She leaned back against him and let him play, piling all her ringlets up and then letting them flutter back down.

After all, they were only playing.

Chapter Twenty-Four

One fine morning a few weeks after Linnet first met Gavan, he was carried downstairs by Neythen and plunked in the sun at the front door of the castle to wait for someone to fetch him.

Linnet found him there and sat down beside him. “Will your father be along?”

He shrugged. “Probably Mum, in the wagon. That’s how she got me here. My dad, he’s in the field, or with the sheep.”

“So you’re a farmer’s son,” Linnet said. “Do you want to be a farmer as well?”

“My dad’s not a farmer; he manages a big estate for somebody who’s never there. I’m going to be a doctor,” Gavan said, with easy confidence. “I’m going to be better than those two.” He jerked his head back at the castle.

“They did a good job with you,” she said, hiding her grin. “What do your parents think of your plan?”

“They don’t know yet, do they? On account of how old Havelock told my mum she had to leave me here. We only live over there in Tydfil.” He gestured, rather vaguely, toward the east. “My mum told me she’d visit, and then Havelock said she couldn’t come, ever.”

“So Tydfil is quite close?” Linnet asked, but Gavan was suddenly struggling to stand. Linnet jumped up and hauled him to his feet.

“There’s the cart!” he bawled, beside himself with excitement. “It is my mum!”

When the cart drew up in front of the castle, a woman jumped down, ran over and swooped Gavan up her arms. “There you are!” she cried. “Bright as a ha’penny and good as gold!”

He had his arms tightly wreathed around her neck. “I never cried,” he said. But he was crying now. “Not even when they held me down, and—” but whatever he was saying was lost in sobs.

Linnet patted the bench she and Gavan had been sitting on, and Gavan’s mother walked over, her son clinging to her front. She wasn’t much older than Linnet, all told, her hair black and gleaming under her bonnet.

She sat down, stroking Gavan’s hair. “There’s nothing wrong with crying,” she told him. “Nothing at all.” After that, they just sat there in the sunshine, his head buried in her shoulder as she rocked him back and forth.

The door opened behind them, and Linnet heard the sound of Piers’s cane. She turned around to give him a warning glance. This was no time for incivility. But he was well-mannered, for him. “Mrs. Wing,” he said, “the boy is healing like a charm. He should be on his feet for an hour a day at the most for the next week, and then go gradually from there. He has a cane; he must use it.”

Mrs. Wing nodded. “Thank you, my lord. We can’t thank you enough.” She squeezed Gavan a little tighter. There was a gloss of tears in her eyes, but she was clearly an energetic soul with little time for weakness.

Piers turned on his heel to leave.

“Wait!” Mrs. Wing called.

He paused and half turned. “Madam?”

“I want to say something to you, my lord,” Mrs. Wing said. She uncurled her son from around her neck and dropped him, quite naturally, into Linnet’s outstretched arms. Gavan had stopped sobbing, and was just hiccupping.

“These weeks without Gavan, and without knowing what’s happened to him, have been terrible for his father and me. Terrible. And there’s no call for that. We live just over the hill. We could have visited easy, without disturbing anyone. That, that housekeeper of yours, she said—”

“We’re changing our ways,” Piers said, cutting her off. “Talk to Miss Thrynne. She’s the frivolous-looking one next to you.” Then he clumped through the door.

“Well, I never,” Mrs. Wing said, plumping down on the bench. “I told Mr. Wing that I would have my word with him, and I knew the doctor wouldn’t like it.” She pulled off her bonnet and started fanning her face with it. “But the way he looked at me! As if I was some sort of rodent he found in the grain bin!”

“He’s not that bad,” Linnet protested.

Gavan suddenly scrambled off her lap. “Mum, I didn’t show you my dog, my dog Rufus!”

Mrs. Wing blinked. “A dog?”

“The miss here, she found me a dog in the stables,” Gavan said, hauling Rufus out from under the bench where he was lying in the shade. “Isn’t he the bestest dog you ever saw, Mum?”

Rufus sat up, his tongue hanging out, and his remaining ear cocked.

“Well, he looks like a good ratter,” his mother said, eyeing Rufus. Then she turned to Linnet. “You found my son that dog?”

“Yes, she took me to the stables before I could even walk, and we found him there,” Gavan said, sitting down on the grass, and then lying down so that Rufus could lick his face. “She kept him in her bedroom at night so he wouldn’t run away. And she took me to see the sea too.”

Mrs. Wing’s lip trembled, and she reached out and gave Linnet a rather blind pat on the knee. “I can’t tell you what that means to me,” she said, her voice wavering. “I’ve been lying awake night after night, thinking about Gavan all alone in this castle, and maybe something going wrong, and us never seeing him again.” She stopped and took out a handkerchief.

“I wasn’t here during Gavan’s entire convalescence,” Linnet said, “but I think he was rather happy. He has a cheerful soul.”

“He does, doesn’t he?” Mrs. Wing dried her eyes. “All I can tell you is that I made four quilts while he was gone. Four. Pieced, sewn, and finished off.”

Linnet had no idea what it took to make a quilt, but one had to imagine it involved a great deal of work.

“Of course, I had help,” Mrs. Wing said. “We all of us women over in Tydfil”— she jerked her head—“quilt together. And if something’s happened, as happened to Gavan, then we quilt more often. It’s a distraction.”

Linnet had a sudden idea. “Quilting doesn’t take anything like a loom, does it?”

Mrs. Wing shook her head. “It’s all piecing squares together at that stage. We sit around in a circle and sew together. And talk, back and forth. Later I put it on a quilting frame and finish up.”

“I wonder if you could ever come here, to the castle,” Linnet said. “Because you see, Mrs. Wing, there’s a room full of women in the west wing who are terribly bored. There’s a woman who’s carrying two babies, for instance, and so she can’t get up for a few months yet. And Mrs. Trusty had a terrible thing happen to her foot, though she’s starting to hobble about now.”

“Would the housekeeper allow such a thing?”

“We could arrange it,” Linnet said firmly. “A quilting circle, here at the castle. Would you please come, once a week, Mrs. Wing? Could you spare the time?”

“Of course. The doctor may be prickly in his manners, but he saved my Gavan’s life.” She nodded. “It helps, you know, with people in pain too. Distracts them. Not labor, though. It doesn’t help for that. I’ve never seen a woman in labor who could sew a straight seam.”