Chapter 36
THOMAS
Belmaine’s men were led away first, wet, sullen, and considerably less grand than they’d looked when they’d ridden beneath Ashcombe’s gate with lies in their mouths and murder at their backs.
Crale was taken, then Osric, who had regained enough spirit to mutter something foul at Hob and immediately lost the privilege of walking unassisted when Hob took him by the collar and moved him along like a sack of onions.
The lease for Father Martin’s brother was noted for protection because Pickering, to Thomas’s surprise, did have some small vein of justice beneath all that parchment and vinegar.
Father Martin himself was kept apart from the prisoners and given hot food because Friar Huck insisted “a hungry conscience collapses before supper and then what use is it?”
Walter argued that consciences were not livestock. Hob said some men’s were. Edith said all three of them were blocking the kitchen path, and if they wished to debate souls, beasts, and the failings of mankind, they could do it away from her pottage.
Dame Margaret and Joan were taken in by Edith, who announced they needed dry stockings, hot food, and no questions from men who liked their ears attached. Joan clutched Amelia’s hand as she passed, her fingers cold as well water and shaking hard enough to make the hem of her sleeve tremble.
“You did well,” Amelia whispered.
Joan flushed scarlet beneath her damp cap. “So did you.”
By the time the prisoners had been secured and Pickering’s clerks had written themselves into wrist cramps, night had fully claimed Ashcombe.
Rain tapped at the shutters. The hall fire burned high, turning wet wool to steam along the rafters blackened by generations of smoke.
Trenchers of bread and cheese, thick bowls of onion pottage, cold pork sliced thin enough to make it stretch, and a small dish of honeyed apples because Huck had declared restoration required sweetness, were provided for all.
Amelia ate because Edith stood over her until she did.
Thomas did not eat. Every time he looked away, his eyes found her again.
Her cheek had been cleaned and dabbed with something that smelled sharply of rosemary.
Her hair had been braided properly now, though the end curled red against her shoulder, defiant as a flame refusing the snuffer.
She sat wrapped in a blanket near the fire with Wat on one side and Alyson half-asleep against her lap.
Ashcombe gathered around her in quiet pieces.
Mald brought more ale. Perkin left a plate of bread near her elbow and fled when she thanked him.
Walter hovered, muttered that the wool blanket was inferior, and sent for another.
Hob stood near the hearth pretending to inspect a crack in the stone, though his gaze kept sliding back to Amelia with the gruff, irritated tenderness of a man who had not agreed to care and now found the condition inconvenient.
This was what Belmaine had not understood. He had looked at Amelia and seen a woman with no kin. Thomas looked around and saw the truth. She had made kin everywhere she went.
Pickering saw it too. Near the lower table, the escheator finished sealing a packet, the red wax gleaming in the torchlight beneath his steady thumb. He looked around the hall once more, lingering not on the patched roof or thin stores, but on the people.
The children tucked against Amelia. Edith directing the household like a queen with flour on her sleeves. Walter guarding the rolls as if they were relics. Hob at the hearth and Huck with his honey.
At last Pickering looked at Thomas.
“I leave at first light for Worcester,” he said. “Sir Roger and the principal men go with me. Crale too. The inquiry will not be swift.”
“Few useful things are,” Walter said.
Pickering ignored him. “Ashcombe is not my concern tonight.”
“Only tonight?” Hob asked.
Pickering gave him a cool look. “Would you prefer I make promises no man can keep?”
Hob grunted. “Nay.”
“Then tonight.”
Thomas inclined his head. “Tonight is enough.”
Pickering’s gaze moved to Amelia. “Mistress Quinn.”
Amelia looked up as did others in the hall. A whisper of wool, a pause in the scrape of a spoon, the faintest creak from Walter’s bench. But Thomas felt it all the same. The whole hall seemed to lean toward the question before it was even asked.
“That is the name you claim?”
Amelia’s hand tightened around the honey pot, then she lifted her chin. “Yes.”
