Chapter Eighteen

“He must be killed! He knows everything. He has spirited that bastard away and as soon as he leaves us, he will report it all—to her. He will be our ruin!”

The shrill voice reached me through a head-thudding stupor. I felt, as Shelton had aptly described it, as if a thousand imps wielded poleaxes in my temples, and when I attempted to open my eyes, the light blinded me.

Light. There was sunlight. It was day.

I tried to struggle but could not move my arms or legs. For a horrified moment, I feared my injury had rendered me immobile for the rest of my life. I had heard of blows to the head that left a man unconscious until he came to, only to discover himself trapped inside a useless body.

Forcing one eye open, I stared downward. I sat on a chair, my ankles bound. The pounding in my head did not permit me to look around, but the burning ache across my chest indicated I had been tied, my arms restrained behind me and fastened at the wrists.

Shadows darkened my vision. I blinked repeatedly, unable to open my other eye. Then, as my surroundings floated slowly into view, I saw the long table before me.

I was in the manor hall.

“This has to end, Philippa,” said a weary voice that belonged to Lord Vaughan, though I heard him as if he spoke through a hollow tube. “We cannot go on like this. He knows, yes, but we’ll only bring more trouble upon our heads if we harm him.”

“More trouble?” A shrill laugh erupted from Lady Vaughan. “You do not know anything! You have not seen how they can gut a man while he hangs from a rope, throw him like a slab of beef onto a block, and yank out his entrails while he still lives. But I have. I know how long they can make the agony last, and I assure you, husband, you are not fit for such martyrdom.”

A teary sniffling reached me. I strained to detect from whence it came when I heard Lady Vaughan snap, “Stop mewling, girl. You brought this on yourself! I told you to get him on his back, pleasure him until he slept, then steal his purse and bring it to me, not run off to that miserable hamlet. Had you done as you were told, you’d not be in this position.”

Agnes lifted terrified protest. “But, he didn’t want me! He questioned me. He—he threatened me! What was I to do—” A stinging slap cut off her wail.

“Shut up.” Lady Vaughan’s skirts brushed against my legs. I felt them as she passed by, thank God. I was not injured to the point of being paralyzed, only immobilized by my restraints.

“Enough.” Lord Vaughan’s voice slashed through Agnes’s piteous sobbing. “Gomfrey found her, didn’t he? He brought her back. There is no need to strike her.”

“Oh?” retorted Lady Vaughan. “She defied my orders. She was going to run off to York, or even London, perhaps, with his coin in her bodice and quite a tale to sell. She must go into the sea with him. She is no use to us now.”

Agnes wailed. I heard the staccato clatter of heels on the floor, a sudden gasp that was not the maidservant’s, then Lord Vaughan’s trembling voice: “I said, enough. I will not be party to such infamy. We are not murderers. It is over, Philippa. Do you hear me? Over.”

As Lady Vaughan cried, “He’ll see us to the gallows!” Lord Vaughan ordered, “Gomfrey, release him.”

The steward stepped from somewhere behind me; as he came around with a dagger to kneel at my feet and cut loose the ropes of my ankles, I glared at him.

He recoiled. “He’s awake!” He scuttled backward on his knees, his cowardice giving me a savage rush of satisfaction. Had my leg been loose, I would have kicked him.

“You’d best learn to crawl,” I rasped. “You’ll be doing a lot of it by the time I’m through with you.”

Lady Vaughan stood as though petrified, clasping her wrist where her husband must have grabbed her, Agnes huddled beside her, bound to a stool. Lord Vaughan stood a few paces from them; as his dark-circled eyes met mine, I saw the desperate toll that years of hiding Elizabeth’s secret had wreaked on him.

His look of defeat urged me to move. A drunkard, grief-stricken over his son, he had let matters come to such a pass that they had assaulted the queen’s own man. I was by no means safe, despite his effort to subdue his wife.

“He—he heard us,” said Lady Vaughan. “Blessed Virgin, he heard everything.” She barked at Gomfrey: “Kill him now.”

I lunged forward, pulling my chair with me against the floor. “Do it and you shall indeed perish on the gallows. The queen will send others, should I fail to return. She will send her own guard and then, by God, she’ll raze this manor to the ground for what you have done!”

Lord Vaughan stood utterly still. His wife pushed past him, stalking up to me. Her expression twisted, that trace of faded beauty I had marked when we first met vanquished by the ravenous hatred consuming her. “You think your heretic queen will save you?” she spat. “You think she’ll send her yeomen and lords of the Privy Council to bring us to task?” Her eyes narrowed. “I think not. She sent you here with only a manservant; she may have told you she sought Lady Parry but she lied.” She paused, taking in my silence. “Your queen never dispatched an escort to fetch Lady Parry back. That note we found on the saddle: My lord husband sent it to her along with a letter, assuring her that her secret was safe. I rather think she will welcome your disappearance, as well. She never wanted her wanton error revealed.”

