52

It was about an hour and a half before dawn when Clarenceux opened the door to the stables. He listened. No sound came from above. He felt his way to the ladder and climbed, stopping halfway to whisper, “Are you here?”

He heard Rebecca move. “Oh, Christ be praised! I heard the fight in the yard and came back here, as you said. Are you hurt?”

“I have more bruises, a cut to my face and another on my arm, and I am covered in blood—but most of the blood is not mine.”

“Whose is it?” she asked as he reached the top of the ladder.

“One of Crackenthorpe’s men.” Clarenceux remembered the moment. It had been a cold-blooded, merciless killing. In terms of its execution, it had been perfect. But he felt sick with himself. He was a herald, not an executioner.

He bent down, felt the hay, and let himself fall into its softness. “Goodwife Machyn, we cannot continue like this. Crackenthorpe knows we are together. The Knights are in disarray; they can do nothing to help themselves. We have to get out of the city.”

She came near him in the darkness and lay down beside him. “That is what we are trying to do, isn’t it? That is why we went to my brother’s house.”

“I suppose so. I just want to be away from this city, from …all this.”

Rebecca heard the note of despair in his voice and was worried. He had not previously sounded so weary, so despondent. If he had thought such things, he had not expressed them to her. He had always been strong for her. It was her turn now to be strong—to distract him from the abyss of dark doubts.

“I’ve been thinking while I have been waiting—about the names.”

“What have you found out?”

“Nothing—except I have an idea. Maybe the names of the Knights spell a word.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You asked why there were two Sir Reynolds and not one Galahad or Gawain. No Mordred. Well, maybe it’s simply because the word that Henry intended required two R’s.”

Clarenceux was skeptical. “Is that what Henry might have thought? Does that sound like his way of thinking?”

“As much as anything else I can think of.”

“So, which letters have we got, if we put all seven together?”

“Lancelot Heath—L for Lancelot. You and Henry—C for Clariance. Michael and Nicholas Hill are Ector and Reynold, so E and R. There’s D for Dagonet, another Reynold and Yvain. So…”

“L, C, E, R, D, R, Y,” he repeated. “Only one vowel.”

“The other names could be vowels. A could be Arthur.”

“But it doesn’t seem right that someone else should be King Arthur if Sir Arthur Darcy—one of the founders—was merely Sir Reynold.”

“So, if there’s no A, what about U—for King Uther? Do you think we can dismiss that too?”

“I don’t think we can guess things like this. If we had an M and an O we could make ‘Mercy, Lord.’ If there was an A, then one word might be ‘Darcy.’ But who knows? They might not actually be initials. We need to see the chronicle.”