A Moment in Time by Bertrice Small Read Free Book Online

bed space. Wynne was obviously a good housekeeper.
    The hall had grown quiet. He dozed, coming alert as he heard a footfall within the hall. Turning his head, he saw Wynne. He smiled to himself. Like the good chatelaine she was, she was checking to be certain that everything was as it should be for the night; that fires were banked. He watched through slitted eyes as Einion joined her. They spoke in voices too low to hear. Then the big slave bowed, and both he and Wynne departed the hall.
    Rhys of St. Bride's felt his body beginning to relax, a state he rarely allowed himself to enter. There was peace and comfort to be had here at Gwernach. These things were Wynne's doing. He looked forward to the day when she would bring the same peace and comfort to his great castle at St. Bride's, and she would. She really had no choice in the matter. A smile of pleasure upon his face, Rhys began to snore most contentedly.

Chapter 2

    Wynne of Gwernach watched with palpable relief as Rhys of St. Bride's departed her home. Although she did not sense cruelty in the man, he had a personality that could best be described as forceful, and it irritated her. He was determined that she would be his wife, but Wynne, for all her delicate appearance, was equally determined she would not. She did not choose to marry. At least not at this moment in time. Yet how was she to refuse Rhys without offending him? And what if he did go to the king? The great Llywelyn would hardly object to such a match between an unimportant relation and a powerful coastal lord. He would, as Rhys had so bluntly put it, prefer a man to hold Gwernach in trust for Dewi ap Owain than to allow a girl such as herself to carry on those duties.
    "A pox on all men!" Wynne muttered as she kicked at a pebble irritably, and then seeing Rhys turn in his saddle to wave a final farewell, she returned his salute unsmiling. Above the lord of St. Bride's the waning moon hung in the dawn skies, reminding Wynne that she had but a few weeks in which to find a solution to her conundrum, if indeed there was another resolution to her problem.
    She needed to work. She needed the benefit of hard, physical labor to help clear her brain, and, like her late father, Wynne was no stranger to the kind of work that sent her sisters into fits of hysteria. She followed a wagon into the meadow, and when it stopped, she grasped a pitchfork and began filling a hayrack with hay, for there was not yet enough new grass to satisfy the cows. She worked steadily and rhythmically, trailing in the wake of the wagon as it made its way from hayrack to hayrack across the field. When the wagon was empty, she rode back to the barns with the driver and, climbing into the high loft, began to pitch down a second load of dried grass. The armpits of her tunic dress were now stained damp with the evidence of her effort, and she hiked her skirts up, baring her legs in an attempt to facilitate her labor. Descending from the hayloft, she followed the wagon back out into the fields.
    For the next few days Wynne worked from dawn to past dusk in the company of Gwernach's serfs. Still she could find no answer to her problem, and it did not help that her sisters chattered incessantly in the hall each evening about their bright futures as wives to Rhys of St. Bride's cousins. Caitlin and Dilys were so self-involved that they did not notice their elder sibling's distress; but Dewi did, and their grandmother did.
    "You do not have to marry him, Wynne, if you do not choose to," the boy told her earnestly one evening. "Have I not said it before, and am I not master here?" But his voice was low, that his other two sisters did not hear him and begin to harp at Wynne again.
    "I seem to have no other choice," Wynne admitted reluctantly. "He will go to Llywelyn if I refuse him. I know it. No man of honor wants a bride who must be dragged to the altar. Will he not resent me if I shame him like that? If I must wed him, I would hope to make him like