“Are you going to stay up with the boy?”
“I had thought to,” she admitted.
“You won’t fall asleep?”
She peeked through her lashes at him. “Not if someone were with me.”
Kendrick pulled up a chair beside her and took her hand, raising it to his lips. “Thank you for tonight.”
“I didn’t do so very much.”
“You gave me the eyes to see, and the hope for something better. I think whatever light may dawn upon us is all due to you, my wife.”
ChapterTwenty-Four
Through a fog of drowsiness, Genevieve heard Kendrick order, “Back in bed.”
“I already spent more time abed than a body can, guv,” Fletcher protested. “I’m going barmy!”
Genevieve pried open her eyes in time to see Kendrick pick the boy up bodily and place him back in the bed. “You’ll go nowhere until the doctor gives you a clean bill of health, my lad. This is the third time you’ve tried to slip out today.”
“Fletcher!” Genevieve straightened in her chair, surprised and injured at this turn of events. “You’d leave without a word? And what of Wulfric—you’d leave him behind?” She cast a glance at the puppy in his blanket-lined basket beside the fire.
The boy rubbed his eyes and protested, “Ain’t no reason to stay abed. I been sicker than this before! I need to check on the nippers! I promised I’d look in on them…”
Genevieve reached out and stroked the hair back from his forehead. “You may be feeling better, but I know you’re not at full strength, dear. Whom do you look in on? Peter and Hannah? August and June?”
“Yes,” Fletcher said, looking very small in the middle of the vast bed. Sometimes, she forgot he was only around ten; he acted so much older than his age. “I keep an eye on them when their mum can’t.”
“Very noble of you,” Kendrick said. “But we can do that easily, if you’ll deputize us in your stead.”
“Eh?” Fletcher blinked.
Genevieve looked over at him in surprise and gratitude. “What a good idea. I had meant to speak to Sally this evening as well. I can go?—”
“We,” Kendrick said.
It was Genevieve’s turn to blink.
“A queen should have an escort, should she not?”
“That was clever of you, to distract Fletcher with notions of queen and kingship and describe what that meant,” Genevieve remarked as she and Kendrick made their way into the East End. She’d donned her old dress, and Kendrick had put on his yeoman garb so they did not stick out like sore thumbs in the street.
“He’s clever. He could learn his letters in no time.”
“If he makes the effort.”
“I think your father’s books have sunk their teeth into him. They won’t let him go so easily.” Kendrick smiled down at her.
Genevieve warmed. “It is something, isn’t it? That his words endure, even now.”
“Men in my time believed great deeds and lauded reputations were the only hope for lasting glory, and even now, I believe it to be so. Many things pass away—monuments, monarchs, even mountains—but stories remain.”
On a street corner, a small girl sang in a high, piping voice, “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, please put a penny in the old man’s hat,” while a boy crouched by the ragged cap on the pavement. Kendrick flicked a coin in a perfect arc into the hat, which made the boy stare open-mouthed.
Genevieve’s smile trembled. She was leaving Hannah and Peter before Christmas. But perhaps she could think of something, a gift that wouldn’t be too much, to give them, one that Sally would not be too proud to accept.
As they approached Sally’s house, a clamor of noise broke over her—one that no one else on the street could hear. “What is that?”
