“Then you’ve more in common with him than you think.” She reached for the latch. “I hope you heed my advice, if only for her sake. Yorkshire is still loyal to the old faith; many there are not happy she is queen and will not welcome a man of hers in their midst. You will be far from court and her protection, too far to send warning or request for help. Should something happen to you, who can she trust to send after you, a spy sworn to secrecy, whose mission is known only to her? You will disappear without a trace.”
She did not await my response. Opening the door, she departed, her footsteps fading away, leaving me more alone than I had ever felt.
Chapter Nine
After shoving my clothes into my saddlebag and strapping on my sword, I made my way to the stables, where I saddled Cinnabar and paid the groom more than enough to ensure at least his temporary silence. We cantered furiously out of Whitehall under a darkening sky.
Flurries of icy sleet stung my face like needles. The weather had turned foul, the morning’s clarity subsumed by an incoming storm, and as I rode, I welcomed the chill seeping into my marrow. I did not want to dwell on the implicit accusation in Kate’s words, the charge that I had once again chosen to risk my personal safety for Elizabeth.
I hated to admit that to some extent, Kate was right: To venture alone to the north on a secret assignation was reckless. If whoever had taken Lady Parry was the same person who sent the poisoned box, I could not fail in my task, as more than just Lady Parry’s safety hung in the balance. Should something befall me, whom could Elizabeth turn to?
Still, I had not fully acknowledged what I was about until I found myself riding down Tower Street to the Griffin, reining outside the door. Tethering Cinnabar to the hitching post, I stalked into the tavern. The clammy smell of spilt ale and dissipated smoke greeted me; in the dismal gloaming of the storm brewing outside, the tavern resembled what it was—a seedy establishment with warped plank flooring, daub walls stained with grease, stools stacked on the scarred tables like pitted mushrooms, as though rats had been gnawing at them with tiny teeth.
I came to a halt. The Griffin might be tawdry, a watering hole for dockhands, whores, and laborers, yet at least here was a place someone called home, while I, with my king’s sword and expensive clothes, my royal favor and enviable repute, had nowhere of my own.
Shaking aside my contemptible self-pity, I called out. From behind the hutch, young Tom stumbled into view, his mop of hair askew, grimy hands rubbing at his sleep-swollen eyes. He gasped. “Your … your lordship—”
“No lordship today, lad. Just me. Where is your master?”
“Upstairs, still abed.” Tom looked anxiously to the door. “Was it unlocked?”
“Well, I am no ghost,” I replied dryly, and he let out a moan. “I forgot! Mistress Nan told me last night to bolt it but I forgot. Please, my lord”—he clasped hands before him in supplication—“don’t tell her. She’ll kick me out and I have nowhere else to go.”
His plea cracked the hardening shell inside me. Looking at his thin, disheveled person, oversized breeches hitched about his skinny waist with a bit of twine, revealing dirty ankles above ill-fitting shoes he must have stolen from some corpse, I saw my lost squire again. Peregrine had also been obliged to fend for himself until I hired him, an anonymous piece of gristle for the court to devour. Bowing my head, I said with a catch in my voice, “Do not worry, boy, I won’t tell.” I looked toward Shelton’s empty chair. “Where’s his ugly dog?”
“Crum?” Tom shrugged. “Upstairs, too; he follows the master everywhere.”
“So much for guarding the establishment,” I muttered. I could not look into his eyes for too long. Memories of Peregrine threatened to engulf me as I rummaged in my purse, tossing out a coin. “See that my horse isn’t stolen,” I told him.
He eagerly scurried out, heaving the tavern door shut. Its closure echoed in the empty room; as I stood there, uncertain, thinking I had made an error in coming here and should just make for the North Road before the storm struck, I heard the dull thud of footsteps. Moments later, a heavy clamber down the staircase preceded Shelton in a rumpled shirt, his thick, veined legs bare and limping under the hem, one visibly deformed and shorter than the other. He brandished a cudgel as he peered suspiciously at me with his one good eye. At his side, Crum growled, baring discolored stumps of teeth.
