Mistress Amelia.
Honestly. If he said it one more time in that careful, gravel-voiced way, she might throw an account roll at his head.
The man had kissed her. Then he had stepped back, reminded her what one witness could do, and spent three days being so correct, restrained, and so painfully honorable that she wanted to shake him, kiss him again, and possibly make him explain himself in a numbered list.
Not that she could blame him. That was the terrible part.
She knew what one witness could do, knew what gossip could become in a place like this, where her whole life rested on a cover story made of cobwebs and everyone’s willingness not to tugtoo hard. She knew Belmaine was watching for weakness, knew Thomas was a baron with too many enemies, too little coin, and one strange woman under his roof who had appeared from nowhere and kept accidentally reorganizing his world.
She knew all of it, but knowing didn’t make it easier to remember the feel of his hand at the back of her head, careful over the pins and veil, as if he wanted all her hair loose in his hands and had only just stopped himself.
She pressed her fingers to the windowsill.
“Stop it,” she muttered.
Thomas turned at that exact moment, as if he’d heard her from across the yard, and looked up.
For one suspended breath, the lists, the yard, the whole busy manor seemed to fall away. His gaze found hers, and the air between them went taut and bright, strung with everything they hadn’t said beside the river. He stood with the sword lowered, shoulders broad, expression unreadable to anyone who hadn’t spent the past couple of months learning the tiny shifts in his face.
But Amelia had. She caught the flicker and somehow knew that he remembered. Then his eyes shifted past her, toward the road. At the same moment, Amelia caught movement beyond the gate.
A small party was coming up the track, four men on serviceable horses, one in a good wool cloak that said official business as plainly as if he’d had it embroidered across his chest.
Her stomach dropped. The memory of the kiss didn’t vanish from her body so much as get shoved into a box labeledpanic about this later.
“Walter,” she called.
The steward appeared in the doorway with the deeply aggrieved expression of a man who had known peace once and found it overrated. He had an ink stain on one thumb, a rolltucked beneath his arm, and the air of someone prepared to disapprove of whatever she said next.
“There’s a man at the gate,” she said. “Good cloak. Official-looking. Is that…”
Walter crossed to the window with more speed than dignity and looked down.
His face went pale and pinched.
“Aye,” he said. “That’ll be Master Pickering.”
Oh no.
“Right.” Amelia took one careful breath, because her lungs seemed to have forgotten their occupation.
“We should make sure that the hall looks settled before he comes in.”
Walter’s eyes narrowed, not at her, but toward the yard below, where Thomas had already handed his sword to Hob.
“Fresh rushes by the high table,” Walter nodded. “Benches straight. No cracked cups where the clerks can see them.”
“And Edith should know there’ll be guests at supper.”
“Edith knows everything before God does,” Walter muttered, already turning. “But I’ll send Alyson.”
He stopped at the door and looked back at the rolls spread across the table.
“Have you moved my Michaelmas copy?”
“No.”
“Have you touched the tallies?”