Chapter 22
THOMAS
The murrey-and-gold livery appeared at the gate before Thomas had finished his morning ale, which told him exactly how much respect Sir Roger Belmaine had for him.
Men who respected you waited until a decent hour.
Men who wished to remind you they could enter your day whenever they liked arrived before the household had finished breaking its fast, with horses stamping in the yard, cloaks bright against the chilly morning, and servants looking about as though they had come to inspect something already half purchased.
Thomas set down his cup without finishing it.
The ale was thin and sour, watered more than he liked because Edith had begun stretching stores with the zeal of a woman preparing to fight winter with a ladle.
A heel of bread sat on the trencher before him beside a smear of soft cheese and one boiled egg he had not yet touched.
Across the hall, Wat was trying to hide the fact he had fed half his bread to one of the dogs.
Alyson, having appointed herself moral authority on breakfast ever since Amelia’s clean-hands campaign began, was watching him with the severe pleasure of someone about to inform.
Amelia was not at the table.
Thomas had noticed that before the livery appeared.
She had been everywhere and nowhere these past three days.
In the stillroom. In the buttery. With Edith over stores.
With Walter over the accounts. With Wat and Alyson in the yard.
Always working. Always useful, with a task in hand and a reason to leave before any conversation could settle into something more dangerous than barley or salt.
She had begun calling him my lord.
He hadn’t understood what wound had opened between them. He had understood only that she had stepped back, and each inch of that careful distance had set his temper lower and colder, like water under ice.
Now Belmaine’s colors stood in his yard.
Thomas pushed away from the table. Hob, who had been near the hearth with a cup in one hand and a slice of bread in the other, set both down and fell into step beside him.
Hob had been falling into step at Thomas’s shoulder for years and showed no sign of stopping. He was grateful for it.
He would, naturally, sooner bite through his own tongue than say so aloud.
At the hall door, Edith caught his eye. The face she wore now said quite plainly that men in fine cloaks before noon were likely to bring trouble, lice, or both.
Thomas stepped into the yard. The morning was hard and pale, with frost silvering the edges of the water trough and mist clinging low along the wall.
Smoke lifted from the bakehouse chimney, thin and blue.
The mud had stiffened overnight, though it would soften by noon and turn the yard back into a sucking brown mess.
Crows gathered on the roofline of the stable, glossy black and judgmental.
Belmaine had come with four men this time.
Not six. That should have felt like less of a threat. It did not.
Four was a number chosen to look courteous while still reminding every watching eye that Sir Roger Belmaine did not travel without steel.
His men wore good boots, better cloaks than any in Ashcombe owned, and expressions trained into blankness.
The murrey-and-gold cloth at their shoulders was new enough that the colors had not yet been dulled by the weather.
Belmaine sat his fat grey gelding at the center of the yard as though he had arrived for a hunt and expected the quarry to be grateful.
He wore a wool cloak lined in dark fur, a belt worked with little silver mounts, and gloves soft enough that Thomas doubted they had ever touched a plow, sword hilt, or anything heavier than a cup of spiced wine.
His beard had been trimmed with care. His smile, when he saw Thomas, was warm enough to curdle milk.
“Ashcombe.”
Belmaine swung down with the easy confidence of a man who had never once considered that he might be unwelcome. He came forward with both hands extended, the same handclasp as before, too warm, lingering, as if he meant any man watching to see fellowship where there was none.
Thomas let him take his hand and did not squeeze hard enough to break anything. An act of mercy, really.
“I hoped to find you at your leisure,” Belmaine said.
“I am never at my leisure.” That was true and had the added benefit of being unfriendly.
Belmaine smiled as if Thomas had made a jest. “Then I shall be brief.”
Hob made a faint sound behind Thomas. No man who said he would be brief ever was.
Belmaine looked around the yard, taking in the stable, the repaired east wall, the stacked timber, the boys carrying kindling, the new thatch laid in bundles near the hall. His eyes lingered on each improvement with a careful, measuring quality Thomas disliked.
“Your place looks better than when last I saw it,” Belmaine said. “Michaelmas was kind?”
“Michaelmas was paid.”
“A miracle in these times.”
“Work,” Thomas said.
“Ah.” Belmaine’s smile sharpened. “Even better. Miracles make men grateful. Work makes them proud.”
Thomas said nothing.
