Thomas should have felt steadier. Pickering had come and gone without finding aught amiss.
But Belmaine was still breathing which meant the day was not safe. Life would be simpler if Thomas could simply run the man through.
He had learned to trust certain quiet warnings in his bones. The shift before a horse bolted. The wrong stillness in the air before men sprang from a ditch. The smell of rain before the sky darkened. This morning the warning came with the soft suck of hooves in mud and Hob’s voice going flat beside him.
“Riders.”
Thomas turned as Sir Roger Belmaine came riding through the gate with two men behind him and a stranger at his side.
The stranger wasn’t richly dressed. His cloak was rust-brown and travel-stained, his boots worn at the heel, his tunic plain enough to pass without comment in a market yard. He was perhaps two score. Broad once, mayhap, but lean now, with weather browned skin, rough hands, and eyes that never stopped moving.
Thomas walked toward the gate as Hob fell in beside him, one hand loose near his belt. Hob always looked half asleep until there was killing to be done.
Belmaine dismounted as if he had come to bring glad tidings.
“Ashcombe,” he said, opening his hands in that warm, helpful way that made Thomas want to knock him into the horse trough.
“God’s mercy, I’m glad to find you well, and to bring a troubling matter to a peaceful resolution.”
He stood with his arms crossed. “What matter?”
Belmaine’s expression folded itself into regret. He did regret things, Thomas suspected. Mostly that other people were difficult enough to need arranging.
“The woman in your house,” Belmaine said. “The runaway. We all knew the tale, of course. A poor wife fled from a cruel husband, taken in beneath your roof out of Christian charity.”
Hob sighed. “And we were having such a quiet day.”
In the yard, a bucket scraped stone and stopped. A stable boy froze with a curry comb in one hand. Near the kitchen steps, Mald stood holding a stack of wooden bowls against her hip. Even the geese turned their pale-eyed attention toward the gate, which was unfortunate, as geese had the morals of tax collectors and made twice the noise.
Belmaine gestured to the stranger.
“Mistress Quinn’s husband has come.”
The words landed in the yard and took root like poison.
“Or should I say Mistress Crale’s husband?”
Thomas rocked back on his heels as the stranger bowed at the proper depth for a man addressing a baron. Not too low. Not too proud.
“My lord,” he said. “Edmund Crale of Alcester. I’m grateful to Sir Roger for bringing me. I mean no trouble. I only want my wife home.”
My wife.
Thomas had taken a spear at Evesham that had hurt less.
Behind him, someone dropped a wooden bowl. It hit the yard with a hollow clatter and rolled in a slow half circle before stopping near a goose.
The goose pecked it, as if it too had objections.
Crale raised both hands, palms out. Rope burns marked the base of two fingers on his right hand. Old marks, not from any wife’s struggle. From binding, or being bound.
“I seek no quarrel,” Crale said. “I’m a sinner, I confess it. I was hard with her. Too hard. I’ve done penance for it and come to bring her home.”
“You don’t know where home is,” Thomas said.
Belmaine stepped smoothly into the gap. “Mistress Quinn is no Quinn at all, it seems. Or not by law. Mistress Amelia Crale is a wife who has been away from her husband since spring.”
Thomas felt Amelia move behind him, one step down from the kitchen threshold.
