Near the chapel house door, Dame Margaret stood with Joan half-hidden behind her and Father Martin at her side. All three had followed. All three had seen too much for Belmaine’s comfort.
Good. Let the whole house watch.
Thomas lifted his sword, not to Belmaine’s throat, but near enough that the meaning needed no translation.
“By mine.”
“You have no authority over another man’s wife.”
“She is not his wife.”
“You cannot know that.”
Thomas’s jaw tightened. “I know her.”
Belmaine gave a thin, cruel smile. “How touching. The king’s men may enjoy that admission.”
Father Martin stepped forward as every face turned toward him.
The priest looked pale in the rain, his plain dark robe damp at the shoulders and his tonsured head shining with mist, but his ink-stained hands were steady and his voice carried clear as a chapel bell.
“The attestation is false.”
Belmaine turned purple.
Father Martin lifted one hand. “Father Odo of Saint Alphege’s has been dead these three years. The seal is false, the hand is not his, and the witness names are not men of that parish.”
“That is a grave accusation,” Belmaine said.
“Aye,” Father Martin said. “I make it gravely.”
Dame Margaret stepped beside him, the keys at her girdle clinking softly as she moved. She had the face of a woman who had swallowed fear for years and found it had finally turned to iron in her belly.
“Crale entered her chamber against command. Sir Roger ordered her moved before dawn. When Lord Ashcombe was seen on the road, he ordered her taken through the orchard.”
“Margaret,” Belmaine said softly.
She flinched. Then she straightened, and when she spoke again her voice had gone cold.
“No. You’ve used my house for enough.”
Joan peeked around Dame Margaret’s shoulder, face white beneath her cap but stubborn as a mule at market.
“And he said Father Martin was to write that she was counseled.”
Belmaine’s glare cut to her.
Joan took one step back, then lifted her chin as if borrowing courage from every angry kitchen girl who had ever lived and every woman who had ever been told to hush when the truth was standing right there, muddy and bleeding.
“He did.”
Hob grinned down at Osric. “Household’s leaking truth all over the place.”
Osric said something muffled into the mud.
“Speak up,” Hob said. “Can’t hear treason from down there.”
Belmaine’s men had gathered beyond the orchard wall, several bleeding, one clutching his arm, all of them wet, grim, and less confident than they had been when the day still belonged to them. Two Ashcombe men held them back with drawn blades. None seemed eager to continue. Not with Galahad stamping rainwater into the mud, Hob looking delighted, and Thomas standing in the orchard like death himself.