There was a stool. Amelia, who had not sat down since a footballer named Gaz had ruined her afternoon, discovered that her legs had been waiting for permission. She sat.
The fire helped. That was the awful thing. There was a real fire in a real hearth and it threw off real heat. She scooted close enough to burn her toes as water dripped from her dress onto the stones with a hiss.
A girl of maybe twelve or thirteen helped her out of the ruined silk and into a shapeless linen nightgown thing, then a brown wool dress that smelled of cedar, went down to the floor, and laced up the sides with a cord that Amelia could not, no matter how she fumbled, work out the order of.
“They’re not—is there a zipper?” she said. “Sorry. A—a clasp? Anything?”
Edith batted her hands away and laced it herself, crisscrossing the cord with the bored speed of a woman who had dressed a hundred bodies and buried a few.
“There. Cover your head. We’ll see about shoes. Those—” she eyed the pale blue heels lying on their sides on the rushes like two small dead birds “—those we’ll burn before someone takes you for a madwoman.”
“Those, were one hundred and ninety dollars.”
Much to Amelia’s rising anxiety, Edith acted like she didn’t know what a dollar was.
By the time the hall began to fill for the evening meal, Amelia had stopped explaining and started watching, because she’d looked around outside and didn’t see any signs of her cousin’s wedding in any direction she looked. If that awful Gaz showed up right now, Amelia decided she’d actually hug the professional footballer, no matter how noxious he was. The more she watched, the worse the reenactment theory looked.
Nobody broke character. That was the thing. Reenactors broke character—to check a phone, to laugh at a joke that didn’t fit, to complain about their feet. These people didn’t have a single phone between them. Not hidden, not silenced, not face-down by a plate.
There were no plates, for that matter, not really. There were thick slabs of stale bread that people apparently ateoff ofand then ate or were piled on a platter and taken back to the kitchens, but hopefully not to be reused.
There was no electricity, no hum. Amelia hadn’t noticed, until it was gone, that her whole life had a hum to it—wires, engines, refrigerators, and the distant ocean-roar of traffic—the silence where it should have been was so total it felt like she was underwater or wearing ear plugs.
She was given a cup, found herself thirsty, so she took a gulp without asking what it was, and then she stopped with the cup halfway down and looked into it.
“What is this?”
The girl, Mald, looked alarmed. “Small beer, mistress.”
“Is there—” Her throat was a desert. “Could I have water? Plain water?”
The whole end of the table looked at her. A grizzled man with a face like a catcher’s mitt—Hob, she’d gathered, the one the lord trusted, paused with his own cup at his lips.
“Water,” he repeated, the way you’d repeatpoison,orthe French.
“The well’s sweet here,” Mald offered, helpful and baffled. “Sweetest in the valley, my granfer says. But you don’tdrinkit, mistress. Not when there’s beer.”
“Of course not,” Amelia said faintly. “Silly me.”
So there was wine instead. Someone, on the lord’s instruction, she caught the glance that traveled down the table, the small nod from the big dark shape of him at the far end, put a cup of wine in front of her, dark, a little sour, and warmer than wine had any business being, and Amelia, still chilled and frightened, and nine-tenths convinced she had lost her mind, drank it.
It was a mistake. She knew it was a mistake when a cup and a half later, the ceiling was rotating as were the people around her.
“Oh, that’s not good,” she informed the cup. “That’s not good at all. I have a thing. One glass of wine and I’m tipsy. My college roommate, Allison, used to say I was a cheap date.”
“Mistress?” said Mald.
“I’m a lightweight,” Amelia explained, warmly, to the entire table now, because the words were coming easily, far too easily, sliding out on a loosened, sun-warmed tide.
“It’s a whole genetic thing. My mother’s the same. One margarita and she’s telling the waiter about her divorce. Where I’m from they put it in cans, you know? The wine. They put it incans,it’s very chic, it’s terrible, I love it?—”
“Cans,” said Hob, his brows scrunched together.
“—and I had a whole plan for this weekend, I had aspreadsheet,and now I’m here, wherever here is, and nobody will tell me what happened to Bree’s wedding, and the well issweet but you can’t drink it, and there’s a hole in the roof, and I think—” her voice did something she hated as it wobbled, “—I think something has gone really, really wrong, and I can’t fix it?—”
A hand closed around her upper arm. Big, warm, and brought her up off the stool and away from the table and the staring faces in one smooth haul, the way you’d lift a child away from a stove.
“Enough,” Thomas said, his voice close to her ear. “Not here.”