Keeper of the King's Secrets (4 page)

Parker rose up. “He must have been watching you. Went up when you came to report to me.”

Harry looked like he wanted to be sick. “I didn’t notice anyone.”

Parker moved out into the courtyard and Harry followed him. “What will we do with the body?”

Parker glanced back at Jens, crumpled against the back door. “Leave it where it is. We have to find the other man you saw going up to Jens’s room. And visit the jeweller’s shop Susanna saw Jens leaving yesterday.”

Harry looked at him sharply. “What about the assassin?”

“If Jens had a secret someone wants to bury, then anyone who had contact with Jens before he died is in danger. If we find them first, the assassin will come to us.” Parker led the way down a short alley, to where they’d left their horses. “At least we know a few things.”

“We don’t know anything.” Harry untied the mounts with sharp, frustrated tugs. “We didn’t even see his face.”

Parker sheathed his sword. “When he fell down the stairs after I’d interrupted him with Jens, he swore in French.”

He slipped a foot into the stirrup and pulled himself up.

“A Frenchman! You really think he’ll go after whoever had contact with Jens?”

Parker nodded.

“But that means …” Harry couldn’t finish the sentence.

Parker did it for him, as he forced his mount into a canter. “Susanna is in this bastard’s sights.”

But when states are acquired in a country differing in language, customs, or laws, there are difficulties, and good fortune and great energy are needed to hold them, and one of the greatest and most real helps would be that he who has acquired them should go and reside there.

—Machiavelli
, The Prince,
chapter 4

P
arker’s face was grim. Dark shadows clung to him as he stepped into the hallway, and Susanna drew him into the study, into the warm glow of the fire.

“Harry?” she asked.

“In the stables, helping Eric and Peter Jack see to the horses.”

“And Master Jens?”

“Dead.” He looked straight at her as he spoke.

Jens had tried to kill her, but she could not link the wild-eyed man in the alley to the man she had known. The man she had respected and liked. She felt a strange sense of confusion. She did not know what to do with her hands, with any part of herself.

Parker’s gaze rested on her, and she had the sense that he wanted to draw her to him but didn’t know if she would accept his touch. “His death was not by my hand. Someone wanted him silent.”

She lifted her hands to his cloak, undid the tie, and drew it off his shoulders. At last he slid his hands along her arms, pulled her close. They stood, quiet, peaceful, and she closed her eyes, leaning into him.

When she stepped back, he took his cloak from her and draped it over a chair, his face lighter than when he’d come in.

She should paint him like this. Standing by the firelight, dressed in unrelenting black, his black hair gleaming. There was something in the way he carried himself, a readiness for action, that would be a challenge to capture.

“You will mourn him?” He walked to the windows and checked that the shutters were fast.

“I will. I don’t know what I will say to my parents.” She rubbed at her temples. There were plenty of things she did not know how to say to her parents. Her presence in Parker’s house being one. Her presence in his bed another.

Her parents had sent her to Henry’s court to separate her from a man they thought unsuitable, and to paint for the English king, and already she had found a betrothed, been drawn into court intrigue, and made an enemy of the Duke of Norfolk. Her father would bring her home if he knew but the half of it.

As if he could read her thoughts, Parker turned. “Have you told them of our betrothal?”

She nodded. “I have. I want to give them as much time as possible to make plans to attend the wedding. I expect a reply soon—if they’re still talking to me.”

Parker’s grin lit his face and pierced her heart. He was beautiful when he smiled. “You’re marrying a king’s courtier. Surely that is better than the illicit liaison with a blacksmith your parents sent you to England to prevent?”

She snorted. “I don’t think my father will see it that way when he learns I’m living with you already.”

Parker raised an eyebrow. “They do not know that?”

She shook her head.

“I could offer to send you to my home in Fulham. But in truth, I want no such thing.” He bridged the small distance between them, put his hands on her shoulders. “I want you close, Susanna. Close as you can be.”

A feather-brush of warmth, of delight, stroked across her skin at his words. Who would have guessed this journey to London had not been into exile, as she first thought, but a chance to find a love she never dared hope for?

Parker’s eyes slid to the shutters. “If the man who killed Jens learns you saw Jens this morning and spoke with him, you could be his next target.”

She went still. “How could he learn of it?”

“Jens could have talked.” Parker shrugged. “He could have been following Jens this morning, come to that.”

“What was Jens involved with? Why would he risk everything, even his life, for it?”

Parker’s gaze hardened. “Whatever it is, Norfolk is involved
somehow—which means there is some advantage in it for him.”

Susanna recalled the shock in Norfolk’s eyes. “When I said ‘diamond cutter,’ he almost lost his composure.”

“Aye.” This time Parker’s grin did not light his face. “I will put Harry on to watching him. The fastest way to uncover this mystery may be to find out what Norfolk is up to. He may lead us to Jens’s killer.”

