THOMAS
Belmaine’s men were led away first, wet, sullen, and considerably less grand than they’d looked when they’d ridden beneath Ashcombe’s gate with lies in their mouths and murder at their backs.
Crale was taken, then Osric, who had regained enough spirit to mutter something foul at Hob and immediately lost the privilege of walking unassisted when Hob took him by the collar and moved him along like a sack of onions.
The lease for Father Martin’s brother was noted for protection because Pickering, to Thomas’s surprise, did have some small vein of justice beneath all that parchment and vinegar.
Father Martin himself was kept apart from the prisoners and given hot food because Friar Huck insisted “a hungry conscience collapses before supper and then what use is it?”
Walter argued that consciences were not livestock. Hob said some men’s were. Edith said all three of them were blocking the kitchen path, and if they wished to debate souls, beasts, and the failings of mankind, they could do it away from her pottage.
Dame Margaret and Joan were taken in by Edith, who announced they needed dry stockings, hot food, and noquestions from men who liked their ears attached. Joan clutched Amelia’s hand as she passed, her fingers cold as well water and shaking hard enough to make the hem of her sleeve tremble.
“You did well,” Amelia whispered.
Joan flushed scarlet beneath her damp cap. “So did you.”
By the time the prisoners had been secured and Pickering’s clerks had written themselves into wrist cramps, night had fully claimed Ashcombe. Rain tapped at the shutters. The hall fire burned high, turning wet wool to steam along the rafters blackened by generations of smoke. Trenchers of bread and cheese, thick bowls of onion pottage, cold pork sliced thin enough to make it stretch, and a small dish of honeyed apples because Huck had declared restoration required sweetness, were provided for all.
Amelia ate because Edith stood over her until she did.
Thomas did not eat. Every time he looked away, his eyes found her again.
Her cheek had been cleaned and dabbed with something that smelled sharply of rosemary. Her hair had been braided properly now, though the end curled red against her shoulder, defiant as a flame refusing the snuffer. She sat wrapped in a blanket near the fire with Wat on one side and Alyson half-asleep against her lap.
Ashcombe gathered around her in quiet pieces. Mald brought more ale. Perkin left a plate of bread near her elbow and fled when she thanked him. Walter hovered, muttered that the wool blanket was inferior, and sent for another. Hob stood near the hearth pretending to inspect a crack in the stone, though his gaze kept sliding back to Amelia with the gruff, irritated tenderness of a man who had not agreed to care and now found the condition inconvenient.
This was what Belmaine had not understood. He had looked at Amelia and seen a woman with no kin. Thomas looked around and saw the truth. She had made kin everywhere she went.
Pickering saw it too. Near the lower table, the escheator finished sealing a packet, the red wax gleaming in the torchlight beneath his steady thumb. He looked around the hall once more, lingering not on the patched roof or thin stores, but on the people.
The children tucked against Amelia. Edith directing the household like a queen with flour on her sleeves. Walter guarding the rolls as if they were relics. Hob at the hearth and Huck with his honey.
At last Pickering looked at Thomas.
“I leave at first light for Worcester,” he said. “Sir Roger and the principal men go with me. Crale too. The inquiry will not be swift.”
“Few useful things are,” Walter said.
Pickering ignored him. “Ashcombe is not my concern tonight.”
“Only tonight?” Hob asked.
Pickering gave him a cool look. “Would you prefer I make promises no man can keep?”
Hob grunted. “Nay.”
“Then tonight.”
Thomas inclined his head. “Tonight is enough.”
Pickering’s gaze moved to Amelia. “Mistress Quinn.”
Amelia looked up as did others in the hall. A whisper of wool, a pause in the scrape of a spoon, the faintest creak from Walter’s bench. But Thomas felt it all the same. The whole hall seemed to lean toward the question before it was even asked.
“That is the name you claim?”
Amelia’s hand tightened around the honey pot, then she lifted her chin. “Yes.”
