Chapter 22 #2
“Not like these. A woman who appeared from nowhere, no kin, no husband any man has seen, no father or brother to vouch for her, no name anyone can prove. She keeps your rolls. Sits near your table. Rides with you to market.”
Thomas did not move. So Belmaine had heard of that.
“A widowed kinswoman, I was told,” Belmaine continued. “Or perhaps a wife fled from some brute, depending on which tongue is wagging. The tales shift. That is the trouble with false tales. Folk enjoy improving upon them.”
Hob’s hand settled lightly near his belt.
Thomas gave the smallest shake of his head. Not yet.
Belmaine saw it. His eyes brightened for a moment. “There are whispers in the village,” he said. “You know what they say. Faery woman. Red-haired omen. The kind of foolishness peasants nurse when their bellies are not full enough.”
“Then let them be foolish.”
“Would that foolishness stayed foolish.” Belmaine tilted his head.
“Mistress Bell has been telling anyone who will stand still that no Christian woman frets so over clean hands as your red-haired widow. It is nothing, perhaps. An old woman and a washing habit. But nothing, Thomas, is precisely what men say before nothing becomes a charge.”
The morning seemed to grow colder.
Belmaine’s voice remained mild. “Mud sticks to wool. So does witchery, once whispered. So does adultery. So does disorder. Choose the word your enemies like best. They will not lack options.”
Thomas thought of Amelia in the hall, standing over Wat with a wash cloth, laughing as Hob presented his hands for inspection like a penitent bear.
He thought of her in the stillroom, beside Edith, with lavender tucked in her sleeve.
He thought of Walter’s white face when gossip had once brushed too close to the accounts.
Out in the world, Amelia’s strangeness was not charming. It was tinder.
Belmaine folded his hands. Patient. Reasonable. A man doing another man a favor.
“Let her go. Send her to the nuns, if you have a tender conscience. Send her to the next county, if you have a practical one. Give her a little coin and a guard as far as Worcester, if you wish to sleep better. It matters not to me where she goes, only that she be gone. Settle the difficulty, make the alliance, and Ashcombe is safe.”
Simple as that.
And the worst of it was that it was simple.
Thomas forced himself to stand in the wanting of it for a moment, the way he would make himself look at a wound before dressing it. A man who flinched from truth bled out from it.
Belmaine was offering him the one thing Thomas had not permitted himself to want since he rode home beneath the king’s frown.
Safety.
Not for himself. He had stopped reckoning his own neck worth the counting somewhere in the mud at Evesham. But for all those who looked to him.
For Wat, who wanted to be a soldier and would more likely be a beggar on a winter road if Ashcombe fell.
For Alyson, who had only just stopped watching the door whenever the wind blew.
For Widow Maud with her two eggs and fierce pride.
For John atte Ford and his flooded meadow.
For the boys in the stable, the women in the dairy, the men who had followed him home broken and still picked up tools the next morning because the walls needed mending.
For Hob, who had dragged him out of slaughter and had never once asked thanks for it.
For Edith, who fed grief. For Walter, who had kept the bones of Ashcombe from crumbling with ink, spite, and one narrow old back.
One marriage. One quiet, good-tempered girl.
Fernhill’s grazing. Ten marks. Courtly favor. No whispers. No red-haired woman no one could explain. No neighbor smiling at an opening. No escheator sniffing for disorder beneath his roof.
The noose around Ashcombe’s neck would loosen. Not fall away, never that, but loosen. A good bargain.
By every measure it was the only sane answer in England. He had only to give up the one thing that had made the place worth saving.
For the length of one breath, Thomas tried to picture it.
Cecily Belmaine at the foot of his table, quiet, wellborn, making no difficulties. A wife with a proper name and a proper dower. A woman who would sit beside him in the hall, manage linens, receive tenants, bear sons, and give Walter the satisfaction of seeing the world put back to rights.
He tried to place her in the chair where Amelia sat with ink on her thumb and trouble in her eyes.
The picture wouldn’t hold. The girl had no face. The chair remained stubbornly occupied by a woman who would have looked at Belmaine’s offer, totted it up in that quick sure way of hers, and told Thomas the true cost in a column he wouldn’t like.
He thought of Amelia’s sudden coldness. The way she had begun stepping away before he reached her. The way she answered him quickly, politely. The way she looked at him only when she thought he would not notice. The way my lord had returned to her tongue like a wall rebuilt stone by stone.
He hadn’t understood it. Now, with Belmaine standing before him and safety held out like a blade by the hilt, that coldness made refusing her feel almost sensible for one weak, shameful moment.
If she had already begun the retreat, perhaps it cost him nothing to let it finish. The thought lasted the space of a heartbeat. Thomas stepped on it hard.
“No,” he said.
Belmaine blinked. Just once. “I beg your pardon?”
“No.”
The word was not diplomatic or careful. Not the answer Walter would have crafted with cautious phrases, delays, and doors left cracked for future advantage.
It was a sword stroke.
Belmaine’s eyes narrowed. “Perhaps you misunderstand me.”
“I understand.”
“Then you cannot have thought it through.”
“I have.”
“You refuse Fernhill?”
“I refuse the condition.”
Belmaine smiled slightly. “Conditions are the bones of bargains.”
“And some bargains rot from the bones outward.”