Pickering studied her for a long moment.
“Then for purposes of my record,” Pickering said, “Mistress Amelia Quinn was falsely claimed by Edmund Crale, unlawfully removed from Ashcombe, and restored under protection before witnesses. Her widowhood, or lack thereof, is not a matter I can determine tonight.”
Amelia blinked.
Thomas understood. Not cleared entirely but free from Crale.
Huck’s smile spread slowly beneath his beard. “God works in footnotes.”
Pickering gave him a pained look. “God may. I do not.”
Amelia breathed in carefully, as if air itself had become something precious and breakable. “Thank you, Master Pickering.”
“Do not thank me. I have merely written what the evidence will bear.”
“That’s possibly my favorite kind of miracle.”
Pickering seemed unsure whether he had been complimented.
Pickering and Aymon were given chambers, though Aymon objected until Huck threatened to dose him with something involving valerian and old monastery wine.
Walter carried the packets to the solar for safekeeping.
Hob took the first watch because he was not yet done glaring at the world, and glaring was best done in the rain with a weapon or three.
Thomas walked Amelia to the stair without touching her, though heaven help him, he wanted to.
The want of her had become a living thing beneath his skin, a creature with claws and teeth and far too much memory.
He wanted to take her hand, her face, her whole trembling, stubborn self and hold on until the memory of Belmaine riding away with her let him go.
He wanted to bury his face in her hair and breathe in until the scene at the orchard stopped replaying itself behind his eyes.
She stopped in the corridor outside the sleeping loft.
Alyson had already been carried up by Edith, limp with exhaustion, her small face pressed against Edith’s shoulder.
Wat had followed, looking back every few steps as if Amelia might vanish if he stopped watching.
The hall had emptied by degrees, leaving shadows, banked fire, and the smell of rain, smoke, wet wool, honey, pottage, and ink.
Amelia turned to him.
“You brought the law with you,” she said.
“I brought Walter. Close enough.”
A smile touched her mouth. “He was magnificent.”
“He’ll be unbearable.”
“He earned it.”
Thomas looked at the bruise on her cheek. Cleaned now. Treated. No longer red with fresh insult, but darkening, blooming beneath the skin in a shadow his hand itched to erase and his sword hand longed to avenge.
“I’m sorry.”
Her smile faded. “I know.”
“No.” His voice came out rough. “You don’t. Not all of it.”
He could face armed men. He could face Pickering. Hell, he could stand in a hall and hear every charge that might have ruined Ashcombe. Yet looking at Amelia and telling her the truth of his own failing felt like stepping unarmored into a field already lost.
“I believed you,” he said. “When you said you didn’t know him. I believed you.”
Her eyes shone in the low firelight.
“But I still let them take you.”
“You had to.”
“I chose to.”
“Thomas.”
“I chose Ashcombe over you.”
Her face softened, and somehow that hurt more. “You chose not to let Belmaine destroy Ashcombe through me.”
“And I watched you ride away.”
“Yes,” she said. “You did.”
No forgiveness gifted too quickly. No pretty cloth thrown over the wound to hide it.
Thomas nodded once. “It will not happen again.”
“That’s not a promise anyone can make.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
She looked up at him, and the torchlight caught the green of her eyes, the copper in her hair, and her standing there in the corridor as if the world had opened once and sent him the one thing he had no right to keep.
Then she stepped closer. Not into his arms. Not quite. But near enough that he could feel the warmth of her through the chill still clinging to him.
“I don’t need perfect,” she said softly. “I’m not perfect either, in case my entire personality has somehow hidden that from you.”
She swallowed, but did not cry.
“I need you to ask me,” she said. “Next time. When you’re afraid I’ve lied, or that you’ve failed, or that silence is safer, I need you to ask so we can talk about it.”
Thomas closed his eyes briefly.
Ask. Talk.
So simple a thing. So difficult for a man who had built his life around not needing words.
