Chapter 10 #2
The walk back to Ashcombe was slower than the walk out had been.
The first rain darkened the shoulders of tunics and dotted the linen of women’s veils.
The children splashed through ruts despite half-hearted warnings.
Someone began to sing, low at first, then louder, an old harvest song with a tune Amelia didn’t know and words she couldn’t quite make out, but the sound wound through the damp air and made something inside her ache.
Her mother sang, badly and with great confidence, usually Motown while burning pancakes on Saturday mornings.
When Amelia was ten, she had thought every mother danced barefoot in the kitchen with a spatula in her hand and bills hidden beneath the fruit bowl until payday.
Linda Quinn had never been tidy or punctual, never once remembered to buy the correct size trash bags, but she had loved Amelia with a fierceness that could make a school principal retreat behind a desk.
And now that same woman was somewhere seven hundred years away, facing the worst thing Amelia could imagine.
Not knowing what had happened to her daughter.
The castle came into view, smoky and weathered, its stone walls standing strong. It didn’t look like the ruins she’d seen in her own time. It didn’t look like a tourist stop, or a wedding venue, or the sort of place printed on brochures beside words like heritage and restoration.
It looked alive. Threadbare, stubborn, hungry, and alive.
By the time they reached the yard, the rain fell in earnest. Edith herded the children toward the kitchens. Walter guarded his tablet beneath his cloak as if it held the Gospel. Hob carried three scythes over one shoulder and shouted for someone to fetch a dry cloth before rust ruined them all.
Thomas came last, pausing under the gate, rain glistening in his dark hair. Amelia stood near the kitchen door with Alyson’s damp hand tucked into hers, too tired to move and too full of feeling to trust herself to speak.
Thomas looked at the children first, then the baskets, then the tools, then the people moving toward warmth and food.
Then he looked at her.
“Well?” she called, because if she didn’t say something ridiculous, she might cry in front of the entire castle.
His brows drew together. “Well?”
“Did we save the harvest?”
Thomas glanced toward the fields, where the rye stood in bundled rows beneath the rain.
“Aye,” he said, and something in his voice shifted, roughening around the edges. “We saved enough.”
We.
The word slid through Amelia like warm mead, dangerous and sweet.
He strode towards her, stopping inches away, as she held her breath, time stopping when he reached out.
His fingers brushed near her temple, careful as he freed a bit of straw caught in one escaped curl. He held it up between them.
“You have gathered half the field in your hair.”
Her laugh came out shaky. “That’s efficient of me.”
His gaze dropped to her mouth.
Only for a moment.
Barely even that.
But she saw it.
Felt it.
The sounds around her faded, and there was nothing but his hand near her face, and the impossible fact that she wanted him to touch her again.
Alyson tugged at her hand. “Mistress Amelia, Edith says there’s stew.”
“Then we should never keep Edith waiting.”
Alyson nodded gravely. “She has a spoon.”
“A terrifying weapon.”
Thomas’s mouth moved, just barely.
There it was. Not quite a smile, but close enough to make the whole exhausted, rain-soaked, coffee-deprived day tilt toward wonder.
Edith stood with both hands on her hips. “Wash first.”
A collective groan went up.
Amelia brightened. “I love this part.”
Thomas, coming up behind her, said, “Of course you do.”
Walter eyed the bucket near the door, then scowled at Amelia. “This is your doing.”
Old Nan pushed forward, cackling. “Let the lass have her way. I’ve seen cleaner pigs than most of you.”
That settled it.
One by one, grumbling and laughing and complaining as if soap were a personal insult, they washed before entering the hall.
Amelia stood near Edith and tried not to look too triumphant.
Wat scrubbed with exaggerated virtue. Alyson washed each finger carefully and then presented her hands for inspection.
Thomas came last, holding out his hands. They were large, scarred, nicked from work, the nails rimmed with soil despite the washing. Amelia poured water over them from the jug, and he rubbed them together, watching her with an expression she couldn’t read.
“There,” she said, quieter than she meant to.
“Am I fit to enter?”
“I suppose.”