The man had not come to discuss weather, walls, or pride. Belmaine turned his gaze toward the hall. “A cold morning. Walk with me?”
“No.”
The word landed between them as Belmaine blinked.
Hob turned his head slightly, as if admiring a bird on the wall.
“Say what you came to say.”
For one heartbeat the warmth in Belmaine’s face thinned. It returned quickly, but Thomas had seen what lay beneath, and filed it away with the same part of him that watched an opponent’s shoulder before the blow.
“As you wish.” Belmaine folded his gloved hands. “Plain speech, then. Between neighbors.”
“We are neighbors.”
“Friends, I had hoped.”
“We are neighbors,” Thomas repeated.
This time Belmaine laughed. A soft, polished laugh, the sort a man used at another man’s table when the meat was overdone and the host too useful to offend.
“Very well. Neighbors.” His gaze flicked once toward Hob, then back again. “What I propose concerns both our houses. Mayhap we might speak without your man-at-arms breathing at your shoulder?”
“Hob hears what I hear.”
Hob inclined his head. “Unless I am asleep, Sir Roger. Then I hear more.”
Belmaine’s eyes cooled.
Thomas nearly smiled.
“Very well,” Belmaine said again, though there was less velvet in it now. “My daughter, Cecily. You have heard me speak of her.”
Thomas had, though only because Belmaine had made certain of it during his first visit.
A good girl. Quiet. Well trained in household management.
Old enough to marry. Young enough to breed.
These things had been stated with the satisfied air of a man discussing a mare with strong hips and no ill temper.
“Aye,” Thomas said.
“She is two score. Of good health, good temperament, and, I say it as her father, pleasing enough to the eye. Her mother was a Wakefield, as you know. Loyal blood. No shadow on either side.”
“No shadow,” Thomas said.
Belmaine pretended not to hear the dryness.
“Her dower would include the Fernhill property.” He gestured beyond the walls, toward the east. “You know it. Good grazing. Good water. The pasture alone would strengthen your lower holdings, and the spring there does not fail even in a dry summer. I would also settle ten marks in coin upon the marriage, with two more at the birth of a son.”
Hob’s expression did not change.
Thomas’s did not either. Inside him, every number struck like a nail being driven into wood.
Fernhill. Good grazing. Good water. Land that touched Ashcombe’s lower field and would make the manor less vulnerable in a hard year.
Ten marks in coin. Two more for a son. Alliance with a royalist neighbor whose loyalty to the crown was known, polished, and convenient.
A daughter from a family with no stain of Montfort’s cause.
Belmaine was not merely offering a marriage, he was offering mortar for every crack in Ashcombe’s wall.
“My friends at court remain well placed,” Belmaine continued.
“The king has a long memory, but not an endless one. A marriage well made is a bond the crown respects. A suspect house allied to a loyal one stops being suspect overnight, or near enough to make no matter. The escheator, should he come, would see order, alliance, a future properly secured.”
Thomas heard Walter’s voice in his mind.
A great marriage to a house above suspicion.
For one dark instant, Thomas wondered whether Walter had spoken to Belmaine.
No. Walter would not. He was many things, some of them aggravating enough to make saints swear, but he was loyal to Ashcombe down to the marrow.
He simply understood the same cold arithmetic Belmaine did.
“You would sleep easier,” Belmaine said softly. “We both know it.”
Thomas looked past him. The hall door stood open.
Warmth moved in the shadows beyond it. Someone inside laughed, a child’s bright burst of sound.
Alyson, most likely. Wat’s voice followed, indignant.
Edith snapped something from the kitchen passage.
Ashcombe living its threadbare little life, unaware the price of saving it had arrived wearing fur-lined gloves.
Belmaine stepped closer. “There is, of course, one small thing.”
“Of course.”
Belmaine’s smile did not move, though the warmth finally left his eyes. “The woman.”
Thomas went still. Hob did too.
“The red-haired one,” Belmaine said. “Your kinswoman, as I believe you called her.”
The word kinswoman landed like a coin on stone. Flat. Deliberate. A man testing whether the metal rang true.
Belmaine took silence for permission, because men like him took everything for permission until a blade persuaded them otherwise.
“I will speak plainly,” he said, “as a friend.”
“You are wearing that word thin.”
“Ashcombe.” Belmaine’s voice lowered, patient, reasonable, a father explaining rain to a child. “There are already questions.”
“There are always questions.”