I yanked off my cap.
“Lad.” Shelton lowered the cudgel. “Rather soon for another visit. Missed us that much, did you?”
Nan sidled around him, clutching a shawl to her throat. Silver-threaded hair escaped her flattened hood. Despite her evident anxiety that an intruder had broken into the tavern, the telltale blush in her cheeks made me grin.
“Do I disturb you?” I said.
“Not at all,” she declared, more loudly than required, betraying that I had. “We were just waking. The hour … it got away with us.” She scowled. “Good thing you returned when you did. That slattern Alice was supposed to be here by now, to scrub the hearths. And where is good-for-nothing Tom? I told him to—”
“I sent him outside to mind my horse. He opened the door for me.” I met Shelton’s eye as I spoke; his expression shifted, indicating he had read my unvoiced purpose.
“Hungry?” he asked. I nodded, sending Nan straight to the kitchen. Shelton set the cudgel aside. “I’ll be a moment. You wait here and break your fast.” He trudged back up the stairs, leaving Crum to stare balefully at me. “Don’t mind him,” Shelton called out. “He won’t attack unless I tell him to.”
I was hardly reassured. Though the dog’s teeth looked fit only for gnawing boiled meat, fending him off would still be an unpleasant experience. Easing a stool down from the nearest table, I sat cautiously. With a snort, Crum lowered himself onto the staircase landing and broke wind.
Nan returned with a tray. She winced. “God save us, he feeds that cur too much.” She set the tray before me: a tankard of small-beer, carter’s bread, and a bowl of porridge. “I haven’t been to the market yet, and they ate us out of everything last night. The winds: No one could do much work on the docks, so every lazybones ended up here. Not that there’s much to choose from at the market these days,” she added, “what with the whole country in the poorhouse: The harvests have been terrible and we’re lucky to find decent turnips, let alone much else. But, I have my sources.”
“This is fine, thank you.” As I reached for the food, she planted her hands on her hips and glared. “I assume this isn’t a friendly waking call? Not that we’re not delighted to see you, but you were just here.” She paused, waiting. When I did not answer, she harrumphed. “Just as I thought. You’ve come to drag him off into more mischief.”
“Nan, I—”
“No, no.” She wagged her finger at me. “It’s none of my business, as that old goat upstairs would be quick to remind me. I’m not to say a word.” She thrust her chin at me. “Except that I will. I do not like it. I do not like it and I never will. He has had enough of the highborn and their intrigues. Almost killed him the last time, that Wyatt revolt; after it was quelled, we spent weeks keeping our noses down so the authorities would not come knocking on our door to ask if we knew something. Lucky for him, he wasn’t seen running around with you, because you’d already gone into hiding and it wasn’t as if grand Master Cecil was about to vouchsafe our contribution to helping save the kingdom.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “He risked his life. I won’t ask him, if it will upset you.”
“Bit late for that now,” she retorted. She went silent again, considering. “I can’t say he didn’t warn me. When you showed up, he told me he was going to do whatever you asked. He says he owes you, as he was not the man he should have been when you were growing up. But whatever mistakes he’s made in the past, he’s different now,” she said, her voice quavering. “He’s a decent soul and God knows there are too few of them these days. Swear to me you will not let anything happen to him. It would be the end of me. I’m not worth
a farthing without him.”
“I swear it. I will lay down my life for his, if need be.”
She hesitated, as if she was going to say more, then she turned away as Shelton trudged back down the stairs. He wore outdoor garb: a hooded cloak and sword sheathed at his hip, his battered wedge-heeled boots that balanced his stance. Crum sighed in dejection.
“Not done yet?” Shelton eyed the platter before me. “Best hurry and fill your belly, lad. The day’s not getting longer, or any warmer, by the looks of it.”
Dutifully breaking bread, I averted my eyes as Shelton cradled Nan in his arms and she rested her head on his shoulder.
