Chapter 26
AMELIA
The trouble started, as all trouble did at Ashcombe, with something entirely innocent. A simple jar of honey.
Friar Huck brought it with him shortly after terce, wrapped in clean linen and tucked beneath one arm as if he carried a saint’s finger bone instead of a sweet treat.
He came through the gate with mud on the hem of his brown habit, a walking staff in one hand, and the cheerful authority of a man who believed honey could cure anything from a cough to a crisis of faith.
“From Winifred,” he said, setting the jar in her hands.
Amelia looked down at it. The honey glowed deep amber through the thick glass, warm and luminous as if a piece of the afternoon sun had been trapped inside.
“Winifred?”
“My best hive. Third year running. A queen of sound judgment and firm opinions.”
“A true queen.”
“She took to you,” Huck said gravely. “Not everyone earns Winifred’s approval.”
She tried very hard not to be moved by the endorsement of a medieval bee.
“Please tell Winifred I’m honored.”
“I shall. Though she’s not one for flattery.”
“Good. I’d hate to embarrass myself in front of livestock.”
Huck stopped in the middle of the yard, his weathered face going solemn beneath the grey of his beard. “Bees are not livestock.”
“They make food and live in a managed structure.”
“So do monks,” Huck said. “Yet no one calls me livestock.”
“I’m very proud of myself for not responding to that.”
His laugh followed her across the yard, warm as the honey beneath her arm.
By now October had settled over Ashcombe. The fields that had been gold and full of harvest only weeks before now lay shorn and brown beneath a low pewter sky, and every doorway seemed to smell of smoke and the sharp green of herbs hung to dry.
Amelia tucked the jar away in the stillroom between the rosemary tied in bunches from a beam and the crock of rendered fat that Edith guarded as if it were treasure, then went back to sorting linen, because she’d come to realize that linen was the hydra of household tasks.
Later that day, Mistress Bell came calling for salt, though it was never really about the salt.
The salt was a social courtesy, a clean little excuse wrapped around whatever gossip she’d brought to season the household.
Amelia had learned the ritual quickly. Smile.
Fetch the salt. Say nothing of consequence.
Let Mistress Bell wander toward the true purpose of the visit while pretending she’d merely been seized by a sudden and desperate culinary need.
Today, unfortunately, the true purpose was about Amelia.
“’Tis only what folk say, mind you,” Mistress Bell said, her voice low, warm, and terrifyingly friendly as Amelia returned with the salt wrapped in a twist of cloth. “I take no part in it myself, mistress. I’m not one for idle talk.”
Mistress Bell was very much one for idle talk. She had built an entire vocation around it. If idle talk had guilds, Mistress Bell would have worn a badge, inspected the apprentices, and complained about declining standards.
“Of course not,” Amelia said.
Mistress Bell accepted the salt but didn’t leave.
She stood just inside the door in a brown wool gown and serviceable cloak, cheeks pink from the wind, eyes bright beneath the edge of her linen hood.
She had the look of a woman who’d already visited three households that morning and intended to leave every one of them feeling informed.
“Only it does seem strange, doesn’t it?” Mistress Bell said.
Amelia folded her hands in front of her apron, because Edith had said respectable women did not clench their fists unless they meant to hit something, and she was still trying to blend in.
“What does?”
Mistress Bell leaned closer, conspiratorial and sweet as spoiled cream.
“A woman appearing from nowhere. No kin. No husband searching for her. Not that I think it, of course. Only that others might.”
“Think what?” Amelia asked, though she already knew.
Mistress Bell’s gaze flicked to Amelia’s hair, which had escaped its pins beneath her wimple in three separate places and was making a bright red nuisance of itself near her cheek.
“That she’s faery-touched.”
There it was. The words slipped into the space between them, small and glittering, and the stillroom seemed to go colder around it.
“Faery-touched,” Amelia repeated.
“Aye. Not wicked, mind you. No one says wicked.”
Mistress Bell widened her eyes, as if wicked were a word that had wandered in without invitation.
“Only strange. And mayhap lucky. Mayhap unlucky. Depends who’s telling it.”
“Who is telling it?”
Mistress Bell’s mouth pursed.
There. That was the interesting part.
“Folk,” she said.
“Then maybe folk need hobbies.”
Mistress Bell blinked. “Hobbies?”
“Useful work,” Amelia said quickly. She was usually careful to watch her words, especially after the rant when she’d first arrived, but sometimes things just slipped out.
“Mending. Baking. Gardening. Herding geese.”
