Walter bowed his head, but the movement had iron in it. “My lord, she is a stranger.”
“I am aware.”
“She is a woman with no kin to vouch for her, no family known to us, and no husband present despite the tales. She speaks strangely, and now she is to be given the manor’s rolls?”
Amelia’s cheeks went pink, but she held her tongue.
Thomas did not know why that annoyed him. Mayhap because he had already grown used to her not holding her tongue at all.
“Do you think she made Wexford steal from us before she arrived?” Thomas asked.
Walter’s jaw worked. “Nay.”
“Do you think she marked the miller’s sign wrong?”
“Nay.”
“Do you think I have any better way of finding what the man did before Michaelmas comes and Master Pickering starts sniffing around Ashcombe like a hound after blood?”
Walter’s gaze dropped to the rolls.
That was answer enough.
Thomas leaned back in his chair, which creaked beneath him in a manner he did not appreciate. “Then she sees the rolls.”
Walter drew himself up. “My lord, if folk hear she has her hands in the accounts, there will be talk.”
“There is already talk. Perkin thinks my horse was chosen by faeries to carry messages between worlds.”
Amelia made a small sound.
Thomas looked at her. “Do not laugh.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m absolutely not.”
Her mouth was trembling.
Saints.
The freckles across her nose stood out in the candlelight, a neat scatter over pale skin, and Thomas, who had taken blows to the head with less damage, found himself thinking they looked like the white blaze down Galahad’s face.
His favorite warhorse.
He had compared a woman to a horse, found the likeness pleasing, and was now wondering if the Almighty had decided the accounts were not punishment enough.
He looked away so quickly his neck cracked.
The accounts still lay in ruins before him, Walter still looked as though propriety had been stabbed through the heart, and Amelia stood there with ink on her finger, trying not to laugh.
Thomas had meant to keep her busy and out of trouble.
Saints help him, he had begun to suspect she was going to be trouble precisely because she was useful.
THOMAS