Mistress Bell clutched the salt. “I only carried warning.”
“Aye. And warning may be kindness if it doesn’t stop there.” Huck pulled the stopper from one of the honey jars. “So I carried one too.”
Thomas’s gaze sharpened. “You heard?”
“I hear many things. Bees hear more.”
“Huck.”
The friar sighed. “Fine, not the bees. Mostly widows, boys at wells, and men who think a habit makes me deaf.”
He dipped a finger into the honey, tasted it, then nodded as if Winifred had performed up to standard.
“I visited six households this morning,” he said.
“And what,” Amelia asked carefully, “did you say?”
Huck looked at her with such kind mischief in his eyes that she braced herself.
“I told them I have eaten at this table, prayed beside this woman in the chapel after harvest, and she held a cross without bursting into flame, fainting, cursing, vanishing, turning blue, or doing anything else likely to trouble sound doctrine.”
Amelia blinked. “That’s a very specific list.”
“I prepared it on the road.”
“I can tell.”
A sound that might have been laughter moved through the nearest servants.
Huck spread honey on a slice of bread with the care of a man anointing a king. “I also told them a faery would not sit in God’s house, would not spend her days arguing with a steward over cartloads of grain, and would not willingly mend household linens, as no creature of enchantment would submit to such tedious mortal doings.”
From the kitchen doorway, Edith said, “Linen humbles all.”
“Amen,” Huck said.
Walter, who had entered the hall at exactly the wrong moment with a roll beneath one arm, stopped dead and looked personally injured. “Are the household linens being discussed without my count?”
“No,” Amelia said. “They’re being used as theological evidence.”
Walter looked as if he might need to sit down.
Huck continued as though this were entirely ordinary. “I told them Mistress Amelia is the most sensible woman in three parishes, that the children love her, the stores are better kept for her presence, the harvest came in easier under her lists, and that anyone claiming otherwise had best bring evidence sharper than the coin in his pocket.”
Everyone was listening now.
“You named Belmaine,” Thomas said.
“Not directly.” Huck’s face remained serene. “I named the coin. Coin is its own sermon when it appears in the wrong purse.”
Amelia felt the words settle over the room like a cloak.
The defense was simple. God-fearing and useful. Not mystical. Not a plea for kindness from people frightened by what they didn’t understand. Friar Huck had given them something solid. Amelia in the chapel, with the grain, and mending, counting, and working. A woman whose oddness could be outweighed, if not erased, by what she did.
It was exactly the right defense. Too bad she hadn’t thought of it.
“Friar Huck,” she said, then cleared her throat. “Thank you.”
He waved one hand, as if publicly fighting gossip with theology, bees, and carefully aimed suspicion were merely part of an ordinary day.