Mistress Bell accepted the salt but didn’t leave. She stood just inside the door in a brown wool gown and serviceable cloak, cheeks pink from the wind, eyes bright beneath the edge of her linen hood. She had the look of a woman who’d already visited three households that morning and intended to leave every one of them feeling informed.
“Only it does seem strange, doesn’t it?” Mistress Bell said.
Amelia folded her hands in front of her apron, because Edith had said respectable women did not clench their fists unless they meant to hit something, and she was still trying to blend in.
“What does?”
Mistress Bell leaned closer, conspiratorial and sweet as spoiled cream.
“A woman appearing from nowhere. No kin. No husband searching for her. Not that I think it, of course. Only that others might.”
“Think what?” Amelia asked, though she already knew.
Mistress Bell’s gaze flicked to Amelia’s hair, which had escaped its pins beneath her wimple in three separate places and was making a bright red nuisance of itself near her cheek.
“That she’s faery-touched.”
There it was. The words slipped into the space between them, small and glittering, and the stillroom seemed to go colder around it.
“Faery-touched,” Amelia repeated.
“Aye. Not wicked, mind you. No one says wicked.”
Mistress Bell widened her eyes, as if wicked were a word that had wandered in without invitation.
“Only strange. And mayhap lucky. Mayhap unlucky. Depends who’s telling it.”
“Who is telling it?”
Mistress Bell’s mouth pursed.
There. That was the interesting part.
“Folk,” she said.
“Then maybe folk need hobbies.”
Mistress Bell blinked. “Hobbies?”
“Useful work,” Amelia said quickly. She was usually careful to watch her words, especially after the rant when she’d first arrived, but sometimes things just slipped out.
“Mending. Baking. Gardening. Herding geese.”
From the doorway to the kitchen, Edith made a sound that might have been a cough but was probably a laugh.
Mistress Bell’s smile tightened.
“I came as a friend,” she said. “To warn you. Men have been asking questions.”
The humor drained out of Amelia so quickly she felt the chill it left behind.
“What men?”
Mistress Bell rubbed the salt between her fingers through the cloth. Her hands were chapped red at the knuckles, the nails cut short, a plain silver ring on one finger.
“I did not know them.”
That was a bald-faced lie. She’d spent years reading faces across banquet tables, behind check-in desks, beside stages where sponsors smiled too hard and donors drank too much.
