Chapter 19 #2
She talked about the countryside as they rode.
Not continually, but the lands around them pulled the words out of her.
A flock of crows lifting from the field became an omen she did not approve of.
Three pigs rooting beneath an oak became a moral inquiry into whether pigs always looked so pleased with themselves.
A boy driving geese along the lane earned a whispered lecture about how geese were mean and ducks were kind.
“Everything here feels like an omen,” she said as a raven flapped across the road ahead of them.
“Most things are simply hungry.”
They passed a wayside cross where someone had left a little twist of flowers, rain-battered and brown at the edges. Amelia quieted then. Her arms remained around him, but her grip softened. Thomas felt the question in her silence before she asked it.
“What is that?”
“A cross.”
“I can see that.”
“A man died near here last winter. Cart overturned.”
“Oh.” She shifted behind him.
“He was not from Ashcombe.”
“But someone leaves flowers?”
“Aye.”
“That’s kind.”
“It costs little.”
“Kindness often does,” she said quietly. “People still don’t spend it.”
Thomas had no answer for that. The road narrowed beneath a stand of trees, their branches interlaced overhead, the last leaves rattling in the wind. Cygnet picked her way through the ruts. A squirrel shot across the path. Amelia made a small startled sound and clutched him tighter.
Thomas closed his eyes briefly.
“Did a squirrel just attack us?” she demanded.
The first hour passed too quickly, which annoyed him greatly.
He had meant to endure the ride with discipline, keep his thoughts ordered, his body indifferent, his attention on the road.
Instead he found himself listening for the next thing she would say, waiting for that wry twist of her voice, for the little huff of breath when the mare stepped awkwardly, for the way she went quiet when the world unsettled her and then made herself brave by mocking it.
By the time the market came into view, Thomas had nearly forgotten to be miserable.
Evesham’s market spread around the square below the church, spilling into the lanes like water from an overturned pail.
Though the worst of the war’s fear had passed from the roads, its shadow remained.
Men looked twice at strangers. Women kept children close.
A few stalls stood empty where traders had not yet returned or never would.
Yet the market lived all the same, stubborn as weeds between stones.
Smoke drifted from cook fires. Bells rang faintly from the church tower.
A crier’s voice rose above the crowd, announcing news no one quite believed.
The air was rich with smells, roasting chestnuts, hot pies, horse dung, leather, onions, fish packed in salt, beeswax, wet straw, and too many bodies gathered beneath a grey sky.
Amelia went quiet behind him.
Thomas turned his head slightly to make sure she had not been rendered mute. “Do not gape.”
“I’m not gaping.”
“You are.”
She snapped her mouth shut.
He dismounted near the edge of the square, then reached up to help her down. She placed her hands on his shoulders because there was no graceful way for her to do anything else, and he lifted her from the mare as if she weighed no more than a bundle of linen.
She landed close. Too close.
For a moment her hands remained on him, her fingers curled in the wool at his shoulders, her face tilted up to his beneath the edge of her veil. There was color in her cheeks from the ride and the cold, and a curl had worked loose at her temple, shining copper against her pale skin.
Thomas released her.
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded and turned to tie Cygnet to a post before he did something witless in the middle of the market square.
“Hood up,” he said.
Amelia pulled the edge of her cloak higher. “I look suspicious.”
“You look less noticeable.”
“I feel like a turnip in hiding.”
“I have never known a turnip to hide.”
“That’s why you still find them.”
He looked at her despite himself.
She smiled.
Saints preserve him from this woman.
The first stall sold salt, and Thomas was immediately reminded why he had insisted on coming. The merchant was broad as a barrel and nearly as round, with a beard forked into two little points. He named a price that would have made Walter faint into the rushes.
Thomas named one half of it.
The merchant clutched his chest. “My lord wounds me.”
“Not yet.”
Amelia coughed.
The merchant’s eyes flicked to her, then back to Thomas. “This is fine salt from Droitwich. White as saints’ linen.”
“It is grey,” Amelia murmured.
Thomas kept his gaze on the merchant. “It is grey.”
“Only in this light.”
The bargaining went on long enough for Amelia to shift from one foot to the other and begin, Thomas suspected, doing sums in her head. When the merchant made his final offer, she leaned close, her voice barely audible as she pretended to brush dust from his cloak.
“If we take two sacks now and one after Martinmas, assuming he’ll hold the price, we can stretch what’s left from the coffer without Walter developing a facial twitch.”
Thomas did not look at her. “You think Walter has only one?”
“He has several. I’ve named them.”
He nearly smiled and hated himself for it.
They left with two sacks of salt, a promise for the third, and the merchant looking as if he had been politely robbed.
They bought lamp oil from a woman with sharp eyes and no patience for foolish men.
Amelia liked her at once. They bought iron nails from a smith whose hands were black to the wrist and whose apprentice stared at Amelia’s loose curl until Thomas turned his head and the boy discovered sudden interest in a horseshoe.
They bought coarse winter cloth, undyed, rough, and sturdy. Amelia rubbed it between her fingers and made a face.
“This is not soft.”
“It is warm.”
“So is a badger, presumably, but I don’t want to wear one.”
The cloth merchant blinked.
Thomas cleared his throat. “She means the weave is sound.”
“I mean I’m going to itch until spring.”
“You may complain warmly.”
She gave him a look that would have felled a weaker man.
At a stall selling herbs, dried fruit, and little charms tied in colored thread, Amelia nearly ruined them.
In fairness, Thomas should have anticipated it. She was full of curiosity, and the old woman at the stall had an eye for customers who looked curious. Before Thomas could steer Amelia toward the next stall, the woman had thrust a small twist of blue thread and dried rue toward her.
“For the evil eye, mistress. A fine charm. Wear it near the heart.”
Amelia looked delighted and skeptical in equal measure. “Oh. That’s very pretty.”
“Against ill wishers, envious women, jealous men, and those who would call a curse on your womb.”
Thomas stiffened.
Amelia opened her mouth.
He saw the sentence forming. He did not know precisely what it was, but he knew the coming of disaster when it gathered breath.
“Actually, the science of—”
Thomas closed his hand over hers and pulled her away.
She stumbled after him. “Hey, I was only going to say—”
“I know.”
“You do not.”
“I know enough.”
She lowered her voice. “You can’t just drag me away every time I mention science.”
“I can and will.”
“That’s not a long-term strategy.”
“It has worked thus far.”
“It’s rude.”
“It is keeping you from being burned, prayed over, or married off to a man with opinions about womb curses.”
Amelia’s mouth snapped shut as she looked around and then nonchalantly pulled her hood tighter around her face.
Thomas regretted the sharpness at once, though not the words.
She looked down at their joined hands.
So did he. Her hand was small in his, fingers cool from the morning, ink still faintly staining the edge of her thumb. The market noise thickened around them, but for one suspended heartbeat all Thomas knew was the warmth of her palm and the astonishing, rightness of it.
Then she curled her fingers very slightly.
Not away, but into his.
The movement was so small any other man might have missed it. Thomas did not miss things.
He let go as her hand dropped to her side. The loss of it felt absurdly large.
He turned toward the next stall because nails, salt, and oil had become vastly safer than her face.
They were bargaining over dried peas when he saw the livery.
Two men stood by the ale-stall across the square, cloaks dull murrey and gold over their shoulders, both travel-stained.
Belmaine’s colors. One was young, narrow-faced, and bored.
The other was older, his beard trimmed close, his gaze moving across the crowd with the idle thoroughness of a man paid to notice things.
Thomas went cold.