Chapter 24
AMELIA
By the third day of acting professional, sensible, and perfectly distant, Amelia was ready to throw herself into the Avon.
Not truly. The Avon was cold, and she had no intention of being fished out by Hob while wearing someone’s second-best grey gown and the expression of a woman who had made a dramatic point badly.
But in spirit, yes. In spirit, she had flung herself in twice before breakfast.
Maintaining a careful, appropriate distance from a man she had accidentally and catastrophically fallen in love with was exhausting. Worse, it was boring. There was only so much dignity one woman could wring out of not looking across a hall.
She had thought distance would help. It did not. Distance merely gave longing room to put up shelves and arrange itself alphabetically.
The problem was that Thomas was everywhere.
He was at the high table with a cup in one hand and his attention on three conversations at once.
He was in the yard with mud on his boots, dark hair wind-tossed, sleeves shoved up as he hauled a beam into place because apparently lordship involved a great deal more lifting than anyone had mentioned in history class.
He was in the lists every day practicing swords with the garrison.
He was by the gate with Hob, shoulders broad beneath a weather-dark cloak, scar pale along his jaw when he turned his head.
He wasn’t looking at her, except when he was, and then she forgot how lungs worked. It was inconvenient. It was also, according to Edith, obvious.
“You’ll ruin that linen if you stab it any harder,” Edith said.
Amelia looked down. The needle had gone through the folded cloth, the hem, and quite possibly into the table beneath.
She had been mending a torn napery cloth because Edith had declared that no woman under her roof sat idle unless she was birthing, dying, or important enough to be useless. Amelia qualified for none of the three.
“I’m concentrating,” Amelia said.
“You’re murdering the cloth.”
“It was already damaged.”
“So was Hob after Evesham, and I didn’t finish the job.”
From the hearth, Hob looked up. “I heard that.”
“You were meant to,” Edith said.
Alyson giggled into her cup of watered ale. Wat tried not to and failed.
The trestle tables had been set up near the hearth in the hall.
Smoke curled toward the smoke hole in lazy, badly managed ribbons.
Rushlights burned in their brackets, throwing gold over the stone walls and shadows beneath the benches.
Supper had been pottage thickened with peas, barley bread, a wedge of hard cheese that could have been used in minor construction, and roasted onions sweet enough to make the whole hall smell warmer than it was.
Everyone drank small beer except Amelia, who had her usual water.
Edith sat beside her with a basket of mending, broad and immovable in dark wool, her white coif pinned so tightly it looked as if it had personal opinions.
Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow. Her hands moved through the cloth with a speed that suggested she could sew a straight hem, dress a wound, and disembowel a fool before breakfast if properly provoked.
Amelia loved her like an aunt which was also inconvenient.
Edith glanced toward the high table, then back to Amelia. “You’ll give yourself a headache holding your neck that stiff.”
Amelia stabbed the needle through the linen again.
Edith sighed. “Child.”
That was worse than a scolding.
Amelia kept her eyes on the cloth. “Please don’t.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re about to.”
“I am always about to. It gives me purpose.”
Despite herself, Amelia smiled.
Edith did not. Her gaze had gone sharp in that quiet way of hers, the way it did when she had seen the bruise beneath the sleeve, the fear behind the joke, the truth one had carefully set in a corner and thrown a blanket over.
“You heard what Belmaine offered,” Edith said.
Amelia’s fingers stopped. The hall kept moving.
Wat and Alyson bickered softly over a crust. Walter argued with one of the reeves about whether a number had been copied correctly.
Hob sat near the hearth, pretending not to listen to everything.
Thomas stood by the far table with his back half turned, speaking to a mason, one hand braced on the wood, his cloak still damp at the hem from the yard.
Amelia made herself breathe. “I heard enough.”
“Enough is plenty with a man like that.”
“Yes.”
“He wanted you gone.”
Amelia looked down at the linen. The stitches blurred for a moment. “Yes.”
“Thomas said no.”
“I heard that too.”
“And now you’ve decided the best way to thank him is to act as if he’s got the sweating sickness.”
Amelia’s head snapped up. “I have not.”
Edith raised both brows.
“I am being careful.”
“You’re being cold.”
“I’m being appropriate.”
Amelia touched the edge of her wimple before she could stop herself. It was pinned tightly beneath her chin, the linen plain and respectable. Not a curl escaped. Not one. She had spent ten minutes that morning making sure of it, then another three hating herself for caring.
