In a Treacherous Court (11 page)

Maggie nodded in approval. “I’ll check the patients and give ye my list.”

Parker noted with relief that he was no longer needed. He bowed. “Ladies, there are things I must attend to in the stable.”

Susanna looked at him sharply, her eyes wide.

“We no longer have time for pity, my lady,” he said, knowing she was thinking of what he was prepared to do to get answers.

She hesitated a moment, then her gaze fell on the boys’ still, white faces. She nodded.

He turned and walked out into the yard, his pace steady. He had never had much use for pity, even before he became a leashed wolf for the King. Now he had gnawed through his tether, and the wolf was running wild.

The Chiefe Conditions and Qualities in a Courtier:
To consider whom he doth taunt and where: for he ought not to mocke poore seelie soules, nor men of authoritie, nor commune ribaldes and persons given to mischeef, which deserve punishment.

Of the Chief Conditions and Qualityes in a Waytyng Gentylwoman:
Not to speake woordes of dishonestye and baudrye to showe her self pleasant, free and a good felowe.

H
e saw to his knife and his sword first; he felt naked without them.

Then he turned back to the injured attacker, propped up against a bale of straw, his legs tied securely to the center support of the stable. The man was sliding into shock. He was shivering violently, and his face felt cold and clammy to the touch.

Parker threw a horse blanket over him and gave his cheek a little tap.

“Huh?” The man turned blindly to face him, fighting to open his eyes.

“You the one who set the wharf boys on my lady last night?”

The man mumbled something unintelligible, and Parker gave his cheek a sharp slap.

“Wha …?”

“Do you want to live?” He could hear the exhaustion in his own voice. The raw honesty.

The man’s eyes tried to focus on Parker’s face. “Nearly gone anyway.”

Parker lifted his knife and moved it without hesitation to the man’s right eye.

He closed his eyes just moments before the tip touched, and the blade bit into the lid. “I’ll talk.”

Parker moved back an inch. “Then talk.”

“I pass on things to some o’ the lords.” He tried to pull himself together, to stay coherent. “Small things coming from France or the Netherlands.”

“What things?”

“Little wooden boxes sometimes. Heavy coins.”

“You’ve looked in the boxes.” Parker did not make it a question.

“Aye. Screwed open the coins too. Some were made in haste, and I could see the join.”

“What was in them?”

“Letters. And I can’t read, ’afore you ask. I don’t know what they said.”

“And you are doing this for …?”

“Never met him.” His voice strengthened. “One night he come up behind me on me way home from the tavern.
Thought I was done for. Knife at me throat, an’ all. Says a sailor will give me something to pass on later that day.”

“I certainly hope the money was good.” Parker swiped the drop of blood from the man’s eyelid off the tip of his knife. “And that you enjoyed it while you could. You’ve been passing treasonous letters from Richard de la Pole to his supporters against the King, and I don’t think they care much for that in the Tower.”

All the blood drained from the attacker’s face. His throat worked, trying to swallow. “I swear, I
swear
, I didn’t know.” He began shivering again.

“You know that matters not at all.” Parker made to stand, and with his good arm, the man grabbed him.

“Please. I’ve been honest. I’ll tell you everything. Everything, I swear it.”

“I’m too weary. You are the third to attack me and mine this day alone. The sixth since I met that ship in Deal. I’ll let the Tower do the work for me this time.” Parker pried the man’s fingers from his arm.

“Please.” He was crying, heaving air into his lungs. “Do you think them what picked up those letters aren’t to do with the Tower? With the King? If they find out I’m there, I won’t last five minutes.”

Parker looked at him, considering. “You can identify them?”

The man painfully tapped his head. “I got a good eye for faces. I c’n remember faces and the days we met.”

“We draw up a list.” Parker crouched down again. “Dates, times, the ship you received each message from, and the name of the courtier you handed it to.”

He nodded eagerly.

“What is your name?” Parker stood.

“Marcus, m’lord.”

“I’ll send the healer out to you, Marcus. When she has finished dealing with the victims of your handiwork.”

Marcus winced. “Your pardon, m’lord—”

“Stop.” Parker’s voice was harsh. “You attacked two small boys and a woman for money. You cannot be sorrier than I.” He began walking toward the door, then turned back. “If you lie to me just once, if you try to run, if you steer me wrong—by God, you’ll be begging me to hand you to the Tower.” He held Marcus’s gaze, saw the stricken look in his eyes, and delivered his final warning. “I am at the end of my patience, with no mercy left in me.”

As he walked into the yard, he looked toward the lane and wondered wearily who would be trying to breach his home next.

Defensive moves were no longer enough. It was time to start moving his own pieces in this mysterious and deadly game of chess, before someone removed his queen—a painter from Ghent who had somehow touched his soul.

H
arvey’s wife.”

