She waited until they had remounted and were once more in the relative seclusion of the lane before asking, “What about the other names? Did anyone know anything?”
Owen shook his head. “They seemed to think they were outsiders. A quality that I gathered found little favor with the men of High Wycombe.”
“It’s the same with all the villages around here. They keep to themselves except for market days and even then they bargain with great mistrust.”
“Mmm.” Owen seemed to consider this fact. “Useful,” he murmured.
“How so?”
“Divide and conquer,” he said. He seemed absorbed and Pen wisely left the master to his plotting undisturbed by the flood of questions, reflections, and possibilities that sprang to her lips. She rode quietly beside him as they crossed three fields and approached a small cottage set in a tiny garden beside a pond, where ducks picked their way across the ice.
“You may come in with me, but if you recognize the woman you must leave immediately. That will confirm for me that she was involved in the birth and ensure that she doesn’t guess at your identity.” He spoke crisply. Pen only murmured an affirmative.
They tethered the horses close to a hedge where they could crop something more appetizing than the stale hay of the stables at the Bryanston Arms. Owen walked briskly up the path and rapped on the door. Pen stood behind him, trying to make herself small and inconspicuous.
The door creaked open. A wizened face peered out at them. “Well?”
“Mistress Wardel?” Owen inquired politely.
“An’ who wants ’er?”
“Esquire Rhoscolyn,” Owen said in the same soft lilting cadences he’d used in the tavern.
Welsh!
Pen realized. A perfect Welsh accent. She couldn’t see the woman clearly as she still stood inside the cottage, the door only opened a crack.
“If I might talk with you for a moment, mistress?” His smile was warm and open. “You had a brother in Highgate, as I understand it.”
“Aye?” She still looked suspicious but she opened the door a little wider. “Our Ned. What of ’im?”
“He asked me to bring you something. I’m a lawyer,” Owen said. “If we could just go inside . . . out of the wind . . . ?”
With a bemused expression Granny Wardel opened the door wider. Owen stepped into the clean-swept interior of the one-room cottage. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Pen, who now had a clear view of the woman, was still standing on the pathway.
Granny Wardel had been there that afternoon. She had bathed Pen’s forehead with lavender water during one of her more lucid moments.
Pen felt the surge of excitement even as the remembered terror and despair threatened to overcome her. That woman had been there. She would know something. She
must
.
Owen emerged from the cottage after half an hour. His expression was abstracted, his purse rather lighter than it had been when he’d begun his chat with Granny Wardel.
“What did she say?” Pen asked, unable to keep silent. “Does she know what happened to the baby?”
Owen shook his head. “She wasn’t there at the moment of delivery, but she believes that the child was stillborn.”
Pen felt disappointment like a suffocating black blanket. “She told you nothing then.”
“I didn’t say that.” He looked at her. She looked so desperate, as if all the life and energy were being pressed out of her.
He said gently, “We have another stop to make, one that I trust will bear fruit.”
Pen mounted the dun in silence. “Where are we going now?” she asked finally as they left the cottage behind.
“To Wycombe Marsh. A woman by the name of Betsy Cosham lives there.”
The third name on the ledger page. “Betsy Cosham was paid more for her services than any of the other women,” Pen said, seeing the page clear in her head.
“So I believe. It didn’t help to improve Granny Wardel’s opinion of Betsy Cosham, which was very enlightening.” He turned his horse through a gap in the hedge beside the lane. “This is a shortcut, I believe. Tell me . . . does the name Mistress Goodlow mean anything to you?”
Pen frowned. “Why, yes, she’s Lady Bryanston’s herbalist. She has a cottage in the grounds of the estate, and her own herb garden. She physics the entire household.”
“Did she attend your labor?”
“I don’t remember her being there in particular. She always attended a sickbed so I probably wouldn’t have noticed her. She gave me physic during my pregnancy, when I was being sick all the time. Did Granny Wardel mention her?”
“Only in passing. I gather she’s no more popular in the neighborhood than Betsy Cosham. Bred from the same bone . . . or birthed from the same cauldron, to use Granny’s more vivid terms,” he added.
