Chapter 9 #2
Her throat tightened.
Edith gave a satisfied nod. “There. You’ll do.”
Amelia had no idea whether that was high praise or merely an acknowledgment that she was dressed and unlikely to embarrass everyone immediately. Around here, it seemed wise to accept either with gratitude.
Outside, the world was still bluish and dim, the sky just beginning to pale beyond the dark shape of the roofs.
Ashcombe stirred like an old creature waking.
Doors opened. Men crossed the yard with scythes over their shoulders, the curved blades catching what little light there was.
Women came from cottages with baskets, babies, binding cords, and the kind of faces that suggested they had been awake long before the rooster congratulated himself for discovering morning.
The air was cool enough to raise the gooseflesh on Amelia’s arms but threaded already with the promise of heat.
Smoke lifted from the cookhouse and drifted low across the yard.
Somewhere a cow complained. Somewhere else a child was told, in no gentle terms, to leave the hens alone before he lost a finger.
Walter stood near the well with his wax tablet pressed to his chest and a look of deep suspicion aimed at the entire day.
Hob stood beside him, broad and scarred and still somehow resembling a boulder that had grown arms from sheer annoyance.
His dark beard was shot with gray, his left shoulder sat stiff beneath his tunic, and his eyes were bright with the dangerous cheer of a man who expected to witness other people’s discomfort and enjoy it.
Thomas stood by the gate. Amelia forgot, for one stupid second, that she had feet.
He wore a plain dark tunic belted over hose and boots, the sleeves pushed up despite the morning chill to bare forearms roped with muscle and marked with old scars.
His hair, black and badly in need of a trim, curled damply at the ends.
Stubble shadowed his jaw, and the scar along one side caught the early light, silver against tanned skin.
He had a scythe in one hand, held as easily as if it weighed nothing, and he was speaking to one of the men with his head bent, listening.
That was one of the things about him that kept getting under her skin. Thomas Ashcombe scowled, grunted, and carried himself as if he had been built for war by the old gods, but when his people spoke, he gave them his full attention. As if their words had value.
Then he looked up and saw her. His gaze moved over the veil Edith had pinned into submission, the plain gown, the apron, the pouch at her belt, and the shoes that were slightly too big. His expression didn’t change much. It rarely did. But something flickered in his eyes, there and gone.
Heat climbed her neck as he crossed the yard toward her.
Edith, traitor that she was, vanished back into the kitchen.
“You are up,” he said.
“I was promised dawn. This is a criminal interpretation of dawn.”
His mouth twitched. “The sun will rise whether you approve or not.”
“That seems arrogant of it.”
“Aye. The sun is known for that.”
Amelia stared at him.
His mouth twitched again as she narrowed her eyes. “Was that humor?”
“Nay.”
“It was.”
“Then I spoke poorly.”
“You seem to do that a lot when complimenting me or being funny.”
“I shall strive to fail less.”
Walter made a strangled sound from beside the well.
Thomas looked over his shoulder. “Is aught amiss?”
Walter’s face suggested many things were amiss, beginning with creation itself. “The rye will not cut itself, my lord.”
“No,” Amelia muttered. “But wouldn’t that be nice.”
Thomas heard her. His eyes came back to hers, and for a moment the chill of morning, the bustle of the yard, the fear of failing, all of it faded around the two of them.
Then Hob bellowed, “If everyone has finished gazing at everyone else like May Day calves, mayhap we might save the harvest.”
Amelia nearly swallowed her tongue.
Thomas turned very slowly.
Hob looked innocently toward the sky.
Walter, to his credit, had turned Amelia’s list into something that looked far more official and far less like the frantic work of a woman who still wanted coffee.
The reeve, a square man named Osbern with straw-colored hair and one eye that watered constantly, stood with him and called names from a tablet while Walter marked them with a stylus.
Men were sent to the low rye first, just as Walter had advised, for that ground held damp longer and would rot if rain came.
Stronger backs went to cutting. Quick hands to binding.
Younger boys were set to carrying water and gathering cords.
Older women minded the smallest children under the shade near the hedgerow while still helping with mending, sorting, and stripping anything useful.
Edith was in charge of the food and drink.
