“I’m being appropriate.”
Amelia touched the edge of her wimple before she could stop herself. It was pinned tightly beneath her chin, the linen plain and respectable. Not a curl escaped. Not one. She had spent ten minutes that morning making sure of it, then another three hating herself for caring.
“It’s safer,” she said.
“For whom?”
The question struck harder because Thomas had asked the same thing.
Amelia went back to her sewing. “For everyone.”
Edith snorted. “There’s a phrase men use when they’re about to do something stupid.”
“I’m not a man.”
“No, but you’ve learned the habit well enough.”
Amelia had no answer for that.
From across the hall, Thomas’s voice carried low over the general murmur. He said something to the mason, and the man nodded. Thomas looked tired. Not merely weary from work, but worn in that deep, inward way she had come to recognize, as if every decision took a shaving from him and no one had told the world there was only so much man to whittle.
He had refused Belmaine. For her. Not only for her, she knew that. Thomas would never reduce a decision that large to one person. He had principles. Honor. A code stubborn enough to survive siege engines, plague, and probably Edith’s bread knife. But Belmaine had laid safety before him with land, coin, alliance, and a future the crown might tolerate.
Thomas had looked at all of that and said no.
Because the price was her gone. Her throat tightened. She bent over the linen until her eyes stopped burning.
“You love him,” Edith said.
Amelia stabbed herself with the needle.
“Ow. Damn it to hell.”
Alyson’s head came up. “Mistress Amelia said damn.”
“No, she did not,” Edith said without looking away from Amelia.
“I heard it.”
“You heard the wind.”
“The wind knows curses?”
“It knows more than you do, and it repeats less.”
Wat laughed. Alyson made a face at him.
Amelia put her pricked finger in her mouth and stared at Edith over it.
Edith’s expression didn’t change.
“That,” Amelia said carefully, once she had removed her finger, “is a very big thing to say.”
“You look at him as if he’s a locked door and you’ve misplaced the key in your own bodice.”
Amelia’s face went hot. “Edith.”
“What? Have you misplaced something else there?”
