The Assassin's Wife (53 page)

“I envy you your glimpse of them.” Disgust lodged like a hard stone in my gullet.

“Ah, of course, you miss your London friends. Do you remember Maud Attemore, too?” He spoke mischievously but his eyes hardened like chips of brown pebble. “She still commands the best gossip in the Chepe. Her tales are marvellous entertainments. Is it true Dame Eleanor bore a child at Norwich?”

This question almost knocked me off my feet.
 

“You seem astounded. I’d thought you, of all people, would know the truth of it. Some say the Duke of Norfolk took the child in but perhaps it remained with the nuns?”

The feigned innocence of his inquiry infuriated me, but I stared at him with a bland expression.

“You’d better ask someone other than me.” I pretended a careless shrug. “I’ve no answers that can satisfy you.”

But I woke in the early hours in a cold sweat of terror. Jack’s words about Nancy revived an alarming memory. Hadn’t the child discovered the cards hidden in my clothes’ chest while playing with Margaret Mercer? Suppose Jack questioned the little maid about me? Like an incubus, the thought sat upon my heart, devouring sleep.

Chapter Sixty-Six

Towards the end of the year Miles returned from the Borders, morose and edgy. He seemed leaner, full of dark silences and given to riding out alone in the early hours as if something preyed on his mind.
 

“Master Forrest rode off like a demon this morning. He almost ran me down.” Startled, I glanced up. Amy Sadler appeared on the steps above me as if from nowhere. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here.” She trilled laughter, her bright eyes sly with secrets. “I sneaked into the nursery to chat to Emma while Mistress Collins was at breakfast.”

“Well, you’d better disappear quickly,” I answered, “because she’s on her way back. I saw her leaving the Hall just now—”

“Oh, she won’t mind.” Amy tucked an auburn wisp under her cap and patted it into place. “I think she likes me. I keep trying to persuade her she needs another nursery-maid.”
 

“The Duchess is the one you need to convince,” I said. Her pert manner irked me. “And you’d better hurry back to the dairy before you’re missed.”

“Oh, they’re too busy talking about the plague to notice,” she answered. She skipped by me with a knowing look.

“Plague?”

“Oh yes,” she called. “One of the Duke’s messengers told me about it.” She preened and simpered, flirting her eyelashes. “Ask Master Forrest—He was in the kitchen when the messenger arrived.”

She didn’t look back, but I knew instinctively she aimed to bait me.

Instead of going to the nursery, I ran to the stables and found Miles with Guy, rubbing down his sweat-soaked horse.
 

“I thought you’d be with Lady Anne,” he said with a puzzled frown.

“And I thought you to be in the Wardrobe.”

“Finish off here.” Miles threw the goggle-eyed lad his cloth. “And put a blanket over him.” He steered me away to the door. “What the devil brings you here to spy on me?”

“I’m not spying on you.” I tried to lower my voice, aware of the grooms pretending industry whilst listening to our conversation. “You left so early and Amy said—”

“Amy Sadler will say and do anything to get attention.” Miles laughed, but a storm brewed in his eyes. “The wench almost brought my horse down trying to lure me into conversation.”

“She enjoys telling me she’s seen you—”
 

“Aye, she would.” He cupped my face in his hands. “Don’t let her goad you, Nan. I was foolish enough to flirt with her once and now she’s forever trying to cajole me into dallying with her—”

“She seems to know you well.” I met his eyes boldly and saw him flinch from the implication.
 

“She means nothing to me.” His glance burned. “But there’s danger in her chatter. This morning she threatened to tell the duke of your fortune-telling if I continued to ignore her.”

He laughed bitterly, then and turned me to look into the stable. “But ask the grooms here—there’s not a man at Middleham she hasn’t enticed with her pretty promises!”

The men grinned back and muttered among themselves.

“She said some messenger—”

“I know.” Miles put a finger to his lips. “Don’t spread such talk, Nan. The Duke has enough worries.” His face grew grim and closed. What secrets was he hiding from me now?

But further rumours of plague in London blew in with the cold season. They cast a cloud over the Christmas festivities and shadowed us well into the next year. In March when the news of Prince George’s death reached Middleham, Lady Anne ran mad with fear.
 

“Just two years old and struck down suddenly—Suppose Ned takes the sickness?”

“Your Grace, every precaution’s been taken.”

“But no one knows how to combat the plague. Wouldn’t that youngest Wydeville child have had every comfort? And yet it took him—my Lord’s just returned from Swansea. They say plague’s rife there—”

Her fears exhausted me.
 

“George is an unlucky name.” Genevieve sat down by me at supper.
 

“George of Clarence was executed and now little Prince George dies of plague—”

“It’s divine punishment.” Old Walt glowered at us. “Even kings must answer to the Almighty. No man should take up arms against his brother.”

Although we all remembered how Walt had railed against Clarence, no one dared argue with the hypocritical curmudgeon.
 

“The duchess asked the monks at Jervaulx to pray for her boy,” someone said.

“He’s so frail he’d never survive the plague.” Genevieve looked at me with tears in her eyes. “Oh Nan, can’t you do something to save him?”
 

“Your brother, Sire.”

The familiar, oily voice oozed courtesy, bubbled with underlying mirth.

The two noble boys confronted one another. The younger, as if recalling an oft-repeated lesson, knelt before the elder, head bowed in homage. A murmur of approving laughter rippled round the chamber.

The taller boy seemed clearly ill at ease. Two rosy blooms flowered in his cheeks. He coughed self-consciously.

“Please—Richard—stand up.” He gestured awkwardly. “I’m glad you’re to be with me.”

