By December, the war had settled into the bones of the household like the cold. Not the charming kind sold on Christmas cards beside sleigh bells, quaint villages, and cheerful mugs of cocoa. This was medieval winter. Wet wool that never fully dried. Stone corridors that trapped damp beneath the rushes. Fingers cracked raw from icy water. Smoke lingering permanently in the rafters because every fire in England seemed to burn green wood now.
The household at Thames had grown quieter in recent weeks.
The Baron spent more time reading correspondence beside the hearth with a deepening line between his brows. Servants lowered their voices instinctively when new riders arrived. Men-at-arms came and went at irregular hours carrying snow across the floors and rumors through the keep.
Rochester had fallen.
King John’s siege had become the kind of story people repeated carefully beside fires after dark. Starvation. Collapsed walls. Mercenaries. Executions. Entire villages burned afterward in retaliation against barons suspected of disloyalty.
The history books had never properly conveyed how exhausting civil war must have been for ordinary people. Not the battles, but the waiting.
Waiting for news.
Waiting for riders.
Waiting to discover which lord had changed sides this week.
Waiting to see whether the next army marching across England belonged to allies or enemies.
I spent most mornings now helping the steward inventory the grain stores and dried meats while the Baron dictated letters nearby. Somewhere along the way, without either of us consciously discussing it, I had become part of the rhythm of the household.
A servant handed me keys one afternoon without hesitation when the cook requested additional honey from storage. Another asked my opinion regarding winter cloth purchases from London.
And three days earlier, the Baron himself had looked up from a dispatch and absently asked whether I thought Geoffrey would prefer more men stationed along the southern crossing before seeming to remember I technically should not know military strategy.
I had somehow become normal here. The thought should have terrified me more than it did.
Outside, snow fell steadily against the narrow windows of the solar. I sat near the fire mending the sleeve of one of my gowns badly enough that every medieval woman who had ever lived would probably rise from the grave specifically to judge me. Maud had attempted repeatedly to improve my sewing skills over the past month with limited success, but I was determined to learn the medieval skills a noblewoman of this time should know.
“You hold the needle like it insulted your family,” she informed me regularly.
Across from me, the Baron read silently beside the hearth in a dark blue wool tunic lined with fur at the collar. His hair had gone more silver than gold in the weeks since autumn. Grief and war seemed to age men quickly here.
“Another village burned near Canterbury,” he said at last without looking up from the parchment.
I set the sleeve down slowly. “John?”
“Who else?”
The fire cracked softly between us. The Baron rubbed one hand across his face with visible exhaustion. “This cannot continue through spring.”
But we both knew it would. I looked back toward my ruined sewing project before speaking carefully. “Do you think Geoffrey’s safe?”
The question escaped before I could stop it.
The Baron’s eyes lifted immediately.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Though increasingly reckless.”
Something tightened painfully beneath my ribs.
I had not seen Geoffrey in nearly three weeks.
Three weeks back in my modern life meant unanswered emails, rescheduled dinners, and pretending everyone was too busy to notice emotional distance widening like cracks in ice.
Three weeks here felt entirely different. Here, the absence felt like I could run my hand through it.
I noticed it at supper when conversations stalled without his dry observations slipping unexpectedly through them. I noticed it crossing the bailey when I caught myself listening automatically for approaching horses. I noticed it every evening when I looked up at footsteps in the corridor before remembering they belonged to someone else. Which was deeply inconvenient.
