The Tudor Vendetta (22 page)

“I too share her blood,” I retorted, stung by his words that reminded me uncomfortably of what Kate had said before I left court. “Have you forgotten it?”

“I could never forget it. You are her kin and you must be loyal. I admire you for it. But this isn’t like those other times when you helped her. People have accidents; they die or disappear. Ale gets fouled; thieves assault travelers; assassins try to poison queens. It happens, but it does not mean anyone here hides a secret. It does not mean…” His voice faltered.

“Say it,” I whispered.

“It does not mean Lady Parry’s disappearance has to do with Sybilla.” He went silent, watching me as I gritted my teeth.

“You think I am imagining it,” I said at length. “You think I’ve spun a delusion to deal with my guilt because I failed to capture her before she leapt off the bridge.”

“I think despite everything, you have a passion for her you cannot escape. You want this to be a plot so you can avenge what she did to you and Peregrine, though you know as well as I do that while you hunt a ghost, whoever seeks harm on the queen remains at large and you are no closer than you ever were to apprehending him. You should be at court, working together with Cecil and the others to find him, not wasting time here searching for secrets that do not exist.”

I turned away. “I’ll see that food brought to you. You must rest and regain your strength.”

Shelton grunted, but he did not try to argue or call me back.

Once he had spoken the truth as he saw it, he invariably stood by it.

*   *   *

The storm erupted with a torrential downpour and iron clashing of thunder.

Inside the manor, I ate alone in the hall, served a trencher of cold remnants from the previous night’s feast by downcast Mistress Harper, who informed me Master Gomfrey had not returned yet from Withernsea and his search for a replacement for Agnes. Lord Vaughan and her ladyship, she added, had elected to remain in their rooms.

This parsimonious display had a deliberation to it that outraged me. I was being treated like a troublesome errand boy, forced to idle while they hid away in the hope I would grow tired, throw up my hands, and leave. I ate what I could, drank my fill of gritty well water (I wouldn’t touch a cup of wine or ale), and then climbed the stairs to my chamber, where I found myself deliberating what I had learned thus far, as well as Shelton’s unwelcome advice.

Was there a child hidden in the tower? Or had Abigail merely imparted a game she had made up with two older boys? Maybe she was confused, and Henry had devised the tale of Hugh, an invisible friend. It made perfect sense, far more so than concealing a child; but something in my gut told me it was not so simple. There was a mystery here in Vaughan Hall. I
knew
it. It was right under my nose and it all somehow connected to the stranger, who in turn had a connection to the past. I must resolve it. Lady Parry’s very life could depend on it.

I lay back, pillowing my hands, staring up at the timber-beamed ceiling. I played the events again, backward in my head. The discoveries I had made since arriving here, about Lady Vaughan’s familial past and possible link to Sybilla, who had also suffered losses during the Pilgrimage of Grace; the attack on the road by those ruffians and the stranger watching us; and further back, to the opening of the gifts in Elizabeth’s apartments and the horrifying death of her spaniel. I saw Kate once more, terrified with the glove in her hand as I searched the upended box for clues. I dwelled on the note in cipher, sent to Dudley’s seer, and Elizabeth’s subsequent summons and the tattered message she had shown me.

You must pay for the sin.

Leaping up, I paced the room. What did it mean? What sin did this stranger seek to avenge and what link did he have to the woman everyone believed was dead and Vaughan Hall? I raked my hands through my hair. At my bedside, the tallow started to gutter. These seemingly disparate incidents must hold something in common. How could they not?

But, I suddenly thought, what if Shelton was right? Did I hunt a ghost from my past even as a murderer stalked the queen, and Lady Parry and Godwin lay in a wood somewhere, pecked over by crows?

The very possibility was chilling. It took a few moments to realize the tallow had gone out but when I turned to strike flint to it, I realized a vague glow still illuminated the room. Looking upward to the arrow-slit window, I saw muted light refracting off the thick pane, distorting it so that it flickered into my room like an eerie nimbus.