“Our mother told me I must treat you as a king now.” The younger lad’s eyes danced with mischief. Back on his feet he grinned broadly, unable to suppress his high spirits. His eyes surveyed the sumptuous chamber in one wide sweep. “Are these the royal apartments?”

“They are, indeed, the chambers assigned to all kings before their coronations.” The bishop opened his arms as if to encircle the vast walls hung with gilded tapestries, his great sleeves spreading about the boys like enormous wings. “Now you’ll have time to get to know one another before the formal ceremonies.” His yellow eyes rested on the younger boy, possessive and predacious. “Better than being kept among women, I think?”

“Will Uncle Anthony come to us now?” asked the elder. His beautifully modulated voice trembled as if at its own audacity.

“Alas,” answered the cleric, embracing all in his rich laughter, “I fear you must rely upon your Uncle Richard—”

“But I demand to see Uncle Anthony. I’m the king, and you must obey my commands.”
 

Laughter drowned out the boy’s protests. It grew in intensity and with it came the furious clap and whirl of huge black wings that conjured darkness.

Far away someone began to sing. The melancholy, discordant timbre of the voice echoed along distant corridors. The alien, outlandish words threaded through the darkness, filling the listeners with dread. Water dripped. A thin, sulphurous smell snaked through the twisting maze of stairs, as if towards the core of the building. And then a fog of filthy, stinking smoke billowed upward, pursued by flames that licked, and raced and roared—

“Sweet Jesu!”

Miles shook me awake.
 

I gulped and sobbed for breath, tears spilling from the corners of my eyes.

“What on earth?”

“A dream—a dream.” I threw myself into his arms, clutching with cruel desperation, reassuring myself of his reality. “These last weeks have been so frantic. Lady Anne’s talked of nothing but plague, I—”

“Ssh, ssh. The prince is safe enough, isn’t he?”
 

Miles held me in uneasy silence while the sweat cooled on my body and my heartbeat steadied.
 

“Just one of your bad dreams,” he said, at last.

The words reminded me suddenly and chillingly of my father and grief clogged my throat. How far away childhood seemed, and how very long I’d been running from my visions. Would I never find peace? I shook the hair from my face, rubbing my eyes and trying to laugh away fear. “Yes, yes, just another dream.”
 

Miles watched me wary with apprehension. “What trouble comes upon us now?”

I swung myself out of bed and wrapped my night-robe round me.
 

“I’m afraid we haven’t heard the last of Bishop Stillington.” Hands still shaking, I poured us both some wine. “Does Gloucester ever speak of him at all?”

“Stillington no longer has any power.” Confusion burned in his blue eyes. “Why would Gloucester have any business with his brother’s disgraced chancellor? He’s no fool like Clarence—”

“No, but he has the same ambition, if not more.”

“What are you saying?”

“Lady Anne’s spirit burns as bright as ever did her father’s and she’ll drive Gloucester to seize whatever power he can to promote their son’s interests—”

Miles snatched me to him, spilling wine across the coverlet. He pressed his hand over my mouth. “What treason’s this you’re speaking?” His eyes rolled wild. “Haven’t you warned me often enough to keep quiet? What madness has taken hold of you, Nan? You must discard these dreams. Do you want to see us both hanged?”

Shuddering, laughing, weeping, I lay against his chest, my eyes fixed on the scattered pattern of wine drops on the coverlet—like rose petals—like blood.

* * * * *

Over the next weeks, a curious sense of waiting enveloped me, as if I stood upon the great rocks above Wensleydale far removed from the everyday world, a silent observer anticipating a great storm.

While Miles remained subject to the duke’s commands, the duchess’s needs ordered my days. Beneath the bird-chatter of the ladies, I sensed her vigilance. She waited too—I felt it in the simmering, impatient surveillance that kept her taut as a wildcat poised to strike.

London lay quiet. No squabbles soured the court. No feverish calls to battle troubled the country. Discord slept.

Tripping lightly down the steps from the solar one dew-sprinkled summer morning, my mind preoccupied with letters I had for the messenger, I didn’t notice anyone.
 

A hand plucked my sleeve.

“Mistress Forrest?” The Duke of Gloucester held out a scroll. “I think you dropped this.”

I sketched a flustered curtsey.

“No need for haste. The messenger’s still eating breakfast in the servants’ hall.”

Confused, I hesitated.

“My wife speaks highly of you.” The duke hesitated too, equally ill at ease.
 

“I’m glad to be of service, Your Grace,” I answered lamely.
 

He gnawed his lip. No golden beauty shone in his care-worn face, but what intensity burned in his eyes. I sensed again the power that drew men to him. He lacked King Edward’s charm—the boisterous laughter which conjured admiration, the brazen courage which earned men’s fealty, the lazy, sensuous smiles which melted women’s hearts—but Richard of Gloucester roused a different passion. A blunt honesty shone in his face—as if he said:
This is who I am. Follow me and I’ll keep my word.
I realised how he’d won Miles’ allegiance. He looked into me, as if he searched for something out of reach.

“One day I may ask you to speak up for me and mine, Mistress Forrest.”
 

Though I bowed my head, I couldn’t answer. Around him shadowy conspirators wearing smiles like scars gathered silently.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Sunlight flooded the dale. Like a sentinel, the abbey building pointed defiantly toward the hot arch of sky. In the surrounding fields monks tended crops, watched over browsing sheep. Birdsong, bees’ drone, plaintive bleating—earthy, living sounds— accompanied this daily toil. Gurgling water plashed over ancient stone. Plain-song drifted from the chapel.