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Page 307
Chapter Eighteen
"Geoffrey FitzWilliam to his dearest wife Joanna," Geoffrey wrote slowly on the evening of the seventeenth of August. He was not yet sure what he would write. He was not sure he should write at all, but he longed so for the rose-covered hills, for the fresh salt air, for the strong stone walls, for the security and stability that was Roselynde. He could not go. Honor bound him to what he had disliked in the morning, loathed and been sickened by in the afternoon, and pitied in the evening.
Yet something of him had to go to Roselynde. He needed to look into Joanna's soft gray eyes where reason dwelt. He needed to hear her voice, which did not rave but spoke grave good sense even when fear pressed upon her. He had hidden himself in this small chamber. Perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps he should be out and doing instead of preparing a letter to be sent instead of himself to the place he wished to be. But doing what? He could not endure to join the scrabbling men who were trying to shore up the crumbling monarchy. Certainly, he would not join those who were rushing about snatching at pieces of that monarchy to aggrandize themselves. Nor was he inclined to take advantage of the panic-stricken king who had cried out, "Save yourselves!" at one moment. Some had chosen to assume those words were permission to flee the court and association with the doomed monarch.
"I am in receipt of your letter," Geoffrey wrote, "but I fear many of those I thought to be my friends are already become my enemies without any doing of any kind on my part."
At that point he hesitated, but he could not leave so am-

 
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