“You are pleased with yourself,” he said under his breath as he passed her.
“I’m concerned for public health.”
“I do not know what that is.”
“That’s because you don’t wash enough.”
Hob choked on his ale.
Thomas stopped.
For a moment, Amelia wondered if one could be exiled from a medieval castle for suggesting its lord had dirty hands. Probably. Men had declared wars for less. She was fairly certain one European conflict had started because somebody married the wrong cousin, which seemed like the sort of thing people should have anticipated would happen if they kept all the cousins in rotation.
But Thomas merely looked down at his hands.
They were, in fairness, cleaner than most. Large, bronzed from the sun, scarred across the knuckles, the nails cut short, with a faint line of dirt at the edge of one thumb. Capable hands. Soldier’s hands. Hands that knew rope, reins, sword, stone, and the weight of lifting someone up from the mud.
Her brain, which should have been focused on germs, wandered somewhere reckless and had to be hauled back by the collar.
Thomas held up both hands. “Will I live?”
It was so dry, so unexpected, that she almost laughed.
“Maybe,” she said. “But I’d feel better if you washed before touching the bread.”
The hall went still again, but this time it was a delighted stillness, the kind that came before a dog realized someone had thrown a bone into the rushes.
Thomas looked at her for one long heartbeat.
Then he walked to the bucket.
The hall erupted.
Not loudly. No one was stupid enough to hoot at their lord while he was within striking distance, but laughter trembled behind cups, shoulders shook, and even Walter stared down at his roll with his mouth pinched as if holding back amusement were a matter of castle security.
Thomas washed with the grim composure of a man enduring a siege.
Alyson watched him with shining approval. “You did it very well, my lord.”
“High praise,” Amelia murmured.
With a single look from Thomas, the rest of the hall scrambled to line up and wash their hands. It was too bad they only had lye soap, Amelia would have gladly given up chocolate for a single bar of lavender soap.
He took the drying cloth from Wat, who now looked far more cheerful about the entire situation, and shot Amelia a glance over the linen.
“How were you raised, Mistress Quinn, that you command lords before breakfast?”
“Carefully,” she said. “And with clean hands.”
AMELIA
After breakfast, Edith cheerfully put her to work. This was Edith’s solution to sorrow, confusion, scandal, and probably the plague. If a person was breathing, Edith could find a task for them.
She was handed a basket of torn linen, told to take it to the women mending in the yard, then sent back for a list of missing stores, then sent to Walter with a count of loaves, then to the dairy to ask whether the morning’s cheese would hold until market, then back to Edith, who added three more things as if Amelia had grown extra arms.
By midmorning, she had a wax tablet in one hand, a stylus in the other, and a veil that refused to stay properly pinned over her hair. The gown she wore today was a faded green, plain enough for household work but better fitted than the brown one. It laced at the sides over a linen shift, and though Amelia still resented the concept of side laces on principle, she had at least managed not to tie herself into a human knot.
Her hair, however, was a losing battle.
