Chapter 25
THOMAS
The harvest-home feast should have come sooner, but Ashcombe had spent the weeks since the last sheaf was brought in paying rents, patching roofs, facing royal clerks, and trying not to be swallowed whole by Sir Roger Belmaine’s smile.
Thomas knew better than to interfere in the harvest-home feast Edith was planning.
Edith had looked at him over a bowl of rising dough with flour on her forearms and murder in her eyes, and Thomas, who had faced mailed men with axes at Evesham and not stepped back, discovered an urgent need to be elsewhere.
“The people have earned it,” she said, punching the dough and sending small puffs of flour into the air.
“Three days of joy costs less than a month of sour faces and short tempers. Feed folk well, let them sing, let them remember they are not beasts yoked to the land, and they’ll work the better for it.”
“We haven’t the stores to waste on—”
“Waste?” Edith’s hand stilled.
That was a poor choice of words, he knew it at once and cringed.
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“Not waste.”
“Good.” She turned the dough with a hard twist.
“We’ve barley enough for pottage, onions enough to sweeten it, peas enough for one decent dish if no fool goes dipping twice, two geese from Widow Maud because the woman is proud as Lucifer and twice as stubborn, three hens past laying, cheese from the dairy, apples from the west orchard, and Friar Huck will bring honey and mead. ”
“That sounds rather extravagant given our circumstances.”
“It sounds like harvest-home.”
“Which means my already limited coffers will be bleeding.”
“It sounds,” Edith said, slowly enough to suggest the words were being laid down for a simple child, “like people who have worked through rain, rot, hunger, rumor, fear, and your temper, will be getting one night to remember they’re alive.”
Thomas looked to the entryway, where was Hob when he needed the man?
“And if I say no?”
Edith’s gaze lifted.
Thomas went to stand somewhere else.
By dusk, Ashcombe had surrendered.
The hall had been overrun by a small army of conscripts.
The trestle tables had been scrubbed, the worst of the rushes replaced, and fresh herbs scattered near the hearth so the room smelled less of smoke and damp, and more of rosemary, thyme, apple peelings, and roasting goose.
Rushlights burned in iron brackets along the walls.
The fire had been built high, golden and loud, throwing heat across the stone and coaxing a shine from every wooden cup, every pewter spoon, every eager face.
Someone had hung the last garlands of dried yarrow and oat straw over the door. Someone else, likely Alyson, had added three lopsided bunches of late lavender and a string of rowan berries that drooped in the middle.
At the high table, he sat where he belonged and felt, as he often did, that belonging was another word for being watched.
He wore his good tunic, dark blue wool patched so carefully at the elbow that only a blind man would call it fine.
His belt had been oiled. His boots had been cleaned until Hob declared them “less tragic.” Edith had sent Wat up twice to make certain Thomas had combed his hair, as if he were eight years old and likely to attend harvest-home looking like a hedgerow.
Amelia sat halfway down the hall between Edith and Widow Maud, exactly far enough from him to be proper and exactly near enough to undo the peace he had spent the afternoon pretending to have.
She had washed the bit of ink from her chin.
Her veil had been pinned more firmly, though one curl had escaped, because Amelia’s hair had apparently declared rebellion against both the Church and household order.
Firelight found it and turned it copper and gold.
The brown gown suited her more than the grey had.
It warmed her skin, brought out the freckles across her nose, and made her eyes look like the green grass in summer.
She had an untouched cup of mead in front of her.
Thomas noticed this, because apparently he had become a man who noticed how much mead a woman drank, whether she had eaten enough goose, and whether her sleeve had slipped down over one hand when she was nervous.
He had become a witless dolt when near her.
The first course was pottage, thick with barley and leeks, served in wooden bowls.
Bread came beside it, warm and coarse, with soft cheese where it could be spared.
Then came goose, crisp-skinned and shining, cut into small portions so everyone received a bite or two.
The hens followed, then peas with onions, roasted turnips, apples stewed with honey and a little ale, and finally broken pieces of honeycomb passed on wooden trenchers while Friar Huck instructed every child in the hall not to chew the wax though few listened.
Alyson made a face so dramatic three men at the lower table nearly choked laughing.
“You said not to chew it after I chewed it,” she told the friar accusingly.
“I said it before.”
“I was listening to the honey.”
“A common spiritual danger,” Huck said solemnly.
