Chapter 10
AMELIA
By noon, the cool morning air had vanished so completely Amelia suspected it had been a rumor invented by dawn to lure people outdoors.
Heat pressed beneath her veil. Dust clung to the damp place at the back of her neck. Her shift itched where sweat gathered under her arms, and her left heel had already developed a blister.
By the time Edith called the first group to eat, the cut rye lay in ordered swaths behind them, neat enough that even Walter paused and looked at the field with something almost like hope.
The meal took place in shifts because the work couldn’t stop all at once.
Men and women came in from the line red-faced and shining with sweat, their hands rough around cups of small beer as they found shady spots beneath the trees.
Bread went from hand to hand. Cheese was sliced with little knives worn thin from use.
Dried apples disappeared into the mouths of children who were not nearly as subtle as they believed.
Wat tried to trade Alyson his crust for her cheese. His sister looked at him with the cold wisdom of six years and made a face. “Nay.”
“You don’t like cheese.”
“I like it today.”
“You liked my crust yesterday.”
“Yesterday is dead.”
Amelia choked on her bread trying not to laugh.
Hob, who had come up behind her without making a sound despite being the size of a minor outbuilding, folded his arms.
“The small one has the right of it. Yesterday is dead. So is Hugh if he does not cease telling me his back pains him more than any man’s back has ached since God made Adam.”
“Hugh does seem committed to the role,” Amelia said.
Hob’s beard twitched. “You’ve a strange way with words, mistress.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Strange can be useful.”
From Hob, that sounded like a declaration.
Amelia tucked that away carefully, like one of Edith’s dried apples saved for later.
Thomas ate last. He came to the shade only when Hob bodily stepped into his path and said, “My lord, if you fall into the rye I shall leave you there until dusk and tell everyone you chose to commune with the grain.”
Thomas gave him a look that would have sent a weaker man to his knees.
Hob smiled as if refreshed by it.
Amelia watched him accept bread and cheese from Edith with the same grave thanks he might have offered for a king’s ransom.
There was dust in his hair, and a thin line of sweat ran from his temple down along the edge of his scar.
He sat on a low flat stone where he could see the field, his scythe laid across his knees, his hand around a cup of small beer.
He looked tired. Not simply hot or worn from working, though he was both, but tired in some deeper place. The kind of tired that came from counting what could still go wrong even while everyone else celebrated what had gone right.
Amelia knew that kind of tired. She had lived with it in hotel ballrooms, in conference centers, in church basements dressed up with twinkle lights and rented linens, standing with a clipboard while the DJ lost power, the caterer misplaced the vegetarian meals, and the bride’s divorced parents discovered they had been seated at the same table.
Only the stakes had changed. Nobody starved if tulips arrived in the wrong shade of blush.
Here, a bad harvest could empty cottages, a man like Thomas could swing a scythe until his hands blistered and still lose everything to rain, rent, or a neighbor with smoother manners and deeper coffers.
He must have felt her looking because his eyes lifted.
Amelia quickly became fascinated by a crumb on her sleeve.
A warm sound escaped him. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sigh.
That day, she learned that Osbern knew the weather by the ache in his knee and the behavior of the swallows.
She learned that Hob could get three sulking men back into motion by standing near them silently until shame did the work.
She learned that Walter’s mayhap contained at least seventeen separate meanings, only three of which were encouraging.
And she learned that small beer was not as terrible when one was thirsty enough, though Amelia still wanted coffee so badly she might have bartered a minor title for it.
She also learned that Thomas did not ask anything of his people he would not do himself.
By afternoon, his tunic was damp, his hair curling wildly at his neck, his jaw shadowed darker with stubble and dust, and there was a thin red line across one forearm where rye had scratched him. He looked less like a lord than a man carved out of stone. He also looked, unfortunately, incredible.
Amelia carried a basket of cords past him and nearly tripped over nothing.
Thomas caught her by the elbow before she could face-plant into the stubble.
His hand was hot. Callused. Steady.
“You are tired,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“You nearly fell over your own feet.”
“They were in the way.”
His thumb shifted slightly against her sleeve, not quite a caress, but something.
“You have done enough.”
“Don’t start.”
His brows lowered. “Start what?”
