Chapter 33 #2
Dame Margaret stepped beside him, the keys at her girdle clinking softly as she moved. She had the face of a woman who had swallowed fear for years and found it had finally turned to iron in her belly.
“Crale entered her chamber against command. Sir Roger ordered her moved before dawn. When Lord Ashcombe was seen on the road, he ordered her taken through the orchard.”
“Margaret,” Belmaine said softly.
She flinched. Then she straightened, and when she spoke again her voice had gone cold.
“No. You’ve used my house for enough.”
Joan peeked around Dame Margaret’s shoulder, face white beneath her cap but stubborn as a mule at market.
“And he said Father Martin was to write that she was counseled.”
Belmaine’s glare cut to her.
Joan took one step back, then lifted her chin as if borrowing courage from every angry kitchen girl who had ever lived and every woman who had ever been told to hush when the truth was standing right there, muddy and bleeding.
“He did.”
Hob grinned down at Osric. “Household’s leaking truth all over the place.”
Osric said something muffled into the mud.
“Speak up,” Hob said. “Can’t hear treason from down there.”
Belmaine’s men had gathered beyond the orchard wall, several bleeding, one clutching his arm, all of them wet, grim, and less confident than they had been when the day still belonged to them.
Two Ashcombe men held them back with drawn blades.
None seemed eager to continue. Not with Galahad stamping rainwater into the mud, Hob looking delighted, and Thomas standing in the orchard like death himself.
Belmaine tried one last smile. It was a poor, thin thing, the sort of smile a man used when he had misplaced the truth and hoped no one would notice the empty shelf.
“A misunderstanding,” he said. “The lady was frightened. Crale misled me. If the document proves false, I am as wronged as any man here.”
Amelia laughed. She couldn’t help it. The sound bubbled up from somewhere raw and reckless, half hysteria, half rage, all disbelief. It was either laugh or start screaming, and screaming felt like letting Belmaine choose the music.
“Sorry,” she said. “No. Try again with fewer lies.”
Belmaine’s eyes narrowed.
Amelia stepped out from behind Thomas before he could stop her. She kept the pottery shard tucked against her palm because growth was important, but stupidity was how people ended up in shallow graves under apple trees.
“You knew Father Odo was dead, or you knew not to ask too many questions. You knew Crale wasn’t my husband. You knew Thomas would come, and that was the point. You wanted him angry. You wanted him to draw steel on your land so you could cry disorder to Pickering and the crown.”
Belmaine kept his big mouth shut for once.
“Then Father Martin knew too much,” she continued. “Dame Margaret wasn’t obedient enough. Joan heard things. Crale got impatient. And you decided dead women make quieter evidence.”
Thomas’s voice dropped. “What did she say?”
Amelia looked at him. “He called me evidence.”
Thomas turned back to Belmaine.
This time, Hob stopped smiling.
Father Martin crossed himself.
Dame Margaret closed her eyes.
Belmaine’s hand moved toward the dagger at his belt.
Thomas was faster. His sword point touched Belmaine’s wrist before the dagger cleared the sheath.
“Do not,” Thomas said.
Belmaine froze.
For several heartbeats, the only sounds were rain dripping from bare branches, Osric’s strained breathing beneath Hob’s boot, and the distant restless stamp of horses beyond the wall.
Somewhere in the orchard, a rotten apple gave up its last brave grip on a branch and landed in the mud with a soft, undignified plop.
Then hooves sounded again.
More riders, but not from the manor, from the road.
Everyone turned as a small party came through the orchard gap, led by Sir Aymon de Sauveterre on a dark horse, pale but upright despite the bandage along one side of his face.
His cloak hung wet and heavy from his shoulders, but there was nothing weak in the cold offense of his gaze as it moved over Belmaine and lingered on the armed men.
Beside him rode Master Pickering, rain glistening on his sober cloak, his sharp little eyes taking in the orchard with the chilly satisfaction of a man whose unpleasant suspicions had found a banquet and meant to taste every dish.
Behind them came Walter, grim as Judgment Day with documents wrapped beneath his cloak, and Friar Huck on a round brown horse that looked as annoyed by politics as Amelia felt.
