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Arthur was gladdened to have his daughter staying with him in England.
She had spent much of her first century in the New World, as at first she was too young to risk carrying back across the Atlantic, and then for the simple fact that he would rather she not witness him carve himself apart again and again at the hands of Crown and Commonwealth.
But at long last, Arthur’s proudest treasure from every travel he had ever made resided neatly at his right hand, under Rhys’ strict tutelage, where she had been nurtured and flourished in every way. She was as capable and learned as any duke’s daughter. Even more so—he was no gambler, but he’d happily put money on her knowledge surpassing that of a woman thrice her tender age. And Amelia had a habit of proving this wherever she could.
Arthur was glad to have his daughter with him. If only Arthur’s opinion was all that mattered. Unfortunately England, core and key of Britain and the sprawling empire that spiraled out from his heart, was swiftly approaching the end of his tether.
England was rather displeased with his daughter’s compulsive need to speak out boldly on her own behalf. Though he no longer permitted her to ride with him into London, he’d returned to the estate to find her cloistered with a number of women who he did not recognize. Who had the same slickened oil-scum feeling as Amelia herself on a bad day, as they slipped through the fingers of his soul. As his daughter tended to, whenever she spent time with those of her citizens who felt most disconnected from him.
He had not brought her into his heart to lose her.
When he arrived home, those unknown not-quite-British-anymore women scattered away from Amelia, bowing and hastily heading for their carriages, for the men that had accompanied them and were apparently—apparently—using his home as a gathering point to discuss matters that they should not be speaking about in front of his daughter.
The argument caught like naphtha on dry wood.
“They’re my people!” Amelia shouted. “I have to—you taught me better than to ignore my people, Father.”
“I’ll not have you embarrassing me anymore!” Arthur snapped. “If you are to be nothing more than a common scold, a rumor-monger, a rude gossip-wife—then I will—I will—” he cast about for what he would do, and a dreadful stillness overtook his face as he realized his only recourse.
If Amelia wished to be treated like a woman grown, he would show her what it meant to be a woman grown, slandering his good name with her loose tongue and constant chattering. If he refused to do so now, she would learn the lesson at harsher hands, no doubt. She followed his laws. They’d been etched into her, as the stream of human lifeblood had settled from his lands and commenced the beating of her heart. It was a kindness for him to do this. She had to learn.
“Very well then.”
Arthur crossed the room and opened the door to the hall, and calling for a servant with a brisk twist of his fingers. Amelia’s lips remained pinched and she remained sitting.
“Fetch my brother,” he said lowly to the maid.
“Which one, sir?” she asked, head lowered enough to be respectful without being obsequious.
Arthur tapped his fingers against his thigh as he considered. Rhys? Or Alasdair? Rhys would probably agree that Amelia needed punishing to his face, but he had no doubt that Wales would ultimately undermine him and tell Amelia she was right to encourage her citizens. Especially since they weren’t always British these days. Rhys would treat it as an opportunity to live out his own fantasies, rather than consider what was best for him and Amelia both. And Alasdair…Alasdair had brought over several innovations, when he’d stayed briefly in the early seventeenth century, before they’d come to their current arrangement. Whatever problems Alasdair decided to cause, Arthur was certain that the man would prove useful in solving them.
“Alasdair. Thank you.” The maid curtsied and left, and Arthur returned to his seat across from his unruly girl.
Amelia’s eyes were tight around the edges, her face holding on to neutrality by a thread, but she managed to not look as though she’d been shouting at him only moments before. She stayed quiet. A pity she only remembered how to do that after he’d arrived at the necessity of what would be coming next.
After a few minutes waiting in silence, Alasdair’s heavy tread shattered the still as he stomped down the hallway. As usual, he didn’t enter the room all the way. Instead, he hung awkwardly at the edge, right along where the doorway split the room from the hall.
“Did you need something?”
“Alasdair. Amelia has decided that she is no better than a common scold. And so I have decided that she will be dealt with as all other scolds are.”
Alasdair grimaced. “Are you sure about that?”
“Am I not the lord of this manor? Is this not a matter for a manor-court to resolve?” There was no need for magistrates or trials, not when the law wrapped steel across his knuckles and fixed his spine upright in the morning. And the law permitted this—or at least the limits and loopholes would allow him to do as he pleased in this matter.
Amelia’s face was slack and afraid, fixed on her lap. Alasdair glanced at her, then at Arthur, and folded his arms across his chest without making another attempt at replying. If he was hoping his silence would speak for him, Arthur knew he would be disappointed as Arthur ignored him to return his attention to Amelia.
