Chapter 8
THOMAS
Walter was still speaking when Thomas forced his attention back to the matter at hand.
“Order matters, my lord. Ashcombe has little enough standing as it is. We are watched. The king’s men do not forget who rode behind Montfort, dead earl or no. A baron under suspicion cannot afford disorder beneath his own roof.”
“I know what I can afford,” Thomas said, sharper than he intended. “I can afford grain in the barn, rents paid at Michaelmas, and enough people left by winter that Ashcombe does not become a pile of stones. I cannot afford pride.”
Walter cleared his throat. “What would you have done, Mistress?”
Amelia blinked as if she had not expected to be asked. Then she looked at the table again, and the uncertainty left her. Thomas had seen men put on mail with less purpose.
“I wouldn’t know where to begin with the actual harvest,” she said.
Walter’s mouth twitched, as if this proved every dark suspicion he had entertained since she walked through the door.
Thomas frowned. “You just said—”
“I know,” she said quickly. “I’m not saying I know how to cut grain or stack it or judge the weather better than people who have lived with these fields all their lives.
I don’t. I would be spectacularly useless with a scythe.
I’m short, easily distracted by bugs, and I have no desire to lose a foot. ”
Hob, who had come to lean in the doorway unnoticed, made a rough sound that might have been a laugh.
Amelia pointed at the table. “But this? This I understand. Too many moving pieces. Not enough time. Not enough people. Everyone doing what they have always done because there has been no time to stop and ask if it still works.”
Walter’s brows drew together.
She touched the nearest tally stick. “The problem isn’t only that you have too few hands.
It’s that you don’t know where the hands are most needed until the day has already started.
So people wait, walk back and forth, ask the same question of three different people.
Or they do a task because it is customary, not because it is the best use of that person’s time and strength. ”
Walter looked offended, but not as offended as Thomas expected.
That meant she had struck near enough the truth to bruise it.
“I organize things,” she said, looking from Walter to Thomas.
“That is what I did. Where I come from, my work was making sure people, supplies, food, messages, rooms, wagons—” She stopped, glanced at Thomas.
“The point is, I made certain the right thing reached the right place at the right time, before everyone started shouting.”
“That is stewardship,” Walter said.
“No,” Amelia said. “It’s panic prevention.”
Hob barked a laugh.
Thomas did not, though it was a near thing.
Amelia looked down at the wax tablet and began scratching marks into it.
“I need Walter’s knowledge, the reeve’s, and whoever knows the fields.
I need whoever knows who can work hard, who can only work half a day, who has a bad back, who is good with animals, who can count, who can carry water, and who will wander off if no one watches. ”
“Hugh Miller,” Hob said.
Walter sighed. “Aye. Hugh Miller.”
Amelia pointed the stylus at Hob without looking up. “See? Useful.”
Hob looked absurdly pleased.
She continued making marks. “Then we make a list. Not tomorrow after everyone has already scattered. Tonight. Who cuts. Who binds. Who carries. Who watches children so stronger hands can work. Who brings food and drink to the fields so no one loses half the day walking back to the hall. Who checks the barns and counts what comes in. Who tells Thomas before a small problem becomes a giant flaming disaster.”
Thomas stared. “A flaming disaster?”
“Worse than a normal disaster.”
“I see.” He resisted the urge to smile.
Walter leaned closer despite himself. “You would have food carried out?”
“Yes. Bread, cheese, small beer, water, whatever can be carried easily. Nothing fancy. I’m not suggesting a feast among the barley. But if the workers eat where they are, they go back to work faster.”
“That is not how we do it,” Walter said.
“I know.”
His mouth tightened. “You say that as if custom is a thing to be kicked aside.”
“No. I say that as if custom is a thing to examine when the roof is on fire.”
Hob looked up. “Is the roof on fire?”
“No,” Thomas said.
“Metaphorically,” Amelia said.
Hob blinked.
Thomas shook his head. “Do not ask.”
Walter looked down at the tablet. His mouth had gone thin again, but his eyes had sharpened.
“You are saying the reeve decides the fieldwork, I decide stores and accounts, Hob keeps the men moving, Edith manages food, and you…”
“I run between you all with a list and bother everyone.”