I was not tall and the window slit proved too high for me. Dragging the clothes chest to the wall, I perched on tiptoes, straining to look out. I grasped the latch and yanked it, but years of sea salt and grit had sealed it shut. Cursing, I went to fetch my poniard to dig into the crevices about its edges, not thinking of how I would explain the blade gouges in the stone, until I heard the latch pop and I yanked the leaded pane ajar. Gripping the sill with my hands, I pulled myself upward with my feet dangling, to peer through the slivered opening.

I found myself staring through rain and fog at the tower of the manor—a toadstool silhouette I could barely discern.

Faint light wavered there.

In the uppermost part of the tower, flame glowed.

I did not hesitate. Pulling on my soiled travel clothes, I cracked open the door, wincing as its hinges creaked. I peered into the corridor. No one was about. Easing my way toward the staircase, I no longer cared if the storm raged or was teeming with goblins. Someone was indeed in that tower and I must find out whom.

A growl froze me in my tracks. In the penumbra, I saw Bardolf, poised like a sentinel at the landing of the stairs. I did not move. He growled again, with a menace that I knew I should heed. I started to shift backward when he bounded toward me with heart-stopping swiftness.

I ripped my dagger from its sheath, braced for his assault. He came within inches of me, his breath rank and meaty. I liked dogs; I did not want to kill one, especially not the lord’s pet. Bardolf lowered his ogre-like head to sniff my boots. I half expected his jaws to chomp on my foot, forcing me to plunge my blade between his shoulders, but after a thorough examination of the smells impregnated in my boot, he looked up, drooling, and nudged me with his snout.

“There now,” I whispered. “Good boy.” I did not dare touch him back, but he seemed assured that I posed no threat and let me move past him. I heard him padding behind me, a heavy clicking of nails on the floorboards, and though I would have preferred he remained where he was, I figured having him at my side as I went about my business might serve me well. He would certainly alert me to anyone, or anything, that lurked in the night.

I could not leave by the main entrance. A heavy iron bar had been lowered across the double doors, which I would have to lift, making enough noise to wake the entire house. Turning past the empty hall, I tried to remember the way Agnes had led me from the kitchens, thinking there must be access to the tower from the inner quadrangle. Abigail had spoken of tunnels, but I had no idea where to find them, even if I were inclined to go looking for underground passages in the middle of the night.

Electing to use the same corridor to the chapel, I proceeded cautiously, moving through deep shadow. I could barely see anything before me, but Bardolf’s assured pace at my heels seemed to indicate I moved in a direction familiar to him. Surely, he must require some means to get outside to relieve himself; I could not fathom fastidious Lady Vaughan tolerating dog piss in her rushes, and soon enough, to my relief, colorless illumination beckoned—a postern door left ajar to the quadrangle, the same one through which Agnes had brought me from the root cellar.

I stepped into a clammy netherworld. The rain had ebbed, summoning in its wake a shroud of fog tainted by brine, muffling sounds, and shapes. I now understood Gomfrey hadn’t sought to intimidate me. In such a dense miasma, it would be all too easy to lose my way and end up tumbling into a void to my demise. Pausing to take stock of my surroundings and allow my eyes to adjust to the gloom, I picked my path across the quadrangle. Things I had not noticed in my haste to escape from the root cellar with Agnes now loomed like fragments of petrified monsters—a broken coach, half capsized, with wheels sunk in hardened mud; barrels heaped in a haphazard pyramid; a makeshift awning over a stall for repairing objects. My heels crunched upon a soggy mixture of old gravel, sand, and dirt pooled on flagstone; I could barely hear my own footsteps but in my heightened awareness, I imagined they echoed like a giant’s.

Bardolf dashed ahead. I clamped down on my cry to stop him as he vanished into the murky night, and I came to a halt, anticipating a sudden scuffle. When nothing happened, I moved on, nearing the tower, which grew larger and more forbidding than it seemed from a distance. All of a sudden, I was before it, staring at its rounded stone ribs, up to that single glowing window tucked under a decrepit peaked roof.

In the dripping silence, I thought I heard weeping. I paused, shutting out every other sense to amplify it. It was too faint to establish a definitive gender; but it sounded to me like a child, and as I made my way around the tower until I reached the adjoining manor wall, moving away from the window, the weeping faded. I knew then that I had definitely not imagined it. But when I rushed back to the spot, it was gone. So was the faint light, as if it had never been.