“I will give you your choice,” Arthur said, and his daughter refused to look at him. He thrust his hand out, and hooked his fingers behind the edges of her small jaw, tilting up her chin so that he could look into her eyes. She grit her teeth, the muscles jumping under his hand. Her brows were furrowed, and he had to resist the urge to smooth away the lines there, as he had when she was an infant. “You may choose between the bridle and the stool. While you decide, Alasdair will go and fetch them from the courthouse in town. When he returns, your sentence will be carried out.”
Amelia’s eyes were fixed on his, but he couldn’t find his daughter in the blue irises. Behind him, Alasdair ducked out of the room to fetch the instruments as Arthur instructed.
“The stool,” she finally said as she wrenched her head from his hands, and her lip curled away from her teeth. “If it pleases you, Lord Kirkland.”
Alasdair returned quickly, drawing the ducking-stool behind his horse, and with the brank clasped under his arm, a grim expression on his face.
“They wanted to know why I was needing these,” he muttered to Arthur after dismounting and the servants led the horse and stool away, toward the back of the house where the pond could be found. “I managed to get them to step off, but it was a near thing. Expect questions, what with the fact that they’ll not be allowed to watch this ducking. I’d forgotten what excitement comes with a scold’s ordeal, and the village were a mite aggravated to not be invited.”
Arthur’s sigh rattled heavy in his nose, and he waved Alasdair to follow the stool and the horse. “I’ll worry about that once this is over. Go help them set things up—I’d rather trust you with preparations than someone likely to do it wrong. It’s a punishment, not an execution.”
Alasdair looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t look at me like that! I would have preferred her to choose the brank myself—far less likely to hurt her in the long run, perfectly humane. I suspect that your perfect device never made it to her shores, and she’s chosen what she’s most familiar with, not what would be best under the circumstances.”
“And whose fault is that? You put her into this position, Arthur. She had to make a decision somehow.”
Arthur grimaced, thinking of his well-loved copy of Hudibras sitting on the bookshelf beside his desk. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Had he spoiled Amelia?
The door opened, and Amelia emerged from the house. Two maids closed the door behind her, and she startled a little at the sound of the closing door. She did not meet Arthur’s eyes as she stood in the drive between him and Alasdair. Alasdair, who immediately turned to follow the servants who’d taken the horse and stool away. Leaving him alone with Amelia.
“Shall we?” He offered her his arm. She followed her uncle toward the back garden without taking it. They made their way out to the pond’s edge without another word, Amelia’s head held high, and Arthur’s fingers folded into a clenched fist at his side.
“If you choose the stool, you must be silent,” he warned, then gestured toward Alasdair who shifted on his feet. His brother’s jaw was tight, but he kept quiet. “If you say anything, I’ll have Alasdair put you in the brank. And then we’ll continue with the stool.”
Amelia said nothing.
Instead she walked to where Alasdair had set up the ducking-stool and settled herself primly atop the seat, tucking her skirts beneath her so that they wouldn’t fling themselves wildly when she went under. Arthur grimaced, and stepped back, turning to the iron ring affixed to the stool that he would need to lock around her waist. It sat oddly on her girl’s hips—it had not been made for someone her age. He hesitated, then turned the lock, and slid the key into his pocket.
A rough heave shoved the device forward, and sent Amelia, locked to her seat, out over the dark waters of the pond. He turned to Alasdair, to the empty shore, to where the crowds would have been if this were being done in a usual fashion. This was abnormal in every sense, but he would see the law carried out as justly as it could be under the circumstances.
“Amelia Kirkland, you stand accused of common scoldry. You are charged with being communis litigatrix cum vicinis suis, and have been sentenced to fifteen duckings in the stool.” Arthur ignored Alasdair’s expression and stepped before the fulcrum which would lower Amelia into the water.
Arthur rolled up his sleeves, and lifted the end of the stool.
Amelia’s eyes went wide, like she’d still not expected him to carry through with this, and she went under the choppy surface of the pond, the dark water reflecting the cloudy sky above.
He waited a heartbeat. Pulled the stool up again. Water streamed from Amelia’s nose, and she spit water from her mouth. Perhaps he should have warned her that she’d be going under, before starting the ducking.
“One,” he counted. Amelia’s face tightened, and she screwed up her face in an attempt to keep her nose closed as he put her back under.
“Two,” he announced as she came up again.
