Across the table, Walter made another sound. This one might have been agreement.
Thomas scowled at him as Walter suddenly found the rolls fascinating.
Just before Sext, Widow Maud came forward.
Maud had buried a son after Evesham, though not on the field. Fever took him a week later, after a wound festered black. Her husband had died three winters before, crushed beneath a cart he shouldn’t have been pulling alone. She was thin as a candle, her back bent but not broken, with hands so knotted they looked carved from root. Her wimple was clean and carefullypinned. Pride, Thomas had learned, often wore its best linen when poverty came to court.
The old roll said she owed three hens and a coin rent she couldn’t pay.
Amelia’s roll told another tale. The hens had been marked paid once, then owed again. The coin rent had been deferred by Thomas’s father after the cart accident, then somehow brought forward by Wexford as if mercy could be misplaced by ink.
Walter had been silent for a long time when they found that entry.
Now Maud stood before the table and set down two eggs from her basket. Not hens. Eggs. Two brown eggs, one with a bit of straw clinging to it.
A few men shifted. Someone near the door muttered. Maud’s chin rose, fierce and fragile.
“My lord,” she said, “I have not the hens. Fox took one. The other two are poor layers, but I brought what they gave.”
Thomas looked at the eggs. Two eggs against a debt Wexford had invented twice over.
He felt anger rise, not hot, but cold and clean. There was nowhere to put it. Wexford was dead. The field had taken him and left Thomas to reckon with the small cruelties he had scratched into Ashcombe’s bones.
Walter began to speak, then stopped.
Amelia’s quill rested above the parchment. She didn’t look at Thomas this time. She looked at Maud. Then she turned the roll so Thomas could see the line she had marked three nights before.
Paid. The word stood there in her clear hand.
Thomas felt the hall waiting. “Widow Maud,” he said, “you owe no hens.”
The old woman stared at him.
“You owe no coin rent this quarter,” he continued. “It was forgiven by my father after your husband died and should have remained so. Walter will strike it from the false roll.”
Walter inclined his head once. “Aye, my lord.”
Maud’s mouth worked.
Thomas looked at the eggs. “As for these, Edith will take them for the kitchen, and you will eat in the hall before you go home.”
“My lord, I cannot?—”
“You can.” His voice gentled despite himself. “And you will.”
The old woman’s eyes filled.
Amelia looked down quickly, but not before Thomas saw her blink too hard.
Damn her for bringing him face to face with the sort of lord he should have been before desperation forced him to learn.
THOMAS
By noon, the coffer held coin enough to pay the king.Barely.
That was the word that mattered. Barely sat on the table between the rolls and the tally sticks like an unwelcome guest who had brought all his brothers. Barely paid the farm, stocked the barns, kept seed for spring. Barely left enough cheese, beans, oats, salted meat, and hope to carry them through the winter if weather was not cruel. And if the roofs held, and no sickness came, no cow died, no neighbor turned wolf, and no escheator decided Ashcombe looked weak enough to swallow.
Barely was still better than not.