Chapter 28 #2
“It was not intended to be.”
“And yet.”
Walter made a sound in his throat. “If this goes ill, it will not be you Pickering strips first. It will be him.”
The words landed like a fist. Amelia looked past him, down into the yard, where Thomas had reached the gate.
“I know,” she said.
Walter’s face softened by no more than the width of a thread. “Then bring the repair roll. And for pity’s sake, pin those curls back before Master Pickering thinks Ashcombe keeps a woodland sprite at the accounts.”
Amelia lifted a hand to the curl near her ear. “It has a mind of its own.”
“Aye. I’ve noticed the resemblance.”
There was no time to answer that with the dignity it deserved, so Amelia gathered the repair roll, tucked the offending curl beneath her veil, and followed him down to the hall.
By the time Master Pickering entered, Ashcombe had arranged itself into a picture.
Not a rich one. No one would believe that.
The hall still bore its scars, patched stone and smoke-dark beams and rushes that had been turned rather than replaced too often.
The east wall had a damp seam no fire could fully chase away.
The trestle tables were clean but old, and one bench leaned, dumping anyone on their backside that sat on the left end.
But it looked alive. A fire burned bright in the hearth, smelling of oak and ash.
Fresh rushes lay near the high table, sweetened with rosemary Edith must have stolen from her own kitchen stores while grumbling about the waste.
Bread cooled beneath linen cloths. A pot of pottage sent up steam rich with onions, barley, and the last of the garden herbs.
The dogs had been banished, which meant one of them sat just beyond the door, sighing with theatrical suffering.
Walter stood at the ready with the rolls.
Thomas stood with his shoulders squared and his face carved into that stern blankness that could have intimidated Ares himself.
Amelia sat where Walter had told her to sit, near enough to hear and far enough away to look unimportant, a mending basket in her lap and needle in hand.
She had never felt less unimportant in her life.
Master Pickering was a small, precise man in his middle years with a face like a careful document.
Clean, organized, and expressing nothing it had not first approved.
His cloak was good wool, dark green, travel-stained at the hem but well kept.
A narrow fur edging marked him as prosperous without being foolish enough to flaunt it in a hall where men had gone hungry in the spring.
His boots were muddy, his belt plain, his gloves neatly folded in one hand.
He bowed to Thomas.
“My lord Ashcombe.”
“Master Pickering.”
Pickering’s eyes moved across the hall. Hearth. Rushes. Servants. Benches. Patched wall. Candles. Walter. The rolls. Her mending basket. Amelia herself.
His gaze lingered only a moment.
Amelia lowered her eyes and set one small stitch into Edith’s apron. Modest, she thought, and hoped her face was behaving. Her face rarely attended the same meetings she did.
“Your steward,” Pickering said.
“Walter has served Ashcombe longer than I have breathed,” Thomas said.
Walter inclined his head. “Master Pickering.”
“And the bailiff?”
“Dead at Evesham,” Thomas said.
Pickering’s quill paused. There it was. The small scratch of history against parchment. Evesham. Montfort. Defeat. Suspicion. Men dead in the mud. Lands balanced on the edge of a king’s displeasure.
“And his successor?” Pickering asked.
“Not yet named,” Thomas said. “Until he is, Walter keeps the rolls. I answer for them.”
Walter’s mouth tightened at the bluntness, but he didn’t dare contradict his lord.
Pickering’s clerks laid out their things at the table. Good ink. Sharpened quills. A little knife for scraping errors from parchment. Amelia eyed that knife and decided at once she didn’t like it. There was something indecent about a blade that existed only to make mistakes disappear.
“The harvest,” Pickering said, settling onto the bench as if he’d been born judging other men’s grain. “Better than last year?”
Walter opened the first roll.
“Better than we feared,” he said. “Less than a fat year. Enough for rents, seed, and winter bread if we are not fools with it.”
One of the clerks blinked. Apparently royal men preferred numbers to honesty.
Pickering didn’t blink. “Show me.”
Walter showed him.
That was when Amelia discovered there were few things in creation more suspenseful than watching an old steward present clean accounts to a man who had clearly come expecting rot.
Walter didn’t rush or flatter. He didn’t fumble as he moved from harvest to rents to stores with the grim elegance of a man laying stones in a wall no army would breach.
Each roll appeared when needed. Each tally matched.
When Pickering asked after the damp sacks from the low field, Walter explained how they’d dried them in the malting shed before spoilage could take hold.
