“A funeral feast?”
“No.”
“A marriage feast?”
“More… friends drinking too much wine while arguing about dead people.”
Maud considered this.
“That sounds like every feast.”
I laughed unexpectedly. And realized with a pang that this was the first Thanksgiving in years where I hadn’t felt quietly lonely beforehand. The realization unsettled me more than I wanted to admit.
Outside, the castle had already begun preparing for Christmastide.
Extra candles arrived from the chandlers. Evergreen boughs appeared gradually in the hall despite the Baron pretending not to notice them. The kitchens salted more meat while Father William muttered darkly about Advent and simultaneously stole honey cakes cooling near the ovens.
The whole household felt poised on the edge of winter.
Waiting.
For snow.
For peace.
For letters.
For the war to finally decide what remained afterward.
And increasingly disastrously, for Geoffrey.
* * *
Letters came less often through the winter. Geoffrey moved twice. The chicken-sentence courier became Hugh of Banbury, who became an old man with a cleft in his chin who introduced himself by asking after the colt.
Aldwin rode from one campaign into the next and, against the medical advice of two surgeons, refused to stay in any camp longer than five days.
He sent fragments —we held the ford; lost six; Beaumont is in Northampton with a fever, which is interesting— and the Baron and I assembled them into something we used as an understanding of what was happening. It was fascinating and it was terrifying.
The colt grew bigger and meaner. I learned to ride well enough to stop bruising and feel like I’d been run over by a truck.
The Baron taught me to read a campaign map the way he read it. I learned that a map was an argument. I’d not, in any of my museum training, ever been told this.
* * *
By late November the roads had become nearly impassable after rain and snow.
Couriers arrived half-frozen. Horses went lame in the mud. The kitchens smelled constantly of onions, smoke, damp wool, and bread rising near the hearths while servants carried heated stones through the corridors before bed.
The war slowed, and Geoffrey came and went through it like a man refusing to admit exhaustion existed.
Sometimes he appeared at Thames after midnight and vanished again before dawn. Sometimes weeks passed with nothing but letters and rumors and the occasional dispatch carried under false names through hostile territory.
And every time the gate horn sounded unexpectedly, my pulse immediately abandoned all reason.
The Baron noticed. Naturally. One evening in December he looked up from a campaign ledger and said, “If you stare at the gate every time a horse arrives, eventually the household will assume you are expecting a lover.”
I kept writing, a smile tugging at the corner of my mouth.