He shook his head. “Witchcraft is an easy accusation, but there’s no denying that the power to do good is easily turned to evil’s hand. Either way, there’s no love at all lost between the midwives of High Wycombe and anyone who might trespass on their territory.”
“That’s why Granny Wardel told you so much?”
“That and money, my dear. Golden sovereigns will unlock most tongues,” he responded sardonically. “She believed I was bringing her a few sovereigns from her brother Ned who had belatedly remembered his duty to his impoverished sister.”
“Oh, but I must reimburse you,” Pen said hastily. “I have money . . . only I left it in the inn at Gerrards Cross with my own clothes.”
“We will have an accounting anon,” he said.
Pen heard the mock solemnity in his tone. “We
will,
” she stated firmly.
“Certainly we will,” he agreed. “In fact, I will probably bill you for my services.”
“I have already paid for them,” Pen said with a taut smile.
Owen had meant it as a light sensual tease, one that he had hoped would lift her mood. “I thought we put that to rest last night,” he said.
“Yes,” Pen agreed in a low voice. “We had. Old habits die hard, I suppose.”
“I suppose,” he agreed coldly.
They rode in silence to the hamlet of Wycombe Marsh, and Owen without hesitation drew up at a sizable cottage set well on the outskirts of the hamlet.
“The woman has resources and doesn’t care for neighbors,” he observed, almost to himself. They dismounted and tethered their horses to the gatepost. “Come in, and if you recognize her, leave immediately.”
Betsy Cosham opened the door at the first knock. She was a blowsy woman in her middle years. Her small pale eyes regarded Owen closely. “What’s it that you want, sir? I’ve got most things. And I can lay me ’ands on others.”
“May I come in?” Owen asked, reverting to his Welsh accent.
She nodded and held the door for him. She cast Pen a shrewd glance and nodded again. “Best come in,” she said, leaving the door open for Pen to follow.
In the dim interior of the cottage Betsy Cosham sat down at the table and surveyed her visitors. “Girl’s in trouble then, is she?” She indicated Pen. “Good family is she? That why she ’as to come to Betsy dressed as a boy?” Betsy threw back her head and roared with delighted laughter. “God’s blood, girl, you couldn’t fool me! No one can put one over on Betsy Cosham.”
Except that you’ve got the wrong end of the stick this time,
Pen thought, creeping shyly into the shadows, hunching her shoulders in a fair imitation of a guilty party. She didn’t recognize the woman, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been in the birthing room. And it seemed a reasonable assumption that the woman wouldn’t recognize in this shadowed figure the barely conscious Lady Bryanston, her face a rictus of agony in the throes of labor.
Owen ignored this by-play. “What can you do?”
“Depends ’ow far gone she is.” Betsy got up from the table, her stool scraping on the flagstones, and went to a shelf of dusty vials and small boxes. “What are ye, girl? Less ’an three months? ’Tis a lot easier then.”
Pen shook her head in mute distress and Owen said brusquely, “Six.”
“She never is!” Betsy exclaimed. “I never seen a six-month that skinny.”
“It’s not for her, it’s for her sister,” Owen said.
Betsy’s eyes narrowed. “Well, I got summat that’ll bring it on early. A six-month won’t live.”
Pen was so cold she thought she would die. Right there in this vile cottage with its shelves of evil potions. Had Philip’s mother come to Betsy for the means to bring on premature labor? Or had she sent Mistress Goodlow?
“And what if it does?” Owen inquired. “What if it’s more than six months and it does live?”
“Not my business,” Betsy mumbled, but the sudden flash of suspicion in her eyes was like lightning in the dimness of the cottage.
“Take your seat again, Betsy,” Owen said, gesturing to the stool. There was something in his voice that electrified the cottage. Pen stepped even farther into the shadows. Betsy almost involuntarily took the stool.
“This is something that
is
your business,” Owen continued, his voice now silky smooth. “Let us assume that some two and a half years ago an eight-month child was forced early into the world, but was safely delivered and, against all expectations, managed to survive. What do you think would have happened to this child?”
Betsy had gone as white as chalk. She stared at Owen, her tongue flicking over her lips. A fleck of saliva nestled in the corner of her mouth. “Don’t know what y’are talkin’ about.”