Chapter Ten
Storm clouds piled in the sky, the sleet and wind tearing through our layers of wool as we made our way through the city to crowded Cheapside, Shelton riding on his large prized destrier, Cerberus, whose very appearance scattered people in our wake. I explained to Shelton the bare facts of my mission, that I was going to investigate a disappearance of one of the queen’s women, but refrained from adding that I suspected there might be more at stake, because for the moment it was only my suspicion.
As usual, however, he sensed what I would not say. “Yorkshire is a long way off, especially this time of year, what with the state of the roads and kingdom at large. Plenty of wolves on the hunt, both of the four- and two-legged kind.” He eyed me over the black cloth tied across the lower half of his face to stop the chill, his ruined visage shadowed by his large cap and his empty eye-socket covered by a patch. “Is this lady so important to her?”
“She is; one of her most trusted. Fever beset the household Lady Parry went to visit, too. Nan made me promise to see you safe, so I think you should know, in case—”
“In case of what?” he growled. “By the cross, I’m not a lily-livered youth. At my age, I’ve had more fevers than most; and worse to boot, as anyone with two eyes can see.”
I had to smile. “I’m only doing as I promised. Nan would have my head otherwise.”
“Aye, she frets too much. She thinks I can’t go to the privy without a hat and scarf.”
“She also thinks you feed that dog of yours too much. I must say, I have to agree.”
Shelton threw back his head in guttural laughter—“Smelled one of his farts, did you?”—and led us through Bishopsgate onto Ermine Street, the old north road that would eventually bring us to Yorkshire.
I had not seen much of my native land. Though I had once rode as far as Framlingham Castle in Suffolk during the struggle between Northumberland and Mary Tudor, like the majority of my fellow Englishmen great parts of the realm remained a mystery to me, a collection of anonymous names. As we distanced ourselves from the serpentine huddle of the city walls and variegated spill of orchard, pasture, and wealthy manors that had sprung up outside them, expanding London’s boundaries, the wind abruptly mellowed, the biting sleet fading into a desultory rain that dampened half-shaped drifts of snow smudging the landscape.
I had already accepted this trip would not be easy. Though the old road had been in existence since Roman times, a carefully patrolled stretch that had conveyed their troops from London to the edge of Hadrian’s Wall bordering Scotland, the passing of the years had eroded it, turning a once well-maintained route into an unpredictable patchwork of mud, baked dirt, and occasional cobblestone. Few people traveled it these days, save for enterprising merchants with packhorses drawing their loaded carts and escorts of strongmen hired to keep thieves at bay. Even so, sometimes they too fell victim to the predations that had resulted from King Henry’s dissolution, which had evicted thousands of friars, monks, and nuns from their ancestral homes to wander the land, begging or stealing, hunters or hunted in a world turned upside down.
Now, the road stretched before us like a frayed ribbon, dense woodlands clustered right to its edges, so that at times it was as though we traveled under a sunless tunnel of leaf and twined branch, the darkness of thickets enclosing us in a feral embrace.
Shelton had been on the road before, he told me, during his time in his former master Charles of Suffolk’s employ. The duke had been an intimate of the king’s, a fellow jouster and ribald companion, whom Henry dispatched to put an end to the rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace, that massacre that had shocked the country into total submission to the king’s will.
“You were still a boy, barely four,” said Shelton, slouched on his mount’s ample back as though he had no worries, though he kept one gloved fist close to his sword. “But that day will go down in infamy, for Henry had given his solemn word he’d treat with the rebels, who wanted only a return of the old ways and an end to Cromwell’s rapine. Instead, the king betrayed his promise and had over three hundred souls drawn and quartered as traitors.”
He did not betray discernible emotion, as if he recounted something in which he had had no stake, but I glimpsed the edging of his jawline under his scarf and wondered if he had been with Suffolk to witness the executions.
Hours passed without incident. Eventually we outpaced the storm, leaving it to brood behind us in a rumble of angry cloud, but the cold seeped into our bones, icing our feet in our boots and turning our hands numb in our gantlets. We finally stopped at the crossroads of an impoverished hamlet to rest our mounts and sup in a smoke-choked tavern. I had hoped to reach Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire, where the road crossed the Great Ouse, but it was twice the distance most men could ride in a day, Shelton warned. He doubted we could get there before nightfall, not to mention that we would overexert our horses and risk our lives to bands of highwaymen who swarmed the road after dusk.
