Chapter 4
AMELIA
There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this, and Amelia was going to figure out what it was if it killed her.
While she considered, she pulled rather smelly straw from her hair and person. The silk dress and shoes were ruined, destined for the trash as soon as she made it back to her delightful room in the inn.
Whispers in an odd accent came from the boys as she narrowed her situation down to three possibilities.
One: this was an extremely committed historical reenactment, the kind men with podcasts traveled hundreds of miles for, and was somehow happening at a castle near the wedding venue.
Two: she had hit her head in the tower and was, at this very moment, being loaded into an ambulance while her brain produced a costume drama.
Three—and she did not love three—the venue was running some sort of immersive experience nobody had told her about, and any second now a cheerful guide in a polo shirt would appear and ask if she was enjoying Ye Olde Ashcombe.
What none of the possibilities explained was the smell.
The reenactment theory had a smell problem.
Reenactors went home at night to showers and toothpaste.
This place smelled like animals and cooking fires, unwashed wool and, underneath it, something green, rotting and old.
The smell didn’t get any better, not when they walked her across the muddy yard, not when they brought her through a low stone doorway into a hall the size of a basketball court with an actual hole in the actual roof, and not when a woman roughly the shape and of a kitchen island took one look at her and said, “Sweet Mary, what’s this, then? ”
“This,” said the enormous, scowling man—Thomas, one of the men had called him, as the rest said my lord—“is a difficulty. Sort it, Edith.”
And then he left. Pivoted on one mud-caked boot and strode back out into the grey, the way men left meetings the second a problem could be handed to someone else, and that was how Amelia found herself abandoned to a woman called Edith.
A woman who reminded her of a mean teacher she’d had in third grade who made her attend recess every day instead of letting her sit under a tree and read.
Edith looked her up and down with small shrewd eyes and made a noise in her throat that managed to convey, all at once, that she had seen everything, expected nothing, and was not going to be paid enough for whatever this was.
“Hello,” Amelia said. “I love your—everything. The commitment is incredible. So I’m going to be honest with you, I think I hit my head, and I really need to find my way back, or possibly a first-aid station, or a guy named Gaz, who I cannot believe I’m asking about, but he has my cousin’s number, and I seem to have lost my purse and phone, not to mention—”
“You’re shaking,” Edith said.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re shaking, your gown’s near to nothing, and you’ve blood on your hand.”
Edith took Amelia’s wrist, turned it over, and frowned at the little cut on her knuckle.
“You’re cold, child. Through and through. Whatever fool dropped you here did it without a cloak.”
She raised her voice without turning her head. “Mald! The fire. And the brown wool from the chest, the old kirtle, it’ll swim on her but it’s dry.”
“I really can’t stay,” Amelia said.
“You can’t go,” Edith said, not unkindly, “in that, looking like that. Sit.”
There was a stool. Amelia, who had not sat down since a footballer named Gaz had ruined her afternoon, discovered that her legs had been waiting for permission. She sat.
The fire helped. That was the awful thing. There was a real fire in a real hearth and it threw off real heat. She scooted close enough to burn her toes as water dripped from her dress onto the stones with a hiss.
A girl of maybe twelve or thirteen helped her out of the ruined silk and into a shapeless linen nightgown thing, then a brown wool dress that smelled of cedar, went down to the floor, and laced up the sides with a cord that Amelia could not, no matter how she fumbled, work out the order of.
“They’re not—is there a zipper?” she said. “Sorry. A—a clasp? Anything?”
Edith batted her hands away and laced it herself, crisscrossing the cord with the bored speed of a woman who had dressed a hundred bodies and buried a few.
“There. Cover your head. We’ll see about shoes. Those—” she eyed the pale blue heels lying on their sides on the rushes like two small dead birds “—those we’ll burn before someone takes you for a madwoman.”
“Those, were one hundred and ninety dollars.”
Much to Amelia’s rising anxiety, Edith acted like she didn’t know what a dollar was.
By the time the hall began to fill for the evening meal, Amelia had stopped explaining and started watching, because she’d looked around outside and didn’t see any signs of her cousin’s wedding in any direction she looked.
If that awful Gaz showed up right now, Amelia decided she’d actually hug the professional footballer, no matter how noxious he was.
The more she watched, the worse the reenactment theory looked.
