I suspect I have been for months.
Yours,
Geoffrey
I read the letter once. Then again, then a third time while pressing my fingers against my mouth like that might somehow hide my smile.
Outside my window the river moved silver beneath the dark.
A tear escaped. Not because I was sad. But because until that moment, I had not fully understood how badly I wanted the Baron to be right when he claimed Geoffrey intended to woo me, that the moments we’d shared since I’d arrived were not just in my imagination.
I placed the letter carefully inside the carved wooden box on the desk beside the first one. Then immediately took it back out again.
* * *
I answered his letter before bed.
The candles had burned low by the time I returned to my chamber after supper. It glowed amber around me from the candles while summer insects sang beyond the open shutters.
19 July, Thames Castle
To my Geoffrey, who has now scandalized at least one bishop.
Your father was lecturing two stewards regarding grain storage with the intensity of a military campaign when he mentioned how competent you are with numbers. I made the mistake of smiling.
He noticed immediately. I dislike that both of you appear to believe my emotions are now a household matter.
I have new dresses, a gift from your father so I look the part of Lady of the Castle. The seamstress insists I stop rolling the sleeves while working because it “ruins the line.” I informed her better the sleeves wrinkled than ink-stained. She rolled her eyes, muttering under her breath about odd women.
Thames feels strange without you in it. Quieter. Your father pretends otherwise, but he asks every courier for news before the poor man has fully dismounted.
I rode at dawn this morning before the heat worsened. The lower fields smell of clover now. Your difficult colt has apparently begun biting stable boys.
And because you were brave enough to say one honest thing plainly, I will say one in return.
I have begun waiting for your letters, wishing for your imminent return.
Yours,
Harper
I reread the final line three times.
Then sealed it before courage failed me entirely.
* * *
A messenger arrived from the north on the final night of July.
The Baron read the report twice. “The alliance is moving south again,” he said at last. “Three companies. They intend to harry the royal supply lines near Nottingham before autumn.”
I crossed the room immediately. The names on the parchment tightened something cold inside my chest. I knew this phase of the war. Not one battle. Worse than that. The long unraveling afterward.
The desperate campaigns. Raids. Sieges. Men trying to reclaim momentum already slipping through their hands.
I had taught this once in a fluorescent university classroom while undergraduates pretended to care about medieval logistics while watching videos on their phones.
History remembered the victories cleanly. It remembered the losing only in casualty lists.
