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“Mine, perhaps.”
She almost didn’t hear him, and she didn’t understand what he meant anyway.
He said, “When this war is over, I will have several estates to go with my title. I could foster your sons then.”
She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t stand it. Hadn’t he heard one single word that she’d said? Was her determination so easily brushed aside? His offer demonstrated the truth of her thoughts—that men created war for the love of fighting and struggled against the civilizing influences of wife and home. When faced with the thought of two boys—boys he had never met—becoming men of peace, Hugh endeavored to save them as surely as the saints endeavored to win a sinner’s soul. She managed a polite tone, but the undercurrent, if he cared to hear, swept through dark and dangerous. “My sons have had too much disruption in their lives already. I am their mother. They will stay with me.”
Gathering the corners of the cloth, she lifted the trefoil. He tried to speak, but she walked past without giving a sign she’d heard and carried the flowers outside. In an area safe from the wind, she knelt and spread them to dry. In the winter they would provide infusions against fits of coughing.
In the winter, Hugh would be gone.
For the first time in her life, she longed for winter. Kneeling down among the herbs, she pulled the few weeds that threatened the comfrey. Last winter had been her first at the abbey. It had been very long, very dull, very cold. She’d longed for the spring as never before, but spring, with its easier travel and its rich landscape, had carried war on its temperate winds. Battle had come too close. The wounded had depleted her stores. A few of the rougher soldiers had threatened to sack the village, and in fact a gold chalice had disappeared from the church.
It took a desperate man to steal from God, and the experience alarmed the nuns. Edlyn thought it frightened the monks, too, untrained as most were in the art of war. Lady Corliss had suggested Edlyn curtail her ventures into the forest until the countryside had settled once more. Edlyn had explained that the season for trefoil was brief, and the leaves from the coltsfoot had to be collected now before they lost their vigor.
What Lady Corliss didn’t understand was that Edlyn needed to escape into those woods. There, no one watched her, no one mocked her for what she had been and what she had become. She could discard her shoes, hike up her skirt, and with a free conscience hunt for medicinal herbs, all the while breathing the air of freedom.
Of course, one time she had had the uneasy sense of being watched. The hair on the back of her neck rose, and she heard the crack of a branch beneath a man’s shoe. When she’d run into Wharton, bloody from skinning the rabbit, she’d been daunted until she recognized him. Then she’d been embarrassed, and he had enjoyed that.
Still, he had denied following her, and she was left with the fear of having been someone’s prey. After that, she had kept a stout oak walking stick close by her side.
She stood. Why was she worried about an imaginary presence? She had two big worries of her own.
She started toward the door when a drop of water struck her cheek. Looking up, she sighed in disgust and relief. Disgust that she had to bring the trefoil in again. Relief that the rain would set the new plants she’d placed in the garden.
She gathered the blossoms and walked back toward the door. As long as Hugh de Florisoun lived in her dispensary, she would have no peace.
He scarcely waited until she crossed the threshold before he said, “I mean for you to come, too.”
“What are you talking about?” She feared she knew, and she dumped the cloth of blossoms onto the table before she gave in to temptation and threw them at him.
“I’ll foster your sons, and you will live with us.”
She had trouble catching her breath. “Live with you?”
“I will be good to you, Edlyn.”
“Good to me.” She tapped her foot, irritated and insulted.
“I’ll need a woman to tend the house, and you know how to do that, and right well, too.” He dredged up a charming smile—clearly he was used to getting his way. “You’d like that better than this task of digging plants out of the dirt and having to boil decoctions for strangers.” He spoke matter-of-factly, as if he knew what she liked and what she didn’t.
“I would?”
“Of course you would,” he said confidently. “Edlyn”—he held out his hand, palm up—“you and I would be an invincible couple.”
“A couple of what?”
His hand dropped and his brows lowered. “A married couple.”
Panic hit her, twisting her stomach, making her want to retch. “Married?”
A tinge of irritation colored his tone. “What did you think I meant?”
“Not married, that’s certain.” Never married. Never again.
His voice rose. “You thought I would propose you stay with me as my mistress while your sons looked on? You thought I would take advantage of your lower status to dishonor you with a suggestion of impropriety?”
She subdued the panic and let irritation sweep her along. “In the past, I have not been impressed with any man’s integrity in the face of a woman’s misfortune.”
