Chapter 7
THOMAS
By his reckoning, Thomas had until Michaelmas before the whole of Ashcombe came down around his ears.
Amelia had been beneath his roof for three days before he understood she might be the very thing that kept the stones standing.
He hadn’t meant to keep her. That had been the truth of it from the first moment he found her in the stables, sprawled in the hay with her wild red hair escaping its pins, her strange gown torn and muddied, and three stable lads shrieking as if the Devil himself had dropped through the thatch.
Thomas had meant to hand her over to someone else as soon as she was steady enough to stand without swaying. The nuns at Evesham, mayhap. A respectable widow in the village. Anyone but him.
A lone woman with no kin, coin, and a habit of odd speech was precisely the sort of trouble a baron under the king’s suspicion could not afford.
He had said as much to Edith.
Twice.
He had also suggested, with what he considered admirable restraint, that someone ought to keep Mistress Quinn busy before she wandered back to the tower, asked another witless question in the bailey, or drank small beer on an empty stomach and told half his household about dentists again.
Edith had looked at him in that way she had perfected when he was seven years old and had come into her kitchen with a split lip, a stolen honey cake, and the absolute conviction that he had been wronged by everyone living.
“And where will you send her, then?” Edith had said, her hands deep in dough, flour dusting the brown skin at her wrists.
“A lone woman with a cruel husband most likely looking for her.” She scowled. “Will ye put her outside your gates, my lord? Then you may as well cut her throat here and save her the journey. It would be kinder.”
Thomas hadn’t appreciated the image. He had appreciated it even less because she was right.
“She is not my concern,” he had said, which was the sort of thing a man said when he already knew it was a lie.
Edith had snorted. “Saints preserve us from foolish men. Everything inside your walls is your concern. That is what being lord means, though you’ve been trying not to for all those years you spent away soldiering.”
He had scowled at her.
“Folk are saying she ran,” Edith said after a time. “From a husband. A cruel one, by the look of her when you found her, half-dressed, frightened out of her wits, and no one to speak for her. Let them say it. ’Tis a tale that holds water better than the one the stableboys are telling.”
The one the lads were telling involved the fair folk, a bolt of lightning, and Thomas’s best grey horse being chosen as some manner of messenger between worlds.
It had already cost him half a morning of Perkin refusing to enter the stable without a sprig of rowan tucked behind each ear and another tied around his belt for good measure.
So. A runaway wife she was.
It was not a perfect tale, but ’twas a tale people understood.
Women ran from cruel husbands often enough, though few made it far, and fewer still landed in a lord’s stable wearing silks the color of a summer sky and odd shoes with heels like weapons.
The tale stopped the worst of the talk, and gave the household something ordinary to talk about instead of the fae folk.
And if there truly was a husband somewhere who had put that hunted look on Amelia Quinn’s face, Thomas hoped the man came looking.
He had a great many things he wished to hit and very little he was permitted to.
The accounts, for one.
Saints, the accounts.
He sat over them now in the small cold solar off the hall, the one his father had used and his grandfather before him.
A narrow slit of a window let in a grudging wash of gray morning, not enough to warm the place and barely enough to see by, though he had lit two candles and set them in iron sticks on either end of the table.
One guttered every time the draught found its way beneath the door.
The other had leaned sideways and was dripping wax onto the scarred wood in slow pale tears.
The chamber smelled of old vellum, damp stone, beeswax, and dogs.
The table itself was buried. Tally sticks lay in uneven piles beside curling rolls of parchment covered in the late bailiff’s cramped, crabbed hand.
Wexford had written as if he was only allowed one roll of parchment for his entire life.
Beside those sat a chipped horn inkwell, three quills, two of which had split, a small knife for sharpening them, a stack of rent notes from tenants who had more need than money, and a wooden cup of small beer Thomas had drained long ago.
He would have preferred a battlefield. A battlefield had rules, even when men broke them. There was mud, fear, blood, noise, and the moment when all the fine plans men made collapsed into whatever courage and training remained.
Thomas understood that. He understood the weight of a sword, the temper of a horse, the give of wet ground beneath a charge, the twitch in a man’s shoulder that meant he would strike high instead of low.