Pickering’s quill paused. “You dried damp sacks in the malting shed?”
“The shed was dry, the malt could wait, and mold does not respect custom,” Walter said.
Amelia pressed her lips together.
Walter, stealing her lines now. Wonders never ceased.
Pickering looked from Walter to Thomas. “A useful household.”
Thomas remained quiet.
It was the correct answer. Pickering’s kind did not require agreement. They required rope, and one tried not to provide it.
“Michaelmas rents,” Pickering said.
Walter handed over the roll as Pickering examined it. One clerk wrote. The other leaned in, lips moving silently as he checked figures against Walter’s spoken account.
Amelia tried to focus on the mending which proved impossible, because Thomas stood within ten feet of her and smelled faintly of leather, soap, and fall air.
Three days ago, his mouth had been on hers.
Now his eyes were on Pickering, and his hands, those scarred, steady, infuriating hands, rested loose at his sides.
She put another stitch through the apron before she accidentally embroidered her own thumb.
“And your stores?” Pickering asked.
Walter presented the store roll.
Pickering read as his eyes narrowed.
“Your hand differs here.”
“It does,” Walter said.
Pickering lifted his gaze. “You used a copyist?”
Walter’s expression suggested Pickering had asked whether the roll had been written by a goat.
“Mistress Amelia Quinn has a clean hand,” he said.
One of Pickering’s clerks made a small strangled sound as Pickering glanced toward her and every eye in the hall seemed to follow.
Amelia folded her hands over the mending and made herself look calm, useful, and not at all like a woman who had once owned three kinds of dry shampoo.
“She writes your accounts?” Pickering asked Thomas.
“She copies what Walter sets before her,” Thomas said. “The reckoning remains his.”
Pickering looked at Walter for a long moment. “Including yours?”
Walter’s spine rose like an offended cat’s.
“Mistress Amelia writes more clearly than I do,” he said. “I am old, not blind.”
Amelia almost swallowed her tongue.
Thomas didn’t move, but she caught the flicker at the corner of his mouth.
Pickering looked down at the copy. “They do read clearly.”
Walter gave a single, stiff nod, as if he had personally permitted the compliment to exist.
Pickering then asked about the east wall, so Thomas took him to see the patched section where new timber met old stone and limewash fought a losing battle against damp.
He asked about village roofs, so Hob led the clerks down the lane to see the cottages that had been mended before the October wind turned sharp.
He asked about the mill, and Thomas answered himself, because a lord with time for mill wheels was apparently a curiosity Pickering wished to observe in the wild.
All the while, she remained in the hall with the mending, Walter, and a stomach that seemed to have tied itself into a sailor’s knot.
When Pickering returned near dusk, his boots were muddy, his cloak smelled of rain, and there was no satisfaction on his face.
That, Amelia thought, was the problem. A man who came to find rot and found repair did not always feel relieved. Sometimes he felt cheated.
Supper was served because hospitality was owed, even to men who might take your home apart with ink and royal seal.
Edith produced pottage, bread, roasted turnips, cheese, and a small honey cake that had been cut into pieces so thin they were nearly symbolic.
There was wine for Pickering, small beer for the clerks, and a great deal of careful conversation about the weather, roads, and the price of salt.
Pickering’s quieter clerk laughed into his cup when Hob told him the east field goose had once chased a tax collector to the river.
“The goose has sound judgment,” Walter said.
Pickering drank plenty of wine, Thomas ate little, and she ate even less, hoping her stomach would stop doing somersaults.
By the time supper ended, Pickering retired to the guest chamber that had been aired for two days and strewn with dried lavender from the stores. Edith had surrendered the lavender with the expression of a woman being asked to donate a limb, but she had surrendered it.
The clerks bedded down in the hall. The household settled into that false quiet that comes after a storm has passed close enough to rattle the shutters but not close enough to break them.
Amelia waited until the hall had gone soft with sleep and firelight before she went back to the account room.
Walter was already there. The old steward sat hunched over the narrow linen-wrapped roll she had shown him that morning, one candle burning at his elbow, his long fingers resting on the parchment as if he might force it to confess by disapproval alone.
Belmaine. The name seemed to sit in the room with them, rich, polished, and smiling with too many teeth.
“You were right not to put this before Pickering,” Walter said without looking up. “You were wrong not to bring it to me sooner.”
“I know that.”