Chapter 17
THOMAS
By noon, the coffer held coin enough to pay the king. Barely.
That was the word that mattered. Barely sat on the table between the rolls and the tally sticks like an unwelcome guest who had brought all his brothers.
Barely paid the farm, stocked the barns, kept seed for spring.
Barely left enough cheese, beans, oats, salted meat, and hope to carry them through the winter if weather was not cruel.
And if the roofs held, and no sickness came, no cow died, no neighbor turned wolf, and no escheator decided Ashcombe looked weak enough to swallow.
Barely was still better than not.
The last tenant filed out just as the grey light shifted toward afternoon.
The hall didn’t empty, not truly, because halls never emptied.
Dogs slept near the hearth. Men lingered over cups.
Edith ordered two girls to carry the geese to the yard before they fouled the rushes.
Hob escorted the miller toward the door, one large hand on the man’s shoulder in a manner that looked friendly to anyone who did not know Hob.
Walter sat very still, staring at the totals.
Amelia ran her finger down the final column. Once. Again. A third time as he watched her shoulders.
They had been high all morning, though she had hidden it well with brisk words, sharp little jokes, and that bright competence of hers that made men forget she was frightened.
Now, as her fingertip reached the bottom of the page, her shoulders came down half an inch.
Only half. But Thomas saw. She had feared ruin too.
The knowledge moved through him strangely.
She could have let Ashcombe be merely the place she had fallen.
A hardship. A temporary shelter. A place filled with smoke, fleas, and men who needed reminding to wash.
Instead she had fretted over his rents until she had not slept.
She had argued with Walter until both of them were hoarse.
She had learned the tenants’ names, the barns’ shortages, the larder’s weakness, the lies in Wexford’s hand.
She had made his burden hers. Thomas didn’t know what to do with that.
“You’re clear,” Amelia said quietly.
Walter lifted his head as she turned the roll toward Thomas. There was a little smudge of ink along her jaw, as if she had touched her face with the back of her hand. “You can pay the king and feed everyone through to spring.”
Walter sucked in a breath.
“Barely,” Amelia added, because she had become honest enough about Ashcombe to be cruel when needed. “If the winter’s kind and the stores hold.”
Walter was still staring at the roll. “We have enough?”
Amelia nodded. “Enough to meet the obligation, to prove the manor is being managed, and enough that if Master Pickering comes sniffing around, he’ll find the accounts in order and rents properly collected.”
“Sniffing?” Walter repeated.
“Like a hound,” Thomas said.
Walter looked pained. “My lord.”
“What? She has the right of it.”
Amelia’s mouth twitched.
Thomas looked down at the total. The numbers didn’t change. He had counted them in the dark that morning, counted them yesterday, counted them until the figures blurred, yet part of him had not believed until this moment.
Ashcombe stood. Not firm. Not safe. Not beyond reach of the crown, weather, hunger, or Belmaine. But stood.
The relief that moved through him was heavy, almost painful, like setting down a shield he had forgotten he carried. His hand curled around the edge of the table until the old wood pressed into his palm.
“You did it,” Amelia said softly.
He looked at her.
“No,” he said. “You did it.”
She shook her head at once. “I made the lists. You held the place together long enough for there to be something to count.”
For a heartbeat, they simply looked at one another across the rolls.
The hall went on around them. Men talked.
A bench scraped. One of the geese honked in outrage from the yard.
Edith scolded someone near the screens passage.
Walter pretended he was not sitting beside two people who had forgotten he existed.
Then Amelia bumped her shoulder lightly against Thomas’s.
It was nothing. A small, careless touch, the sort she gave without thinking.
She nudged Wat that way when he leaned too far over her tablet.
She touched Edith’s sleeve to ask a question.
She tapped Hob’s arm when he said something dreadful in French and she wanted him to explain it without the children hearing.
Amelia lived as if touch were ordinary, as if the body were not a battlefield on which every glance, every brush of fingers, every moment too close could become evidence.
Her shoulder touched his for less than a breath. Thomas felt it everywhere.
