Chapter 21
AMELIA
When Walter found Amelia in the stillroom, she knew before he opened his mouth that whatever he’d come to say would be the sort of thing she couldn’t fix.
There were many kinds of conversations at Ashcombe. There were Edith conversations, which began with a command, contained at least one insult, and somehow ended with a person fed, corrected, or wrapped in dry wool.
There were Hob conversations, which wandered cheerfully from weather to murder. There were Wat and Alyson conversations, which tended to involve questions Amelia didn’t know how to answer, like whether angels had wings of feathers or gold or whether geese went to confession if they bit people.
And then there were Walter conversations.
Walter conversations arrived with account rolls, bad news, or both.
That morning, she’d been checking a tally of dried herbs against Edith’s winter stores, because apparently the household survived on grain, salt, ale, linen, and the contents of every hanging bundle in the stillroom.
The chamber lay just off the kitchen passage, small, cool, and close enough to the hearths that warmth seeped through the stone without ever becoming comfortable.
Herbs hung from the rafters in bunches tied with string: sage, rue, thyme, lavender, yarrow, and plants she didn’t know, all drying, filling the air with fragrance.
Shelves held little crocks of salve, rolled linen, wax cakes from Friar Huck’s bees, stoppered jugs of vinegar, honey, rosewater, and something Edith said was for coughs but smelled like it might strip paint.
Amelia sat at the worktable in a faded blue wool gown. Her sleeves were pinned back, her veil had slipped again, there was ink on the side of her hand, honey on one cuff from Alyson’s enthusiastic morning hug, and a little smear of something green on her thumb from crushing some kind of herb.
Walter stood in the doorway turning his cap in his hands as she set down the tally.
Outside, beyond the stillroom’s narrow window, the day moved on.
A cart creaked in the yard. Someone called for a boy to fetch water.
From farther off came Alyson’s bright shriek of laughter, followed by Wat shouting, “I didn’t push her, she leapt poorly! ”
Amelia kept her voice calm. “Walter?”
He was a narrow man, all bone, tendon, and disapproval held together by stubbornness and wool.
His hair, what remained of it, stood in white wisps beneath the cap he was currently torturing between both hands.
His brown tunic was clean but worn shiny at the elbows.
His belt held a knife, keys, and a little wax tablet, the tools of a steward’s authority.
His eyes were rheumy with age, but they saw more than most people wanted seen.
“I’ll speak plain, mistress,” he said. “For I’m too old to do it any other way.”
Amelia’s stomach sank. “All right,” she said carefully.
He came in and closed the door behind him. Not fully. That would have been improper, and Walter would sooner set fire to the rolls than be improper without reason. He left it cracked enough that the world outside still existed, but not enough that their words would carry.
He stood across from her at the table, the drying herbs hanging between. For a moment he seemed to be searching for the right starting place, which unnerved her. Walter usually began at the beginning, whether anyone wished him to or not, and marched forward until the matter surrendered.
“You’ve been good for him,” he said.
Amelia blinked. Of all the things she had expected, that was not one of them.
“It costs me nothing to say what is true,” Walter continued, though from the look on his face it cost him a great deal.
“I’ll own that I would not have believed it these two months past. I thought you’d bring disorder beneath this roof.”
“I did bring hand-washing.”
His mouth twitched despite himself.
“Aye. There is that.”
The tiny almost-smile faded. “The house runs better,” he said. “The harvest came in. The rents were reckoned clean. Edith complains less.”
“That’s not true.”
“Nay, but her complaints are less murderous.”
Amelia shouldn’t have laughed. It slipped out anyway, small and nervous.
Walter’s face softened for one heartbeat. Then hardened again because he hadn’t come for kindness alone.
“He sleeps some nights,” Walter said quietly.
Amelia looked down at her hands.
“He did not before,” Walter said. “Not often. He would walk the yard till dawn, or sit in the hall with that look on his face as if he had one foot in this world and one in the grave. I have served this family two and forty years. I knew him when he was a boy with scraped knees and more temper than judgment. I knew his father, and his brother, God rest them. I knew the lad before war made a hammer of him.”
He turned the cap once more. “You have done what I could not.”
Amelia swallowed. “Walter—”
“Let me finish, mistress, or I’ll lose my courage and begin speaking of barley instead.”
She nodded.
He drew a breath that seemed to come from somewhere tired and deep.
