properly. Threads from different decades. Different hands. Tiny sections carefully reinforced long after the original weaving had begun unraveling. Women I would never know preserving something because someone had decided it mattered.
I loved that about medieval objects. That history was never static preservation. It was maintenance. Constant care. People choosing over and over again to keep something alive. The thought landed softly somewhere in my chest. Because maybe love looked like that too.
Not merely grand declarations in a hall decorated for Christmas with picture postcard snow outside, though Geoffrey had managed that portion with frankly irritating effectiveness.
Maybe it was the smaller things afterward. The staying. The daily choosing and the willingness to keep repairing what mattered.
Outside the chapel windows I could hear the castle waking around me. Horses in the bailey. Distant voices. The clatter of someone carrying wood across stone.
And somehow, impossibly, I belonged inside those sounds now.
Back in the spring, I had been cataloguing manuscripts in a climate-controlled conservation lab while drinking overpriced coffee from a paper cup.
Now I was engaged to a devastatingly handsome medieval nobleman with battle-callused hands and eyes the exact grey-blue of storm clouds over the Thames.
Life came at you fast.
I smiled helplessly at the tapestry.
“You would think,” I murmured, “that eight hundred years of historical scholarship would better prepare someone for accidentally falling in love with a thirteenth-century war strategist.”
“You are speaking to the wall again.”
I startled hard enough to nearly become permanently embedded in four hundred pounds of medieval embroidery.
Father William stood near the chapel entrance holding a candle and looking profoundly unsurprised by my existence.
Morning light caught along the folds of his black Benedictine habit as he crossed the threshold, the heavy wool robe brushing softly against the stone floor. A white linen under-tunic showed faintly at the collar and sleeves, and a worn rope belt circled his waist beside a leather satchel overflowing with loose parchment. His tonsure had surrendered additional territory overnight, exposing more silver-grey scalp beneath the candlelight.