by Paul Doherty
Kathryn stared down at the calfskin-bound book, fighting the urge to pluck it up and toss it into the fire.
‘What will you do?’
‘I am going to put it back in the coffer,’ Colum declared, ‘and say the key Dauncey gave me didn’t fit. Let Foliot and the Queen do what they want with it.’
Colum snatched up the book and put it back into the coffer. He locked it and then, going out into the garden, threw the key with all his force into the darkness. He came back into the kitchen.
‘Was there anything about my husband?’ Kathryn asked.
Colum shook his head. ‘No, there was not, Kathryn. Nothing about you or me or the little ones of the earth. Elizabeth Woodville will probably destroy it to protect her own secrets.’ He glanced round the kitchen. ‘And where’s the lovely Thomasina?’
‘I am in the buttery, Irishman, keeping an eye on you,’ the old nurse bellowed back. ‘As I always have and always will.’
Colum beckoned Kathryn over. ‘It’s finished, Kathryn. Mathilda Sempler is free. God will take care of Isabella Talbot, Dionysia Dauncey and the rest. Tomorrow, Foliot will return and I’ll thrust that casket at him and he’ll be out of our lives within the hour. The sun will rise, Wuf will be dancing in the garden, Thomasina is there to be teased and then there’s you.’ He grasped her hand, took her out into the garden and pointed up to the starlit sky. ‘There’s a poem,’ he said. ‘“Oh, come to Ireland fair, shall I . . .”’ Colum paused and put his arm round Kathryn’s shoulder. ‘Will you ever come to Ireland, Kathryn?’
Kathryn edged closer and nipped him playfully.
‘Aye, and if I can’t, Ireland will have to come to me!’
‘Is that a promise?’ Colum asked.
‘Irishman, on this starlit night, that’s the best you are going to get!’
Author’s Note
The possibility that there was a secret marriage between Edward of York and Eleanor Butler is more than a possibility. Indeed, Edward’s own brother, Richard of Gloucester, used this eleven years later when he usurped the throne. The Woodvilles, as a group, were robber barons of the first order: brilliant, brave, charismatic and totally ruthless. Henry VI’s death in the Tower is as described in the novel while the main murder victim, Tenebrae, is modelled loosely on Bolingbroke, the great necromancer of fifteenth-century England.
—C.L. Grace