“No?” He took a purse from his doublet and laid it on the table. It chinked. Then he withdrew his dagger from its sheath at his hip and laid it beside the purse. “Let me help you to understand, Betsy.”
Betsy’s eyes were riveted on the purse and the dagger, on the elegant white hands that rested beside them. Elegant yet embodying strength.
“I offer you your choice of gifts, Betsy. Answer my questions correctly and the purse is yours. Or you could choose the other.” He clasped his hands lightly on the table and looked at her.
The dagger was plain, a business tool. No jeweled hilt, nothing but that razor-keen blade. Pen told herself he would never use the knife. Of course he would not follow through on such a threat. An unspoken threat.
But then she realized that she didn’t know . . . didn’t know whether he would use it any more than she knew anything truly
real
about Owen d’Arcy. He was a spy, and he used a rapier like an assassin. How could she possibly expect to know what he would do?
She felt Betsy’s fear, felt the other woman’s conviction that this stranger in his dark clothes with his intense black eyes and soft voice would indeed use that dagger.
“I ask again, Betsy. What do you think would have happened to this child?”
She licked her lips, catching the fleck of saliva. Her eyes were scared, her skin gone pasty. “There’s places,” she muttered finally. “Places to board such a babe. When they’re not wanted like.”
Not wanted!
The words screamed in Pen’s head but she stood immobile, barely breathing.
“Who took the child?” Owen’s fingers flickered suddenly, lightly touched the blade of the knife, seemed to caress the hilt. Betsy quivered.
“My lord,” she said. “My lord took it. Wrapped it in flannel and took it. That’s all I know, honest. An’ they’ll kill me if they ever finds out I told.”
“They won’t,” Owen said calmly. “Where did they take it?”
“I dunno. Truly I dunno,” the woman said, wild-eyed with fear.
“Guess!” The knife point drove into the table. His movement was so quick that it eluded even Pen’s fixed gaze.
Betsy shuddered. “I ’eard ’em talk of Lunnon.”
Owen sheathed the dagger very slowly. As slowly, he pushed the purse across the table. Then he rose and without a word of farewell strode to the door. He put an arm around Pen’s shoulders, easing her ahead of him out of the cottage.
“You wouldn’t have, would you?” Pen asked, too stunned to take in Betsy’s information, her head full of what she had seen Owen do.
“Do what?”
“The knife . . . you wouldn’t have hurt her?”
“I knew it wouldn’t be necessary,” he said quietly.
Pen realized that he had not answered her question, just as she realized that she wouldn’t ask it again. There were things better not known.
Slowly what she had heard became real. “My child,” she murmured. “She said the child lived.”
“Yes,” he agreed. He hesitated, then said, “That does not mean, Pen, that the child
still
lives.”
“My child is alive,” she stated. “I just have to find him.” Her voice was calm and full of a conviction that Owen knew no doubts of his would shake.
“How were you so certain she was lying when she said she knew nothing?” she asked as they reached the end of the path.
“A trick of the trade,” Owen replied. He looked down at her and his eyes were cool. “The spy’s trade, Pen. I have an infallible sense of when people are concealing information. Isn’t that why you wanted my help . . . my professional expertise was how you put it, I believe? You should not balk at the methods I use to achieve the results you want.”
“I ask your pardon,” Pen said without hesitation. “There was no reason for me to refer to our bargain just then . . . or in that tone. I understand it offended you.”
Owen looked at her closely. He was surprised at how hurt and disappointed he had felt when she had started to pick the old bone. But he could see in her candid gaze only genuine regret.
Finally he smiled, and the warmth returned to his eyes. “We will put it behind us, then.”
Relieved, she returned his smile. They untied the horses and set off back to the road to Gerrards Cross.
“So, we look for the child in London,” Owen stated.
“But
where
? The city’s huge.”
“Let me think about it.” It was an evasion; he was convinced he knew where Pen’s child, if he still lived, was held. Owen was remembering when he’d met Miles among the South Bank stews coming out from one of the more insalubrious alleys. There were very few reasons that would take a man of Miles Bryanston’s lineage and wealth into the dangerous, disease-ridden hovels of Southwark.
Owen could think of one, and it filled him with a cold and savage fury.
