Chapter Fourteen #2
I ran my hand along the back of a chair.
Walking in a forest, Roland would tug on leaves, leave a trail in his wake.
He’d trace the lines of furniture, of picture frames, searching for dust. Roland’s busy hands—infamous at court.
His admirers must imagine he was touching them instead.
Maybe I’d noticed him more than I cared to admit, but I had to be careful. Kitty’s eyes were just as keen as mine.
I stood before her while she sat demurely on a cushion, subduing the dog with gentle coos. “I thought you’d come for Cecily,” she said.
“I came to talk.”
She peered up at me through narrowed eyes. “Don’t you and Cecily talk? Or do you do other things?”
“Our kind of talk is different.”
“That, I have no doubt. Cecily Guildford knew men long before—”
I leapt forward and clapped my hand over her mouth. Beneath it, her quick, excited breath. Her eyes shone with challenge as her chest heaved. When I released her, she wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “I see the truth is still unwanted, even if the queen and her family have been naughty.”
My heart again. Now, now, now, it pounded. Ask her now. What would I want Roland to say, if I were her? I settled on: “Are you lonely here, Kitty?”
She blinked several times. “Lonely. Am I lonely?” She rose onto her knees.
“After Eleanor became queen, I was cast into the country, begging for scraps of a word. And then, and then! A page delivers a note from Charles Guildford, and I’m to return to court in the service of his witless daughter, after years of nothing from anyone at all.
I was promised a full pardon by Prospero himself. ”
Cast to the country. No word. Waiting for a messenger to round the bend. I had more in common with her than I thought.
“Prospero is dead. He cannot issue pardons.”
She fell onto her heels. “The pardon has already been issued. What I meant was—no one has forgiven me.” Her black eyes cut to mine.
“I told the king what he needed to know. Instead of a reward, I was banished—and now, mocked. How is this the Crown’s generosity?
” She gestured around the queen’s empty rooms, pulling the dog tighter against her belly, where it began to struggle. “I was helping.”
And I knew she believed she was. Her conviction was apparent.
“Help me now.” I gave her what I knew to be Roland’s most charming, confident grin.
“With what? What do you want? If you want me to spy on Cecily, don’t bother. She never does anything interesting.”
“No, not Cecily. I want your memory.” I tilted my head back. How many times had Roland gripped me with this precise stare? “I know it’s sharper than most.”
She smiled, flattered enough to let me continue.
“Three years ago”—I turned my hand from side to side—“roughly, after Hal died, there was an inquest.”
Everything about her expanded. Her smile, her delight at being useful and under someone’s line of questioning again. Roland was right—she was someone who would steal just for the thrill of being interrogated afterward. “Yes, but it was rather uneventful.” She peered up at me curiously.
I sat down beside her and leaned my head against the base of a chair, crossing one of Roland’s long legs over the other. I eyed the fluttering pulse on her neck. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve heard. But I wasn’t there myself, so I’d like to ask you about it.”
“Why?” Beneath her crescent hood, her face was pale and eager, and there was a single brown mole twitching beside her pursed lips.
“Because I believe what you said. You want to help, and you are selfless when someone is in need.”
She liked that very much. “Well, I sat in the balcony and watched as that old Estellan Sunborn and Prospero brought witnesses forward. The Guildfords were terribly smug, drunk throughout, you know, because they saw a path had cleared for them. They aren’t smart enough to have done it themselves, but they were crafty enough to push little Eleanor right in front of the king’s nose.
” She laughed. “Or, I suppose, Prospero was. Let’s see …
what else? A stable hand was brought forward, and he was so frightened, convinced that because he was a witness he was being accused. ”
As she recalled it, moment by moment, I touched her mind, as lightly as dipping my finger into a pond.
The memory was already there, resting on the surface, and so I saw what her words reflected: the stable hand pushed forward by Tom Guildford.
He had a tuft of hair on his chin—unfashionable after barefaced Roland rose at court—and he kept scratching it as he beheld the two magicians raised above him.
“How long have you lived here, at Redhall?” boomed Prospero, voice magnified by his expansion magic.
The stable hand twisted the hem of his shirt. “I came here as a boy.”
It was grooms and servants and ladies-in-waiting like him and Kitty who watched and listened at doors, who kept the great houses and palaces running. “How many years ago was that?” Prospero demanded.
The man licked his lips. “Can’t know for sure. If pressed, I’d say twenty.”
Prospero nodded. “And how long did you serve the prince?”
“Ten years, I’d say. Got his horses ready for him when he wanted to ride out. I’m sorry he’s dead. I have a way with horses, always have. And the prince was a fine horseman.”
“Yes, all right,” Prospero said, flipping through his paperwork. “What else?”
“When I began serving the prince, Sir John Seton asked me to tell him whenever he took his horse out. Wanted to know where he went. Said he’d give me a crown for it each time if I kept my mouth shut.
When I said no thank you, he boasted of a man in his house who could tell me great things about my future, like whether I’d ever marry, and I didn’t like that at all, and I told him, I said, I was already promised to a very pretty lady, and if his man couldn’t tell me that he wasn’t a good sorcerer at all, and I could take his place in the lord’s house.
” The stable hand peered closer at Prospero.
“You’re all strange looking, you sorcerers.
Anyway, I went to the Lady Alice, of course, and she gave me double her father’s offer to tell her about the prince’s whereabouts. ”
The man’s voice warmed when he said Alice’s name, as if he liked the taste of possessing her. Prospero flinched, Alice’s execution still raw. In the first row of pews, the king fumed. “So, you would tell Alice Seton where the prince was.”
The stable hand looked down at his feet. “Well, not so for several weeks now, sir. She’s got no ears to hear, since the Setons got ’em chopped off their bodies and all.”
“Yes, they did,” agreed Prospero. “So you would have reported to Alice Seton, had she been alive, when the prince rode off.”
“I suppose so, sir.”
“On this particular morning, however, you told no one. You could not have told Alice, because she was already dead.”
“That’s right.”
Another shuffle of his papers. “So, what did the prince do on this morning? What did he say? Was he—agitated? Did he seem despondent to you, perhaps?”
“No, my lord. He was very happy. His father wanted him on the—” He searched for the word.
“His privy council?”
“That’s right. He was set on memorizing that oath, and I remember him being so proud, Your Grace, that his father had trusted him so well. He was good-humored that morning when he rode out.”
“And he was alone? You’re sure?”
“Yes, sir. He said the oath required it. A sacred place.”
“All true,” the Sunborn reported.
Prospero nodded. “What happened then?”
“Next time I saw him was when his body was being dragged out the forest.”
Prospero called forward Hal’s groom of the stool, his pages, his bowmen, and they all said the same—Hal had gone off riding in the woods and been struck dead.
The prince did not break his fast that morning.
His food and wine were tested. He opened no strange letters.
It was simply a terrible, tragic accident.
I interrupted her. “But Hal was always accompanied by a retinue. In fact, his father required it. Even for an oath, he wouldn’t have gone off alone at dawn.”