Page 87 of The Shadow Key

The fields slope beneath them, lushly green after the recent rain. On the lower reaches are clouds of the same mustard-yellow flowers to be found in Lady Gwen’s room, their vanilla scent strong against the warm breeze. In the distance Henry can see a rambling farm and beyond it, black cattle. A gull – or perhaps a buzzard or kestrel, for he can perceive only its shadow across the wide expanse of sky – soars aloft, arching across the clouds like a winged dancer before wending downward to the right, and as it does a cluster of stone huts snaps into view. Henry nods to them.

‘Linette told me these were ancient settlements,’ he murmurs. ‘Can you imagine anyone living there? So desolate, so open to the elements. I can scarce picture it.’

Miss Carew props her chin on her knees. ‘But people did live there once,’ she says quietly. ‘Not so ancient, either. Whole families, before Emyr Cadwalladr turned them out.’

‘Where did they go, do you think?’

Her nose creases, drawing attention to the pretty smattering of freckles on its bridge.

‘Where they could.’

Henry nods thoughtfully. ‘It must have been awful to see the fields sold off, one by one, wondering how long they had left.’

Miss Carew says nothing, only picks at a blade of grass.

‘Where are you from? Linette says you’re not local to Penhelyg.’

She hesitates. ‘I lived in the marches.’

‘Then how came you to be here?’

Again she hesitates, a little longer this time.

‘I wanted more,’ she says softly.

Henry does not say what he thinks – that Penhelyg surely could not offer more than the borderlands. Still, he thinks, picturing her little cottage, the table of herbs, Miss Carew has carved a life for herself here. She is useful to the villagers. Respected.

He was respected, once.

‘I understand,’ Henry says, and he does – ambition, his brutal schoolmaster at the Foundling told him sternly, makes a man ripe for greatness, differentiates the wolves from the lambs. He never agreed with the analogy but Henry appreciated the sentiment, has lived by it for as long as he can remember. It is why he strove to rise so high at Guy’s.

As if reading his thoughts she asks, ‘What was it like, practising medicine in London?’ and though the subject has been on his mind her question takes him by surprise.

‘Different,’ he manages after a moment.

Miss Carew is looking at him now, eyes russet beneath the rim of her straw bonnet. ‘Progressive, I suppose?’

An image of the operating theatre at Guy’s pops into his head. Henry pictures the curving stalls filled with apprentices and rich patrons hungry for knowledge, how they absorbed his lectures like sponges.

‘I taught.’

‘Really? How thrilling.’

It feels like flattery. Henry likes it.

‘It was,’ he says.

‘Your parents must be very proud.’

Henry tries not to think about the circumstances of his birth; what manner of person would abandon their child to somewhere so cold, so regimented, so devoid of affection? For a moment he is taken back to his boyhood, a time when he used to have night terrors and wet the bed. Each night he would wake, call for the ward nurse, and Henry remembers how she made light of his distress, scolding him for making her more work and disturbing the other boys, until, finally, the dreams stopped altogether.

‘I don’t have any parents,’ he says softly.

Miss Carew bites her lip. ‘Forgive me. I did not mean to—’

But Henry shakes his head. ‘I grew up in a place for children who had been abandoned. I may have had a roof over my head but there was no warmth there, no love. Just row on row of beds in a sterile room shared with other motherless boys.’ His mouth twists. ‘The nurses were stern, the schoolmasters sterner. We grew up on an appetite of gruel and scripture, structure and hard work. Every day regimented, every day the same. I was never more unhappy than I was there.’

She turns her face away, for a long moment says nothing, staring down at the settlements as if hypnotised by them. Then she offers a small sad smile.

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