Chapter 17 #2
Not loudly. Not disrespectfully. But enough that warmth moved through the room and loosened the last of the morning’s fear.
Even Walter looked down with his mouth twitching in defeat.
Edith, carrying Maud a bowl of pottage, shook her head as if Thomas had personally disappointed every lord Ashcombe had ever buried.
Amelia leaned closer, all green eyes and trouble. “Your people adore you.”
“They are laughing at me.”
“Both can be true.”
“I preferred them fearful.”
“No, you didn’t.”
He looked at her. The answer that rose was too soft and too true, and so he swallowed it whole. Instead he grunted. Amelia smiled as if she had heard the thing he had not said.
The court resumed after the meal, smaller matters now.
A boundary dispute between two men who had apparently hated each other since childhood and intended to continue until one of them died.
A complaint about geese in a barley patch.
A broken fence. A missing mattock. The question of whether Hugh Miller’s bad back excused him from ditch work, which Hob answered by offering to carry Hugh to the ditch and lay him in it until the matter improved.
“Hob,” Thomas said.
“What? I did not say I would leave him there after dark.”
Amelia covered her mouth with her hand.
Walter whispered, “Saints preserve us.”
By late afternoon, the hall smelled of extinguished rushlights, tired bodies, and the rich pottage Edith had made from barley, onion, herbs, and a scrap of salt pork cut fine enough to convince the pot it held more meat than it did.
Folk ate before leaving, not a feast, but enough to put warmth in bellies and soften the hard edges of the day.
The geese had been carried away. The coin was locked.
The rolls were wrapped in cloth and tied.
Thomas stood near the high table while Walter placed the final tally sticks into a small chest.
The steward’s hands lingered on the lid.
“You did well today,” Thomas said.
Walter’s shoulders stiffened. Slowly, the old man nodded. “Mistress Quinn’s columns are sensible.”
Thomas looked at him.
Walter scowled. “Do not make much of it.”
“I would not dare.”
“She asks too many questions.”
“Aye.”
“She writes in a hand too large.”
“It is readable.”
Walter sniffed. “Precisely. Wasteful of parchment.”
Thomas waited.
Walter’s mouth worked as if the next words had to be dragged up a hill. “At first I thought she would bring disorder.”
His gaze moved across the hall to Amelia, who crouched near Alyson, helping the child wrap a leftover barley cake in a bit of cloth for later.
“She has brought a different sort of order than I am accustomed to.”
From Walter, that was a hymn sung beneath stained glass.
Thomas looked at Amelia too. She had flour on her sleeve now.
Ink on her thumb. A honey smear near one cuff because Alyson had embraced her with sticky hands.
Her veil had given up entirely, sliding back far enough that half her hair was visible in red-gold coils.
She was laughing at something Wat had said, her face open, tired, and bright.
Thomas hated, with sudden and unreasonable force, how right she looked there. As if Ashcombe had been waiting for someone to walk in and begin rearranging it into sense. As if the hall had made room for her before he had.
His chest tightened.
“Walter,” he said.
“My lord?”
“If Master Pickering comes, the accounts will stand?”
Walter drew himself up. Here, at least, was ground the man trusted. “Aye. They will stand. The rents are defensible, the arrears properly noted, remissions marked, payments in kind valued, labor owed and labor given recorded. If he means to find fault, he must bring his own.”
“Good.”
“But it is thin,” Walter added.
Thomas nodded. “I know.”
“One bad month, one sickness, one roof failing in the wrong storm, and we will be scraping again.”
“I know that too.”
Walter’s gaze sharpened. “Belmaine will know it.”
At the name, the warmth of the hall seemed to chill. Thomas watched Amelia tie Alyson’s little bundle. Wat said something to her. She rolled her eyes and flicked a crumb at him. He laughed.
“Aye,” Thomas said. “He will.”
“Then we must give him no opening.”
Thomas looked back at the chest of rolls. No opening. A strange woman some still called faery at his table was an opening. A woman he wanted with the sort of want that made a man careless was an opening large enough to ride an army through.
Walter did not say it, he did not need to.
Thomas closed the chest himself and slid the bolt into place. “Then we give him none.”
The words felt like an oath. He told himself they were only about Ashcombe.
That evening, when the court was done and the tenants had gone out into the grey with fuller bellies and lighter shoulders, Edith permitted a small kindness in the hall.
Not a feast. They could not afford a feast. But there was pottage thickened with beans, bread warm from the ovens, a little cheese, watered ale, and the last of the honeyed apples.
Friar Huck arrived late with a crock of mead he claimed was medicinal and should therefore not be counted as indulgence.
Edith told him his medicine caused more trouble than it cured. He blessed her for the compliment.
Hob sang half a song until Edith threatened him with a ladle if he finished the verse in front of the children.
Walter retired early, clutching the wrapped rolls as though someone might seduce them into disorder overnight.
Thomas remained near the hearth longer than he intended. He told himself it was because this was his hall, his people, and his duty to be seen among them on a day that had ended better than it might have. He told himself he watched everyone. That was a bloody lie. He watched her.
She sat on a low bench near the fire with Alyson half asleep against her side and Wat at her feet, pretending not to drowse. Hob had cornered her with Osbern and Martin and was apparently teaching her another French curse, judging by her scandalized expression.
“No,” she said. “Absolutely not.”
Hob looked wounded. “It is useful.”
“That is not useful unless I am being attacked by a cheese.”
Osbern laughed into his cup.
Friar Huck leaned over, interested. “What curse?”
“No,” Amelia and Hob said together.
The friar looked delighted. “Then it must be a good one.”
Amelia shook her head, curls slipping further free, and laughed.