The traitors blade, p.4
The Traitor's Blade, page 4
“Now we need to figure out what the key is,” I said. “The message says it’s about the truth of what happened in Paris. So what is that?”
“Finding the Templars?” Tom suggested.
As good a place as any to start. I wrote out the cipher, then repeated the key above it.
T E M P L A R S T E M P L A R S T E
M O I U R H J B X A M G X B H B L L
“I don’t remember how the rest of this works,” Tom said.
“To decipher something,” I reminded him, “we start on the row with the first letter of the key: T. Then we search to the right, until we find the letter of the code: M. Then we go up to the top of the column… and that should be the first letter of the message.”
“T,” Tom said.
“Yes. And we write that down.”
T E M P L A R S T E M P L A R S T E
M O I U R H J B X A M G X B H B L L
T
“Now we just keep doing that for each letter. Next in the key is E… go across to find the O… and up to get…”
“K,” Tom said.
T E M P L A R S T E M P L A R S T E
M O I U R H J B X A M G X B H B L L
T K
“Next, start with M, go to I, and we get… W.”
T E M P L A R S T E M P L A R S T E
M O I U R H J B X A M G X B H B L L
T K W
I already didn’t like what we were seeing. And I was right not to. Deciphering the whole message left us with nonsense.
T E M P L A R S T E M P L A R S T E
M O I U R H J B X A M G X B H B L L
T K W F G H S J E W A R M B Q J S H
“It didn’t work,” Tom said.
I shook my head. TEMPLARS wasn’t the key.
Tom thought some more. “What about ‘treasure’?”
We tried that next.
T R E A S U R E T R E A S U R E T R
M O I U R H J B X A M G X B H B L L
T X E U Z N S X E J I G F H Q X S U
It didn’t get us anywhere, either.
I sighed. Figuring out a key was never easy. We’d just have to keep going until we found it. Tom and I tried whatever we could think of that fit the riddle. ASSASSIN. LOUISXIV. KING. Even RAVEN.
I really hoped that last one wouldn’t be the answer—and it wasn’t. All I ended up with was a similar jumble of letters that meant nothing.
“Maybe we’ve got the wrong idea,” Tom said.
“How do you mean?”
“What if it’s a different code?”
That was a possibility. If the cipher wasn’t Vigenère, then the square would never give us the answer. But it was just as possible we hadn’t figured out the right key yet. After all, the only cipher we’d used in Paris that needed a key was Vigenère—
Wait.
Maybe that’s what the hint about Paris meant. We were supposed to use the same key we’d used to solve the riddle there.
The key in Paris turned out to be RAI. Excited, I tried it.
R A I R A I R A I R A I R A I R A I
M O I U R H J B X A M G X B H B L L
V O A D R Z S B P J M Y G B Z K L D
But that didn’t work, either.
Now I was totally stumped. Further thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door.
Dobson had returned. “The Marquess of Chillingham requests your company, sirs. At your earliest convenience.”
Diplomatic, our Dobson. What Lord Ashcombe had likely said was Get those two idiots here now.
“What did you do?” Tom said to me as Dobson led us through the palace.
“Nothing,” I said. “Why do you always assume everything’s my fault?”
He shrugged. “I find it saves time.”
* * *
As it turned out, neither of us was in trouble. Lord Ashcombe received us in an office; I wasn’t sure if it was his. Not that it mattered. I’d left the map of Whitehall on the desk, so I had no idea how I’d find this room again.
Lord Ashcombe was staring out the window, looking down at the Privy Garden. The marble statues were lit by torches, glowing against the darkness of the night. The King’s Warden held something. With his back turned, I couldn’t tell what it was.
“Lockdown’s over,” he said.
“What caused it, my lord?”
“Murder. Servant girl of seventeen, by the name of Mary Brickenham.”
Tom covered his mouth in horror.
“When did this happen?” I said.