Wat swallowed his wax, then looked both pious and ill.
Amelia leaned toward the boy. “You’re turning green.”
“I’m always this color.”
“You absolutely are not.”
Thomas looked down quickly before she caught him smiling.
Huck’s bees fed on heather along the ridge, clover in the lower meadows, and whatever wild blossom had survived the season’s weather.
The mead came pale gold and fragrant, sweet first, then sharp, and far stronger than it seemed to men who trusted their tongues over their knees.
Cups lifted. Shoulders lowered. Voices warmed.
The hard lines around mouths softened by degrees.
Hob, who claimed that no mead brewed by a friar could trouble a man of his constitution, had entered the third stage of his usual harvest-home argument with the drink. The first was confidence. The second was philosophy. The third was singing.
He had not yet begun to sing though Thomas watched him warily.
The old songs began when the second keg was tapped.
Not the courtly ones sung by minstrels in great houses.
These were rougher, older, born of fields and kitchens and men who had spent too long behind plows or with blades in their hands.
Songs for cutting barley, songs for apple harvest, songs for saints who had probably not approved the verses sung in their honor.
The women knew the true words. The men knew louder ones.
Huck joined with an alarming cheerfulness and a voice that would have frightened birds from a hedge.
Edith endured one verse, then held up a ladle. “If the next line mentions the miller’s daughter, I’ll put that ladle somewhere it was not blessed to go.”
The song changed at once.
“Cowards,” Hob said.
“You especially,” Edith told him.
“I had not yet begun to sing.”
“I know the look of a man preparing sin.”
Huck nodded over his cup. “An important pastoral gift.”
Amelia laughed. Not the quick little sound she used to deflect Walter, or the soft smile she gave Alyson when the child crawled close with sticky fingers and way too many questions.
This laugh was warm, slipping out of her before she thought better of it, and the whole hall seemed to brighten around the sound.
Thomas wanted, with a force that nearly unmanned him, to be the cause of it.
He looked away. The fire blurred for a heartbeat, orange light over blackened wood, and for one terrible instant it was not a hearth but a field, not laughter but men crying out, not harvest-home but Evesham’s red ruin reaching for him again.
His hand tightened around his cup until the wood bit into his palm.
Then Alyson appeared at his side. She had honey on one wrist, a smudge of ash on her cheek, and the solemnity of a small woman bearing official orders.
Thomas looked down. “What have you done?”
“Nothing.”
“That is rarely true.”
“It’s true right now.”
“That is not the same thing.”
She held up both hands. “Mistress Amelia says I must tell you good night because I am too tired to remember my manners, and she says you’re to inspect my hands.”
Thomas looked over the child’s head.
Amelia was watching them from beside the hearth, her expression soft in a way that made something foolish run through him.
He looked back at Alyson’s hands. They were mostly clean, though the honey near her wrist had collected one suspicious oat flake and two crumbs.
He considered the matter gravely. “You will live.”
Alyson beamed. “I washed twice.”
“A fearsome achievement.”
“Wat only washed once.”
“I heard that,” Wat said from Amelia’s side.
“You were meant to,” Alyson said, with such perfect imitation of Edith that Hob wheezed into his cup.
Thomas leaned closer to inspect her hands again. “You may go to bed with honor.”
“Good.” She leaned against his leg for one brief, trusting moment before scampering back to Amelia.
The weight of that small body against him did something no mead could soften and no battlefield had managed to kill. It hurt. The way dawn hurt after a night one had not expected to survive.
At his elbow, Huck lowered himself onto the bench with the careful satisfaction of a man who had eaten well and intended to discuss truths no one had invited.
Thomas didn’t look at him. “No.”
Huck blinked. “I didn’t say a word.”
“You were about to.”
“I breathe. It is one of my better habits.”
Huck’s face was ruddy from fire and drink, his tonsured hair shining faintly where the light caught it, but his eyes remained annoyingly clear. “God sees what is good.”
Thomas closed his eyes briefly. “Friar.”
“Even when men stand directly in front of it wearing the expression of a mule at a locked gate.”
“I should have let Col find the mead before you.”
“Col would have died happy and sung badly. I offer more useful service.”
Thomas drank and had to agree, the mead was very good.
“She’s useful,” he said, because useful was a safer word than the others waiting behind his teeth.
Huck sighed. “You are a man determined to use the smallest word possible for the largest thing in the room.”