Nobody broke character. That was the thing. Reenactors broke character—to check a phone, to laugh at a joke that didn’t fit, to complain about their feet. These people didn’t have a single phone between them. Not hidden, not silenced, not face-down by a plate.
There were no plates, for that matter, not really. There were thick slabs of stale bread that people apparently ate off of and then ate or were piled on a platter and taken back to the kitchens, but hopefully not to be reused.
There was no electricity, no hum. Amelia hadn’t noticed, until it was gone, that her whole life had a hum to it—wires, engines, refrigerators, and the distant ocean-roar of traffic—the silence where it should have been was so total it felt like she was underwater or wearing ear plugs.
She was given a cup, found herself thirsty, so she took a gulp without asking what it was, and then she stopped with the cup halfway down and looked into it.
“What is this?”
The girl, Mald, looked alarmed. “Small beer, mistress.”
“Is there—” Her throat was a desert. “Could I have water? Plain water?”
The whole end of the table looked at her. A grizzled man with a face like a catcher’s mitt—Hob, she’d gathered, the one the lord trusted, paused with his own cup at his lips.
“Water,” he repeated, the way you’d repeat poison, or the French.
“The well’s sweet here,” Mald offered, helpful and baffled. “Sweetest in the valley, my granfer says. But you don’t drink it, mistress. Not when there’s beer.”
“Of course not,” Amelia said faintly. “Silly me.”
So there was wine instead. Someone, on the lord’s instruction, she caught the glance that traveled down the table, the small nod from the big dark shape of him at the far end, put a cup of wine in front of her, dark, a little sour, and warmer than wine had any business being, and Amelia, still chilled and frightened, and nine-tenths convinced she had lost her mind, drank it.
It was a mistake. She knew it was a mistake when a cup and a half later, the ceiling was rotating as were the people around her.
“Oh, that’s not good,” she informed the cup. “That’s not good at all. I have a thing. One glass of wine and I’m tipsy. My college roommate, Allison, used to say I was a cheap date.”
“Mistress?” said Mald.
“I’m a lightweight,” Amelia explained, warmly, to the entire table now, because the words were coming easily, far too easily, sliding out on a loosened, sun-warmed tide.
“It’s a whole genetic thing. My mother’s the same. One margarita and she’s telling the waiter about her divorce. Where I’m from they put it in cans, you know? The wine. They put it in cans, it’s very chic, it’s terrible, I love it—”
“Cans,” said Hob, his brows scrunched together.
“—and I had a whole plan for this weekend, I had a spreadsheet, and now I’m here, wherever here is, and nobody will tell me what happened to Bree’s wedding, and the well is sweet but you can’t drink it, and there’s a hole in the roof, and I think—” her voice did something she hated as it wobbled, “—I think something has gone really, really wrong, and I can’t fix it—”
A hand closed around her upper arm. Big, warm, and brought her up off the stool and away from the table and the staring faces in one smooth haul, the way you’d lift a child away from a stove.
“Enough,” Thomas said, his voice close to her ear. “Not here.”
“I’m telling them about cans.”
“Aye. You are. Stop.”
He steered her into the relative dark at the side of the hall, near a cold stone wall hung with one faded, moth-chewed banner, and let go of her arm the instant she was out of the firelight, as though it had cost him something to hold it.
Up close he was even larger than she’d decided, and tired in a way that went past his face, a bone-tiredness, the kind you couldn’t sleep off. The scar along his jaw was pale against the dark stubble. His eyes were the grey of the sky outside.
“You are either mad,” he said, quietly enough that the table couldn’t hear, “or you are the worst liar I have met in my life, and I have met many liars. Which is it?”
And Amelia, drunk on a cup and a half of wine, was so tired, and so scared, that the truth came up before the planner in her could stop it, as she looked up at this enormous scowling stranger and said, “I genuinely have no idea. Both? It’s been a really weird day.
I’m in the wrong place—” she gestured, a loose hopeless circle that took in the hall, the hole in the roof, the silence where the world should be, the entire impossible everything of it “—place. And the worst part, the actual worst part, is that I don’t even have my purse or my phone so I can call my cousin to come get me, if she hasn’t already left for her honeymoon.
Did you know he’s taking her to the Greek Islands?
I’ve always wanted to go, but I work all the time. ”
Thomas, Lord Ashcombe, stared down at her for a long moment.
Then he closed his eyes, the way a man does when the headache he’s been ignoring finally wins, and said, to the ceiling or to whoever was listening, “Merde.”