Sixteen
The Duke of Northumberland paced the antechamber to the king’s sickroom. It was close to noon. The king’s apartments looked out over a courtyard from whence rose the unruly sounds of the crowd gathered to pay homage to their sovereign. Every day a crowd gathered hoping to catch a glimpse of Edward. And every day for weeks now they had been disappointed.
“We must show him today,” Northumberland stated. The king’s physicians had been summoned to Edward’s bedside and the Privy Council now waited impatiently without for their verdict on the king’s condition. Would he be fit enough to appear before the people?
The Duke of Suffolk pulled at his short beard as he joined Northumberland. “The people are clamoring to see him,” he muttered.
“I have ears. I can hear them myself,” Northumberland said irritably. He frequently had difficulty controlling his impatience with his somewhat slower-witted companion. It wasn’t that Suffolk was unintelligent, but Northumberland’s wit far outstripped his.
Suffolk didn’t take offense. He endured too much of his wife’s acidity to find the duke’s occasional tartness offensive.
“Perhaps we could keep him under wraps for a few more months,” Suffolk suggested. “The danger of the cold, of winter chills . . . People will understand that.”
“Aye,” agreed his companion. “But in a few months he could be dead. And then we have Mary marrying herself to Philip of Spain and clawing back the country for the damned Catholics.”
Both men were silent, considering how much of their own personal wealth they would lose if Mary reinstated the Catholic church, as they knew she would. Both men, like their fellows in the king’s antechamber, had benefited greatly from the dissolution of the Catholic church, seizing lands, estates, and treasure. Power and titles had followed. They had too much to lose if Mary succeeded Edward.
“Perhaps we could persuade the king to name Elizabeth in Mary’s stead,” Suffolk suggested hesitantly. “On religious grounds. He always finds religious arguments persuasive. He’s such a fanatical Protestant he cannot wish to see his Catholic sister on the throne. Elizabeth professes to be a committed Protestant—”
“Elizabeth is a tricky little bastard,” Northumberland interrupted savagely. “She’ll say whatever she thinks is politic. No one knows her well and she makes damn sure it stays that way. She’s all sweetness and duty to her brother, and has only understanding smiles for her sister. But what goes on in that red head is anyone’s guess. She’s a damn sight cleverer than she lets on, I’ll tell you that, Suffolk.”
“So you think she couldn’t be managed? She’s barely twenty, after all.”
“She might be easier than her sister,” Northumberland allowed. “But if I can contrive, we’ll have neither of ’em.”
Suffolk looked as startled as he felt. “You cannot set aside the succession.”
“
I
cannot, certainly. But that poor invalid in there might be so persuaded,” Northumberland said, his voice very soft, but his eyes burning with a sudden passion.
Suffolk’s expression was as suddenly cunning. He stroked his beard again, his fingers twisting and twining in the short graying hairs. “If he puts aside his sisters, my wife, as Henry’s niece, is next in line.” He looked slyly at Northumberland.
“Aye,” Northumberland agreed with a placid smile. “But there’d be little satisfaction in such a resolution for me, Suffolk. The marriage that we have talked about will satisfy all our needs.”
“Jane and your son?” Suffolk looked puzzled.
“Precisely.” Northumberland waved him down as the door to the king’s bedchamber opened and the procession of black-clad physicians emerged, one shaking his head over the lidded chamber pot he held out in front of him.
“Bad, my lord duke. His Highness is very bad,” announced the leading physician. “The stimulant we gave him earlier in the hopes it would enable him to rise from his bed has had an ill effect, I fear.”
“How so?” snapped the duke. “Apart from the fact that it didn’t work.”
“Unaccountably it seems to have caused an inflammation of the gut.” The physician gestured to the chamber pot. “His Highness has passed much blood.”
Northumberland grimaced. “Can he be taken to the window?”
“I would not advise it, your grace.”
“Your advice be damned!” Northumberland’s raised voice caused a silence to fall over the antechamber.
“Pembroke, tell the king’s attendants to wrap him up well and carry him out.”
“I most strongly protest, your grace! His Highness will suffer a relapse,” the physician protested as the Earl of Pembroke hastened to do the duke’s bidding.