Words could be twisted, could be repeated by the wrong mouth to the wrong ear. Words could become charges, promises, betrayals, orders to march men into the mud and leave them there.
But Amelia was asking for them.
He opened his eyes. “I will try.”
“That’s all I ask.”
“I’ll fail at times.”
“Obviously.”
He huffed a laugh before he could stop it.
Her mouth curved, then she pressed her lips together. “I was so scared,” she whispered.
The last of his strength broke. He reached for her then, slowly enough that she could step away.
She did not.
Thomas drew her into his arms. She came stiffly at first, as if her body had forgotten how to trust. Then all at once she gave way, her face pressing against his chest, her hands clutching the back of his tunic.
He held her as carefully as if she were wounded and as fiercely as if every man in England had declared claim against her.
“I know,” he said into her hair. “I know.”
“I hated that horse.”
A laugh tore out of him, raw and disbelieving, and she made a small sound that was half sob, half laugh against his chest.
“It was a perfectly good horse.”
“It was an abduction horse.”
“Then I shall dislike it on principle.”
“Thank you.”
He held her tighter, but as much as he wished to, he did not kiss her, somehow knowing she wasn’t ready.
Thomas let her go because he had to, not because he wished it.
She looked at him for one last moment, something unspoken moving between them, fragile and dangerous and alive.
“Good night, Thomas.”
He bowed his head. “Good night, Amelia.”
Once she shut the door, only then did he turn and go down to the hall.
Hob stood near the outer door with rain on his cloak and satisfaction in his beard.
His broad face was half in shadow, half in firelight, and the look he turned on Thomas was far too knowing for a man who spent most of his time pretending not to possess thoughts beyond ale, weapons, and tormenting younger soldiers.
“You did well,” Hob said.
Thomas gave him a look. “Did I?”
“Nay. You were a great lummox for much of it. But at the end, you did well.”
Thomas almost smiled. “Your praise overwhelms me.”
“As it should.” Hob nodded toward the stair. “She’ll forgive you.”
“Mayhap.”
“She will. Women like that don’t waste fury on men they don’t intend to keep.”
Thomas looked at him.
Hob shrugged. “What? I notice things.”
“That is alarming.”
“Aye. To many.”
The fire cracked behind them. Rain whispered against the shutters. Somewhere upstairs, Alyson’s voice rose sleepily, asking if Amelia could sleep near them, followed by Edith’s answer that Amelia was a woman, not a blanket, and then Amelia saying she didn’t mind being a blanket.
Thomas closed his eyes.
Home.
The word had never felt safe in his mouth.
For years, it had meant duty. Stone. Rotting accounts. Roof leaks. Dead men’s places at empty benches. The bitter weight of inheriting a life he had never asked for and failing at it in public, one short harvest and one suspicious royal clerk at a time.
Tonight, it stood around him in children who swore too often and clung too fiercely.
In a friar who loved honey and cake. In a steward who had insulted the crown in defense of a woman he had once wished gone.
In a hall that had seen hunger, grief, false charges, and fear, and still managed to smell of pottage because Edith refused to let treason ruin supper.
Ashcombe was not safe forever. Pickering’s favor was not pardon.
Belmaine would face inquiry, not immediate ruin, though ruin had begun sharpening its knives.
The queen’s letters would matter. Sir Aymon would speak.
The rescue would travel farther than any rumor Belmaine had started.
By morning, the tale would be on the road with Pickering’s clerks, in the mouths of guards, in the saddlebags of men who thought themselves discreet and never were. For tonight, royal scrutiny had turned.
For tonight, that was enough.
Thomas looked toward the stair one last time.
“I’ll do better,” he said, though no one was near enough to hear.
Hob, unfortunately, had excellent ears.
“You’d best,” he said.
Outside, rain washed Belmaine’s mud from the stones of Ashcombe’s yard, and inside, beneath rafters blackened by generations of smoke and survival, the castle exhaled.