Huck’s robe was hitched indecorously high to keep it from the mud, his sandals were splashed past saving, and a small oilskin bundle sat tucked beneath one arm as if even rescue and royal law were no reason to travel without provisions.
Huck saw Amelia and crossed himself with visible relief.
Then he saw Osric in the mud and brightened.
“Well,” Huck said.
Master Pickering dismounted with care, his boots sinking into the wet grass. His gaze moved from Belmaine to Thomas, then to Amelia’s cheek, the muddy men, the priest, Dame Margaret, Joan, and finally Osric beneath Hob’s boot.
“I appear,” Pickering said, “to have arrived in the middle of a legal matter.”
Hob snorted. “Near the end, I’d say.”
Thomas didn’t lower his sword.
“Master Pickering,” Belmaine said, finding his court voice with impressive speed. “Lord Ashcombe has invaded my land and assaulted my household.”
Pickering looked at the red-faced man lying facedown in the mud. “Your household seems to have been assaulted by a small woman and a branch.”
“The branch didn’t do as much as I’d hoped,” Amelia said.
Pickering’s gaze slid to her. One brow rose.
Friar Huck beamed. “That’s our girl.”
Thomas’s face tightened at the words, as if they cut and healed at once.
Belmaine drew himself up, though rain had flattened his hair and robbed his fine cloak of much of its authority. “This woman is Edmund Crale’s lawful wife.”
Father Martin stepped forward. “The attestation is false.”
Walter came down from his horse with a speed that belied his age and a ferocity that suggested, given a choice, he’d have preferred to stab someone with a quill.
“And the seal is false.”
He held out a cloth-wrapped packet.
Pickering took it.
Walter’s eyes gleamed with the terrible glory of a steward about to eviscerate paperwork.
“Also, Edmund Crale was held for theft and assault near Worcester less than a fortnight past. He was released three days ago after a payment made by one of Sir Roger’s men.”
Crale, who had been hovering near the orchard wall with the air of a rat considering a drainpipe, made a small noise and looked as if he wished very much to evaporate.
Pickering turned slowly toward him. “Is that so?”
Crale backed up one step.
Hob lifted his axe. “Run. I could use the cheer.”
Crale stopped.
Sir Aymon looked down at Belmaine from his horse, all pale elegance and cold offense. “Your men on the old road were more convincing than this one.”
Belmaine’s eyes flashed. “My men?”
“The two who survived said enough before they thought better of it.”
Sir Aymon touched the bandage at his temple. “You should choose hirelings with stronger loyalty or weaker fear.”
Pickering looked at Thomas. “Lord Ashcombe, lower your sword.”
Thomas didn’t move. Amelia stepped close and touched his wrist.
His hand was cold beneath her fingers, rain-soaked and rigid, the tendons standing out beneath scarred skin. She could feel the violence in him, not wild, never that, but banked and burning with such force that it made the air around them seem heated.
“Thomas,” she said softly.
He looked down at her. The rage in his face didn’t vanish. It broke around her instead, like water around stone. Slowly, he lowered the blade.
Belmaine exhaled.
Thomas took Amelia’s hand and drew her to him, but this time he didn’t hide her. He stood with her beside him, not before him, his fingers wrapped around hers in front of every witness in the orchard.
“She is under my protection,” he said.
Belmaine’s mouth twisted. “You’ve said so before.”
Thomas’s gaze did not waver. “This time, I’m not asking the law to believe me. I brought it with me.”
Pickering’s eyes narrowed.
Walter looked deeply pleased.
Friar Huck murmured, “Saints preserve us, he’s learning.”
Amelia would have laughed if her knees had not chosen that moment to remember the last several hours.
The cold, the fear, the slap, the shard, the wax, the orchard, the awful knowledge of how close she had come to disappearing into the wet countryside like one more inconvenient woman in a world built to lose them.
Thomas felt the tremor in her hand. The man noticed a loose buckle at twenty paces and could probably hear guilt fermenting in a cellar. His grip tightened, warm and certain.
“You came,” she whispered.
His face shifted, and suddenly the orchard, the men, Belmaine, all of it dimmed at the edges.
“Aye.”
“Eventually.”
Pain moved through his eyes. “I know.”
No defense or excuse, just the truth, standing between them in the rain, bruised but breathing.