Chapter 28
AMELIA
The reckoning arrived on a Tuesday. Or what Amelia had decided to call Tuesday, because the medieval week had saints’ days, market days, feast days, fast days, and Sundays that were not technically Sundays in the tidy little box where her brain wished to keep them, and her brain, which had survived a cross-Atlantic flight, a wedding, time travel, and being kissed beside a millrace by a man who looked as if he’d been carved out of battle smoke and bad decisions, had drawn a hard line at giving up the days of the week.
So it was Tuesday.
Three days after the kiss. Not that she was counting.
She was absolutely not counting the hours since Thomas had touched her hair as if it were something precious, then kissed her with such hunger that every practical thought she owned had gone fluttering out of her head like frightened pigeons.
She was also not standing at the upper window of the accounts room watching him in the lists.
No. Amelia was checking the north field’s drainage after last night’s rain, which was sensible and necessary, and exactly the sort of thing a woman did when she had become a person who thought about drainage, roof repairs, meal stores, candle stubs, and whether a man’s mouth had felt as devastatingly soft as she remembered.
Which it had. Unfortunately.
Down in the yard, Thomas moved through sword practice with Hob and two of the younger men. He wore linen and plain leather, no mail, no lordly show, just a sword in his hand and the kind of focus that made the whole world seem to arrange itself around him.
His dark hair was damp at the temples. His jaw was rough with stubble, and every movement looked spare and exact, as if he never wasted strength because he’d learned, in some hard school she didn’t want to imagine too closely, that wasted strength got men killed.
He parried a strike, stepped inside the younger man’s reach, and checked the blow with the flat of his blade.
The lad staggered back, red-faced and grinning, while Hob said something that made the others laugh.
Thomas didn’t laugh, and her foolish heart did a little leap, because it was now a trained dog begging scraps from a man who had spent three days calling her Mistress Amelia as if he hadn’t stood beside the Avon with her hair wound around his finger.
Mistress Amelia.
Honestly. If he said it one more time in that careful, gravel-voiced way, she might throw an account roll at his head.
The man had kissed her. Then he had stepped back, reminded her what one witness could do, and spent three days being so correct, restrained, and so painfully honorable that she wanted to shake him, kiss him again, and possibly make him explain himself in a numbered list.
Not that she could blame him. That was the terrible part.
She knew what one witness could do, knew what gossip could become in a place like this, where her whole life rested on a cover story made of cobwebs and everyone’s willingness not to tug too hard.
She knew Belmaine was watching for weakness, knew Thomas was a baron with too many enemies, too little coin, and one strange woman under his roof who had appeared from nowhere and kept accidentally reorganizing his world.
She knew all of it, but knowing didn’t make it easier to remember the feel of his hand at the back of her head, careful over the pins and veil, as if he wanted all her hair loose in his hands and had only just stopped himself.
She pressed her fingers to the windowsill.
“Stop it,” she muttered.
Thomas turned at that exact moment, as if he’d heard her from across the yard, and looked up.
For one suspended breath, the lists, the yard, the whole busy manor seemed to fall away.
His gaze found hers, and the air between them went taut and bright, strung with everything they hadn’t said beside the river.
He stood with the sword lowered, shoulders broad, expression unreadable to anyone who hadn’t spent the past couple of months learning the tiny shifts in his face.
But Amelia had. She caught the flicker and somehow knew that he remembered. Then his eyes shifted past her, toward the road. At the same moment, Amelia caught movement beyond the gate.
A small party was coming up the track, four men on serviceable horses, one in a good wool cloak that said official business as plainly as if he’d had it embroidered across his chest.
Her stomach dropped. The memory of the kiss didn’t vanish from her body so much as get shoved into a box labeled panic about this later.
“Walter,” she called.
The steward appeared in the doorway with the deeply aggrieved expression of a man who had known peace once and found it overrated. He had an ink stain on one thumb, a roll tucked beneath his arm, and the air of someone prepared to disapprove of whatever she said next.
“There’s a man at the gate,” she said. “Good cloak. Official-looking. Is that…”
Walter crossed to the window with more speed than dignity and looked down.
His face went pale and pinched.
“Aye,” he said. “That’ll be Master Pickering.”
Oh no.
“Right.” Amelia took one careful breath, because her lungs seemed to have forgotten their occupation.
“We should make sure that the hall looks settled before he comes in.”