“She brought lunch to the Countess of Castlemaine at one thirty, so sometime later than that. Her body was found in the charcoal house. Just lying there, atop a pile toward the back.”
I frowned. Given the cold weather, servants would be in and out of the charcoal house all day. It would have been trivially easy for the killer to shovel charcoal over the body, hide it in one of the piles. Mary wouldn’t have been found for days.
So either someone didn’t want to give themselves away by getting charcoal all over their clothes, or… “The killer wanted her discovered.”
Lord Ashcombe nodded. “This murder wasn’t random. There’s a message in it.”
“To whom?” Tom said. “Saying what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why do you think it’s a message?” I said.
“The weapon was left in the body. She’d been stabbed through the heart, from the back. With this.”
He slid the item he held across the desk. It was a dagger. Flat pommel, unadorned grip, narrow hilt, long blade.
I stared at it. “That’s the kind of dagger Simon was stabbed with.”
“Exactly.” Lord Ashcombe regarded me. “Whoever killed Mary Brickenham wanted Chastellain dead just the same.”
CHAPTER 9
LORD ASHCOMBE HAD NO ANSWER as to why anyone would want a servant and a French vicomte dead. According to him, Mary Brickenham was well liked and a decent worker, with no suitors or romantic involvements. He’d also been able to discover that Simon had visited Whitehall earlier that day, looking for me.
I regretted being stuck in the palace. Dr. Kemp had promised us Simon would be all right after his surgery, but I still would have liked to check on him. Lord Ashcombe said he’d ask Simon tomorrow if he’d seen Mary while he was here. In the meantime, Lord Ashcombe pointed out both daggers had a symbol on them, pressed into the steel near the hilt.
It was a W, imprinted inside a circle. It reminded me of the witches’ marks we’d seen in Devonshire.
“It’s not that,” Lord Ashcombe said when I mentioned it. “It’s a maker’s mark, hammered by the blacksmith. We’re trying to identify which man made them. And then, from there, who bought them.”
“Any leads, my lord?”
“All we know so far is this mark isn’t from any blacksmith in London. We’ll have to check with other cities.”
That would take weeks. Far too long to be helpful, I thought. But Lord Ashcombe pointed out that the mark told us something, regardless. If the killer—or killers, no reason to assume there was only one—got their weapons outside the city, they very likely came from somewhere else, as well.
When he was finished with the daggers, I showed him the letter I’d found in my house.
He frowned as he read it. “No idea who it’s from?”
I shook my head. “Tom and I have been trying to decipher the code at the bottom. That might give us a clue. But we haven’t been able to figure it out.”
Lord Ashcombe looked pensive. “Someone may be able to help with that.”
“Who, my lord?”
“You’ll meet him tomorrow. For now, get some sleep. The king rises early, and he wants to speak with you in the morning.”
Sleep well before a private meeting with the king? Not likely. I spent the night dreaming of angry, black-feathered birds.
THURSDAY, MARCH 4, 1666
Who cannot be crushed with a plot?
CHAPTER 10
I WASN’T EXPECTING SO MANY spaniels.
Tom and I shuffled nervously as Lord Ashcombe ushered us into the king’s private study, on the second floor of the palace. It was bright and spacious, the rounded window providing a fantastic view of London over the Thames. We could even see the Tower of London’s turrets from here, all the way across the city, peeking through the faint morning mist.
Near the window was a grand desk of mahogany, where a servant stood rearranging several papers into neat piles. By the coal fire were four chairs upholstered in velvet, a second servant waiting behind them with a bottle of wine on a tray. The king sat in front of the fire, looking with bemusement at a letter.
And everywhere, everywhere, were dogs. A dozen spaniels romped about the room, snuffling through the rugs. One pup lay on his back in Charles’s lap, squirming happily and gnawing at the king’s fingers as he scratched idly at the dog’s belly. The others came running from all corners of the room as we entered, tails wagging, weaving playfully through our feet.
“Boys! Welcome. Join me,” the king said, sounding in a pleasant mood indeed.
