“Bolt the door behind you.”
For a moment, disappointment flickered across her face, or mayhap he imagined it because he deserved to see it.
Then her mouth curved, wry and small. “Very romantic.”
He frowned. “What?”
“Nothing.” She stepped back into the warmth. “Good night, Lord Thundercloud.”
The door closed before he could ask what in God’s name a lord thundercloud was.
Thomas made the decision, then. Not because he wished it, but because he must. He would depend on Amelia’s system, her numbers, her lists, her fierce strange mind that had turned chaos into order and given Ashcombe a fighting chance. He would let the castle lean on her because he was not so proud as to refuse salvation when it came in a blue gown with ink on its face. But he would not let himself lean. Not with the whole weight of what he wanted. Not where anyone could see. Not where she might be hurt by it.
Thomas closed his eyes, set his jaw, and crushed the wanting down as hard as he could.
It did not go quietly.
AMELIA
It was the storm that did it. Storms were how all of this had started, after all, and storms, apparently, were how the universe intended to keep making its little announcements. Not subtle announcements, not a polite tap on the shoulder or a memo slipped under the door. No, storms came crashing down from the sky as if God himself had upended a barrel over England and then decided the thunder could use drums.
This one rolled up the valley after dark, the first real gale of autumn, and it found every weakness in Ashcombe’s patched roof. By midnight, the hall had begun to drip in six places. Amelia knew because she had counted them.
There was the steady plink near the screens passage where someone had set out a cracked bowl. The mean little patter beside the second trestle table. The slow, fat drop near the hearth that hissed whenever it struck warm stone. Two leaks near the wall hangings that had already made the faded green banner sag with damp, and one sneaky leak above the rushes that had not been noticed until a sleeping dog stood, shook himself violently, and sprayed everyone within ten feet.
The wind pressed against the shutters hard enough to make them rattle in their iron fittings. Rain blew beneath the doors in fine silver threads. Smoke from the banked fire sulked low beneath the rafters, refusing to rise properly, and the whole hall smelled of wet wool, old ashes, dog, damp rushes, spilled ale, and the sour ghost of the evening’s stew.
No one else seemed troubled by this.
That, Amelia had discovered, was one of the many differences between her century and Thomas’s. In her century, a leaking roof was a homeowner’s insurance claim, three panicked calls, an estimate, a tarp, and at least one man named Dave scratching his nose, and saying, “Well, that’s not ideal.”
In this century, a leaking roof was something you put bowls beneath the worst of, shifted the bedding if you had to, and got on with being grateful the whole thing hadn’t collapsed on your head.
Amelia lay in the loft above the hall and tried to be medieval about it. She failed. The wool blanket scratched her chin. The straw-stuffed mattress beneath her smelled faintly of lavender, sheep, and damp. Around her, the sleeping women and girls of the household breathed in uneven rhythm, wrapped in blankets and shadows. Somewhere below, a man snored with the grim determination of a saw working through oak. Alyson, sleeping tucked beside Wat on a pallet near the hearth, muttered once, then quieted.
Thunder cracked so close the stones seemed to flinch.
Amelia opened her eyes.
“Nope,” she whispered to the dark. “Absolutely not sleeping through that.”
For a while she lay still and listened to the rain batter the roof, to the wind worrying at Ashcombe like a dog at a bone, to the old castle answering in groans, creaks, rattles, and little sighs of shifting timber and stone. It was strange how alive a medievalbuilding sounded in a storm. Her apartment back home had been all sealed windows and white noise, traffic far below, pipes knocking politely inside walls someone else maintained. Ashcombe breathed around her. A drop landed on her forehead. Another drop gathered in the dark, fattened, and fell onto her nose.
“Betrayal,” she muttered.
She rolled away, gathered her blanket, and sat up. Her hair had escaped its braid during the night and now hung in a loose red tangle over one shoulder, because apparently even her hair had decided this century was lawless. She shoved it back, found the pins by touch, and braided it down her back.
Below, the hall was dim, lit only by the banked fire and one small rushlight guttering near the high table. Most of the household slept in the shadowed warmth, bodies curled beneath cloaks and blankets, boots lined near benches, dogs sprawled like dropped rugs. The long tables had been pushed aside for the night. Cups, bowls, a heel of bread, and one forgotten onion sat on a sideboard, relics of supper left to face the storm alone.
Amelia only meant to climb down and move her pallet away from the leak. That was the plan.
Plans, she had learned, had a short life expectancy at Ashcombe.
Halfway down the ladder, she saw him. Thomas sat alone near the hearth. Not at the high table where the lord of the manor belonged, not on the bench where men gathered to talk after supper, but on a low stool beside the dying fire, his forearms braced on his knees, a clay jug at his elbow and a cup dangling loose from one hand. He wasn’t dressed for sleep. His dark tunic was unlaced at the throat, and his hair was damp from the rain. He wore no sword, which made him look oddly more dangerous rather than less, as if removing the blade had only revealed the man beneath it.
The firelight cut his face into shadow and bronze. It caught the hard bridge of his nose, the dark stubble on his cheeks, the deep hollows beneath his eyes. He stared into the coals with a stillness Amelia had come to recognize. There was quiet, and then there was Thomas quiet. This was the second kind. The shut-down kind. The kind he wore like mail.
Amelia stopped with one hand on the ladder. She should go back. There was no version of propriety in 1265 where an unwed woman climbed down from the sleeping loft in the middle of the night to sit alone with the lord of the manor while half the household slept and rain covered every small sound. Walter would have a seizure. Edith would narrow her eyes. Hob would pretend not to notice while noticing so hard the walls might crack. Belmaine, if he ever heard of it, would turn it into a weapon before breakfast.