He could not hear what the child asked, but Amelia’s answer carried back, light and quick.
“Nothing. A very dull linen matter.”
Alyson looked unconvinced. She had learned suspicion from the best people in the house and wielded it with terrible confidence.
“Does linen make you laugh?” Alyson asked.
“Only when it’s badly managed.”
Alyson considered this, accepted it with the solemnity of a judge who had heard stranger testimony, and returned to arguing with Wat over the ownership of a burnt crust.
Hob made a soft sound.
Thomas looked at him. “What?”
“You have no plan.”
“I said so.”
Hob nodded toward the hall. “She does.”
Thomas looked at Amelia.
She sat in her ugly grey gown with her perfect wimple and her careful distance, writing on the back of a linen inventory as if the fate of Ashcombe could be settled between sheets, towels, and whatever Edith called those square cloths that appeared everywhere and were never where anyone needed them.
Thomas had refused to send her away, had refused Belmaine’s bargain.
He had chosen to try to save the land and the woman both. Now he only had to work out how to do the impossible before Belmaine found a weapon sharp enough to make the choice for him.
AMELIA
By the third day of acting professional, sensible, and perfectly distant, Amelia was ready to throw herself into the Avon.
Not truly. The Avon was cold, and she had no intention of being fished out by Hob while wearing someone’s second-best grey gown and the expression of a woman who had made a dramatic point badly.
But in spirit, yes. In spirit, she had flung herself in twice before breakfast.
Maintaining a careful, appropriate distance from a man she had accidentally and catastrophically fallen in love with was exhausting. Worse, it was boring. There was only so much dignity one woman could wring out of not looking across a hall.
She had thought distance would help. It did not. Distance merely gave longing room to put up shelves and arrange itself alphabetically.
The problem was that Thomas was everywhere. He was at the high table with a cup in one hand and his attention on three conversations at once. He was in the yard with mud on his boots, dark hair wind-tossed, sleeves shoved up as he hauled a beam into place because apparently lordship involved a great dealmore lifting than anyone had mentioned in history class. He was in the lists every day practicing swords with the garrison. He was by the gate with Hob, shoulders broad beneath a weather-dark cloak, scar pale along his jaw when he turned his head.
He wasn’t looking at her, except when he was, and then she forgot how lungs worked. It was inconvenient. It was also, according to Edith, obvious.
“You’ll ruin that linen if you stab it any harder,” Edith said.
Amelia looked down. The needle had gone through the folded cloth, the hem, and quite possibly into the table beneath. She had been mending a torn napery cloth because Edith had declared that no woman under her roof sat idle unless she was birthing, dying, or important enough to be useless. Amelia qualified for none of the three.
“I’m concentrating,” Amelia said.
“You’re murdering the cloth.”
“It was already damaged.”
“So was Hob after Evesham, and I didn’t finish the job.”
From the hearth, Hob looked up. “I heard that.”