Thomas made the mistake of looking at her, at her eyes sparkling in the candlelight. He thought, with a jolt that had nothing to do with reason, that mayhap the accounts had finally broken something inside his thick skull.
Walter tapped the wax tablet. “This may help the work move more quickly.”
From Walter, that was practically a hymn.
Amelia did not preen. Thomas liked that about her. She merely looked relieved, as if she had been holding her breath since she walked into the chamber.
“It might,” she said. “But only if the people who actually understand the harvest tell me what I’m getting wrong.”
Walter stared at her for a long moment, then he gave one sharp nod. “The north field should not be first.”
Amelia immediately scratched something out. “Good. Why?”
“The barley there will stand another day. The rye nearer the low ground will not if rain comes.”
“Then that goes first,” she said, writing again. “See? That is what I mean. You know the field. I know how to keep the work from tangling itself into knots.”
Thomas felt something in his chest ease. Not hope. He did not trust hope, but something nigh to it.
He looked at Walter. “Can it be done?”
Walter drew a slow breath, eyes still on Amelia’s odd little marks. “Mayhap.”
Hob came fully into the room. “If there is bread, cheese, and small beer in the field, the men will not complain.”
Walter snorted. “The men will complain if angels descend from heaven to cut the grain for them.”
“That’s true,” Hob said. “But they will complain less with cheese.”
Amelia pointed the stylus at him. “Exactly.”
Thomas looked from one to the other, then down at the accounts that had seemed like an enemy army that morning and now, somehow, looked like something that could be divided, named, and fought.
“What do you need?” he asked.
Amelia looked surprised. “You’re asking me?”
“I am.”
“Not ordering?”
“I can order if it comforts you.”
“It does not.”
“Then I am asking.”
Her face went soft. Amelia was small as a wren and somehow gave the impression she might fly straight into a man’s face if properly provoked.
“I need more light,” she said. “Bring me every roll and tally Wexford touched. The reeve. Edith. Someone who knows the barns. Someone who knows the larder. And space to sort this into piles.”
“Piles?” Hob said, scratching at his neck.
“Yes. Good piles, bad piles, suspicious piles, and I-don’t-know-yet piles.”
Hob looked at Thomas. “Is that how accounts are done?”
Thomas looked at Walter.
Walter looked at Amelia.
Amelia lifted one shoulder. “It is how they’re done today.”
For a while, there was only the scrape of stools, the crackle of candles, the rustle of parchment, and Amelia asking questions instead of giving commands.
That was the difference, Thomas realized after a time.
She did not stride in and pretend to know more than the people of Ashcombe.
She found the people who knew, pulled the knowledge out of them, and set it where all could see.
Walter muttered, argued twice, was proven wrong once, proven right once, and seemed equally offended by both. Hob matched tally sticks. Edith came in with bread, took one look at the table, and began naming stores from memory with terrifying precision.
By midday, the table had changed. The heap had become rows. The rows had become sense. Wexford’s theft, or carelessness, or some ugly marriage of both, began to show itself in small repeated cruelties.
A widow charged twice. A tenant’s labor erased. Grain marked spoiled where no spoilage had been reported. Coin rents that had entered the roll and never reached the coffer.
Walter grew quieter with each discovery.
Amelia did not crow. Thomas liked that too. She did not make victory a cudgel, though he suspected she could wield one if pressed.
At last she sat back, rubbing the side of her hand where the stylus had left a red dent. “There’s enough missing to hurt, but not enough to ruin you if we move quickly.”
Walter looked up. “Say that again.”
“There is enough missing to hurt Ashcombe,” Amelia said carefully. “But not enough to ruin it. Not yet.”
Not yet. The words settled over all of them.
Thomas had lived with ruin breathing down his neck since the day he returned from Evesham. It had sat at his table, slept at the foot of his bed, followed him into the yard, stood beside him every time he looked over thin fields and thinner faces.
Not yet was not salvation, but it was room to fight. And Thomas knew how to fight.
Walter touched the edge of the wax tablet as though it might vanish. “I will speak with the reeve.”
“I’ll fetch him,” Hob said, already turning.
Thomas stopped him. “Hob?”
“Aye, my lord?”
“Tell no one yet that Mistress Quinn has had aught to do with this.”