I started back around the tower, seeking an entrance until I located a door, square-cut and inset high above me, accessed by a shattered wooden staircase that clung like a cobweb to the tower side. The tower must have once functioned as refuge against a siege; but it had long since fallen into disrepair. The steps hung rotted, skeletal. Even if I could leap up and grab hold of the bottom rung, it would not support me. The entire dilapidated structure would crumble under my weight and send me crashing to injury or death.

I heard Bardolf return, his panting labored. He slipped past me to sniff at the ground. He paused, lifting his leg and jettisoning urine, and started snuffling once more.

“You make a fine watchdog,” I muttered. Thunder grumbled in the distance. The rain resumed, not as hard as before but enough to make me wish I had not forgotten my cap. It was the bane of my life, this penchant for not having a cap at the most inopportune times, and I started to chuckle under my breath, thinking this was a fine to-do, roaming about at night in a storm, seeing strange lights and hearing disembodied cries from a tower which no doubt had stood deserted for ages.

Bardolf barked. I hushed him before I peered at where he stood, his stance alert, his tongue hanging out. He barked again. Lurching forward, I saw what lay directly under his paws.

A small trapdoor almost embedded in the quadrangle stone.

I leaned over to grab hold of its rusted handle. It was wet and slipped in my hand; I tugged at it until I felt my shoulders and arms burn. As I thought I would have to find another way inside—or better yet, relinquish my absurd notions and return to the manor and rest, so I’d be better equipped to deal with the lord and lady come morning—I heard the voice again. Only this time as I paused, crouched over the trapdoor, it came from above me: a chanting of sorts, like a child singing a defiant lullaby.

Bardolf’s ears perked. He too looked up, whining in his throat.

“You heard it, boy?” I said and he turned expectantly as if to urge me to hurry up with whatever I was doing. I raced back to the sagging awning over the stall with its utensils. Everything was rusty, decayed to near uselessness. A bellow of frustration lodged in my throat. Was there nothing in the entire manor that actually functioned as it should? Finally, after scavenging near the heaped barrels, I located an old shovel. It was hardly in better shape than anything else but I splashed through pools of mud back to the trapdoor, lodging the shovel under its handle and hauling upward with all my might.

I was breathless now with exertion, sweat sliding down my back to mingle with the rain and adding to the chill of my sodden clothes. I was going to catch a fever, sure as night; and if anyone came upon me with a shovel trying to dislodge a trapdoor they were going to think me mad, as well. Still, I tried again, pushing the chipped shovel farther under the handle. Looking at Bardolf, who had sat in apparent content to watch, impervious to the rain beading his coat, I pressed down hard until I heard my own gasp of pain escape me.

The shovel’s wooden handle broke, the ruptured part I held splintering and slicing my palm. With a curse, I flung the handle aside, sucking at the blood, when I saw I had cracked open the door just enough to see a crevice of darkness underneath it.

I went to my hands and knees, ignoring the dirt crusting my wound as I scraped and dug with the broken shovel around the door. After what felt like an hour of exhausting labor, I tried the handle again. It gave way a bit more, but still not enough. And the smell that wafted from within that small opening was putrid, making me think of dead things and compelling me to dig again, removing layers of caked dirt and moss even as the dreadful thought began to occur to me that a decomposing body might lie under here—Lady Parry’s own, perhaps.

The next time I grabbed the handle, I managed to pull the door enough to get my hand and arm through. I encountered empty space, cool and damp. It must be a root cellar like the one near the garden postern, where those barricaded in the tower would have stored their foodstuffs. There was a broken bolt on the door’s underside, too, which I felt with my fingers. It no longer worked, the passage of time and nature having sealed it to the door.

I went back to excavating, stopping only until I had to sit back on my heels, covered head to toe in grime. I had propped the door halfway open. I yanked at the handle again. The trapdoor finally gave way with a reluctant groan.

Bardolf was up, poking his nose eagerly into the opening. I had no idea what was down there and started to reach for his collar to detain him when he plunged inside with a joyous bark.

Dogs have a sense of danger, and he had not seemed perturbed in the least. Squeezing through the opening, which was wide enough for a basket but not much more, I dropped onto narrow steps leading into utter blackness, as if I were about to descend into a bottomless pit.