She needed to listen to him again. She needed to fold back into him, to his side, that he might be able to feel her the way he could when she was still small. When her grip had only just managed to wrap around half his hand, and she squeezed twice as tight for the insecurity of it. When she dreaded nothing more than the thought of separation from him. When she looked at him like he defined the limits of her world—her Atlas and atlas.
He dunked her again, again, and again. Each time her pale wan face rose back into sight, set in a moue of fierce mulishness. Again. Amelia had lost her hair-ribbon. Water plastered her hair over her face, and she shook her head frantically trying to clear it from being sucked into her mouth and nose as she took heaving gasps of air.
“Arthur, look at her—this is madness!” Alasdair shouted, and Arthur dunked her again. He had expected her to recant her actions by now—the last time he was in Virginia and seen this done to one of the girl’s citizens, it’d only taken five for the woman to apologize, to swear off her wicked ways.
Amelia came up for air again, and he caught her eye. She fixed him with a gimlet glare, and her mouth remained closed, save for the pond water dribbling from it.
Again.
Annoyed pride buoyed his unsteady heart. She came up coughing water. He’d stopped counting. He was relatively certain of one thing, however—he was far from finished with Amelia.
Again.
Alasdair was the one to stop him.
He hauled Amelia out of the water, and she lolled forward, coughing and gagging wetly, water spilling from her mouth and down her dress. She hadn’t—he was about to dunk her again, when Alasdair had shouted, and grabbed his arms.
“Enough! That’s enough, Arthur!”
“She hasn’t—” Arthur snarled, but Alasdair kept going.
“You’ve hit fifteen. That was the limit you set. Fifteen. She’s had fifteen. Let her go.” Alasdair was already stepping forward to drag the stool away from the water before Arthur acquiesced. Arthur palmed the key that he’d tucked into his pocket, and went into the shallow water to undo the iron band around Amelia’s waist.
He managed to catch her before she tipped forward into the water.
Arthur gathered her into his arms. Amelia could not even hold herself upright as he lifted her from the stool. She made the attempt—she would always try—but her knees knocked together and her lips were an off-cast shade of her eyes. If she had been wan before, now she was wax. Waxen and burned candle-nub.
“Get the door,” Arthur instructed. Alasdair’s eyes skipped away from Amelia’s goose-bitten body and stiff fingers set atop Arthur’s coat like she had forgotten how to secure herself when she was carried like this.
The servants had long scattered into the most distant corners of the house. The procession up to Amelia’s room stayed silent, even when Amelia roused herself enough to lay a single weakened slap against Arthur’s shoulder.
Her bedroom was unchanged from how it had looked that morning.
She hadn’t even made her bed.
Alasdair helped keep her upright as he carefully undid her overdress, looking away as Arthur slid off her slip and pulled a dry one over her head. His brother kept his daughter steady as Arthur did his best to untangle the mess the pond had made of her hair, gathering it back in a simple English braid which could be draped over the pillow away from her neck. Then he left without another word as Arthur gathered Amelia back up in his arms again. And though she was now pressed against his chest so close he could feel her heart thud and her pulse thrum, he had never felt more distant from her. As though the one thousand and fifty-seven leagues between Bristol and Boston cleft them even embodied.
He laid her down in her bed, and pulled the thick covers over her shivering. Though he could have sworn she opened her eyes, Amelia said nothing as he left.
When he closed the door, Alasdair was waiting for him.
“Do you reckon it was worth it?” he asked in a harsh whisper, no doubt assuming that Amelia had truly been asleep when they’d put her to bed. Arthur did not reply—he asked a question of his own.
“Do you think she’ll listen now?”
Alasdair snorted, obviously still angry with him, but unwilling to fight outside Amelia’s room. “Aye. I think she’ll obey you, if that’s what you were after. Even so, she will never forget what happened today.”
“Good. Then I won’t need to do this again.”
Arthur pushed past his brother, and did his best to ignore the strange shadows cast as Alasdair’s expression changed.
In the morning, Arthur had Alasdair return the stool to the courthouse, but whether by intent or by accident, his brother leaves the brank behind. Arthur considered it for a moment, then he carried it upstairs, and set it atop the high shelf in Amelia’s closet that she couldn’t quite reach and thus never used.
He couldn’t help shivering when it was finally out of sight. And by the time Amelia awoke, and come down quietly for breakfast, he’d already forgotten where he’d put it. Even as Amelia left her closet door ajar most nights.
And when she is forward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.
(The Taming of the Shrew, 5.2.173-180.)