A Murdered Peace

At the top of the outer stairway Kate gazed up at the patch of sky between the houses where the stars still glimmered in the wakening dawn, obscured now and then by the smoke from her neighbors’ morning fires and that from her own chimney. She’d paused to say a prayer for Carl’s safe delivery. Last night she and the hounds had searched, but found no sign of him. Worry weighed her down.

Lady Margery had last come to York to raise money for her husband’s efforts to bring the royal cousins Richard and Henry together so that they might discuss their differences and come to a peaceful resolution. At that time Margery’s husband, Sir Thomas Kirkby, was in France trying to meet with Henry of Lancaster, now King Henry. Kate had thought it a fool’s errand, however noble in spirit, and time had proved her right. A king come to rule in such a way would never be at peace. She guessed Sir Thomas had become a casualty of Henry’s ambition. If this was so, danger must surely ride the wind at Margery’s back. Pray God Carl was not the first casualty.

She had expected to feel a happy satisfaction this morning, for this was the day she would pay off the last of her late husband’s accounts and be free of that burden. It felt as if she’d spent every waking hour since Simon’s death almost four years earlier raising the money to pay off the enormous debt he’d managed to hide from his guild and his partners – and her. She’d hoped the sense of victory would buoy her spirits through tonight’s celebration at the guesthouse, which would mark the departure of Kevin, the Earl of Westmoreland’s retainer who had been convalescing in her home. He had become dear to all the household, his loss all the more difficult on the heels of another deeply felt absence among them. And now Lady Margery and her missing servant added to Kate’s worries.

She and the hounds were not the only ones who had searched for Carl in the night. Her servant Jennet had rallied the street children she called her eyes and ears, but she’d had no news for Kate when she woke her.

Damn the royal cousins. Kate laid all blame at their feet.

Wrinkling her nose at all the smoke, she tucked one end of her mantle over her shoulder and descended the frost-slicked stairs with care, then hurried along beneath the eaves of the house to the kitchen behind it, the refrozen snow crunching underfoot. As she pushed open the door she reveled in the warmth … until Petra, her seven-year-old niece, yanked a bowl out of the hand of Kate’s ward Marie and dashed the contents into the hearth fire as she shouted, “You slurp so loudly you make me sick to my stomach.”

Older than her attacker by a few years, but smaller, more delicate, Marie shrank back, white-faced, tears brimming. “Why are you so mean to me?”

This was not the Petra that Kate and all the household had come to love; yet, of late, this darker aspect of the child surfaced more and more often. Marie and her brother Phillip had taken to avoiding the girl as much as possible. It was particularly difficult for Marie, who had grown so fond of Petra that the two girls did everything together. No longer.

Petra turned to rush from the room.

“Not so fast.” Kate caught her up, pinning her arms and ignoring her kicks while quietly commanding Marie to leave, and to close the kitchen door behind her. “Wait for me in the hall.”

The girl obeyed without argument.

“I hate you,” Petra hissed as Kate maneuvered the child onto a chair and called to her wolfhounds Lille and Ghent. Already sitting up, alert, watchful, they trotted over and settled to either side of the struggling child.

“I do not believe that,” Kate said.

“I will hurt them,” Petra warned.

Resisting the urge to smile at the child’s threat that she might injure the giants who each weighed more than she would until fully grown, if ever, Kate motioned to Ghent to lay his head in the child’s lap. The struggling stopped. A sniff. Kate smoothed the child’s hair, so wild, just like her own. They were much alike, often taken for mother and daughter.

“What troubles you, my love?” Kate asked as she knelt between the two great hounds.

Petra sat on her hands and stared down at Ghent.

“Is it the dreams?” Kate asked.

Silence.

“Did you dream of Berend again?” A few days before Christmas the child had dreamed that Kate’s cook Berend had gone away, having said he was duty-bound to answer a summons, but refusing to tell them more, or whether he would return. Petra had been inconsolable, even after Marie had flopped down on the bed with the announcement that Berend was in the kitchen, going about his usual preparations for the day’s meals. When Kate had told him of Petra’s dream Berend had assured her that he was going nowhere. But he had not met her eyes. Less than a week later he was gone. Damn him. He knew how much her wards loved him. “Is it Berend?” she asked again. “Or is it the other nightmares?” A leper king haunted the child’s dreams, his skin torn and hanging from his body, his hair a mass of squirming lice.