The icy meaning of her words sank into me like teeth. “You are wrong,” I whispered. “That child, he means everything to her.”

“Oh?” She smiled with a callous disregard that made me want to throw myself at her throat. “He might have once, but not now. She knows well how every Catholic in this realm believes her illegitimate. She will be fortunate to see her own coronation, much less live out the year. Should it come to light she hid away a bastard, they will take her down like wolves. They’ll tear her apart and put her cousin, our rightful queen, Mary of Scots, in her place.”

“You will die for this,” I told her, but she did not flinch.

“No,” she said. “It is you who shall die.”

The resolve in her voice made me struggle against my tethers, yanking furiously at the ropes even as she reached out her hand to Gomfrey. “Your knife.”

Still crouched on the floor, the steward extended the blade to her, as Agnes yowled in the background. Anticipation suffused Lady Vaughan’s face. I braced for her thrust even as I strained to break free. I would die fighting for my last breath.

She did not hear her husband come from behind her, the candlestick he swiped from the table aimed at her head. He brought it down with a sickening crack. Her eyes flared. She swayed, the dagger dropping from her fingers. She started to turn around, exposing to me the wound on the back of her head, then she toppled into Lord Vaughan’s arms.

As he sank to the floor with her, he said, “Have mercy on us,” and started to weep.

*   *   *

Gomfrey cut my restraints. Shoving him aside, I staggered to my feet and looked down at the lord of the manor with his dead wife in his arms, crying as he buried his face in her bloodied hair. I said hoarsely to the steward, “Untie the girl.”

While Gomfrey hastened to free Agnes, I leaned against the table. My legs threatened to buckle under me, but a cautious probing of my own nape detected only a painful knot. My left eye was swollen shut, no doubt blackened from my fall to the kitchen floor, which was why I was having such trouble opening it. Otherwise, though battered and bruised, I would survive.

Mistress Harper emerged tentatively from the doorway leading to the kitchens. She gasped when she saw the scene before her and rushed to Agnes, who sat limp on the stool, her bindings strewn at her feet as she moaned.

“See to her,” I heard myself say. My voice was flat.

“Yes, at once,” Mistress Harper quavered. She dragged Agnes to her feet, one arm about the girl’s waist. Turning to Gomfrey, who had regained something of his impassive demeanor, I ordered, “Fetch my belongings from my chamber and bring them here.”

With a terse turn of his heel, he left to do my bidding. A servant to his marrow, he knew better than to challenge me now that the edifice of lies his master and mistress had built had come tumbling down about their collective ears.

I sidestepped Lady Vaughan’s body.

I could not find it in myself to care that she was dead.

*   *   *

An hour later, after I washed myself with a pitcher Mistress Harper brought me, changed into my court doublet, hose, and breeches, and stuffed my filth-stiffened clothes into my bag, I returned to the hall. Pale and still sniffling, Agnes had my cloak; it was then that I belatedly remembered Raff’s ring. I snatched my cloak from her, probing the inner pocket. When I felt its small bulk there, I waved her aside and turned to find Lord Vaughan waiting.

He had had his wife’s corpse taken away. Bardolf reclined at his feet and little Abigail sat beside him, ashen with fright. Before I could utter a word, Lord Vaughan said, “I will tell you everything. I swear it on my daughter’s soul. Only, I beg you”—his voice fractured—“do not arrest me. I am all my daughter has left.”

I hardened my reply, though I had already determined it was not my role to condemn him. “Your only hope is that you withhold nothing more. When was Raff brought to you?”

“In the winter of 1548,” he replied in a thread of a voice. “My aunt, Lady Parry … she came here with him at night. Philippa had not been able to conceive. After everything she had suffered, she thought God was punishing her. When Lady Parry arrived with a man unknown to us and the babe in her arms, we thought God himself had answered our prayers. We were assured the child was healthy; all we need do was care for him as if he were our own. My aunt promised us we would lack for nothing; she gave us a sum of money and said we had only to send word to her using a cipher provided by the man with her, one Master Parry, though he bore no relation to us. She did not say whose child it was and I did not ask. But I knew. I knew almost at once.”

Master Parry was Elizabeth’s treasurer, whom I had met at Hatfield and whom she had told me to contact should I need money. The plot to hide her child had indeed originated from deep within her most intimate ranks.

“How did you know?” I drew a chair up beside him. Abigail pressed her face into her father’s doublet as Lord Vaughan caressed her hair. He then called for Mistress Harper, who hastened in. “Please,” he said, “take my daughter to her room.” Abigail tried to resist, clinging to her father until Mistress Harper managed to coax her away. As she left clutching the woman’s hand, I felt a deep sorrow for her. She had lost her brother and seen her own father murder her mother, albeit to protect me. She would never forget it, marked by the tragedy in her home.

