The thought of her mother standing in some English police station, small and frantic and furious, trying to explain that her daughter did not simply disappear, made Amelia’s throat close until it hurt to breathe.
Her mom had been the chaotic one when Amelia was little, always misplacing keys, burning the toast, running out of milk, and forgetting which bill was due until the pink envelopearrived. Amelia had become the list-maker, the calendar-keeper, the girl who laid out school clothes before bed and reminded her mother to buy gas before the tank dipped below fumes and hope. They had been a team, the two of them, one storm and one umbrella, and now Amelia had broken the one rule neither of them had ever said aloud.
Do not leave the other one wondering.
She pressed both hands to her face and breathed through the panic until it eased enough for her to swallow.
She couldn’t get to her mother, not to a phone, or a police station, or the American embassy, or a single person who would understand the phrasemissing person reportwithout assuming she had struck her head and needed a priest.
With a firm shake of her head, she pushed the thoughts down deep. There was nothing she could do about her old life, but Ashcombe needed the rye brought in before the rain. Thomas needed the accounts untangled before Michaelmas when the King might take his title, lands, and home, all because he fought on the wrong side of some battle.
Wat and Alyson needed water carried, bread counted, and someone to make sure they didn’t wander under a scythe because medieval childhood was apparently one long attempt to be accidentally maimed.
So Amelia quickly dressed, stopped by the solar, and did the only thing she knew how to do when the world fell apart.
She made a list.
By the time she reached the kitchen, Edith was waiting with a veil in one hand and the expression of a woman who had already lost patience with the day, though the sun had not yet had the courtesy to appear.
“Sit.”
Amelia sat on a low stool near the hearth while Edith began pinning her veil into place with the grim determination of a woman fortifying a border keep.
“Hold still.”
“I am holding still.”
“You’re twitching like a flea on a hot skillet.”
“I’m being stabbed in the head.”
“You’re being made respectable.”
“That’s definitely worse.”
Edith snorted and tucked one of Amelia’s curls beneath the linen. The curl, bright red and entirely unrepentant, sprang loose near her ear before Edith had even reached for another pin.
Edith gave it the same look Thomas gave unpaid rents.
“It wants to be free,” Amelia said.
“It wants to get you stared at.”
“It can be both.”
“A woman’s hair is her own business until the world makes it everyone else’s,” Edith said, pulling the veil forward and pinning it again. “Out among the reapers, you keep covered.”
Amelia tried not to move while Edith tied a plain apron over the front of her gown. The kirtle was soft gray wool, serviceable and warm enough for the chill before sunrise, though Amelia suspected it would become an oven by midday. Beneath it she wore a linen shift that had been washed so many times it had gone thin at the elbows, stockings tied above the knee with garters she had nearly knotted badly enough to lose both legs, and shoes Edith insisted were better than the odd ones Amelia had arrived in.
They were, strictly speaking. They didn’t have heels thin enough to spear a fish.
Edith tucked a small cloth pouch into the belt at Amelia’s waist, then gave the knot a tug sharp enough to make Amelia straighten.
“What’s this?”
“Bread. Cheese. Dried apples. You’ll forget to eat if no one makes you.”
The kindness of it, offered so briskly, made Amelia’s chest ache. “Thank you.”