Chapter 9
AMELIA
Amelia woke before dawn to the sound of a rooster screaming as if someone had stolen his inheritance and insulted his mother on the way out.
For one blessed, foolish second, she didn’t remember where she was.
Then the straw beneath her shoulder scratched through the linen of her shift, the air smelled of smoke, old stone, rushes, and someone’s damp woolen stockings instead of hotel soap and carpet cleaner, and everything came tumbling back into place.
Ashcombe.
Thomas.
Falling through time to the year 1265.
Her mom.
That last thought struck hard enough that Amelia sat up too quickly and cracked her head on a beam.
“Ow. Spinach fudge.”
Alyson snuffled in her sleep on the pallet nearby and rolled over, one small hand tucked beneath her cheek. Edith, curled beneath a blanket near the wall, snored loud enough to wake the dead, which Amelia decided she would never mention unless she wished to die young and unmourned.
For a moment she sat in the gray dark of the chamber, one hand pressed to the sore place on her head and the other fisted in the blanket.
Her mom would know by now that Amelia had vanished.
Linda Quinn had raised one daughter alone for the past twenty-nine years.
They always communicated. Amelia texted when she landed.
She texted when Bree’s footballer wedding became every bit as ridiculous as predicted.
She would have texted after the reception too, probably something about wet shoes, overconfident groomsmen, and how she couldn’t wait to come home.
Except she hadn’t texted.
She’d vanished in a storm, wearing a summer cocktail dress and heels that could barely survive gravel, much less a police search.
By now her mother would have called Bree. Her cousin, back from her honeymoon by now, would have cried, because Bree cried when coffee shops were out of oat milk and would likely dissolve over an actual missing cousin.
Someone would have checked the hotel, found Amelia’s suitcase with the neatly folded backup outfit, her phone charger, her hair products lined up like little soldiers on the bathroom sink, and the itinerary printed in triplicate because her mother teased her for being the only person alive who packed emergency copies of vacation plans.
Maybe they found her purse in the tower.
The thought of her mother standing in some English police station, small and frantic and furious, trying to explain that her daughter did not simply disappear, made Amelia’s throat close until it hurt to breathe.
Her mom had been the chaotic one when Amelia was little, always misplacing keys, burning the toast, running out of milk, and forgetting which bill was due until the pink envelope arrived.
Amelia had become the list-maker, the calendar-keeper, the girl who laid out school clothes before bed and reminded her mother to buy gas before the tank dipped below fumes and hope.
They had been a team, the two of them, one storm and one umbrella, and now Amelia had broken the one rule neither of them had ever said aloud.
Do not leave the other one wondering.
She pressed both hands to her face and breathed through the panic until it eased enough for her to swallow.
She couldn’t get to her mother, not to a phone, or a police station, or the American embassy, or a single person who would understand the phrase missing person report without assuming she had struck her head and needed a priest.
With a firm shake of her head, she pushed the thoughts down deep.
There was nothing she could do about her old life, but Ashcombe needed the rye brought in before the rain.
Thomas needed the accounts untangled before Michaelmas when the King might take his title, lands, and home, all because he fought on the wrong side of some battle.
Wat and Alyson needed water carried, bread counted, and someone to make sure they didn’t wander under a scythe because medieval childhood was apparently one long attempt to be accidentally maimed.
So Amelia quickly dressed, stopped by the solar, and did the only thing she knew how to do when the world fell apart.
She made a list.
By the time she reached the kitchen, Edith was waiting with a veil in one hand and the expression of a woman who had already lost patience with the day, though the sun had not yet had the courtesy to appear.
“Sit.”
Amelia sat on a low stool near the hearth while Edith began pinning her veil into place with the grim determination of a woman fortifying a border keep.
“Hold still.”
“I am holding still.”
“You’re twitching like a flea on a hot skillet.”
“I’m being stabbed in the head.”
“You’re being made respectable.”
“That’s definitely worse.”
Edith snorted and tucked one of Amelia’s curls beneath the linen. The curl, bright red and entirely unrepentant, sprang loose near her ear before Edith had even reached for another pin.
Edith gave it the same look Thomas gave unpaid rents.
“It wants to be free,” Amelia said.
“It wants to get you stared at.”
“It can be both.”
“A woman’s hair is her own business until the world makes it everyone else’s,” Edith said, pulling the veil forward and pinning it again. “Out among the reapers, you keep covered.”
