Her coldness should have helped. It did not. It made the hall feel larger and emptier around him.
Walter cleared his throat. “My lord, the mason waits with a report on the southeast corner.”
The day, having delivered Belmaine before breakfast, had apparently decided to be generous with misery.
Thomas looked at Amelia. She turned a page. The quill moved.
“My lord?” Walter said.
Thomas dragged his gaze away. “Send him in.”
The afternoon had no improvement to offer.
The mason’s report was expensive, necessary, and delivered with the cheerful sorrow of a man who knew exactly how much bad news cost. The southeast corner needed new stone, not merely timber bracing, unless Thomas wanted the next winter storm to put part of the wall into the ditch.
A tenant arrived with a grievance about sheep that took an hour to resolve and resolved nothing except Thomas’s desire never to see a sheep again. Young Col had cracked a practice sword in the lists, which was both impressive and ill-timed. Friar Huck came by with honey and left with an argument about whether mead counted as a household necessity.
“It is a medicinal substance,” Huck declared, his round face shining with conviction beneath his travel-stained hood.
“It is a drink,” Edith said from the kitchen passage, where she was turning a spit with one hand and ruling the known world with the other.
“So is water,” Huck said.
“And look how little men value that.”
Huck considered this as if it were a point in formal disputation. “Then I shall say mead is holy.”
“You say that because bees made it.”
“Bees are industrious creatures of God.”
“So are laundresses,” Edith said. “Yet no one has called my wash water holy.”
Hob, who had been foolish enough to be drinking small beer at that moment, choked into his cup.
Alyson brightened. “Is wash water holy if Mistress Amelia says we must use it?”
“No,” Edith said.
“Then why must Wat wash his hands before supper?”
“Because Wat has hands that could sour milk.”
Wat objected loudly as his sister laughed. Huck blessed the honey, the argument, and quite possibly the insult. Life in the hall continued around Thomas with all its ordinary noise and warmth, and through all of it Amelia remained near and unreachable.
In the hall, she sat with the accounts. When Thomas crossed toward the fire, she rose to fetch Edith.
When he went to the accounts chamber, she was in the stillroom.
When he stomped out to the yard, she was by the buttery door speaking with Walter about lamp oil, her head covered properly, her hands folded properly, her voice politely proper enough to make his teeth ache.
Never obviously fleeing. Amelia was too clever for that. Always working, useful, exactly where she couldn’t be accused of avoiding him, and precisely far enough away that no one could say she sought his company.
Thomas had spent enough of his life on battlefields reading the ground to know a strategic withdrawal when he watched one.
He didn’t know what had put her to flight. No. That was a bloody lie.
He knew several things that might have done it. His own words at the gate after market. Belmaine’s attention. Walter’s pale, careful silence. Perhaps all of them had worked together, little knives cutting one thread at a time.