That was when Amelia discovered there were few things in creation more suspenseful than watching an old steward present clean accounts to a man who had clearly come expecting rot.
Walter didn’t rush or flatter. He didn’t fumble as he moved from harvest to rents to stores with the grim elegance of a man laying stones in a wall no army would breach. Each roll appeared when needed. Each tally matched. When Pickering asked after the damp sacks from the low field, Walter explained how they’d dried them in the malting shed before spoilage could take hold.
Pickering’s quill paused. “You dried damp sacks in the malting shed?”
“The shed was dry, the malt could wait, and mold does not respect custom,” Walter said.
Amelia pressed her lips together.
Walter, stealing her lines now. Wonders never ceased.
Pickering looked from Walter to Thomas. “A useful household.”
Thomas remained quiet.
It was the correct answer. Pickering’s kind did not require agreement. They required rope, and one tried not to provide it.
“Michaelmas rents,” Pickering said.
Walter handed over the roll as Pickering examined it. One clerk wrote. The other leaned in, lips moving silently as he checked figures against Walter’s spoken account.
Amelia tried to focus on the mending which proved impossible, because Thomas stood within ten feet of her and smelled faintly of leather, soap, and fall air. Three days ago, his mouth had been on hers. Now his eyes were on Pickering, and his hands, those scarred, steady, infuriating hands, rested loose at his sides.
She put another stitch through the apron before she accidentally embroidered her own thumb.
“And your stores?” Pickering asked.
Walter presented the store roll.
Pickering read as his eyes narrowed.
“Your hand differs here.”
“It does,” Walter said.
Pickering lifted his gaze. “You used a copyist?”
Walter’s expression suggested Pickering had asked whether the roll had been written by a goat.
“Mistress Amelia Quinn has a clean hand,” he said.
One of Pickering’s clerks made a small strangled sound as Pickering glanced toward her and every eye in the hall seemed to follow.
Amelia folded her hands over the mending and made herself look calm, useful, and not at all like a woman who had once owned three kinds of dry shampoo.
“She writes your accounts?” Pickering asked Thomas.
“She copies what Walter sets before her,” Thomas said. “The reckoning remains his.”
Pickering looked at Walter for a long moment. “Including yours?”
Walter’s spine rose like an offended cat’s.
“Mistress Amelia writes more clearly than I do,” he said. “I am old, not blind.”
Amelia almost swallowed her tongue.
Thomas didn’t move, but she caught the flicker at the corner of his mouth.