“The lordly protective thing where you decide I’m delicate and should go sit beneath a tree while everyone else works themselves into pudding.”
“Pudding?”
“Not important.”
“You are small.”
“I am aware of that too.”
“And tired.”
“So is everyone.”
“You are unused to the work.”
“Yes, and tomorrow I’ll probably wake up unable to move. That is tomorrow Amelia’s problem.”
His mouth twitched. “Tomorrow Amelia?”
“She’s very responsible. I trust her completely.”
Thomas huffed, and for one impossible second she thought he might laugh. Truly laugh. The urge rose in his face, softened his mouth, lightened his eyes, and Amelia would have given a great deal to hear it.
Then Walter shouted from the far side of the field, “My lord!”
The moment broke.
Thomas released her arm. “Stay clear of the blades.”
“Go be lordly somewhere else.”
He looked down at her for one heartbeat too long. “As you wish.”
Then he was gone, striding across the field toward Walter, and Amelia stood there with her basket and her heart fluttering in her chest.
The rest of the day stretched golden and brutal.
Clouds gathered beyond the Malverns, small at first, then dark along the undersides.
Every person in the field seemed to notice at once, though no one pointed.
The rhythm shifted. Scythes moved faster.
Binders bent lower. Children carried water at a trot until Amelia reminded them, twice, that tripping with a full jug was not a noble sacrifice to the harvest gods, it was just a mess.
Walter fussed and fussed. “Those sheaves must stand higher. Higher, I said. They’ll not dry if you leave them sprawled like drunkards.”
Hugh muttered something about his back.
Walter rounded on him. “If your back can carry complaint, it can carry rye.”
Amelia pressed her lips together so hard they nearly disappeared.
Edith leaned near her. “Best not laugh. It encourages him.”
“Walter?”
“Hugh.”
The first distant roll of thunder moved across the hills late in the afternoon.
Every head lifted. For one breath the whole field went still, suspended beneath the sound.
Then Thomas’s voice cut clean across the field.
“Finish this row. Bind what is down. Leave nothing loose.”
No shouting or panic. Just the command, low and certain.
Amelia’s heart kicked. There was a difference between a man who liked being obeyed and one who was obeyed because people trusted him to stand steady when the sky turned black.
Saints and sneakers, he was dangerous to her heart.
The final hour became a blur of motion. Amelia’s arms no longer felt like arms but like ropes someone had attached to her shoulders. She carried two baskets, then one, then none when Edith caught sight of her face and snapped, “You’ll sit before you topple.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re the color of old flour.”
“That’s just my natural glow.”
“Sit.”
Amelia sat on an overturned basket in the shade of the hedgerow and drank water because if she fainted, Edith would never let her forget it. Alyson leaned against her side. “Your hair is coming undone.”
“I know.”
“You look like fire.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“It’s pretty.” Alyson touched one curl with the reverence of someone approaching a relic.
“My mama had brown hair. Wat says he doesn’t remember, but I do. A little.”
Amelia’s heart folded in on itself as she tucked an arm around the girl before she thought better of it.
“I bet your mama’s hair was beautiful,” she said, because if she said anything else, she would cry.
Alyson nodded. “She sang when she kneaded bread.”
“She did?”
“Mmm. Wat says he doesn’t remember, but he does. He just doesn’t like remembering.”
Changing the subject, Wat asked, “Did we win?”
Amelia looked out over the field. The last sheaves stood upright in golden bundles leaning together against whatever weather came.
Men moved like shadows between them. Women gathered any remaining stray stalks.
Hob’s voice rumbled somewhere to the left, telling Hugh that if he died from honest labor, Hob would carve the words never stopped talking on his grave.
Thomas stood at the far edge of the field, dark against gold, scythe resting against his shoulder as he surveyed the work. Walter stood beside him, tablet in hand, and for once did not look displeased.
“We didn’t lose,” Amelia said softly.
Wat considered that with the solemnity of a statesman. “That’s almost winning.”
“Yes,” Amelia said, watching Thomas turn toward them as the first cool wind brushed across the field. “It is.”
A drop of rain struck her hand, then another.
No one shrieked or scattered like they had at her cousin’s wedding. They simply lifted baskets, gathered tools, collected children, and turned toward the manor with the weary satisfaction of people who had done as much as they could before the storm.