Amelia had already returned to the roll, unaware or pretending to be, her quill moving as she made some final mark. The curl at her temple shifted when she bent her head. The ink on her jaw looked like a small dark freckle beside the others. Her mouth moved faintly as she counted under her breath.
He wanted her.
Not merely the wanting of a man for a fetching woman, though there was that, God knew.
That was a daily affliction and had become so common he had begun treating it like bad weather.
The flash of her ankle when she gathered her skirts from the mud.
The curve of her neck beneath that damned escaping hair.
The clever mouth that should have been outlawed in three shires.
The way she looked at him sometimes as if he were not broken, only difficult.
Aye, he wanted her. He was made of flesh, not stone, no matter what half his household seemed to believe. But this was worse. He wanted the rest.
Wanted to sit beside her at this table when the year turned and the rushes were fresh for Christmas, wanted to come in cold from the lists and find her bent over some problem, muttering about men, mud, and the criminal absence of coffee, whatever that was.
He wanted to watch her teach Alyson letters, argue with Walter over columns, bully Hob into washing his left thumb again, and look up when Thomas entered as if some private part of her had been waiting.
He wanted to be the man who unpinned that glorious hair at night, one copper curl at a time, and learned whether it truly fell to her waist as Edith claimed.
He wanted to know what she had looked like the day before she’d arrived at Ashcombe. In the place she grieved and would not name. He wanted to know who had loved her, who had failed to love her properly, who had been fool enough to let her go.
He wanted to make her laugh the way Hob had made her laugh in the yard, helplessly, with her whole self.
No. Worse. He wanted her to laugh that way because of him. It was the most dangerous thing he had ever wanted.
It was not the hot wild danger of a charge or the sharp bright fear of blades in the fog.
It was a softer danger, and therefore worse.
It crept beneath armor. It made a man imagine mornings.
It made him look at a crumbling castle and think, not merely I must hold this, but mayhap there could be joy here.
Thomas knew better. He had learned in mud and blood and smoke. Men who imagined futures invited God to take inventory. So he did what he had always done with things he wanted and could not have. He set his jaw, turned his eyes from the side of Amelia’s face, and reminded himself of the facts.
She was a stranger and he was a disloyal baron, his loyalty stained by Montfort’s banner, one bad report from crown hands in his coffers, one bad season from ruin.
He had no business wanting any woman, least of all one the world would already be eager to condemn.
And the surest way to ruin Amelia in this century was to be seen wanting her.
He looked toward the hall, toward the men lingering near the hearth, toward the tenants not yet out of earshot, toward Walter’s stiff profile.
Every glance mattered. Every softness could become a story. Every story could become a weapon.
Belmaine would make one if he could. Thomas had seen the way the man looked at her. His hand tightened until the table edge bit his palm. Then there was the last fact. The oldest one. The truest.
He had failed to keep alive nearly everyone he had ever let himself need.
There were faces he could not forget. Hugh Tanner’s surprised eyes.
Wexford dying in the mud. Men who had trusted Thomas’s banner and been carried home under none.
Boys who had followed him because he had asked and then never saw home again.
Thomas was good at fighting. Good at taking blows, and good at standing between danger and whatever stood behind him. He was not a man who got to keep things.
He had made his peace with that in the mud at Evesham, and he would make it again, every morning if need be, for as long as Amelia sat at his table.
“You’ve gone all thundery again,” Amelia said.
Thomas blinked. She hadn’t looked up from the roll.
“I have not.”
“You have. I can hear you brooding from here. It’s very loud.”
Walter made a strangled sound.
Thomas turned his head slowly. “Brooding makes no sound.”
“Yours does.”
“I am reckoning the king’s farm.”
“You’re reckoning it upside down.”
He looked down. Bloody hell, he was.
Amelia’s lips pressed together.
“Do not laugh,” he said.
“I would never.”
“You are laughing.”
“Only on the inside.”
Walter coughed into his fist. It sounded suspiciously like a man choking on amusement and trying to disguise it as age.
Thomas turned the roll around. “It was handed to me thus.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Amelia said.
Hob, from near the hearth, called, “Was he holding it upside down again?”
“Again?” Thomas demanded.
The hall, treacherous pack of ingrates that it was, began to laugh.