“It’s safer,” she said.
“For whom?”
The question struck harder because Thomas had asked the same thing.
Amelia went back to her sewing. “For everyone.”
Edith snorted. “There’s a phrase men use when they’re about to do something stupid.”
“I’m not a man.”
“No, but you’ve learned the habit well enough.”
Amelia had no answer for that.
From across the hall, Thomas’s voice carried low over the general murmur.
He said something to the mason, and the man nodded.
Thomas looked tired. Not merely weary from work, but worn in that deep, inward way she had come to recognize, as if every decision took a shaving from him and no one had told the world there was only so much man to whittle.
He had refused Belmaine. For her. Not only for her, she knew that.
Thomas would never reduce a decision that large to one person.
He had principles. Honor. A code stubborn enough to survive siege engines, plague, and probably Edith’s bread knife.
But Belmaine had laid safety before him with land, coin, alliance, and a future the crown might tolerate.
Thomas had looked at all of that and said no.
Because the price was her gone. Her throat tightened. She bent over the linen until her eyes stopped burning.
“You love him,” Edith said.
Amelia stabbed herself with the needle.
“Ow. Damn it to hell.”
Alyson’s head came up. “Mistress Amelia said damn.”
“No, she did not,” Edith said without looking away from Amelia.
“I heard it.”
“You heard the wind.”
“The wind knows curses?”
“It knows more than you do, and it repeats less.”
Wat laughed. Alyson made a face at him.
Amelia put her pricked finger in her mouth and stared at Edith over it.
Edith’s expression didn’t change.
“That,” Amelia said carefully, once she had removed her finger, “is a very big thing to say.”
“You look at him as if he’s a locked door and you’ve misplaced the key in your own bodice.”
Amelia’s face went hot. “Edith.”
“What? Have you misplaced something else there?”
“I’m begging you not to discuss my bodice.”
“Then stop putting all your feelings in it.”
Hob coughed into his beer.
Amelia closed her eyes. “I hate this household.”
“No, you don’t,” Edith said.
No. She didn’t. That was the problem. In fact, she loved the smoky hall and the badly behaved rushes, and the way the benches were never quite where they ought to be.
She loved Wat’s solemn scowl and Alyson’s bright curiosity.
She loved Hob’s sideways humor, Walter’s brittle devotion, Friar Huck’s honeyed theology, and Edith’s ruthless tenderness.
She loved the autumn smell of apples drying near the hearth, the sound of rain against the shutters, the sight of Thomas in the yard with his cloak lifting in the wind and his whole body turned toward whatever needed protecting next.
She loved Ashcombe. And she loved him. Thomas Ashcombe, who thought himself a sword because swords were easier to understand than hearts.
She loved his grim mouth and his gentleness with children, the terrible care he hid inside orders, the way he said her name.
She loved the way he carried responsibility like armor that had fused to the bone.
Edith’s voice gentled, which was alarming in its own right. “You think making yourself smaller will keep him safe.”
Amelia looked down at the linen, at the uneven stitch where the needle had jumped. “Belmaine is going to use me.”
“Aye.”
“At some point, Thomas will have to choose.”
“He already did.”
“He chose today. Belmaine will come again with something worse.”
“Likely.”
“And if I’m visible, if I’m the faery lady, if people keep talking, then I become the easiest way to hurt him.”
Edith set her mending down. “You were visible the day you were found in the hay wearing a gown the size of a handkerchief and shoes fit for torturing chickens. We are somewhat past the point of making you ordinary.”
Amelia stared at her.
“What?” Edith asked.
“Shoes fit for torturing chickens?”
“They were pointed.”
“They were elegant and so pretty.”
“They looked like murder.”
“They cost three hundred and ninety dollars.”
“I know, a great deal of money, and each time you say it I am more certain it was foolish.”
Amelia pressed a hand over her mouth. The laugh escaped.
Edith looked satisfied. “There,” she said. “Better.”
Amelia drew a breath, then another. Across the hall, Thomas moved away from the mason and spoke to Hob near the hearth. His voice was low enough that she should not have heard it, but she had become unfortunately good at hearing his voice.
“Belmaine’s coffers run deep for a man living on honest rents.”
Amelia’s quill stilled as Hob grunted.
“He sits too near the old road,” Thomas continued. “Pershore to Worcester, then north for those with reason to ride that way. Great folk pass in autumn from feast to feast, and he has men enough to watch what goes by.”
“Or take toll where none is owed,” Hob said.