Walter’s relief was immediate, though he tried to hide it. “Wise, my lord.”
Thomas kept his gaze on Hob. “Say only that Walter has found a better order for the work and that all hands will be given their tasks at first light.”
Hob looked from Thomas to Amelia, then nodded. “As you say.”
When he was gone, Amelia looked down at her ink-stained fingers. “You don’t want people to know I’m helping.”
Thomas heard the carefulness in her voice.
“It is not shame of you.” He met her gaze.
“Then what is it?”
“Protection.”
She gave a small laugh without humor. “That word does a lot of work around here.”
Walter stiffened. “Mistress—”
Thomas raised a hand, and Walter fell silent.
He could have said what was true, that Walter was right, that a suspect baron could not afford to have folk whispering that a strange woman from nowhere had taken charge of his fields and accounts.
He could have said that every eye on Amelia was another road for Belmaine or the crown’s men to cause trouble. He could have said that he already disliked how many men had begun to look for her when she entered a room.
Instead he said, “You have helped. Let that be enough for today.”
Her mouth tightened, and for a moment he thought she would argue.
Then she looked at the rolls, the tablet, the neat rows that had been chaos that morning. “Fine.”
It was not fine.
He knew it. She knew it. Even Walter knew it, and Walter was pretending very hard not to know anything beyond the accounts.
Thomas softened his voice, though it came out rougher than he intended. “Amelia.”
She looked up.
“You saw what I could not,” he said. “I will not forget it.”
The anger in her face loosened, just a little. “That almost sounded like a compliment.”
“Nay.”
“It did.”
“Then I spoke poorly.”
Her mouth twitched.
Walter made a sound that suggested he wished to be anywhere else in England.
Thomas looked back to the table before he did something witless, like smile at her in front of his steward.
“We begin before dawn,” he said.
Amelia groaned. “Of course we do.”
“You object?”
“No. I just miss coffee with a passion that may actually be sinful.”
Walter frowned. “Coffee?”
“A medicinal herb,” Amelia said quickly.
Thomas looked at her. She looked back at him, all innocence. He did not believe her for a moment.
Later, when Walter had gone to find the reeve and Edith had carried the empty bread basket back to the kitchen, Thomas found Amelia still by the table, flexing her fingers as if they ached.
“You should rest,” he said.
“So should you.”
“I am accustomed to little sleep.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
He had no answer for that.
The candlelight caught in her hair beneath the veil, making the loose curls glow dark red and copper. Her face was tired, but there was life in it. Purpose. The brittle look she’d worn since asking him the year had eased for the first time.
Ashcombe had done that or mayhap being useful had. He understood the danger of that better than most. Need could become a chain before a man noticed the first link closing.
“Why are you helping?” he asked.
She looked down at her hands. “Because I’m here and I can.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have tonight.”
He knew a door closing when he heard one. For once, he did not kick at it.
“Ashcombe will take what help you give,” he said. “So will I.”
Her eyes lifted to his.
The words had cost him more than he liked. Worse, she seemed to know it.
“I’ll do my best,” she said.
Thomas nodded.
There were a dozen things he might have said then.
That her best had already done more than his fury.
That he had not felt the ground steady beneath him since Evesham.
That when she bent over the accounts with ink on her cheek and that glorious hair escaping her veil, he had thought, with a force that nearly unmanned him, mine.
Instead he said, “Be in the yard before dawn.”
She stared at him. Then she laughed. “You really are terrible at sweet words of wooing.”
His heart gave one hard, foolish kick “Wooing?”
Her eyes widened. “I didn’t mean wooing. I meant regular words. Normal words. Words that don’t make people want to throw a shoe at you.”
“I see.”
“You do not.”
“Nay,” he said, and let himself almost smile. “I do not.”
She backed toward the passage, cheeks pink. “Good night, Lord Ashcombe.”
“Thomas.”
She stopped.
He had not meant to say it.
The chamber seemed to listen.
Her face softened in a way that made him want to retreat behind every wall Ashcombe still possessed.
“Good night, Thomas.”
Then she was gone, leaving him with the fire, the accounts, and the unsettling knowledge that for the first time in weeks, he was not thinking of Michaelmas as the day Ashcombe ended.
He was thinking of tomorrow. Which was far more dangerous.