“So was Belmaine.”
She stared at him, lips parted, and he could see the moment the words struck too close.
Thomas regretted it at once. “Amelia.”
“No,” she said, quiet now. Too quiet. “No, you’re right.”
“I was not.”
“You were.” She looked down at the parchment in her hands. “That’s the awful part. I was standing there listening to him offer you safety in exchange for making me disappear, and some part of me thought, well, at least that’s efficient.”
“Do not.”
She laughed once. It was a broken little sound with no humor in it. “You see? I’m excellent in a crisis. Give me a disaster and I’ll organize the napkins around it.”
“Amelia.”
She looked up.
He wanted to tell her she was not the price of Ashcombe. Not a problem to be solved. Not a neat column in anyone’s account. He wanted to say all of it plainly, but the hall was too close, and Thomas had never been good at laying tenderness out where others might see it trampled.
So he said what he could. “No woman beneath my roof is coin for another man to weigh.”
Her eyes brightened.
“Especially not one who writes treason about peas in my market tallies,” he added.
She blinked. “That was not treason.”
“You wrote that I was wrong.”
“You were wrong.”
“About peas?”
“Objectively.”
“I have commanded men in battle.”
“Were there peas involved?”
“No.”
“Then your experience is irrelevant.”
A laugh escaped him, rough and brief, and something eased between them, not mended, but loosened.
Then Walter’s voice rose in the hall. “Mistress Amelia? The lower field tally, if you have not misplaced it into some system only the saints understand.”
Amelia closed her eyes for one small moment. “That man has the emotional range of a locked cupboard.”
“He is loyal.”
“Cupboards can be loyal?”
“And useful.”
“Also musty.”