Amelia tried not to move while Edith tied a plain apron over the front of her gown.
The kirtle was soft gray wool, serviceable and warm enough for the chill before sunrise, though Amelia suspected it would become an oven by midday.
Beneath it she wore a linen shift that had been washed so many times it had gone thin at the elbows, stockings tied above the knee with garters she had nearly knotted badly enough to lose both legs, and shoes Edith insisted were better than the odd ones Amelia had arrived in.
They were, strictly speaking. They didn’t have heels thin enough to spear a fish.
Edith tucked a small cloth pouch into the belt at Amelia’s waist, then gave the knot a tug sharp enough to make Amelia straighten.
“What’s this?”
“Bread. Cheese. Dried apples. You’ll forget to eat if no one makes you.”
The kindness of it, offered so briskly, made Amelia’s chest ache. “Thank you.”
Edith narrowed her eyes. “Do not look at me so. I’ll not have you fainting in the rye and giving the men something else to be fools about.”
The kitchen had already come awake around them, all heat and shadow and purposeful hands.
The hearth fires had been coaxed high, throwing gold light against soot-dark stone, copper pots, hanging herbs, and the faces of women who moved with the silent efficiency of people who knew morning was a beast best tackled by the horns.
Loaves were wrapped in cloth. Wheels of cheese were cut into wedges.
Jugs were filled with small beer, and a bucket of sweet well water stood ready because Amelia had apparently become the patron saint of making people drink water whether they liked it or not.
A boy no older than ten staggered beneath a basket until Edith barked at him to use both hands if he wished to keep both feet.
The smells were almost enough to make Amelia forget she was exhausted. There was hot bread, yeast, smoke, sharp cheese, onions sweating in a pan, and beneath it all the faint sweet-sour tang of small beer.
She missed coffee with a longing so specific it had become a separate organ in her body.
Wat darted past with two wooden cups dangling from his fingers and Alyson trailing him like a small determined duckling.
The girl’s pale brown hair had been braided unevenly, her gown was too short at the wrists, and her solemn little face looked as if she had been entrusted with royal secrets instead of a basket of napkins.
“Mistress Amelia,” Alyson whispered, tugging at her sleeve.
Amelia bent. “Good morning.”
“Wat says we’re to carry water like proper workers.”
Wat skidded to a stop, thin legs and elbows everywhere. “I said I was a proper worker. She’s too little.”
Alyson’s chin came up. “I am not too little. I can carry a cup.”
“You spilled yesterday.”
“That was because you pushed me.”
“I did not.”
Amelia pressed her lips together because laughing would only encourage them.
“Both of you are going to be very important today.”
Wat straightened. Alyson’s eyes went round.
“But important workers listen the first time they are told something, don’t run through the fields, don’t get near the scythes, and don’t argue with the person handing them water.”
Wat opened his mouth.
Amelia looked at him.
He shut it.
Alyson smiled smugly at her brother.
“Also,” Amelia added, “important workers do not look smug.”
Alyson’s smile vanished so quickly Amelia nearly lost the battle with her own.
She watched the two of them dart toward the table, Wat all elbows and Alyson solemnly clutching her little cup as if it were a chalice from a cathedral treasury.
“Where are their parents?” she asked quietly.
Edith’s hands stilled for half a breath before she reached for another cloth.
“Gone. Their father was taken when the king’s men came through Lowmere, and their mother followed before the church bell had finished tolling. Fever, grief, smoke, fear. Take your pick, child. War kills with more than swords.”
Amelia’s stomach tightened. “And Thomas took them in?”
“Aye.” Edith’s voice softened, though only a little, as if tenderness were something she preferred to hide beneath plain words.
“He found them after the fighting near Blackmere, picking through the field for food, poor lambs. Wat had Alyson by the hand and a knife too dull to frighten a goose, but he stood before her as if he might hold off the whole king’s army.
Lord Ashcombe brought them back wrapped in his own cloak and told Walter to find them pallets by the kitchen fire. ”
The image struck Amelia with such force that she looked toward the yard as if she could see him through the stone. “He did that?”
Edith gave her a sidelong look. “He does many things and says little of them.”
Amelia looked back at Wat and Alyson. Wat was trying to balance three cups in one hand while Alyson scolded him with all the authority of a very small queen.