From the doorway to the kitchen, Edith made a sound that might have been a cough but was probably a laugh.
Mistress Bell’s smile tightened.
“I came as a friend,” she said. “To warn you. Men have been asking questions.”
The humor drained out of Amelia so quickly she felt the chill it left behind.
“What men?”
Mistress Bell rubbed the salt between her fingers through the cloth. Her hands were chapped red at the knuckles, the nails cut short, a plain silver ring on one finger.
“I did not know them.”
That was a bald-faced lie. She’d spent years reading faces across banquet tables, behind check-in desks, beside stages where sponsors smiled too hard and donors drank too much.
Mistress Bell knew something. Not everything, perhaps, but enough that fear had given her gossip a brittle little shine.
“What did they look like?” Amelia asked.
Mistress Bell’s eyes darted past her toward the yard. “Riders. Good horses. Livery, mayhap. Murrey and gold, one of the boys said. Though boys see colors in mud if it gives them a tale to tell.”
Murrey and gold. Belmaine’s colors.
Amelia felt her stomach drop, but kept her face neutral with the same grim determination she had once used when a groom’s mother announced, twenty minutes before the ceremony, that the floral arch looked like a funeral wreath.
“What questions?”
“Only whether the lord’s strange woman still remained here. Whether she went to chapel. Whether she ate with Christian folk. Whether she cast shadows.”
Amelia stared. “Whether I cast shadows?”
Mistress Bell had the grace to look slightly embarrassed. “Some tales grow legs.”
“That one grew antlers.”
“It would be better,” Mistress Bell said, lowering her voice, “if you took care. Folk are kindly when they know what a thing is. They’re not kindly when fear takes over.”
The worst part was that she was right.
Amelia hated that more than she hated the word faery. Fear made people stupid. It made them cruel. Fear gave men like Belmaine something to build on.
Before she could answer, Wat came skidding into the hall with a bundle of kindling in both arms and mud on one cheek. Alyson followed at a trot, carrying three sticks and the grave expression of a person contributing essential labor to civilization.
“Mistress Amelia,” Alyson said, then stopped when she saw Mistress Bell. “Are we in trouble?”
“No,” Amelia said.
Wat looked from one woman to the other and narrowed his eyes. He had become alarmingly good at detecting adult lies. “Is someone dead?”
“No.”
He crossed his arms over his chest like Thomas did. “Is Walter angry?”
“Walter is always angry.”
Wat relaxed. “Then it’s normal.”
Mistress Bell’s gaze softened at the sight of the children. “There now. You see? No one says you’ve done harm here. The children follow you like ducklings.”
Alyson brightened. “I’m not a duckling.”
“You do waddle when you carry the water jug,” Wat said.
“I do not.”
“You do.”
“I shall hit you with my stick.”
“No one is hitting anyone with sticks,” Amelia said, because there were days when that seemed to be the entire foundation of childcare in the thirteenth century.
Alyson looked disappointed but obedient. Wat did not look obedient, merely like he was calculating.
Mistress Bell watched them, and something moved through her face. Curiosity, worry, perhaps even kindness, though kindness here was wrapped in so many layers of superstition and survival that Amelia couldn’t be sure.
“See that you take care,” Mistress Bell said again. “There are those who do not like what they do not understand.”
The door opened behind her as Thomas came in with the wind at his back.
Conversation didn’t stop exactly, but it altered.
It always did when Thomas entered a room.
The hall straightened around him. Men found tasks.
Children remembered manners. Even the dogs near the hearth lifted their heads, decided he wasn’t carrying food, and lowered them again with faint disappointment.
He wore a black wool tunic belted at the waist, a cloak damp at the shoulders, and boots muddied nearly to the knee.
His black hair curled at the ends from mist and weather, and the scar along his jaw looked pale against the rough shadow of his beard.
He looked tired, cold, and large enough to make the hall feel half its size.
His gaze moved first to Amelia, then to Mistress Bell, then the salt in Mistress Bell’s hand.
“What has happened?”
No one in Ashcombe ever answered that question with the truth first.
Mistress Bell dipped a curtsy. “My lord. I came for salt.”
Thomas looked at the little twist of cloth in her hand. Then he looked at Amelia.
She tried to make a face that said everything is fine, which was idiotic, because her face had betrayed her to caterers, customs agents, and one very offended priest in Chicago who had absolutely noticed when she mouthed wow during a spectacularly passive-aggressive wedding homily. No poker face for her.
“Edith,” he said.