He pushed through the courtyard with long, unrelenting strides. His pulse roared in his ears. The abbey was quiet, save for the distant tolling of a bell. It sounded resolute and deliberate, as if beckoning to him.
Several sisters stopped what they were doing to stare as he passed. One dropped her basket of herbs, while another pressed her rosary to her lips. Whispers followed him like ripples.
“Is that?—?”
“A gentleman inside the cloister?”
“Dear heavens, whoishe?”
He ignored them all.
“Where is she?” he demanded of the first nun he passed, who happened to be a young woman who looked both scandalized and alarmed.
“Who, sir?” she stammered.
“Lady Matilda Sterlington.” His voice was sharp and commanding. “Where is she?”
The nun blinked, her mouth opening and closing like a frightened bird. “I cannot say, sir, we do not?—”
But he was already gone.
His boots struck the flagstones hard as he turned corner after corner. Now, the quiet halls of the abbey stretched before him in all their stone and shadow glory. Unfortunately, every single path looked the same.
He knew he had to look half-mad: unshaven, windblown, with mud on his cuffs and his eyes too bright. The calm faces of the nuns only sharpened his sense of desperation.
He did not care. He had come too far to be turned away by silence.
Then, he heard the bell again. The sound seemed to vibrate through the floor itself, heavy with solemnity.
Something was happening. Something important.
He turned toward the sound and began to run. The corridors narrowed as he went, the stone archways pressing close. Voices drifted faintly from ahead. Many were chanting, but there was one, a woman’s voice among them, familiar even through the layers of echo and prayer.
Her.
He stopped for only a moment, listening. Yes… he could hear her. The timbre of her voice, quiet but clear, was like the echo of a memory he could never quite silence.
“Matilda,” he whispered.
And then he moved again through another archway, up a short flight of steps, toward the open doors at the end of the hall. The bell tolled once more, louder this time, vibrating through the air like the strike of fate itself.
He didn’t think. He didn’t care for the scandal of it, nor the impropriety, nor what the sisters would say when a duke burst through their sacred doors. He only knew that if he was even a moment too late, he might lose her forever.
So, he quickened his pace, as his boots echoed through the cloisters. And when he reached the chapel doors, he did not pause to knock. He threw them open and stepped inside. Thegreat wooden doors burst open with a thunderous crack that shattered the quiet like lightning through glass.
Every head turned at once. The sisters gasped, the chant broke off mid-note, and the bell fell silent as if stunned.
Jasper stood in the doorway disheveled and breathless, with his hair damp from rain and his eyes blazing. He looked every bit a man unhinged, and for once, he did not care.
“Matilda!”
Her name tore from him like a plea. His rough voice rang through the vaulted space. Matilda, kneeling before the altar, froze. The silver chalice trembled faintly in the abbess’s hand. The sisters rose in alarm, their faces pale with shock.
“Do not do this!” Jasper shouted, striding forward, heedless of propriety, of sacred space, of the horrified murmurs around him. “Matilda, stop! Don’t make this vow!”
The abbess raised a hand sharply. “Your Grace, this is a house of God?—”
“I know where I am,” he cut in, his tone shaking, “but God Himself would not ask her to bury herself alive!”