“I may look like a country fool,” Lord Vaughan said once we were alone, “but even I had heard the rumors during one of my trips to London, something about the princess and the king’s younger uncle, Admiral Seymour, who had wed King Henry’s widow, Kate Parr. It was said there had been flagrant behavior: an incident of the widow Parr restraining the princess in the garden while Seymour cut her dress to shreds, and other more disturbing tales of him bursting into the princess’s bedchamber when she was abed, near-naked himself, while all her ladies watched. The widow queen finally sent the princess away to a manor in Cheshunt. Her own brother King Edward forbade Elizabeth to set foot in court. And then,” he added, lowering his voice, “the arrests came.”

“Admiral Seymour,” I said, thinking quickly of what I knew. “He was arrested by his brother, Lord Somerset, was he not? He was tried and executed for treason.”

Lord Vaughan sighed. “He was, indeed. I remember it well because the princess was also questioned and several of her servants, including Master Parry, sent to the Tower for a time. The Admiral was condemned of plotting to marry her, but she denied any knowledge of it. Shortly thereafter our payments for Raff’s upkeep ceased.”

“You had payments?” I thought Elizabeth had indeed risked her life by hiding away her son. If Seymour was Raff’s father and the child’s existence discovered, it would have made her appear guilty in Seymour’s plot. She could have bowed her head to the sword like her mother before her. Had she, in her youthful exuberance, consented to Seymour’s advances? Or had something more sinister occurred under his roof, a violation of a girl by a man who was supposed to be her guardian, the husband of her stepmother, the widowed queen?

“Yes,” said Lord Vaughan. “For almost a year, payments came quarterly, issued through a solicitor in York, a client of Master Parry’s. I had to travel there to receive them. Sometime following Seymour’s execution, the payments stopped. I made inquiry but the solicitor had no explanation to offer. Then he disappeared. Gone abroad, I was told. I wrote several times to my aunt, using Parry’s cipher. On a few occasions she came to visit and left a small jewel or purse of coin but never enough to see to our needs and by then my own livelihood was suffering.”

“Did you ever try to contact the princess directly?” I asked.

“Never. I am a loyal subject, as I assured you. I never shared Philippa’s belief that the Tudors were accursed for breaking with Rome or imposing heresy on us. I am of the old faith but no traitor. I kept my head down and trusted that in time, the monies due would be sent.”

“But they never were?” His account fitted with what I knew of the manner in which Elizabeth had lived toward the end of her brother’s reign. As young Edward began to sicken, those who ruled in his name harbored constant fear of a revolt and did their utmost to subdue both Elizabeth and her sister Mary by keeping them impoverished and far from court.

“It was as though Raff had been forgotten,” Lord Vaughan went on, “and once Philippa gave birth to our children she began to nurture this hatred of him. We had seen by then that while he was indeed robust—he almost never had an ailment—he was … unusual. Not simple, but not normal, either. Philippa did not want him near her; she believed he would curse our children. We engaged nursemaids from the village when he was a babe, but once he grew old enough, Philippa refused him any affection. She could not abide kindness shown to him. Her loathing of him grew until I thought she might have seen him dead had I not been here to protect him.”

“Protect him?” My voice was sharp. “You call what he has endured protection?”

“I did what I could,” he said sadly. “I know it was not enough, but as the years passed, Raff became something we feared, a child that must be kept secret, though we had never asked for him. Philippa kept saying we should give him to a farmer far away, to rid ourselves of the obligation; but how could I allow that, given who he was? I insisted that he must be educated and be raised with our own children.”

“You speak as if your wife had no idea of whose child she spoke of.”

He hesitated for a moment. “Perhaps in some part of her, she did,” he said at length. The admission seemed to pain him. “I never told her of my suspicions but I think she shared them, only she found it easier to deny. She finally accused me of having been unfaithful with some doxy during one of my trips to London and then, having entrusted the child to my aunt, concocting a scheme to hide the fact that Raff was mine. She was so vehement; she relished making me feel guilty and I let her. I thought it better for her to blame me instead of the boy.”

I leaned back in my chair. The hall was dimming, the afternoon fading toward early winter dusk. “She certainly knew who Raff was today,” I reminded him. “She admitted as much and implied he had been deliberately abandoned here, among other things.”

“Yes. She changed her tune after the tutor arrived,” he said.

A shiver went through me. “Why? Did Godwin know about Raff?”

“He never mentioned it, if he did. Indeed, he seemed to despise and disregard the boy as much as Philippa did.”

“Can you describe him to me?” I leaned toward him again, intent now on this revelation that the tutor’s appearance had altered the situation in the household.

