“You’re lying,” Amelia said. Her voice was steady enough to fool the yard, but not him.
Crale looked at her with a sorrow so polished it might have been rubbed with oil. “Amelia.”
“Don’t.” Her voice cut through the bailey. “Don’t say my name like you’ve ever had the right.”
Belmaine’s brows lifted. “A wife, frightened and ashamed, may deny much.”
Amelia gave him a look sharp enough to skin the bark from a tree. “And a man with too much money and not enough honor may buy whatever story suits him.”
A murmur moved through Ashcombe.
Belmaine’s face hardened. “I anticipated denial.”
“Of course you did,” she said. “You packed it with the rest of your props.”
Saints, but Thomas loved her.
The thought hit him with the subtlety of a mace and left him standing in front of Belmaine, Crale, half his household, and the entire ruin of his common sense.
Belmaine reached inside his cloak and withdrew a narrow folded parchment with a red wax seal hanging from the bottom. The seal was whole, pressed deep, darkened at the edges from travel. Thomas saw a crude church stamped into the wax, with letters around the rim he couldn’t make out from where he stood.
Walter made a small, strangled noise.
Belmaine heard it and smiled.
“A clerical attestation,” he said gently. “Drawn by Father Odo of Saint Alphege’s near Alcester and witnessed by two men of the parish. It states that banns were properly called, no lawful impediment was raised, and Edmund Crale and Amelia,daughter of Quinn, were wed before priest and witnesses on the feast of Saint Lucy last.”
Thomas didn’t take the parchment. If he took it, the thing became real in his hand.
Walter came forward because his steward could no more leave a document unread than Hob could leave a fight unentered.
“My lord?” Walter asked quietly.
Thomas held out one hand.
Belmaine placed the parchment in it with the air of a man passing over a relic. The wax seal brushed Thomas’s palm. He hated the weight of it. Hated that such a small thing could threaten everything.
Walter stepped closer, squinting at the writing. Master Pickering was not in the yard, curse the man’s timing, but his clerk was. The thin young man had come to fetch copies of the corrected tallies and now hovered beneath the arch like a soul hoping judgment might happen in another parish.
Belmaine saw him too.
“How fortunate,” Belmaine murmured, “that Master Pickering’s clerk remains within your walls. No whisper need grow crooked in the telling.”
Thomas looked at the clerk. “Come here.”
The clerk came as if walking to his own funeral.
“Read it.”
“My lord, I am only?—”
“Read it.”
The clerk took the parchment, and bent over the writing. His lips moved first without sound. Then he swallowed.
“It is as Sir Roger has said, my lord.”
Walter leaned closer. “The seal?”