“It is readable.”
Walter sniffed. “Precisely. Wasteful of parchment.”
Thomas waited.
Walter’s mouth worked as if the next words had to be dragged up a hill. “At first I thought she would bring disorder.”
His gaze moved across the hall to Amelia, who crouched near Alyson, helping the child wrap a leftover barley cake in a bit of cloth for later.
“She has brought a different sort of order than I am accustomed to.”
From Walter, that was a hymn sung beneath stained glass.
Thomas looked at Amelia too. She had flour on her sleeve now. Ink on her thumb. A honey smear near one cuff because Alyson had embraced her with sticky hands. Her veil had given up entirely, sliding back far enough that half her hair was visible in red-gold coils. She was laughing at something Wat had said, her face open, tired, and bright.
Thomas hated, with sudden and unreasonable force, how right she looked there. As if Ashcombe had been waiting for someone to walk in and begin rearranging it into sense. As if the hall had made room for her before he had.
His chest tightened.
“Walter,” he said.
“My lord?”
“If Master Pickering comes, the accounts will stand?”
Walter drew himself up. Here, at least, was ground the man trusted. “Aye. They will stand. The rents are defensible, the arrears properly noted, remissions marked, payments in kind valued, labor owed and labor given recorded. If he means to find fault, he must bring his own.”
“Good.”
“But it is thin,” Walter added.
Thomas nodded. “I know.”
“One bad month, one sickness, one roof failing in the wrong storm, and we will be scraping again.”
“I know that too.”
Walter’s gaze sharpened. “Belmaine will know it.”
At the name, the warmth of the hall seemed to chill. Thomas watched Amelia tie Alyson’s little bundle. Wat said something to her. She rolled her eyes and flicked a crumb at him. He laughed.
“Aye,” Thomas said. “He will.”
“Then we must give him no opening.”
Thomas looked back at the chest of rolls. No opening. A strange woman some still called faery at his table was an opening. A woman he wanted with the sort of want that made a man careless was an opening large enough to ride an army through.
Walter did not say it, he did not need to.
Thomas closed the chest himself and slid the bolt into place. “Then we give him none.”
The words felt like an oath. He told himself they were only about Ashcombe.
That evening, when the court was done and the tenants had gone out into the grey with fuller bellies and lighter shoulders, Edith permitted a small kindness in the hall.
Not a feast. They could not afford a feast. But there was pottage thickened with beans, bread warm from the ovens, a little cheese, watered ale, and the last of the honeyed apples. Friar Huck arrived late with a crock of mead he claimed was medicinal and should therefore not be counted as indulgence. Edith told him his medicine caused more trouble than it cured. He blessed her for the compliment.
Hob sang half a song until Edith threatened him with a ladle if he finished the verse in front of the children.