“High praise.”
“I’m known for my generosity.”
He took the drying cloth from her, his fingers brushing hers.
Only that.
A brush.
It was enough to turn her into herself at sixteen when she’d developed her first crush.
Inside, the hall had been made ready. The trestle tables were set, benches had been dragged into place, candles were lit as the light faded, and there were new rushes on the floor.
Men and women sat together with the easy exhaustion of shared labor.
Bread disappeared. Bowls of stew were filled and emptied.
Someone passed ale and wine. Someone else began the harvest song again, softer this time.
Later, when supper had ended and the children had begun nodding where they sat, Thomas walked her to the passage leading toward the women’s sleeping space.
Edith had taken Alyson ahead, and Wat had finally been claimed by sleep against Hob’s side, which Hob pretended to resent while not moving a muscle.
Amelia stopped near the shadowed archway.
“I think today went well,” she said.
“It did.”
“Tomorrow will probably be chaos.”
“Aye.”
“But slightly organized chaos.”
“Your preferred kind?”
“My natural habitat.”
His eyes warmed.
She wished, suddenly and fiercely, that she had better words for what this day had done to her. How strange it felt to be so tired and so full at once. How seeing his people cheer over the cut rye had made something in her ache with wanting to belong.
The corner of his mouth moved. “You should sleep.”
“So should you.”
“I will.”
He leaned one shoulder against the stone, the shadows catching in his dark hair. “There are things to see to.”
“There are always things to see to.”
“Aye.”
She should go. Amelia knew she should. The rules here were different than her own time, and Walter’s voice lived in the back of her head now, reminding her that a closed door, a quiet passage, a hand held too long, all of it could become talk.
Thomas knew it too. She could see the restraint in the line of his body, the way he kept one hand curled at his side.
“You still have straw in your hair,” he said.
“I thought you removed it.”
“That was only one piece.”
“How many are there?”
“A harvest.”
She sighed. “Wonderful.”
Before she could stop him, he reached toward her. Slowly enough that she could have stepped back. Carefully enough that she did not.
His fingers touched one escaped curl near her shoulder where her veil had shifted, and drew a piece of straw free. Then another. His knuckles brushed the side of her neck.
The breath left her in a quiet, traitorous rush as Thomas went still.
The hall noise drifted from behind them, muffled and warm. Somewhere someone laughed. A bench scraped. Edith called for Wat to wake up enough to walk or be carried like a sack of meal, and Hob grumbled.
Thomas held her gaze. “Tomorrow,” he said, voice rougher than before, “do not stand so near the blades.”
Of all the things he could have said. Amelia blinked once, then smiled despite herself. “That’s your big good-night speech?”
“I’ve more to say.” His eyes were silver as he leaned forward.
Then from the hall came Hob’s voice, far too loud. “My lord, if you are done discussing farm implements, Walter has found another problem.”
Thomas closed his eyes as Amelia bit the inside of her cheek.
“Farm implements?” she whispered.
“I shall kill him.”
“No, you need him for harvest.”
“After the harvest, then.”
She laughed, and Thomas looked at her as if the sound had struck him somewhere tender.
“Good night, Thomas,” she said softly.
His expression changed, just enough to make her heart trip.
“Good night, Amelia.”
She went before she could do something ruinous, like touch his hand or ask him to stay or tell him that for one whole day she had almost forgotten to count the distance between herself and home.
Amelia climbed the stairs with aching feet, straw in her hair, chaff in places she refused to think about, and the smell of cut rye clinging to her gown.
She should have been miserable. She should have wanted nothing more than clean sheets, air conditioning, coffee, and the safety of a century that made sense.
Instead, when she lay down that night, with Edith snoring nearby and Alyson curled like a kitten on a pallet close to the wall, Amelia closed her eyes and heard the harvest song again.
Ashcombe wasn’t her home, it couldn’t be.
Home had phones, coffee, her mother, dental appointments, and a return flight waiting for a woman who had missed it by seven centuries.
As she rolled over, she didn’t feel like she had fallen, Amelia felt, impossibly, as if she had been caught.