He looked at her for a long moment. “Nay. I don’t.”
He left before she could do something ridiculous, like fling herself into his arms. Amelia stood there with the jug in her hand and her heart behaving like it had been startled out of a hedge.
Edith came to stand beside her. For a while, the two women watched Thomas cross the yard, Walter already holding up the roll like a banner of doom.
“He’s a good man,” Edith said.
Amelia kept her voice light. “Even with the scowling?”
“Especially with it. A man that pretty with no scowl would be unbearable.”
Amelia choked.
Edith looked pleased with herself.
“I didn’t say he was pretty,” Amelia managed.
“No. You’ve more sense than to say it where Hob can hear.”
Amelia covered her face with one hand. “Is subtlety dead?”
“Never met her.”
A laugh escaped before Amelia could stop it.
Edith’s gaze moved over her face, sharp as a needle but not unkind. “You’re settling.”
She looked toward the hall, the stables, the lists, the children sharing a barley cake on the rail, Hob cuffing Martin lightly on the back of the head for saying something idiotic.
Amelia swallowed. “I’m not from here.”
Edith’s expression didn’t change. “I know.”
The breath caught in Amelia’s chest.
Edith snorted softly. “I know you’re not from Ashcombe. Not from any place I can name either, mayhap. But you’re here now.”
“For now,” Amelia said.
Edith was quiet long enough that the yard filled in around them, men laughing, horses shifting, a hammer ringing from the smithy, Alyson’s high voice asking Wat whether clotpole was a word she could say if she whispered it.
Edith patted her arm. “For nowis where most of us live.”
Amelia had no defense against that.
Edith picked up the empty basket. “And for now, you can help me tear linen. Hob will get them bruised again before supper, and if you’re to keep fussing over clean hands, you may as well learn to bind the damage when the hands are attached to fools.”
“I don’t know much about tending wounds.”
“You can tear cloth, can’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then we begin there.” Edith started toward the hall, then glanced back. “And Amelia?”
The sound of her name, without mistress, without suspicion, without the careful distance of a household still deciding what she was, settled warm and unexpected in her chest.
“Yes?”
