Thomas glanced at her. “There. You’ve found kin.”
Her mouth twitched. “I do admire a man with standards.”
Godwin, having decided that either Amelia was not offended or that offense was less urgent than the mill trying to drown his meadow, planted his boots and spat into the mud.
“Devil gnaw that peg. Hold it there, mistress, if you please. Nay, not there, unless you mean to lose a finger and gift it to the Avon.”
Amelia moved her hand immediately. “Good to know.”
Thomas’s gaze dropped to her fingers before he could stop it. Small hands. Clever hands. Hands that had reordered his accounts, soothed Alyson’s tears, dragged Ashcombe closer to survival one day at a time. He shouldn’t have noticed the pale crescent moons at the base of her nails, or the mud caught beneath one cuff, or the way cold had pinked the end of her nose.
He noticed everything.
They worked through the morning. It was the sort of labor Thomas understood. Direct. Honest. Timber, water, pressure, leverage. Things that could be seen, braced, wedged, struck. He liked problems that were simple. A split board did not smile across a hall and call itself neighbor. A sluice did not watch from the ridge in murrey and gold. A mill gate did not make an offer of marriage with rot hidden inside it.
He wedged while Godwin hammered and Amelia held.
It turned out she was good at holding. Not stubborn merely, though she had that in quantities that ought to have been taxed. She had a way of giving her whole attention to a task. He’d seen it in the accounts room, in harvest fields, in the hall when Alyson asked questions no one had the patience left to answer. Now she stood ankle-deep in mud on the bank of the Avon, cloak pinned back, cheeks pink with cold, fingers whitening around the timber, and held exactly where he told her to hold.
She watched and was quiet while he worked.
He was irrationally grateful for that. Then, when he needed a sliver more room, she gave it without being asked. When the post shifted, she leaned her weight and steadied it. When Godwin cursed again, this time something about the “pox-ridden hinge and the mother who birthed it,” she said, “That was a new one,” with such thoughtful appreciation that the miller nearly dropped the mallet.
“Do not remember that one,” Thomas said.
“I’ll remember whatever I like.”
“You’ll give Edith ideas.”
“Edith already has ideas.”
Godwin crossed himself. “Aye, my lord. That she does.”
By the time the fog began to lift, the new wedge had seated cleanly, the split joint had been drawn tight, and the gate held.
Godwin went inside to start the wheel.
For a moment there was nothing but the river, the drip of water from the sluice, the creak of damp wood, and Amelia breathing beside him as she stood at the bank’s edge, watching the wheel. Mud streaked her cloak. A smear of green river weed clung to one sleeve where she had caught herself on the bank. One curl had escaped at last, a bright, unruly coil slipping free near her cheek, damp from the mist and shining like it had trapped a stray thread of sunrise.
The wheel caught, shuddered, then turned. Inside the mill, the great stone engaged with a low, grinding hum that seemed to move through the ground beneath their feet. Grain began its old transformation somewhere beyond the wall, hard kernels becoming meal, the day’s hunger becoming tomorrow’s bread.
Amelia’s smile came slow and surprised, as if the world had handed her a small victory and she hadn’t quite trusted it until now.
“There,” she said.
“There,” he agreed as she turned that smile on him.
Thomas had learned her smiles because there were not nearly enough of them. There was the quick one she used for children. The narrow one she gave Walter when she’d won a point and wanted to be gracious. The dry little smile that meant he’d said something foolish and she was deciding whether to point it out.
This one was different. Wide. Unguarded. Lit from inside by the satisfaction of something fixed.
He was in a great deal of trouble.
The thought wasn’t new. Now the mill put it in his hands with mud on its hem, river light in its eyes, and that single red curl lying against her cheek like a banner raised after a siege.
This was not the time. The mill yard was ten yards behind them. Godwin was inside. Anyone might walk down the river track. One sighting, one wrong word carried back to the village, and whatever remained of Amelia’s careful, fragile respectability would be ashes before dusk. The faery whispers had only just been blunted. Belmaine was watching. A suspect baron couldn’t afford scandal.
Thomas knew all of that. He’d been raised on duty the way other boys were raised on sweet cakes. He had swallowed it until it became bone. He knew the rules of land, household, name, protection, obligation, and consequence.