We hesitated. As commoners, we weren’t allowed to sit in the king’s presence.
Charles waved away our worries. “Sit, sit,” he commanded. “No one will see you but Richard here, and he knows how to keep a secret.”
Tom and I exchanged a glance. The king hadn’t considered the servants, even as the man behind him stepped forward to place glasses of wine on the small tables between the chairs. No one ever pays attention to servants, Sally had said once, a fact that had nearly spelled our doom in Paris.
But we did as he wished. The chairs were awfully comfortable. Two of the spaniels immediately sprang up, front paws on Tom’s thighs; he ruffled their ears in delight. An older dog placed her graying muzzle on my leg and looked at me with hopeful eyes.
“That’s Barbara,” the king said. “She won’t leave until you pet her. Of course, she won’t leave after you pet her either, so there you are.” I scratched Barbara’s neck as Charles turned to Lord Ashcombe and held up the letter. “Guess who wrote to me.”
“The tailor, demanding you pay your bills?” Lord Ashcombe said.
“Odd’s fish, you’ve a cheek this morning,” Charles said, more in amusement than outrage. “It’s from La Grande Mademoiselle.”
Lord Ashcombe looked surprised. “What does she want?”
“How would I know? I’m hardly going to read it.”
“Sire,” Lord Ashcombe said reprovingly.
“Did you boys meet La Grande Mademoiselle in Paris?” When we shook our heads, the king said, “Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier. Dreadful woman. My mother kept trying to arrange a marriage with her while I was in France. She was annoyingly persistent.”
The king gave me a sidelong glance, a smile playing about his lips. Clearly, he wanted me to ask. “How did you get out of it, Your Majesty?”
He could barely suppress a grin. “Tell him, Richard.”
“Oh, for the love of the holy,” Lord Ashcombe said.
“Tell him, tell him. The boy wants to know.”
Lord Ashcombe sighed. “He pretended he didn’t know French.”
“For two years!” The king burst into laughter, startling the spaniel on his lap. “She would come to me, and I’d just look blankly at her as she tried to make conversation. She thought I was singularly ill bred. Said it right in front of my face! Ha-ha-ha!”
“Didn’t she ever see you talk to anyone else?” I said.
“Of course! I’d be right in the middle of a conversation—then she’d join us and suddenly I’d lose the power of speech. Never figured it out! As dim as a candle in the countryside, that woman. And no conception of humor. Literally couldn’t understand what a joke was.” He shook his head. “Make no mistake, boys: No decision will bring more happiness to your home, or more grief, than whom you choose for a wife. So choose wisely.”
Suddenly he sat up. The dog squirmed from his lap onto the rug, where it gnawed on the king’s shoe instead. “I just had a wonderful idea.” He pointed at me just as I was taking a drink. “You should marry Sally!”
I sprayed wine everywhere.
The dogs seemed to think this was great fun. So did the king. “Wine in the stomach, not the rug, surely,” he said.
Tom slapped both his hands over his mouth. I tried not to look at him.
“S-sire?” I stammered, wiping my lips.
“Why not marry Sally?” he insisted. “She’s brave, loyal, clever—and let’s face it, extremely easy on the eyes.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “You know, as her guardian, it’s my duty to arrange a suitable marriage. I could provide a very reasonable dowry, given the right fellow.”
A sound escaped from Tom, which was either him being strangled, or stifling a laugh.
“I… er… it’s…” I couldn’t seem to find any way out of this. “I’m an apprentice,” I said finally.
“So?”
“I’m not allowed to get married. Until my apprenticeship is over.”
“Odd’s fish. I hadn’t thought of that. Well, you’d best hurry it up, then. Sally’s certain to attract suitors at Court, and I won’t wait forever. What about you, Thomas?”
Tom stared in horror. “Me?”
“Surely you must have some girl who’s sweet on you.”
He turned red as an apple. “Oh, no. No, no. No.”