Susanna opened her eyes as Parker sank wearily down next to her before the study fire. She struggled to shake off her exhaustion. At last the house was quiet. The body in
the stable had been taken away. The other attacker had been taken to Father Haden, lest someone try to silence him before he could fulfill his promise to Parker, and Mistress Greene and the boys seemed to be resting easily.

“You think all this is to stop me giving Harvey’s message to his wife?” They had both thought it, just before Mistress Greene had cried out, but Susanna had since dismissed the notion.

“If it was for her. What exactly did Harvey say?” Parker’s eyes seemed feverish in the firelight, the contours of his face stark.

“He gave me the message for the King, said he knew how the messages were getting through. Then he stopped suddenly and stared over my shoulder, his eyes filled with horror.” Susanna curled her fingers around her wrist where Harvey had grasped her, so weak he could barely hold on. “Then he said: ‘My wife. I have provided for my wife’s future. She holds my secrets.’”

“Did you look over your shoulder?” Parker asked.

Susanna shook her head. “I wanted to, but I was afraid. I knew there could be no one behind me, but the way Harvey looked, so focused, it felt as if Death truly could be standing at my back. I was too much a coward to look.”

“It was good that you did not.”

The way Parker spoke, so hard and flat, made her frown. “You think someone
was
behind me?”

He nodded. “Someone Harvey knew.”

“He was telling them something. Warning them his wife had a secret hidden, that they could not kill her without risking
discovery.” Susanna leaned forward and grabbed Parker’s arm in excitement. “We must go to her.”

He nodded, but she could see his energy had been leached out by the long day. “Tomorrow is soon enough. I need rest.”

“Did you get Maggie to look at you?” Susanna recalled the beating he had taken in the stable, and compressed her lips as he shook his head.

“No time, and all I have is bruises.”

“Are you sure?”

He gave her a lopsided smile, leaning back against his chair. “Are you offering to play the healer, Mistress Horenbout?”

Susanna felt her face flush, and her voice was gone for a moment. There was a longing in his eyes, a true invitation behind the dry humor. “I …”

He began to close her off, his wall coming down again, and she shoved her shyness aside.

“Yes.”

He focused on her, and his eyes glittered in the firelight.

“I will get warm water from the kitchen.” Her words tripped over themselves, but she rose as calmly as she could. “This room is the warmest, so you can start taking off your doublet, if you are able.”

His face was serious, his brows drawn together. “I was not talking only of seeing to my wounds—”

“I know what you were talking about.” Susanna walked to the door, then turned to look at him.

Parker grinned back at her. “As long as we’re in accord.”

The Chiefe Conditions and Qualities in a Courtier:
His love towarde women, not to be sensuall or fleshlie, but honest and godly, and more ruled with reason, then appetyte: and to love better the beawtye of the minde, then of the bodie.

Of the Chief Conditions and Qualityes in a Waytyng Gentylwoman:
Not to be lyghte of creditt that she is beloved, though a man commune familierlye with her of love.

H
e was too tired for this sweet torture. And too stiff.

Parker winced as Susanna applied salve to an open cut on his arm, where he’d been sliced open by his own shovel in one of his many rolls on the stable floor with Marcus.

He was getting old.

He needed to start thinking instead of fighting, but it wasn’t as if he’d had any choice.

Her fingers brushed his shoulder, and then she placed a warm, wet cloth over the deep purple bruise there. The solution she’d dipped the cloth in had a pungent smell, but he could feel his muscles relax as the heat did its work.

Despite being half-naked in a room alone with Susanna
Horenbout, he would not be doing what he’d wanted to since the moment he saw her.

Ravishing her.

Just the thought of it made him smile.

“I would have my way with you—you know that, don’t you?”

He saw a smile dance on her lips and then disappear. “I know.”

“And as you do not run, the thought is obviously not repugnant to you?”

Her hands stilled. “No.”

“Perhaps you should run.” The words stuck in his throat.

Her hands gripped him just tight enough to make him wince. “Perhaps I should. But I won’t.”

“And your blacksmith?” Ever since Susanna had mentioned him, Parker had felt the man’s presence like a stone in his boot.

She started sponging his back again. “I am an artist, Parker. I do not cook, I do not clean. I work long hours on commissions my father receives from lords and royalty throughout Europe. I would make a poor wife.”

Parker waited, wanting to hear everything before he spoke.

“But I am no nun. I want to experience the pleasures of the bed. I thought my father—I thought he would understand that. See me as he sees my brother. But he took very badly to my clumsy attempts at seducing the blacksmith who works with him on some of his larger commissions.”

“Were you successful? In your seduction?” Parker made his
voice level, but he could feel the tension in her fingers as she stopped sponging.

“What if I was?”

“I will not lie and say it matters not to me, but it will change nothing between us.”

She made a helpless twitch of frustration. “I was not successful.” She sighed. He heard the regret in it and felt a stir of chagrin. “So close we were, and my father …” She squeezed out the cloth absently, as if thinking back to the moment before her father caught her in her blacksmith’s arms.