And if there truly was a husband somewhere who had put that hunted look on Amelia Quinn’s face, Thomas hoped the man came looking.
He had a great many things he wished to hit and very little he was permitted to.
The accounts, for one.
Saints, the accounts.
He sat over them now in the small cold solar off the hall, the one his father had used and his grandfather before him. A narrow slit of a window let in a grudging wash of gray morning, not enough to warm the place and barely enough to see by, though he had lit two candles and set them in iron sticks on either end of the table. One guttered every time the draught found its way beneath the door. The other had leaned sideways and was dripping wax onto the scarred wood in slow pale tears.
The chamber smelled of old vellum, damp stone, beeswax, and dogs.
The table itself was buried. Tally sticks lay in uneven piles beside curling rolls of parchment covered in the late bailiff’s cramped, crabbed hand. Wexford had written as if he was only allowed one roll of parchment for his entire life. Beside those sat a chipped horn inkwell, three quills, two of which had split, a small knife for sharpening them, a stack of rent notes from tenants who had more need than money, and a wooden cup of small beer Thomas had drained long ago.
He would have preferred a battlefield. A battlefield had rules, even when men broke them. There was mud, fear, blood, noise, and the moment when all the fine plans men made collapsed into whatever courage and training remained.
Thomas understood that. He understood the weight of a sword, the temper of a horse, the give of wet ground beneath a charge, the twitch in a man’s shoulder that meant he would strike high instead of low.
He understood when a shield wall would hold and when it would break. He knew how to keep men alive and, when he could not, how to carry the names of the dead home and speak them to mothers who would never forgive him.
He did not understand why one roll said Ashcombe should have eight more sacks of grain than the barn held, or why the tally for three tenants matched neither the steward’s notes nor the memory of the reeve, or how he was meant to pay the king’s rents at Michaelmas with the harvest still standing in the fields.
He lifted one roll, frowned at it, turned it slightly, and frowned harder, muttering curses under his breath.
“You’re holding it upside down,” said a voice from the doorway.
He was not holding it upside down, though he checked to be sure.
“I am holding it correctly,” he said without looking up. “Have you somewhere to be, mistress?”
“No. Edith ran out of things to keep me busy.”
That made him look up.
Amelia stood in the doorway wearing one of Edith’s plain gowns, though plain seemed to take on strange habits when it found its way onto her. The wool was a soft brown that should have made her fade into the shadows. Instead it warmed the green of her eyes and set off the red of her hair, which had been dragged into some approximation of respectable order. Severalcurls had already escaped, springing along her temples and the side of her neck as if propriety bored them.
She had ink on one finger.
He didn’t know why and wondered why he noticed.
“Edith said,” she continued, stepping into the room without waiting to be invited, which no one ever did, “and I quote, ‘Go bother his lordship, since he’s good for nothing else this morning.’”
“She said that?”
“With affection.”
“Edith has the tongue of a pike.”
“I don’t know what that means, but I’m going to agree based on your tone.”
She stopped at the edge of the table and looked down at the piles of sticks and parchment. Thomas braced himself for the polite glaze most folk got when faced with accounts, then the quick retreat, the nervous smile, the sudden recollection of some pressing chore in another room.
Instead, Amelia stopped, tilted her head, and leaned closer. He watched as her face changed.
It was the look old soldiers got when a fool on the other side of the field left his flank open. Her eyes moved over the rolls, the tallies, the wax tablet, the scattered notes. A small line appeared between her brows as she frowned.
“Oh,” she said softly. “This is a disaster.”
“So I had gathered.”