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He had handsome features: strong and full of masculine beauty that had always made women pant after him like bitches in heat.
She snorted. She’d already had that disease, and like someone who had suffered from smallpox and lived to tell about it, she couldn’t get it again—and she was only stalling. She had to check that bandage.
Lifting the gown, she focused on that one thing. Hugh’s move onto the pallet had loosened the linen strips, and she adjusted them to fit tightly once more. She lowered the gown and allowed herself a small smirk of self-congratulations. That hadn’t bothered her a bit. Her hands were hardly shaking.
She lifted his head and placed it on her bent knees. “Drink.”
He drank, but a bit of the precious liquid oozed out of the corner of his mouth and he choked a bit as he swallowed.
She would have to hold him higher next time.
Taking the rags, she started folding them. He watched her steadily as she worked, and when he spoke, she flinched at his curiosity.
“Edlyn, why are you living in a nunnery?”
“Maybe I’ve taken vows.” She kept her gaze on her hands as she folded.
He laughed softly, then closed his eyes as a spasm of pain struck. “I don’t think so.”
Offended, she said, “What? You don’t think I’m virtuous enough?”
“I think those two vipers”—he gasped for air—“who visited made your status clear.”
“I don’t think you ought to talk anymore.”
His fingers tangled in the skirt of her cotte. “Then tell me.”
He was starting to drift but fighting against it, and she subdued her instinctive rebuff. She did, after all, hold the power in this situation. “Lady Blanche and Adda might have been twins, so alike are they in temperament and appearance.”
He struggled to open his eyes. “Don’t care about them.”
“Lady Blanche’s mother was singularly unappreciative when presented with her husband’s child by her maid so soon before Lady Blanche’s birth.”
“Tell me…you.”
“I think Lady Blanche drank bitterness from her mother’s tit, and Adda absorbed it from the moment she was put in Lady Blanche’s service.”
“When I’m better…”
“Both girls were placed in the nunnery at the age of seven to get rid of them.”
“Edlyn…”
“And they move from abbey to abbey as they make themselves unwelcome.”
Hugh’s faint snore stopped her. She slid the folded rags beneath his head, but he didn’t move, and she grinned in open triumph.
Wharton’s voice sounded from behind her. “He’s going t’ wake someday, ye know, an’ he’ll get those answers he wants.”
Gathering the bottle and the cup, she faced Wharton and his armload of wood. “Not from me, he won’t.”
Wharton knelt to place the logs on the pile. “He always gets what he wants.”
“Then it’s time he learned differently.” Stepping well away from Wharton, she returned the bottle to its hiding place and put the stool away again. “I have work to do.”
“How long will it take him t’ get well?”
Edlyn realized that wasn’t what he wanted to ask. He really wanted to know if Hugh would get well, and she didn’t know the answer to that. She had prescribed the most effective medicine she knew. “Pray for him. Perhaps in a fortnight he’ll be well enough to sit up.”