“And Pettigrew?” She shivered at the thought of the doctor lurking somewhere in the city, malevolent and dangerous.

Parker drew back from her. “I think Norfolk understood me. I don’t think we’ll be seeing the doctor again.”

P
arker slowed, and looked up. The jeweller’s well-appointed shop had a carved sign hanging above the door, and was raised from the street by wooden stairs and a small platform. The proprietor was doing well.

Instead of going within, Parker walked past the shop without so much as looking in the window, and turned into the mean alleyway where Jens had tried to kill Susanna.

The fine lace of his shirt cuff caught on the rough stone of the alley wall, and he jerked it free. There was almost nothing here to show what had happened yesterday. Only a smudge of blood on the wall.

The answers to this lay elsewhere, some of them in the little shop around the corner.

He swung back into the street, climbed the few stairs, and pushed on the door, and it opened with a tinkle of a bell. He had half expected the place to be locked up.

The jeweller came out from the back, wiping his hands on a cloth that glinted with gold dust. A man who worked and fashioned jewelry, then, instead of just selling it.

He took in Parker’s fine clothes, but when he noted the chain of office under Parker’s cloak, instead of smiling with satisfaction at having an important paying customer, fear flared in his eyes.

“Yes?” He spoke as if struggling for breath. He edged a step closer to the door to his workshop.

Parker chose the direct approach. “You had a visitor to your shop yesterday, Jens of Antwerp. What did he want?”

“Who would be asking, sir?” The jeweller tried to keep his voice firm.

“I’m the Keeper of the Palace of Westminster, and the King’s Yeoman of the Crossbows.” Parker pulled his cloak back for the man to see the chain more clearly.

He paled at the list of Parker’s offices, and his eyes darted about his shop, refusing to alight on Parker’s face. “I have many visitors every day, and not all give me their name.”

“This man wore a blue cloak and was a diamond cutter from Antwerp. As a fellow professional, it would be strange if you had not exchanged names.”

The jeweller opened his mouth, as if to answer, then bolted to his back room. He was short and round, and Parker leaped over the counter and caught hold of the back
of the man’s doublet before he had taken more than three steps.

“Unhand me, sir. I know nothing. Nothing.” His voice quavered. His body shook with fear.

“You can answer me here, privately, and we could leave it at that, or you could come with me to the Tower.” Parker kept his hold firm. “What will it be?”

“Pr … privately?” The jeweller’s tone held a sliver of hope.

“Aye.”

He slumped and Parker released him, let him turn and press himself up against the wall.

“In truth, I do not know much. Jens is an acquaintance. He is one of the finest diamond cutters in the world, and I have sent gems to him for cutting before. He said only that he was in dire trouble, and had no more funds. He needed to catch a ship back to Antwerp, and I guessed the trouble was serious.”

He lifted his hands helplessly. “I lent him the coin he asked for. He promised to pay me back and I had no cause to mistrust him, but something about him …” The man shuddered. “He was almost wild with fear, muttering about the Tower. So perhaps, as a loyal Englishman, I should not have lent him that money.” The jeweller looked up at Parker, resignation in the lines of his face.

“You helped a friend, and you did not know the nature of his trouble.” And neither did he, Parker thought, his mood sour. This was a dead end.

“I am not in trouble?”

Parker shook his head. “Not with the King. But Jens is dead, and I have a feeling that if his visit here yesterday becomes known, you may suffer the same fate. If you have a place to go for a week or more, I would suggest you take yourself off.”

Parker left him throwing things into a bag and stepped out into the street.

From the corner of his eye, he noticed a man push himself off the wall he was leaning against and walk away, a slight limp to his step.

Parker had told Harry that if they tracked down all the people Jens had seen on his last day, the assassin would come to them, but he had known his chances were slight. Now every nerve tingled.

Without breaking stride, he turned in the same direction, his heart pounding in anticipation. If this was the assassin, he finally had a chance to get some answers.

A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it.

—Machiavelli
, The Prince,
chapter 6

P
arker had said not to leave the house, but he hadn’t counted on a summons from the King. Susanna added parchment and quills to her leather satchel and ignored the frown on Peter Jack’s face.

Simon lifted his hands in supplication at the look Peter Jack sent him. “The King wants her immediately.” He was so easygoing, so good-natured, Susanna suspected the King used him whenever the delivery or the tidings were unlikely to make anyone happy. But she knew firsthand he could be counted on. He’d come to her aid often enough since she’d arrived in England and he’d driven her from Dover to London in his capacity as the King’s official transporter.

“I thought the King was away in the country, hawking.” Peter Jack crossed his arms over his chest, and Susanna noticed they were bigger, more muscled than they had been a month ago, when he’d been a child on the streets.