“He is already suffering a relapse,” Northumberland declared with ice in his voice. “May God preserve us from physicians.”
The physician drew himself up to his full height. “I am considered the most skilled of my profession, my lord.”
“Aye, and such skill gives me a very poor opinion of your profession,” the duke declared rudely. He turned his back on the man, who left the antechamber with an air of self-righteous chagrin.
Someone coughed discreetly at Northumberland’s shoulder. “My lord.”
The duke glanced at the man who had appeared beside him. He frowned as if searching for his name.
“Bryanston, my lord duke,” Miles supplied with an ingratiating smile.
“Oh,” Northumberland said testily. “What brings you to the king’s antechamber?”
Miles knew that only the members of the Privy Council had unrestricted rights to this holy of holies. But he had his mother’s orders and they were ringing in his head.
“I was thinking, my lord duke, that perhaps His Highness’s physicians are no longer effective,” he said. “It seemed to me that perhaps you share that feeling.” He rubbed his hands together nervously, aware that sweat was beginning to trickle down his face.
“What if I do?”
“There are other avenues, my lord.” He wiped his face on his turquoise brocade sleeve and turned to pull forward an elderly woman who had been hidden by his bulk. “My family has an old retainer who is a most skilled healer. She has many secrets and wishes to offer her services to the king.”
Northumberland stared at the old woman, who surprisingly met his stare with a steady gaze of her own from washed-out gray eyes. There was something assured about her, something that inspired confidence. “Your name, goodwife?” the duke demanded.
“Mistress Goodlow, your grace,” Miles answered for her. “A very skilled healer and herbalist. My mother thought—”
“I have no interest in what your mother thinks, let the woman speak for herself,” the duke interrupted.
“I have the touch, your grace,” the woman said in a soft voice. “I have healed many cases where life hung in the balance.”
“Your grace, it would do no harm to let her examine the king, since the physicians don’t appear to be doing any good,” Miles put in eagerly.
“That is certainly the case,” Suffolk declared. He regarded Northumberland speculatively. “We have little to lose.”
Northumberland glanced at the Earl of Bryanston, who looked, the duke thought, like a large and overanxious puppy wanting to be let out. “You and Mistress Goodlow may wait in the far antechamber. After the king has been shown to the people, we will talk again.”
Miles beamed. His mother would finally be pleased. Now he had access to the real seat of power. He would make himself indispensable to Northumberland and the Privy Council. Mistress Goodlow would attend the king, the healer
he
had placed at the king’s bedside. From now on his position would be assured.
The door to the king’s bedchamber opened and a stalwart attendant came out, in his arms a slight blanket-swathed bundle.
Northumberland strode across the antechamber. He spoke softly to the bundle. “Highness, the people call for you.”
“They are my subjects,” Edward said, his voice a bare thread. “I would greet them. Take me to the window, Samuel.”
Northumberland gestured that the long windows should be flung open, and as he approached there was a great roar from below. “The king! The king!”
Northumberland stepped to one side so that the attendant carrying the young king could step into view. Bonnets flew in the air and a rousing cheer sent startled pigeons aloft in a flap of beating wings.
Edward could not stand but he insisted the blanket be loosened so that the crowd could see his face. It was a miscalculation. At the sight of the ravaged countenance the crowd fell silent. Edward tried to wave but the effort was too much and he was racked by a violent coughing fit.
Northumberland gestured to the attendant to bring the boy back into the antechamber and himself closed the windows on the crowd, already dispersing in an atmosphere of dejection.
“Take him to his bed,” he instructed and followed the attendant to the king’s room, Suffolk on his heels. They waited by the door as Edward was once more installed in the huge four-poster.
His body made a barely discernible lump under the covers. The air in the chamber was fetid, reeking of sickness. The windows were tightly shuttered, the fire blazed in the hearth.
The dukes approached the bedside. Edward coughed weakly now and the stench of decay on his breath made his visitors step back.
“Forgive me, Northumberland, but I could not stay longer,” he whispered.
The duke waved away the men attending at the bedside and came closer, ignoring the foul odor.
“Northumberland, I am dying,” the king whispered. “But there is so much to do first.”
