“Or take toll where none is owed,” Hob said.
“Mayhap.” Thomas sounded tired. “Mayhap worse. But unless the king himself chooses to look kindly on Ashcombe, none of it helps us.”
The king himself.
The words dropped into Amelia’s mind where they floated, bright and sharp.
Thomas went on, “Belmaine knows it. He can smile, wait, and let the crown’s suspicion do his work for him.”
Hob muttered something.
Thomas’s reply came with an edge in it. “Aye, well. He can wait until the river runs uphill.”
Amelia sat motionless. The linen blurred. Not because she was crying. She wasn’t. The words had blurred because something inside her had shifted.
A little click, a door unlatching. She set the linen down slowly, as if sudden movement might frighten the thought away.
For the past three days she’d been trying to make herself smaller. Less visible. Less dangerous. A quieter woman in a dull grey gown with her hair hidden and her mouth shut before the wrong words slipped out.
But what if hiding was the wrong answer?
What if the only way to save Ashcombe was not to make herself smaller, but to make Belmaine larger in the crown’s eye?
Belmaine the neighbor with too much coin, with extra men on the road, with coffers full beyond honest rents.
Her heart beat faster. Not the foolish, tender beating it did when Thomas walked near. This was different. Cleaner. A familiar bright rush, the old planner’s flare. The moment a broken schedule, a missing caterer, an lost room block, and a keynote speaker stuck at O’Hare suddenly became one problem instead of four.
She knew this feeling, trusted this feeling. Amelia drew a scrap of parchment from beneath the linen roll and dipped the quill again.
Belmaine, she wrote. Royalist. Publicly loyal. Too much money. Men on old road. Why?
Thomas: suspect because of Evesham. Needs royal favor. Not rumor. Proof of loyalty.
She stared at the words.
Proof of loyalty.
What counted here?
Not intention or goodness. Goodness was useful only after supper and mostly to people who already loved you.
Service, then. Something visible. Something the crown couldn’t ignore. Something big enough to stand in a hall full of men who liked seals, witnesses, and reasons to pretend mercy was strategy.
Her quill moved.
Who travels the road? King’s men? Queen’s household? Clerks? A lord worth saving? Someone Belmaine watches?
If Belmaine was doing something unlawful along that road, if his deep coffers had a source, if the right person could be made to see it, then Thomas didn’t need Belmaine’s protection. He needed Belmaine exposed.
Not exposed like a shouted accusation. That would only make noise, and noise helped men like Belmaine.
Evidence. That was the word. Evidence was a quieter blade.
She needed accounts. Not Ashcombe’s. Belmaine’s, or as much of them as could be built from rents, purchases, men paid, horses kept, cloth bought, and coin spent where coin should not be.
She needed gossip. Who had passed. Who had been delayed. Who had paid. Who had vanished. Which merchants avoided one stretch of road and why. Which servants drank too freely in taverns. Which reeve’s cousin knew more than he was meant to know.
She needed Hob. Probably. Almost certainly. She didn’t yet know how to ask Hob for help without explaining what she was doing, and she couldn’t explain what she was doing because Thomas would stop her.