Amelia carried the tablet, checking names, making certain the bread and cheese went with the right group, that water and small beer followed the workers, that no one took the cracked jug Walter had sworn was perfectly serviceable until it leaked down Wat’s leg.
She moved between Edith, Walter, Hob, and Osbern, passing information the way she once passed messages between caterers, florists, lighting technicians, and a notorious tech guy whose vision for simple elegance had involved seven hundred chocolate boobies and three emotional breakdowns.
Only now the boobies were grain and if they failed, people might starve.
No pressure.
By the time the sun finally cleared the ridge, the fields had come alive.
The rye stood tall and pale gold, heavy-headed and rustling in a faint wind that smelled of damp earth, crushed grass, and summer’s last green breath.
Beyond it, the manor spread in uneven patches.
There were strips of barley and oats, stubble from the first cut fields, hedges thick with bramble, distant cattle flicking their tails, the silver thread of water where the brook turned through the meadow.
The Malvern Hills lay soft and blue on the horizon, half haze and half promise.
Amelia had seen beautiful places in her life.
Hotel terraces lit with fairy lights. Gardens arranged for weddings.
Corporate retreats in mountain lodges where everything smelled like cedar, expensive soap, and people pretending not to check email.
But this was beauty with dirt under its nails, alive and hungry and utterly indifferent to whether she understood it.
A line of men moved into the rye. The first sweep of the scythes made her stomach dip.
The blades whispered through the stalks in long, even arcs, each man stepping, swinging, stepping again, the motion rhythmic and deadly graceful.
It was not like the lists, where Thomas with a sword made violence look brutally controlled.
This was labor, but there was skill in it, and a kind of rough music.
Sweep, fall, step. Sweep, fall, step. The cut rye went down in shimmering rows, and behind the cutters came the binders, women and men both, stooping to gather the stalks and twist them into sheaves with bands of straw.
Thomas worked among the cutters. He could have stood on the rise and watched like a lord in a story, issuing orders while everyone else sweated through their clothes.
Instead he had taken his place in the line with Hob two men down and Osbern beyond him, and he swung the scythe with the same contained strength he seemed to bring to everything.
His dark tunic pulled across his shoulders.
The muscles in his forearms flexed each time he guided the blade. Sweat darkened his hair at the temples.
Amelia turned very deliberately away and nearly walked into a basket of cheese.
“Careful, mistress,” said a girl of about fourteen, biting back a grin.
“I was watching for holes.”
“In the air?”
“Yes.”
The girl gave her a look that said Amelia had just confirmed all rumors of faery blood but was too polite to mention it.
Excellent.
She found Edith beneath a tree. Bread had been divided into cloth bundles.
Cheese sat wrapped and shaded beneath damp linen.
Small beer filled several jugs, and a bucket of well water sat nearby for those Amelia kept forcing to drink so they wouldn’t get dehydrated, despite Walter’s repeated statement that too much water would wash the strength out of a body.
It wasn’t a battle she could win, so Amelia stopped trying to explain.
“How are we doing?” Edith asked.
She checked the tablet, already smudged with dirt and a spot of what she sincerely hoped was cheese.
“The first group has water. The second group needs bread in half an hour. Hob said the men near the hedge are moving too slowly because Hugh Miller keeps stopping to complain about his knee, his back, the sun, the rye, and one cloud that looked at him in an unfriendly manner.”
“Hugh Miller would complain if he woke in heaven and found the angels singing in the wrong key.”
“I’m beginning to realize that.”
Edith handed Amelia a small wedge of cheese. “Eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat.”
Amelia ate. The cheese was sharp enough to make her eyes water, the bread coarse and a little gritty from the millstone, and yet she had to admit her stomach was happy enough as if Edith had handed her room service on a silver tray.
Edith nodded. “Good. Take these to the binders near the low ground. And keep Wat from trying to lift the heavy jug again. He thinks because he has bones sticking every which way that he’s half-grown.”
Amelia took the basket and started across the field.
Walking through a working harvest in a long dress required a level of concentration Amelia believed deserved its own certification.
The hem caught on stubble. Her shoes found every clod of earth.
Her veil warmed her head until she understood why medieval women were always being described as fainting.
It had probably been the headwear. That, and the lack of iced beverages.