Chapter 39
AMELIA
By morning, all of Ashcombe knew their lord had asked Amelia to marry him.
No one knew, precisely, how he had asked.
This was fortunate, because the true answer involved a storm, a sword, a door in the air, Thomas nearly trying to wrestle time itself, Friar Huck praying like a man on familiar terms with terror, and Hob crossing himself so many times he had likely bruised his own chest.
So the household invented its own version.
This, Amelia discovered before breakfast, was how history was made. Not by facts, but by Edith deciding which facts were respectable enough to survive.
According to Mald, Thomas had gone down on one knee.
According to Joan, he had pledged his heart in the solar by candlelight.
Hob, who knew better and was enjoying himself far too much, said Thomas had likely grunted, scowled, and frightened the lady into agreement.
According to Wat, Thomas had promised Amelia a castle, a horse, and the right to tell Walter what to do.
According to Alyson, Amelia had said yes because Thomas was “the tallest and most scary in a good way, and therefore probably the best.”
Walter objected to all of these versions on grounds of accuracy, propriety, and vocabulary.
“No man,” Walter said, standing in the hall with a cup of small beer in one hand and a wax tablet in the other, “should become betrothed without first considering the legal, financial, and customary implications.”
Amelia looked at Thomas. “Did you consider the implications?”
Thomas, seated beside her at the high table with the air of a man who had expected battle but found himself ambushed by happiness, looked at Walter.
Then at Amelia.
Then down at their joined hands, which he had placed openly on the bench between them as if he were daring God, crown, Walter, and the entire English system of propriety to object.
“Aye,” he said.
Walter looked relieved.
Thomas added, “I considered that I wanted her.”
Hob made a delighted choking sound into his cup.
Walter closed his eyes.
Amelia’s heart did something deeply inconvenient behind her ribs.
“You cannot put that in a contract,” Walter said faintly.
“Nay,” Thomas said. “But it seems useful in a marriage.”
Friar Huck lifted his cup. “Sound theology.”
“Is it?” Amelia asked.
“It is now,” Huck said.
The hall had changed overnight. Not in any way a mason could measure.
The roof still leaked in two places, one shutter still banged whenever the wind caught it from the east, and the table nearest the hearth had a wobble that made every cup placed upon it live a brief but exciting life.
Yet the air itself felt different. Lighter.
As if the manor had been carrying a stone in its chest and someone had finally lifted it away.
People smiled at Amelia when she passed. Not the cautious smiles they had given the strange woman from nowhere. Not the fond, worried smiles after Belmaine’s defeat. These were wide, conspiratorial smiles, full of plans and meaning and a truly alarming amount of opinion.
Betrothed, Amelia had learned, was not a private condition. It was a public sport.
Mald advised her to praise Thomas’s shoulders often, because men liked to believe their shoulders had achieved something through merit rather than bone structure.
Joan said a husband should always be kept slightly uncertain whether he had pleased his wife, as it encouraged effort.
Edith said both girls were fools and that a husband required feeding, managing, and correction in equal parts.
Friar Huck said honey softened tempers, sweetened tongues, and should be present at all important conversations.
Hob said ale worked faster.
Walter said none of this was useful and attempted to explain dower rights.
Alyson asked if wooing involved presents and whether she might also be wooed with cherries.
Wat asked Thomas if he intended to compose a love song.
At that, the entire hall went silent.
Thomas stared at the boy.
“No.”
“You could,” Wat said, with the wary bravery of a child poking a sleeping bear to see whether it had improved overnight.
“I could not.”
Hob leaned against the wall, arms folded, eyes bright with wicked joy. “Every lady likes a song, my lord.”
Thomas turned his head slowly.
Hob smiled. “Or so I’ve heard.”
“You’ve heard wrong.”
“Mayhap a poem, then,” Huck said, because friars were apparently not above tossing dry twigs onto a fire.
Thomas looked at Huck. “You too?”
“I am invested in the health of this union.”
“I proposed.”
“A fine beginning,” Huck said. “But wooing does not cease at victory. It is a garden, my son. You do not plant one seed and then stand in the yard expecting pottage.”
Huck grinned. “Nor,” he added, “do you marry in a rush because the hall has gone soft in the head. The banns will be cried, witnesses gathered, and enough mead brewed to make even Hob sentimental.”
Hob lowered his cup. “That is slander.”
“It is prophecy,” Huck said.
Amelia pressed her lips together.
“Do not laugh,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m being supportive.”
“You are shaking.”
“That’s support trying to escape.”
His mouth twitched.
Saints and spreadsheets, that almost-smile.
