His gaze did not move. “Not yet.”
Heat rose in Amelia’s face. “That isn’t fair.”
“Nay,” Walter said. “It is not.”
Her throat tightened.
He looked down at the cap in his hands, then set it carefully on the table between them. The gesture felt deliberate, as if he needed both hands free for honesty.
“You are not a fool,” he said. “Nor is he. That may be the trouble. Fools are easier. Fools tumble into scandal because they cannot see the ditch. You both see it. You stand on either side of it and call that safety.”
Amelia wanted to deny it.
Walter’s mouth flattened. “Soon others will see. Not Edith, not Hob, not children who think affection is merely another warm thing by the fire. Folk with no love for this house will see. Sir Roger Belmaine has eyes set in that fox face of his, and he is not the only one watching. My lord backed the wrong man in the war. The king’s mercy is a thin and chancy thing. The escheator will not need much if someone whispers disorder beneath this roof.”
“He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“No,” Walter said. “And that has never yet stopped a man from being ruined.”
The words settled cold in her stomach. Outside, Alyson laughed again, farther away now. A chicken clucked indignantly beneath the window. Ordinary sounds. Little sounds.
Walter leaned one hand against the table. His fingers were knotted with age, nails clean, ink in the cracks despite all Amelia’s campaigns.
“You are a woman with no name we can prove,” he said. “No father, brother, uncle, or lord to speak for you. The tale we tell is that you fled a husband cruel enough to send you running in little more than a scrap of blue silk and shoes fit for a penitent’s nightmare.”
“They were beautiful shoes.”
Walter gave her a look.
“Sorry,” she said faintly. “Nerves.”
The look eased, but only a little. “A husband,” he repeated, “who, by that tale, may be living still.”
Amelia’s chest squeezed. The cover story had been useful. A shield. A neat little explanation for the woman who appeared from nowhere and spoke like someone who had taken a wrong turn out of a dream. It had given the household something ordinary to believe instead of whispers that she was a faery.
She had not thought often enough about the trap hidden inside it.
Walter had.
“If it is seen,” he said, “if it is so much as whispered that Lord Ashcombe keeps a leman under his roof, a runaway wife, a woman not his to shelter so closely, then his enemies will have the excuse they want. If she is a wife, he dishonors another man’s claim. If she is not, he keeps a mistress. If she is neither, the gossips will make her fae, fallen, or worse, whatever best suits their malice.”
Amelia’s hands had gone cold. “People here know me.”
“Ashcombe knows you.” Walter’s voice gentled. “The world is larger than Ashcombe and less kind.”
That one struck clean. Because Ashcombe had begun to feel like the world. The hall with its smoke and laughter. Edith’s sharp tongue and warmer hands. Wat and Alyson. Hob’s awful French. Walter’s rolls. Thomas standing in a doorway, large and tired and watchful. Sweet well water at her place every morning.
She had forgotten there were other eyes beyond the walls. No. Not forgotten. Wanted to forget.
Walter saw that too. “The king can take the castle,” he said. “You know this.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what that means?”
Amelia opened her mouth.
But Walter continued. “It does not mean a parchment changes hands and folk go on with their pottage. It means the crown’s man comes. It means men who have never walked these fields decide what can be sold, stripped, seized, or given to another. Tenants who cannot pay are turned out. Stores counted for tax before hunger. Repairs left undone if no profit sits in them. The people scatter. The old suffer first, then the children.”
