Chapter 31 #2
Joan flushed scarlet. “The stables.”
Amelia sat on the edge of the bed before her knees did it for her. “Before dawn.”
“Aye,” Dame Margaret said.
“That’s bad.”
“It is not good.”
“Thank you. Very clarifying.”
Dame Margaret looked toward the door, then crossed to the bed and reached beneath it. She pulled out the poker and held it up.
Amelia winced. “In my defense, you gave it to me.”
Dame Margaret set it by the hearth again, though not as far from Amelia as it had been before. “You cannot remain in this room.”
“Funny, because there’s a lock that says otherwise.”
“You must speak with Father Martin before Sir Roger removes you.”
“Can you get me to him?”
Dame Margaret hesitated. “Yes, I can get you to the chapel,” she said. “I cannot promise what comes after.”
“That’s fine. I’ve rarely known what comes after since the day I arrived in this century.”
Joan blinked. “This what?”
Amelia closed her eyes briefly.
Dame Margaret’s gaze sharpened.
“Figure of speech,” Amelia said.
“I know many figures of speech,” Dame Margaret said. “That was not one.”
“Can we focus on the part where I’m scheduled for dawn delivery to a fake husband?”
“For now,” Dame Margaret said.
A few minutes later, Joan helped pin Amelia’s wimple properly, then gave up when two curls sprang loose immediately like tiny red rebels. Dame Margaret wrapped Amelia in her cloak and pressed a small heel of bread into her hand.
“Eat.”
“I had honey cake.”
“I did not ask if a priest had fed you sweets. Eat.”
Amelia obeyed. Mostly because Dame Margaret looked like Edith’s wealthier, colder cousin, and Amelia had developed a healthy respect for women with keys.
The bread tasted of old grain. It stuck in her throat, but she swallowed it anyway.
“You will walk with your head down,” Dame Margaret said. “Not because you are meek. Because I don’t want Osric seeing your face before we reach the passage.”
“Osric?”
“My nephew.”
“Of course there’s a nephew.”
“He serves Sir Roger.”
“And you?”
Dame Margaret’s face did not change. “I serve this house.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.”
Joan slipped to the door, listened, then nodded once. Dame Margaret knocked, it was unlocked, and the three of them stepped into the corridor as the guard retreated after a stern look from Dame Margaret.
Amelia kept her head bowed as Dame Margaret led her down the stair with Joan at her heels. The broken cup shard pressed against her wrist inside her sleeve.
At the bottom, they crossed the screens passage rather than the hall.
Through the open arch, Amelia saw men gathered near the hearth.
Belmaine stood among them, one hand on the mantel, speaking low.
Crale was there too, hunched over a cup, his bruised face turned toward the fire.
He did not look like a husband wronged. He looked like a man wishing he had chosen another line of work.
Then he looked up as his eyes met hers. Amelia looked away quickly, but not before his expression changed.
Recognition. Possession. And anger over the ale still drying in his beard.
Lovely.
Dame Margaret’s hand tightened on Amelia’s arm. “Walk.”
They went through a narrow door into a covered passage leading toward the chapel.
The air changed, carrying the smell of limewash, beeswax, old incense, and wet stone.
Rain had begun to tap on the roof tiles in a soft, uneven patter.
Outside, the last of the light had drained from the yard, leaving the world bluish and thin.
The chapel was small, prettier than Amelia expected, and colder.
Whitewashed walls. A narrow altar dressed with linen.
A plain wooden cross. Three candles burning in iron prickets.
A woven mat near the step. Nothing grand.
Nothing gilded. Just a little room where human fear had probably knelt for generations and asked heaven to explain itself.
Father Martin stood near the altar.
He was younger than she expected, perhaps not yet forty, with a narrow face, tired eyes, and ink stains on two fingers. His brown robe had been patched at the hem. A wool cloak hung from his shoulders, and he held a small leather pouch in one hand.
His gaze went to Amelia first, then to Dame Margaret, and then to Joan, who hovered at the chapel door like a girl trying to look invisible and failing beautifully.
“Sir Roger said I was to counsel a disobedient wife,” Father Martin said.
Dame Margaret spoke first. “Counsel quickly.”
The priest’s mouth twitched. He reached into the leather pouch and withdrew a lump of sealing wax, hardened and dark red, wrapped in cloth.
“The attestation shown at Ashcombe carries the mark of Saint Alphege’s,” he said quietly. “Or what is meant to pass for it.”
Amelia’s breath caught. “You know it?”
“I served there as a clerk when I was young. Father Odo died three years past this Martinmas. His hand was fine, but not the hand on that paper. The seal itself is not from Saint Alphege’s.”
“How can you tell?”
Father Martin turned the lump of wax in his fingers.
“The parish seal bore the church and a small fish beneath, because the old spring there was said to have fed the village in famine. The seal on Sir Roger’s parchment shows only the church.
It is a copy made by a man who saw the mark and did not understand what mattered. ”
Wax remembers.
Amelia almost laughed. Not because it was funny, but because the clue was so perfectly medieval. In her own century, someone would check a database or scan a signature. Here, the truth lived in wax, parish gossip, and a dead priest’s fish.
“Can you testify to that?” she asked.
Father Martin’s eyes flicked toward the door. “Before the proper authority, aye.”
“Will you?”
Silence. There it was. The human part. The price.
Dame Margaret looked down. Joan twisted her hands in her apron.
Father Martin’s voice lowered. “Sir Roger holds my brother’s lease.”
Of course he did. Belmaine’s fat fingers were everywhere, tucked under every latch.
Amelia tried to keep the disappointment from her face and failed.
Father Martin saw it and flushed. “I did not say I would not speak. I said there is a cost.”
“I know.” Her voice came out softer than she intended. “I’m sorry.”
The priest looked at her for a long moment. “You are not his wife.”
“No.”
“You are not Edmund Crale’s wife either.”
“Definitely not.”
“You are Lord Ashcombe’s…”
He stopped.
Amelia’s heart did something painful and stupid.
“I’m not anyone’s,” she said.
The priest’s expression gentled. “Few women are granted such danger.”
That landed oddly. Danger, yes. But also truth. She had belonged to no one in this world and because of that, every man with a document thought he could claim the empty space.