“He was…” Lord Vaughan considered, his hand trembling slightly as he smoothed the blood-spotted front of his doublet. “How shall I put it? You could not find a more diffident man, almost submissive. He always wore black and he spoke softly, so you had to pay close attention to what he said. Yet he had this air of sophistication, which he used to great effect. He entranced Philippa. He was comely, if too thin and pale, and despite his crippled leg, elegant of movement. He did not seem to me like a man who must earn his board teaching children, but then, as Philippa often said, I should know more than most to which depths people could fall.”

“What did she mean by that?” I said. “What depths did she refer to?”

“I suppose the fact that she too had fallen, marrying beneath her rank.” A bitter smile twisted his mouth, betraying that while he might never admit it aloud, he too had suffered for his choice of a spouse. “She never let me forget that had the circumstances been different, I would not have won her hand. In any event, she declared Godwin a gentleman, like those she had met growing up in her father’s house, of good breeding and position, who had, like her, lost much in the upheaval following King Henry’s break with Rome.”

“Was Godwin papist, too?”

Vaughan assented. “He attended mass with us, so, yes, he must have been.” His voice hardened a fraction. “I began to think my wife was in love with him. To hear her speak, you would think Godwin could do no wrong; it was he, in fact, who suggested Raff was no longer a suitable companion for our children and must be put to work instead. He told Philippa the boy was simple, hopeless at his lessons; that he ran off and hid for hours, and was leading our children astray. Philippa was adamant that Raff tend the stables. We had so few servants as it was and so much work to maintain the very roof over our heads…” He avoided my stare, his face visibly affected by his recollection. “Regardless, I carry the blame, for I did not argue against it. She would hear nothing in his defense and Raff—he had such fear of Godwin. He avoided the tutor at any cost.”

“So, you let your wife and a hireling dictate the rule of your house,” I said, disgusted by his weakness, even as I was now certain Master Godwin had had far more sinister intent that Lord Vaughan could ever have suspected.

“Not entirely,” he started to say. Then he paused. “Master Godwin worked for meager pay,” he explained. “We could hardly afford a tutor in the situation we were in, and Philippa was constantly fretting that he might seek a better position, though he told her he was content with a room and his books. I reasoned, as he was crippled, he must have had difficulties securing posts in the city—Londoners being what they are—and Raff preferred to be outside; he loved the animals, often bedding in the stables of his own accord. Bardolf followed him everywhere, and he had a sure hand with the horses, almost a talent for sensing if they were hurt or ill. He was more himself with the beasts than with any of us, and didn’t seem to mind.”

I had no doubt Raff had welcomed it, anything to escape Lady Vaughan and the tutor. I kept the thought to myself, however, for there remained a final piece to the mystery I needed to resolve. “You did not like or trust Master Godwin yet you allowed him to accompany Lady Parry to fetch the physician for your son. I must confess that I find that strange. Why would you entrust your aunt’s safety to the very man whom you believed your wife conspired with?”

“What I told you about that day is the truth,” he insisted. “No, I did not care for Godwin. How could I? No man cares to see his wife beholden to another, but he taught our children well and never showed us any disrespect. York is but a day away. My son was dying. Godwin offered to be of service, and with my aunt so determined, it seemed the only way. I did send that note we found on her horse to court. It was the first time I had dared write to the queen. Philippa was irate; the fact that Godwin had also vanished, along with Henry’s death—she wanted us to hide any evidence of Lady Parry’s visit and report that my aunt had never arrived here. I refused. I told her we must welcome any assistance Her Grace could provide. But no one came until you.”

I believed him. I saw it in his eyes, the anguished candor. He had killed his own wife to stop her from destroying whatever was left of his life; he had done it for Abigail, more than to save me, but he had not willingly dispatched Lady Parry to her fate. Yet perhaps his wife had; perhaps she and Godwin had been planning something nefarious that Lady Parry’s unexpected arrival had interrupted. Perhaps the very reason for her rift with Lady Philippa had arisen because Lady Parry had suspected her and Godwin and confronted them. I might never discover their intent now. Philippa Vaughan was dead, and though I had found Raff, I was no closer to discovering the whereabouts of Lady Parry or the tutor, though now I believed at least one of them was alive. Godwin’s horse had never been found. What if he had taken Lady Parry after they left the manor? If so, he could be the stranger who had sent the poisoned box to the queen and stalked me on the journey here.

Nevertheless, in order to satisfy or refute my suspicions, I had to return to court. I had to expose my own self and wait for him to strike. He had had plenty of time and opportunity to come for me here, and thus far, he had kept his distance since the incident on the road. Whatever he planned, I had the disquieting sense that he wanted me back in London.

“This cipher you were provided to correspond with Lady Parry: Do you still have it?”

Lord Vaughan gave me a startled look. “I … I fear not.” As he saw me frown, he added, “I wanted to employ it to compose my letter to the queen, but when I went to find it, I realized it was gone.”