“Yes. Bread, cheese, small beer, water, whatever can be carried easily. Nothing fancy. I’m not suggesting a feast among the barley. But if the workers eat where they are, they go back to work faster.”
“That is not how we do it,” Walter said.
“I know.”
His mouth tightened. “You say that as if custom is a thing to be kicked aside.”
“No. I say that as if custom is a thing to examine when the roof is on fire.”
Hob looked up. “Is the roof on fire?”
“No,” Thomas said.
“Metaphorically,” Amelia said.
Hob blinked.
Thomas shook his head. “Do not ask.”
Walter looked down at the tablet. His mouth had gone thin again, but his eyes had sharpened.
“You are saying the reeve decides the fieldwork, I decide stores and accounts, Hob keeps the men moving, Edith manages food, and you…”
“I run between you all with a list and bother everyone.”
Thomas made the mistake of looking at her, at her eyes sparkling in the candlelight. He thought, with a jolt that had nothing to do with reason, that mayhap the accounts had finally broken something inside his thick skull.
Walter tapped the wax tablet. “This may help the work move more quickly.”
From Walter, that was practically a hymn.
Amelia did not preen. Thomas liked that about her. She merely looked relieved, as if she had been holding her breath since she walked into the chamber.
“It might,” she said. “But only if the people who actually understand the harvest tell me what I’m getting wrong.”
Walter stared at her for a long moment, then he gave one sharp nod. “The north field should not be first.”
Amelia immediately scratched something out. “Good. Why?”
“The barley there will stand another day. The rye nearer the low ground will not if rain comes.”
“Then that goes first,” she said, writing again. “See? That is what I mean. You know the field. I know how to keep the work from tangling itself into knots.”
Thomas felt something in his chest ease. Not hope. He did not trust hope, but something nigh to it.
He looked at Walter. “Can it be done?”
Walter drew a slow breath, eyes still on Amelia’s odd little marks. “Mayhap.”
Hob came fully into the room. “If there is bread, cheese, and small beer in the field, the men will not complain.”
Walter snorted. “The men will complain if angels descend from heaven to cut the grain for them.”
“That’s true,” Hob said. “But they will complain less with cheese.”
Amelia pointed the stylus at him. “Exactly.”
Thomas looked from one to the other, then down at the accounts that had seemed like an enemy army that morning and now, somehow, looked like something that could be divided, named, and fought.