He understood when a shield wall would hold and when it would break. He knew how to keep men alive and, when he could not, how to carry the names of the dead home and speak them to mothers who would never forgive him.
He did not understand why one roll said Ashcombe should have eight more sacks of grain than the barn held, or why the tally for three tenants matched neither the steward’s notes nor the memory of the reeve, or how he was meant to pay the king’s rents at Michaelmas with the harvest still standing in the fields.
He lifted one roll, frowned at it, turned it slightly, and frowned harder, muttering curses under his breath.
“You’re holding it upside down,” said a voice from the doorway.
He was not holding it upside down, though he checked to be sure.
“I am holding it correctly,” he said without looking up. “Have you somewhere to be, mistress?”
“No. Edith ran out of things to keep me busy.”
That made him look up.
Amelia stood in the doorway wearing one of Edith’s plain gowns, though plain seemed to take on strange habits when it found its way onto her.
The wool was a soft brown that should have made her fade into the shadows.
Instead it warmed the green of her eyes and set off the red of her hair, which had been dragged into some approximation of respectable order.
Several curls had already escaped, springing along her temples and the side of her neck as if propriety bored them.
She had ink on one finger.
He didn’t know why and wondered why he noticed.
“Edith said,” she continued, stepping into the room without waiting to be invited, which no one ever did, “and I quote, ‘Go bother his lordship, since he’s good for nothing else this morning.’”
“She said that?”
“With affection.”
“Edith has the tongue of a pike.”
“I don’t know what that means, but I’m going to agree based on your tone.”
She stopped at the edge of the table and looked down at the piles of sticks and parchment. Thomas braced himself for the polite glaze most folk got when faced with accounts, then the quick retreat, the nervous smile, the sudden recollection of some pressing chore in another room.
Instead, Amelia stopped, tilted her head, and leaned closer. He watched as her face changed.
It was the look old soldiers got when a fool on the other side of the field left his flank open. Her eyes moved over the rolls, the tallies, the wax tablet, the scattered notes. A small line appeared between her brows as she frowned.
“Oh,” she said softly. “This is a disaster.”
“So I had gathered.”
“No, I mean it’s a disaster, but with a pattern.”
“That does not comfort me.”
“It should.” She reached for a tally stick, then paused and glanced at him. “May I?”
“It is a stick.”
“It’s clearly not just a stick or you wouldn’t look like you want to stab it.”
He considered denying that and decided he had not the strength.
“Take it.”
She picked it up and turned it in her hand, thumb passing over the notches. Her brows drew together. Then she pulled another stick toward her, laid both beside one of the rolls, and bent low enough that one of the curls slipped free and brushed the parchment.
Thomas opened his mouth to tell her not to touch the rolls, but she was already reading.
She read swiftly, not sounding out words as many did, not dragging a finger slowly from line to line.
Her gaze moved quickly, taking in the cramped hand, the marks, the figures, the notes in the margin.
She glanced from parchment to tally and back again, then reached for a second roll as if she had every right in the world to rummage through the bones of his house.
“Who did this?” she asked.
“My bailiff. Wexford.” The name still sat ill in his mouth. “Dead at Evesham.”
Her expression softened at once. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
And he was. Wexford had served Ashcombe for years, though Thomas had never liked him.
The man had been too smooth, too pleased with the sound of his own quill, but dislike did not make death easier to swallow.
Too many men had gone down in that bloody field beneath a hot August sun, some guilty of nothing worse than following the lord who had called them.
Amelia was quiet for a moment. Then the sharpness returned.
“I’m sorry he died,” she said. “But I don’t think he was honest.”
Thomas stopped tapping his fingers against the dagger at his side.
Outside the narrow window, somewhere in the bailey, a man called for a cart to be brought round. A dog barked, children shrieked and men practiced in the lists. The ordinary sounds of Ashcombe went on as if she had not just accused a dead man of theft.
“Take care, mistress.”
“I am.”
“Nay. You are accusing a dead man of stealing from my coffers.”
“No,” Amelia said, looking down at the tally again. “I’m saying he was clever about it.”
Thomas stared at her.
She pushed one tally stick toward him. “This says the reeve delivered twelve sacks from the south field.”
“Aye.”
“This roll says eight were put into the barn.”
“Aye.”