“You’ve been good for him,” he said.
Amelia blinked. Of all the things she had expected, that was not one of them.
“It costs me nothing to say what is true,” Walter continued, though from the look on his face it cost him a great deal.
“I’ll own that I would not have believed it these two months past. I thought you’d bring disorder beneath this roof.”
“I did bring hand-washing.”
His mouth twitched despite himself.
“Aye. There is that.”
The tiny almost-smile faded. “The house runs better,” he said. “The harvest came in. The rents were reckoned clean. Edith complains less.”
“That’s not true.”
“Nay, but her complaints are less murderous.”
Amelia shouldn’t have laughed. It slipped out anyway, small and nervous.
Walter’s face softened for one heartbeat. Then hardened again because he hadn’t come for kindness alone.
“He sleeps some nights,” Walter said quietly.
Amelia looked down at her hands.
“He did not before,” Walter said. “Not often. He would walk the yard till dawn, or sit in the hall with that look on his face as if he had one foot in this world and one in the grave. I have served this family two and forty years. I knew him when he was a boy with scraped knees and more temper than judgment. I knew hisfather, and his brother, God rest them. I knew the lad before war made a hammer of him.”
He turned the cap once more. “You have done what I could not.”
Amelia swallowed. “Walter?—”
“Let me finish, mistress, or I’ll lose my courage and begin speaking of barley instead.”
She nodded.
He drew a breath that seemed to come from somewhere tired and deep.
“You must stop.”
The stillroom became very quiet. The herbs above them barely stirred in the faint draft. A drop of water slipped from somewhere beyond the wall into a bucket with a hollow plink. The scent of lavender seemed suddenly too sweet.
Amelia’s fingers curled around the edge of the table.
“Stop what?” she asked, though she already knew.
Walter looked at her as if he wished she had not made him say it.
“You know what.”
If he had been cruel, she could have fought him. If he had sneered at her as a stray, a nobody, a woman without proof or place, she could have folded her dignity around herself and walked away with her chin up. Amelia had survived rooms full of men who underestimated her. She knew how to handle cruelty in good shoes.
Walter gave her none. He gave her truth.
“I have eyes,” he said. “So has Edith. So has Hob, who I caught grinning about it near the stables like a fool whose wits had gone courting.”
“Nothing has happened.”