Amelia was getting dangerously fond of it.
It was quiet. Rare. A little crooked on one side because of the scar along his jaw.
In her old life, she had once worked a charity gala where a famous actor smiled at her and every woman in the room sighed like the wind.
Thomas’s almost-smile would have ruined the man.
Reduced him to ash. Left nothing but cheekbones and shame.
“You’re staring,” Thomas said.
“You’re being wooed by committee. I’m trying to appreciate the moment.”
“I am not being wooed.”
“Right. You’re being instructed in wooing.”
“Worse.”
She leaned closer. “For what it’s worth, I don’t require a song.”
His gaze warmed. “Good.”
“A poem would be funny, though.”
“No.”
“A short poem?”
“No.”
“What about one line?”
“Amelia.”
She sighed. “Fine. But I reserve the right to revisit this after mead.”
Hob pointed at her. “That’s a wise woman.”
Thomas looked at Hob. “Why are you still here?”
“To offer counsel.”
“You have none.”
“I have much. First, never tell a woman to calm herself.”
Amelia pointed at Hob. “That is excellent advice.”
“Second,” Hob continued, warming to his subject, “if she asks whether you like her gown, the answer is aye.”
“What if I have not seen the gown?”
“Aye.”
“What if there is no gown?”
“Aye.”
“What if—”
“Aye,” Hob said firmly.
Thomas considered him for a long moment. “You have been married?”
“Nay.”
“Betrothed?”
“Nay.”
“Courted a woman longer than three days?”
Hob lifted his cup. “I observe.”
Edith snorted from near the hearth. “You lurk.”
“A useful soldier habit.”
“A useless domestic one.”
Amelia laughed, and the sound moved through the hall like sunlight finding cracks in old stone.
She had not slept enough. Her heart still ached when she thought of her mother in the ruined tower, clutching Amelia’s purse in the rain.
Her hand still bore the small cut where the sapphire had cut her.
And somewhere in the quiet corner of her mind lived the knowledge that only three men in this room knew the truth of her.
Thomas.
Hob.
Huck.
The three who had seen the door open. The three who had looked through seven hundred years and said nothing.
Hob caught her eye across the hall. His humor softened, just for a moment, into something steadier. A promise without words.
Huck, seated near the hearth with honey on his bread and prayer still tucked somewhere behind his eyes, gave her the smallest nod.
Thomas’s hand closed over hers.
He knew where her thoughts had gone. Of course he did. The man missed entire conversations about fabric and propriety, but could read fear in the angle of her fingers.
“No one else knows,” he said quietly.
Amelia looked up at him.
His voice lowered so only she could hear. “No one else needs to.”
A tightness she had not known she carried loosened beneath her breastbone.
“Edith suspects.”
“Edith suspects everything.”
“That’s true.”
“She knows enough to guard you. Not enough to grieve what she cannot fathom.”
Amelia blinked against a sudden sting in her eyes.
Thomas’s thumb brushed over her knuckles, careful of the cut. “Your truth is yours.”
She looked at him for a long second, this impossible medieval man who had every legal right in his world to command, question, expose, and claim, and who instead sat beside her in a smoky hall giving her ownership of herself.
No wonder she had stayed. No wonder she would choose him again. Before she could answer, the horn sounded from the gate.
Every voice in the hall stopped.
The shift was instant. Laughter gone. Cups lowered. Hands moving toward knives. Hob straightening from the wall, all jest burned away. Thomas rising in a single smooth motion, one hand already at his sword.
Amelia stood with him.
Thomas looked down at her cream gown, the green ribbon Alyson had tied around her wrist as a “betrothed lady token,” and the stubborn set of her chin.
“You were about to tell me to stay behind,” she said.
“Aye.”
“Was it going to work?”
“Nay.”
“Good. We’re learning.”
His jaw tightened, but his eyes warmed for half a heartbeat before he turned toward the door.
The hall doors opened to cold daylight.
Four riders waited in the yard, their cloaks spattered with mud, their horses blowing steam into the autumn air. Riders from the queen’s household.
Walter made a sound like a quill snapping in half.
“Saints,” he whispered. “Not again.”
The rider dismounted. Not the same man who had brought the sword, but kin to him in bearing, sober, efficient, and possessed of the face of someone who had carried both good news and death warrants and preferred neither to be mishandled.
“Lord Ashcombe?”
Thomas stepped forward. “Aye.”
The man bowed. Deeper than the last messenger had.
That alone changed the air in the yard.
“I come from Lady Eleanor’s household by command of Her Grace the Queen, and with seal from those empowered to speak upon the matter of Ashcombe.”