“Yes, Highness,” Northumberland agreed calmly. There was neither time nor point in denying the truth since the king himself had accepted it. “You must consider well whether you wish to name Princess Mary as your successor.”
“She is already named,” Edward responded. “My father named her.”
“But
you
are king now, sir,” Northumberland said gently, holding his pomander to his nose. “You have ruled over a Protestant realm. Would you see it returned to the Catholic church? Your sister will marry Philip of Spain, and Protestant England will fall into the fires of the Inquisition.”
Edward groaned. “I would rather burn in hell’s fires myself. But how can it be done?”
“I will explain, Highness. When you feel a little stronger.” The duke stepped back from the bed. He nodded at Suffolk and the two slipped quietly from the king’s bedchamber.
Northumberland pushed through the press of people in the antechamber, ignoring their questions. He passed Miles Bryanston and the old woman but didn’t acknowledge them. Instead he made his way to a chamber at the end of the passage, closed the door after Suffolk had entered, and then swiftly and in silence went to work. He looked behind every arras, moved pictures aside to check the walls behind, peered into the fireplace, knocked on the paneling with his knuckles.
“You can never be sure,” he said. “Whenever I leave this chamber I’m afraid someone will make it insecure.” He ran his hand over a knot in the paneling, frowning, trying to remember if it had been there before. It could well conceal a peephole.
Satisfied at last, he sat down in a carved chair behind a massive table and drummed his fingers on the oak. “The king cannot die until we have arranged the succession to suit us.”
He reached into his purple silk doublet for a key and unlocked a drawer in the table. He reached in, felt for the spring that would release the false bottom, and then drew out a sealed package. This he laid on the table in front of Suffolk.
“As we agreed, I have drawn up marriage contracts betrothing your daughter, Lady Jane, to my own son, Guildford Dudley. You and your wife should look them over carefully, but I think you will find that they are exactly as we agreed.”
Suffolk picked up the sealed package and tapped it against his palm. “I take it the marriage should take place without delay.”
“Within a few weeks.”
Suffolk nodded. “Lady Frances will inform Jane. The girl may have some silly objections since there is a precontract with Lord Hertford, but my dear wife will have no difficulty overriding any objections.”
“I am sure not,” Northumberland agreed. He had little doubt that the formidable duchess would prevail over her timid dab of a daughter. “In the meantime, we should perhaps try the skills of Bryanston’s herbalist. The king has to live long enough to alter the succession in favor of his cousin Jane. He must exclude both sisters and settle the throne on Jane.”
“And by extension her husband, your son,” Suffolk said rhetorically.
“And my son,” Northumberland agreed. “In the meantime we must calm the jittery nerves of the French, who are terrified that with Edward on his deathbed, Mary will marry Philip of Spain. No one must have an inkling of what we intend. I suggest we inform the French that we are making plans for Mary’s marriage to the Duc d’Orleans. An alliance they have long sought. It should keep de Noailles busy for a while.”
Suffolk regarded him closely. It was clear to him that Northumberland knew where he was going with this. “And?” he prompted.
“Beaucaire’s sister,” Northumberland said, steepling his fingers. “She appears to have taken up with a French agent. It occurred to me that it might be a useful connection so I told Robin to leave it alone, let it develop.”
“You would use her to pass information to the French?”
“Precisely. Robin is very close to her, she would never question anything he told her. He will tell her what we want the French to know.” Northumberland smiled his thin smile. “Neat, don’t you think, Suffolk?”
“Very.”
“Meanwhile, we must ensure that Mary remains in the palace under our eye. She still insists that she’s too ill to leave her chamber, and she continues to importune the king for a visit, but of course the king doesn’t receive her messages.”
Northumberland rose abruptly, as if he’d said all he was going to on the subject. “Let us see this woman Goodlow again. If she does the king any good I suppose that fool Bryanston will want some favor in exchange. We’ll find him another earldom or something.” He left the chamber in his usual energetic fashion, Suffolk on his heels.
Pen stretched and gave a languid yawn. It was still dark. The embers of the fire glowed and her bedchamber in the Bull inn was warm and quiet and secluded as the womb. She turned on her side, pressing her lips into the hollow of Owen’s shoulder, licking the salt tang of his skin as he slept.