“What do you need?” he asked.
Amelia looked surprised. “You’re asking me?”
“I am.”
“Not ordering?”
“I can order if it comforts you.”
“It does not.”
“Then I am asking.”
Her face went soft. Amelia was small as a wren and somehow gave the impression she might fly straight into a man’s face if properly provoked.
“I need more light,” she said. “Bring me every roll and tally Wexford touched. The reeve. Edith. Someone who knows the barns. Someone who knows the larder. And space to sort this into piles.”
“Piles?” Hob said, scratching at his neck.
“Yes. Good piles, bad piles, suspicious piles, and I-don’t-know-yet piles.”
Hob looked at Thomas. “Is that how accounts are done?”
Thomas looked at Walter.
Walter looked at Amelia.
Amelia lifted one shoulder. “It is how they’re done today.”
For a while, there was only the scrape of stools, the crackle of candles, the rustle of parchment, and Amelia asking questions instead of giving commands. That was the difference, Thomas realized after a time. She did not stride in and pretend to know more than the people of Ashcombe. She found the people who knew, pulled the knowledge out of them, and set it where all could see.
Walter muttered, argued twice, was proven wrong once, proven right once, and seemed equally offended by both. Hob matched tally sticks. Edith came in with bread, took one look at the table, and began naming stores from memory with terrifying precision.
By midday, the table had changed. The heap had become rows. The rows had become sense. Wexford’s theft, or carelessness, or some ugly marriage of both, began to show itself in small repeated cruelties.
A widow charged twice. A tenant’s labor erased. Grain marked spoiled where no spoilage had been reported. Coin rents that had entered the roll and never reached the coffer.
Walter grew quieter with each discovery.
Amelia did not crow. Thomas liked that too. She did not make victory a cudgel, though he suspected she could wield one if pressed.
At last she sat back, rubbing the side of her hand where the stylus had left a red dent. “There’s enough missing to hurt, but not enough to ruin you if we move quickly.”
Walter looked up. “Say that again.”
“There is enough missing to hurt Ashcombe,” Amelia said carefully. “But not enough to ruin it. Not yet.”
Not yet.The words settled over all of them.
Thomas had lived with ruin breathing down his neck since the day he returned from Evesham. It had sat at his table, sleptat the foot of his bed, followed him into the yard, stood beside him every time he looked over thin fields and thinner faces.
Not yet was not salvation, but it was room to fight. And Thomas knew how to fight.
Walter touched the edge of the wax tablet as though it might vanish. “I will speak with the reeve.”
“I’ll fetch him,” Hob said, already turning.
Thomas stopped him. “Hob?”