Still, Amelia stepped back.
Thomas looked at the window for one heartbeat longer, then Hob said something, and he turned away.
Amelia leaned against the shelves and closed her eyes. There was no spreadsheet for this. No plan. No clever reorganization of people, supplies, rooms, wagons, and time that would make loving Thomas Ashcombe harmless.
There was only the oldest, worst fix in the world. She would have to pull away from him herself.
Not enough to make people ask questions. She would still work, still laugh with the children, still sit with Edith, still make Walter’s cursed columns tidy enough to withstand a royal inspection. She would be useful, because useful was safe and because Ashcombe needed her. But she would stop looking forThomas when she entered a room, would stop standing too near, stop letting her hand linger, and stop making him smile.
At that thought, the tears finally came. She wiped them away at once with the heel of her hand and was annoyed to discover she had smudged green herb paste across her cheek.
“Get it together,” she whispered.
Amelia picked up the tally she had abandoned, stared at the marks until they swam, and forced herself to count.
Sage. Rue. Yarrow. Lavender.
She could do this. And if it felt, with every breath, like taking a knife to the life that had only just begun to feel like hers, then no one needed to know.
THOMAS
The murrey-and-gold livery appeared at the gate before Thomas had finished his morning ale, which told him exactly how much respect Sir Roger Belmaine had for him.
Men who respected you waited until a decent hour. Men who wished to remind you they could enter your day whenever they liked arrived before the household had finished breaking its fast, with horses stamping in the yard, cloaks bright against the chilly morning, and servants looking about as though they had come to inspect something already half purchased.
Thomas set down his cup without finishing it. The ale was thin and sour, watered more than he liked because Edith had begun stretching stores with the zeal of a woman preparing to fight winter with a ladle. A heel of bread sat on the trencher before him beside a smear of soft cheese and one boiled egg he had not yet touched. Across the hall, Wat was trying to hide the fact he had fed half his bread to one of the dogs. Alyson, having appointed herself moral authority on breakfast ever since Amelia’s clean-hands campaign began, was watching him with the severe pleasure of someone about to inform.
Amelia was not at the table.
Thomas had noticed that before the livery appeared.
She had been everywhere and nowhere these past three days. In the stillroom. In the buttery. With Edith over stores. With Walter over the accounts. With Wat and Alyson in the yard. Always working. Always useful, with a task in hand and a reason to leave before any conversation could settle into something more dangerous than barley or salt.
She had begun calling himmy lord.
He hadn’t understood what wound had opened between them. He had understood only that she had stepped back, and each inch of that careful distance had set his temper lower and colder, like water under ice.
Now Belmaine’s colors stood in his yard. Thomas pushed away from the table. Hob, who had been near the hearth with a cup in one hand and a slice of bread in the other, set both down and fell into step beside him. Hob had been falling into step at Thomas’s shoulder for years and showed no sign of stopping. He was grateful for it.
He would, naturally, sooner bite through his own tongue than say so aloud.
At the hall door, Edith caught his eye. The face she wore now said quite plainly that men in fine cloaks before noon were likely to bring trouble, lice, or both.
Thomas stepped into the yard. The morning was hard and pale, with frost silvering the edges of the water trough and mist clinging low along the wall. Smoke lifted from the bakehouse chimney, thin and blue. The mud had stiffened overnight, though it would soften by noon and turn the yard back into a sucking brown mess. Crows gathered on the roofline of the stable, glossy black and judgmental.
Belmaine had come with four men this time.
Not six. That should have felt like less of a threat. It did not.
Four was a number chosen to look courteous while still reminding every watching eye that Sir Roger Belmaine did not travel without steel. His men wore good boots, better cloaks than any in Ashcombe owned, and expressions trained into blankness. The murrey-and-gold cloth at their shoulders was new enough that the colors had not yet been dulled by the weather.
Belmaine sat his fat grey gelding at the center of the yard as though he had arrived for a hunt and expected the quarry to be grateful. He wore a wool cloak lined in dark fur, a belt worked with little silver mounts, and gloves soft enough that Thomas doubted they had ever touched a plow, sword hilt, or anything heavier than a cup of spiced wine. His beard had been trimmed with care. His smile, when he saw Thomas, was warm enough to curdle milk.
“Ashcombe.”
Belmaine swung down with the easy confidence of a man who had never once considered that he might be unwelcome. He came forward with both hands extended, the same handclasp as before, too warm, lingering, as if he meant any man watching to see fellowship where there was none.
Thomas let him take his hand and did not squeeze hard enough to break anything. An act of mercy, really.
