Chapter 27 #3
When he pulled back fully, the river was still running, the wheel was still grinding, the fog was lifting from the valley, and nothing in the world had visibly altered, yet everything had.
Thomas put three steps of cold air between them and stood with his hands clenched at his sides.
Amelia remained where he had left her.
He’d never seen her look like that. Not shocked or wounded, but open. As if something carefully locked had been given a key and she didn’t yet know whether to rejoice or grieve.
“One witness,” he said.
His voice came out like gravel.
“One person on this bank. One word carried back.”
She understood. He saw the calculations move behind her eyes. The village. Belmaine. The faery talk. The fragile story that let her remain beneath his roof without becoming a scandal sharp enough to cut them both.
“I know,” she said quietly.
“It is not that I—”
“Thomas.” Her voice was steady in a way that cost her something. “I know.”
That nearly undid him more than the kiss.
She knew the difference between not wanting and not daring. She knew it and gave him the mercy of not making him say the rest aloud where the river, the mill, and Godwin’s ears might hear.
Amelia lifted one hand to tuck the escaped curl back beneath her veil. The movement was deliberate. Steadying. He watched her build her careful self-possession around herself again, piece by piece, and hated that the world had made it necessary.
“The wheel joint should hold through winter,” she said.
Thomas looked at her for one long moment.
“Aye,” he said at last. “It should.”
They walked back to the mill yard in silence, a proper distance between them.
Godwin came out to report the wheel was running smooth and the grindstone engaged.
Thomas answered with all the correct words.
Amelia checked the little leather-bound channel ledger and noted three things with Godwin’s quill, because even after being kissed beside a millrace she could still locate a faulty record, which Thomas found both admirable and deeply unfair.
By then the fog had finished lifting. The valley stood revealed in its late-season colors, gold stubble in the fields, copper leaves along the hedges, the river bright in patches where the weak sun touched it.
Crows moved over the meadow in a ragged black line.
Smoke rose from the village chimneys, thin and blue.
They started back toward Ashcombe. Amelia walked ahead of him for part of the path, her cloak dark at the hem, mud on her gown, shoulders straight. Not distant in the way she had been before.
He knew exactly what he could not have, knew, for the first time and without any remaining doubt, exactly why it mattered.
By that evening out in the stables, Thomas had brushed Cygnet twice. The mare tolerated the first brushing with the solemn dignity due to her station. She endured the second with less grace, swinging her grey head around to look at him as if he had personally insulted her intelligence.
“I know,” Thomas said.
Cygnet huffed.
“Do not start.”
She stamped one hoof.
“I am not discussing it with you.”
The horse flicked an ear, clearly unconvinced.
The stable door creaked as he paused.
“If you’re here to tell me Edith has sent for me, I’m coming.”
“No, you’re not,” Hob said. “You’re brushing the same horse until she decides to bite you.”
Cygnet gave a satisfied snort.
Thomas glared at her. “Traitor.”
Hob came to lean against the stall, broad shoulders filling the doorway, beard silvered by the last of the outside light. There was mud on one boot and straw caught at his sleeve, which meant he’d already done three useful things since supper and would pretend all of them had happened by accident.
“The mill is fixed,” Hob said.
“Aye.”
“Godwin says the grind is smooth.”
“Aye.”
“Says Mistress Amelia found the trouble in the ledger before any of us found it in the water.”
“She did.”
Hob nodded. “Useful woman.”
Thomas said nothing.
“Brave one too.”
The brush stilled. Cygnet turned her head. Even the horse knew better than to interrupt Hob when he had found his point and meant to club a man with it.
Hob looked toward the yard. “She trusts you.”
Thomas’s hand tightened around the brush.
Hob went on, quieter now. “More than you have trusted her. And she’s known it and given you her trust anyway.”
The words struck too cleanly to answer.
“That’s a particular kind of person, my lord,” Hob said. “The kind a man shouldn’t waste.”
Thomas put one hand flat against Cygnet’s warm neck. The mare stood steady beneath his palm, solid and unimpressed by the ruinous complications of men.
He thought of Amelia on the riverbank, drawing her veil back into place. Thought of the safe words she had handed him because he had needed them. Thought of how quickly she had understood what one witness could do.
Thought of the softness of that red curl against his fingers, of her mouth beneath his. And thought of the fact that she had understood the danger and still had not stepped away first.
He was a dolt. Not for kissing her. That would have been easier. No, he was a fool for thinking he could put things back where they had been before the mill wheel turned.