“You must stop.”
The stillroom became very quiet. The herbs above them barely stirred in the faint draft. A drop of water slipped from somewhere beyond the wall into a bucket with a hollow plink. The scent of lavender seemed suddenly too sweet.
Amelia’s fingers curled around the edge of the table.
“Stop what?” she asked, though she already knew.
Walter looked at her as if he wished she had not made him say it.
“You know what.”
If he had been cruel, she could have fought him.
If he had sneered at her as a stray, a nobody, a woman without proof or place, she could have folded her dignity around herself and walked away with her chin up.
Amelia had survived rooms full of men who underestimated her.
She knew how to handle cruelty in good shoes.
Walter gave her none. He gave her truth.
“I have eyes,” he said. “So has Edith. So has Hob, who I caught grinning about it near the stables like a fool whose wits had gone courting.”
“Nothing has happened.”
His gaze did not move. “Not yet.”
Heat rose in Amelia’s face. “That isn’t fair.”
“Nay,” Walter said. “It is not.”
Her throat tightened.
He looked down at the cap in his hands, then set it carefully on the table between them. The gesture felt deliberate, as if he needed both hands free for honesty.
“You are not a fool,” he said. “Nor is he. That may be the trouble. Fools are easier. Fools tumble into scandal because they cannot see the ditch. You both see it. You stand on either side of it and call that safety.”
Amelia wanted to deny it.
Walter’s mouth flattened. “Soon others will see. Not Edith, not Hob, not children who think affection is merely another warm thing by the fire. Folk with no love for this house will see. Sir Roger Belmaine has eyes set in that fox face of his, and he is not the only one watching. My lord backed the wrong man in the war. The king’s mercy is a thin and chancy thing.
The escheator will not need much if someone whispers disorder beneath this roof. ”
“He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“No,” Walter said. “And that has never yet stopped a man from being ruined.”
The words settled cold in her stomach. Outside, Alyson laughed again, farther away now. A chicken clucked indignantly beneath the window. Ordinary sounds. Little sounds.
Walter leaned one hand against the table. His fingers were knotted with age, nails clean, ink in the cracks despite all Amelia’s campaigns.
“You are a woman with no name we can prove,” he said. “No father, brother, uncle, or lord to speak for you. The tale we tell is that you fled a husband cruel enough to send you running in little more than a scrap of blue silk and shoes fit for a penitent’s nightmare.”
“They were beautiful shoes.”
Walter gave her a look.
“Sorry,” she said faintly. “Nerves.”
The look eased, but only a little. “A husband,” he repeated, “who, by that tale, may be living still.”
Amelia’s chest squeezed. The cover story had been useful. A shield. A neat little explanation for the woman who appeared from nowhere and spoke like someone who had taken a wrong turn out of a dream. It had given the household something ordinary to believe instead of whispers that she was a faery.
She had not thought often enough about the trap hidden inside it.
Walter had.
“If it is seen,” he said, “if it is so much as whispered that Lord Ashcombe keeps a leman under his roof, a runaway wife, a woman not his to shelter so closely, then his enemies will have the excuse they want. If she is a wife, he dishonors another man’s claim.
If she is not, he keeps a mistress. If she is neither, the gossips will make her fae, fallen, or worse, whatever best suits their malice. ”
Amelia’s hands had gone cold. “People here know me.”
“Ashcombe knows you.” Walter’s voice gentled. “The world is larger than Ashcombe and less kind.”
That one struck clean. Because Ashcombe had begun to feel like the world.
The hall with its smoke and laughter. Edith’s sharp tongue and warmer hands.
Wat and Alyson. Hob’s awful French. Walter’s rolls.
Thomas standing in a doorway, large and tired and watchful.
Sweet well water at her place every morning.
She had forgotten there were other eyes beyond the walls. No. Not forgotten. Wanted to forget.
Walter saw that too. “The king can take the castle,” he said. “You know this.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what that means?”
Amelia opened her mouth.
But Walter continued. “It does not mean a parchment changes hands and folk go on with their pottage. It means the crown’s man comes.
It means men who have never walked these fields decide what can be sold, stripped, seized, or given to another.
Tenants who cannot pay are turned out. Stores counted for tax before hunger.
Repairs left undone if no profit sits in them.
The people scatter. The old suffer first, then the children. ”
Alyson’s laughter echoed in Amelia’s memory.