The Lady of Charlotte, Part 7
In which a storm comes...
Olivier hadn’t seen Charlotte in almost three days. He was behind on making nails for the chapel roof, so he’d halted every other project and turned his attention to the mindless creation of six hundred massive iron stakes with a flat head.
It wasn’t intricate work, and in the thirteenth century, it would have been a woman’s job. Blacksmiths were too exalted—those mysterious men who turned stone into metal—to produce such mundane items as nails. Obviously, this was not a gender role Olivier wanted to lean into…but he would have gladly handed off the task to literally anyone else, if he could have.
The tedium of making nails meant he had too much time to think. And for some reason, his mind always circled back to Charlotte. He wondered how her nose was. He wondered how her mill was. He wondered if Harry had bothered her again, and he wondered why she hadn’t come by the forge to see him. Every time a tour group arrived, he searche…
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