Walter’s eyes narrowed, not at her, but toward the yard below, where Thomas had already handed his sword to Hob.
“Fresh rushes by the high table,” Walter nodded. “Benches straight. No cracked cups where the clerks can see them.”
“And Edith should know there’ll be guests at supper.”
“Edith knows everything before God does,” Walter muttered, already turning. “But I’ll send Alyson.”
He stopped at the door and looked back at the rolls spread across the table.
“Have you moved my Michaelmas copy?”
“No.”
“Have you touched the tallies?”
“Not since last night.”
His mouth pinched.
Amelia lifted both hands, smiling. “I cross my heart.”
Walter looked suspiciously at the gesture. “That had better not be some oath I’m meant to report to Friar Huck.”
“It means I promise.”
“Hmph.” He went to the table, set down the roll beneath his arm, and touched the stacks in order, not quite moving them. “Harvest. Rents. Stores. Mill.”
“Yes.”
“Labor owed and labor given?”
“Under the rent roll.”
“Repairs?”
“Behind the stores, because he’ll ask after the east wall as soon as he smells the damp.”
Walter gave her a look that, two months ago, would have been nothing but reproach. Today it held annoyance, alarm, and something dangerously close to respect.
“You have a foul habit of being right.”
“It’s one of my more lovable qualities.”
“I did not say lovable.”
“No, but we both heard the implication.”
Walter snorted, which, from him, was practically a song with lute accompaniment.
Below, Thomas was already moving, stride hardening into the lord of Ashcombe before her eyes.
Not the man who had touched her hair, not the man who had kissed her, but the lord.
The one the crown had come to measure.
Amelia heard the changes in the household as word passed.
Hooves in the mud. The creak of the gate.
Men straightening from tasks, women gathering baskets, Wat’s voice pitching too high before Edith shushed him.
Somewhere, a dog barked once and was silenced by someone who understood inspections, danger, or both.
Walter gathered two rolls into his arms.
“Mistress Amelia.”
She looked up.
“If you have kept aught from me that bears upon these accounts, tell me now.”
The words were said quietly, as if he wanted to know, but dreaded it.
Her fingers tightened on the edge of the table. “The accounts are clean.”
“That is not what I asked.”
For one foolish second, she considered lying. Not because she didn’t trust him. Because trust, in this century, was not a soft thing. It was a knife handed hilt-first to someone who might one day be forced to use it.
Walter watched her with the patience of old stone.
Amelia crossed to the door and looked out into the passage. Empty. The household had gone rushing toward the hall, the yard, the thousand visible proofs that Ashcombe was orderly, loyal, and not worth seizing.
She shut the door most of the way as Walter’s eyebrows climbed.
“I haven’t kept anything from the accounts,” she said. “But I’ve been gathering something else.”
The steward’s face closed like a ledger.
“What have you done?”
“That tone suggests you already think I’ve committed a felony.”
“I do not know this felony, but by the sound of it, aye.”
Despite everything, she almost laughed. “Belmaine’s behind this. Or part of it. He’s been whispering to someone, and if Pickering’s here now, three days after Belmaine’s last little performance, that’s not by chance.”
Walter glanced toward the window, then back at her. “You have proof?”
“Not enough. I have gossip, fragments, and little pieces that don’t prove anything alone.
Hob’s men heard talk on the Worcester road.
Friar Huck heard something about a messenger and a sealed letter.
You said last week that Belmaine’s cousin in Pershore has been spending coin like a man who expects he’s about to have much more. ”
Walter paused, thinking.
So she hadn’t imagined the string. It was there.
“I need your help,” she said, softening her voice before he could wrap himself in stewardly disapproval and strangle her with propriety.
“Not because I can’t gather the pieces, but because I can’t use them. You can ask questions I can’t. You can speak to men who would wonder why a woman wants to know who’s been riding which road. And if Pickering comes back, we need more than clean accounts. We need to know who sent him and why.”
Walter stared at her for a long moment, then he shut his eyes.
“Saints preserve me from clever women with poor judgment.”
“I’m going to take that as agreement.”
“You would take a bee sting as agreement if it suited you.”
“Only if the bee seemed sincere.”
His eyes opened. “Not a word of Pershore in front of Pickering. If he asks you aught, you are a useful woman with a good hand and a better head for reckoning than is seemly.”
“That’s devastatingly flattering.”