“It’s either that or camp in a field,” I said. I made a subtle motion with my chin, directing his gaze across our table to the corner alcove, where three mean-looking men with the shrunken expressions of those who have nothing left to lose eyed us with that peculiar blend of suspicion and interest that isolation inevitably breeds toward strangers. “I’m not about to let those blackguards slit our throats for whatever we have in our purse.”
Shelton immediately squared his shoulders and glared, causing the men to shift their gazes away. One of the ruffians, however, looked back at me. He was no seedier than his companions yet he had a certain air about him, his ferret-like features and beady eyes alight with a greed that made my nape prickle. As soon as we finished our repulsive meal of unidentifiable meat pie and rancid beer, Shelton pushed back his stool and rose to full height, towering over all in the low-raftered room. Together, we walked into the yard, blades unsheathed. We mounted quickly and cantered onto the road, looking behind us the entire time. I did not settle down until forested countryside wreathed in mist surrounded us.
Shelton turned to me. “Have you truly told me everything I should know?”
I winced, hoping I sounded more nonchalant than I felt. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I think you think those men were expecting us.”
“That’s impossible,” I said at once, even as a shudder went through me. “No one knows where I am.” Except Kate, I thought, and perhaps Cecil by now, given his penchant for uncovering secrets. Much as I hated even to consider it, Kate might have told him anyway.
“You are certain?” Shelton eyed me. “Because if this affair turns dangerous, I’d rather not be caught with my breeches about my ankles.”
I had no choice. “No, I have not told you everything. But I have not only because I don’t know anything else yet.”
“I see. But whatever it is you don’t know anything about yet, I wager it has to do with more than some favored lady’s disappearance.”
“I think it might, yes.” While I disliked going back on my vow to Elizabeth, he did not deserve to be blindsided should our situation take an ugly turn. “I swore not to tell anyone,” I added. “So, no one knows you are with me except Nan.”
He chuckled. “Then I’ll be invisible. Would not be the first time, eh? Scarcliff is not someone most people care to remember.”
I nodded uneasily. People might not wan
t to remember him, but in my experience, he was not someone you could easily forget. It struck me in that instant that I had been more than reckless. I had not thought any of this through. Goaded by Kate and the hurt I felt, I’d tossed caution aside and put Shelton in jeopardy. I did suspect hirelings of Cecil’s had just spotted us. I could not think he would have left my departure unexplored, no matter what Elizabeth told him, and though we had made excellent progress, I had tarried long enough at the Griffin for his informants to gain a head start. For all I knew, he had outliers at every crossroads between here and York by now, primed to report on me—or to do more than report. That, too, was not something I could ignore. If Cecil had decided to interpret my absence as a threat, he would have no compunction in acting upon it.
My life was secondary to his ambition. It always had been.
“Is there another way to Yorkshire?” I asked abruptly.
Shelton’s brow furrowed. “I’m sure there is, through the fens, but it’s not wise. It’ll take us off the main road and those wolves I mentioned earlier—the forests seethe with them.”
I withdrew my dagger, palming it. “Better wolves than Cecil. I think those men in the tavern will come after us. They are waiting until we get far enough from the hamlet that we cannot turn back. Come.” I kicked Cinnabar off the road into the woodland, Shelton riding behind me, grumbling he would have done better to stay in London with his feet propped before the hearth rather than be murdered in some godforsaken field in the middle of nowhere.
I had to agree.
* * *
Dusk fell swiftly, dragging a black hem across the horizon and snuffing out the light. We stopped to let the horses graze, while we chomped on dried venison, cheese, and bread Nan had packed for us in Shelton’s saddlebag. After watering the horses in a brook, we located a meadow nestled among a copse of trees, sheltered from the elements, though still icy as a witch’s cunny, Shelton remarked, hauling his saddle blanket to his chin as he bedded on the ground, using his bag for a pillow.
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