I smiled at Tom. My turn. “He’s being modest, sire. You should have seen the way the maids in Paris fawned over him.”
The king nodded. “How well I remember. Like vultures, they are.”
“There is a girl here in London who likes him,” I said. “Dorothy, the innkeeper’s daughter, who lives across from my shop. She’s been trying to catch Tom for some time.”
“Sounds excellent. Is she pretty?”
“Very,” I said, “but maybe a bit… aggressive.”
“How so?”
“Imagine a bear trying to open a jar of honey. And Tom’s the jar.”
The king doubled over in laughter. Tom buried his face in his hands. Lord Ashcombe just sighed and shook his head.
Charles wiped away tears and patted Tom on the knee. “Ah, you two. Have no fear, Thomas, I’ll find you someone suitable.”
“Perhaps, sire,” Lord Ashcombe said, “the betrothals can wait. Until the boys are no longer fourteen, at least.”
“Odd’s fish. I keep forgetting how young you are. You’ve just served me so well.” He clapped his hands. “Which brings me to the point. I promised you gifts.”
He turned serious. “You three, Sally included, accepted great danger in traveling to Paris, with no idea whom or what you might face. You did this at my request, and yet asked for nothing in return. You saved the life of my sister, Minette, which means more to me than my own—which you have saved, even so.
“I considered giving you titles, but that wouldn’t fit my plans for you at the moment. Therefore, instead, I have decided to provide you with a pension. Six hundred pounds per annum, divided between the three.”
Tom swayed in his chair, white with shock. I went dizzy myself, a low buzzing filling my head.
A pension?
Of six hundred pounds?
That meant Tom, Sally, and I would each be given two hundred pounds, every year.
A journeyman apothecary could hope to make a shilling a day. That worked out to around fifteen pounds a year. The king would be giving us—each, giving us each—thirteen times that.
Forever.
It was well known Charles was generous with money. He’d given a similar sum to the family who’d helped him escape the country fifteen years ago, when Cromwell’s troops had been hunting for his head. And yet this… I could barely breathe.
Tom stared, slack-jawed. “But you already gave me this hat.”
Again the king doubled over with laughter. “Odd’s fish, Thomas. I must invite you to all my parties.”
Head still buzzing, I asked, “Does Sally know?”
“She was informed last night,” Charles said, “upon her arrival at Berkshire House. I would have liked to have told her myself, but circumstances didn’t permit.”
I wished I’d been there to see it. She should be here, with us; she deserved to be.
And as that occurred to me, even dizzy as I was, it struck me as odd. Telling Sally about the pension could have waited a day. He could have brought her here this morning, told us all together.
But he hadn’t. What’s more, we’d been told there weren’t any spare quarters. Yet an irate knight had been displaced from his parlor to accommodate Tom and me. The same could have been done for Sally, if Charles had wished it. Which meant…
“You don’t want Sally at Whitehall,” I said suddenly.
The king looked at me sharply but said nothing.
Barbara the spaniel decided she wanted more than a scratch and climbed carefully into my lap. I stroked her fur, long and soft. “Is it because of Mary’s murder?” I wondered aloud. “No, it can’t be. Not alone. There must have been something else.”
Now Charles looked at Lord Ashcombe.
The King’s Warden shrugged. “You wanted him sticking his nose in.”
“Clearly, I was right,” the king said, and he nodded for Lord Ashcombe to tell me.
Ashcombe dismissed the two servants, shutting the door behind them. Then he spoke.
“There have been two murders,” he said quietly. “Another servant girl was found in the Thames, the day before we returned to London. She’d been stabbed in the back, like Mary, but since she was fished out east of the Tower, no one imagined the murder had happened in the palace. It was assumed she’d gone to market and fallen afoul of thieves. Given yesterday’s circumstances, it’s fair to assume the deaths are connected—that she was killed here, and her body dumped in the river.”
“Was it done with the same type of blade?” Tom asked nervously.
