A Twisted Vengeance
- Автор: Робб Кэндис
- Серия: A Kate Clifford Mystery #2
- Год: 2017
- Язык: английский
- Год: Pegasus Books
- ISBN: 9781681774756
- Жанр: Исторические детективы
Электронная книга - «A Twisted Vengeance». Краткое содержание книги:
As the fourteenth century comes to a close, York seethes on the brink of civil war – and young widow Kate Clifford, struggling to keep her businesses afloat, realizes that her mother is harboring a dangerous secret…
1399. York is preparing for civil war, teeming with knights and their armed retainers summoned for the city’s defense. Henry of Lancaster is rumored to have landed on the northeast coast of England, not so far from York, intent on reclaiming his inheritance – an inheritance which his cousin, King Richard, has declared forfeit.
With the city unsettled and rife with rumors, Eleanor Clifford’s abrupt return to York upon the mysterious death of her husband in Strasbourg is met with suspicion in the city. Her daughter Kate is determined to keep her distance, but it will not be easy – Eleanor has settled next door with the intention of establishing a house of beguines, or poor sisters. When one of the beguines is set upon in the night by an intruder, Kate knows that for the sake of her own reputation and the safety of her young wards she must investigate.
From the first, Eleanor is clearly frightened yet maintains a stubborn silence. The brutal murder of one of Eleanor’s servants leads Kate to suspect that her mother’s troubles have followed her from Strasbourg. Is she secretly involved in the political upheaval? When one of her wards is frightened by a too-curious stranger, Kate is desperate to draw her mother out of her silence before tragedy strikes her own household.
“Yours is a singularly ungodly life, Katherine,” she concluded.
A strange lecture from the mother who had raised Kate to view with skepticism all those who wore their spiritual beliefs like a badge and who had never encouraged such activities in their home. Growing up in the border country of Northumberland, Kate had been taught to rely on her kin, her wits, and her knowledge of the countryside rather than prayers. “Prayers are for spineless cowards and addle-pated sophists,” Eleanor had told her children time and again. Their remote parish shared a priest with several other clusters of farms and manors so that they heard mass infrequently, and, when they did, the cleric’s rambling sermons occasioned much eye-rolling and giggling among the children, while the adults sat with heads bowed in slumber.
So Kate might be forgiven for questioning the sincerity of her mother’s newfound piety. She was not the only person perplexed by Eleanor’s return to York in the company of three beguines, or poor sisters, with whom she intended to found a Martha House. It had caused a stir in her cousin William Frost’s household and more widely among Kate’s fellow merchants and guild members. All wanted to know what catastrophe had left Eleanor widowed, pious, and fleeing from Strasbourg.
“Well? What of that?” Eleanor loudly demanded.
Glancing up at her mother’s flushed face enclosed in the incongruous wimple, Kate could do nothing but shrug, having stopped listening early in her mother’s tirade. After all, she’d heard it all before.
Growling, Eleanor took Kate by the shoulders and shook her. A mistake.
Kate’s father had trained her to defend herself, and she had spent her years since his death perfecting her martial skills. In one sweeping motion she caught her mother’s hands and used them to push her so that she lost her balance and stumbled backward against a – fortunately – heavy table.
Sisters Clara, Brigida, and Dina rushed to Eleanor’s aid, helping her to a chair.
Knowing there was nothing she could say or do to make peace in the moment, Kate turned to leave.
But Eleanor was not finished. “What will the children you claim to hold so dear think when they learn their guardian is a bawd? Have you thought of that?”
Kate had established her guesthouse on Petergate before she added two wards and a niece to her household. The fees wealthy merchants and the occasional noble or cleric paid for a discreet night with their mistresses had been necessary to pay off her late husband Simon Neville’s debts and provide for the masses he had requested for his soul. By the time Simon’s children by a prostitute in Calais had been brought to Kate upon their mother’s death, the household servants were already in the habit of discretion. Indeed, her clients paid for secrecy. However, worldly-wise Marie and Phillip had ferreted out the nature of the guesthouse, their own mother having been the mistress of many married men. The first thing Phillip, a boy of eleven, had said in Kate’s presence was a matter-of-fact explanation of what her brother-in-law Lionel had intended in Calais: He meant to comfort Maman and fill her with another baby she could not feed. Too late to shelter them. Pray God her mother never discovered how much they knew. But how had Eleanor learned of it?
“And who is to tell them? You, Mother? Is that what your sudden obeisance to the Church has taught you – to slander your daughter? To undo all my work in healing three children who have already lost so much?” God in heaven, Kate had said it aloud. She had vowed to remain silent, to refuse her mother’s bait.
“Your life is a shambles, Katherine.” With every word, Eleanor sought to undermine all that Kate had accomplished. Why? Why would a mother abuse her daughter in such wise?
“I am leaving you now,” Kate said, stepping through the door and out into the night.
At least she did not include me in the attack, her dead twin whispered in her mind.
Yes, at least that, Geoff.
Eleanor had brought Kate to York shortly after Geoff’s death in the hope that distance would sever the powerful link between the twins that remained strong even in death. She did not understand that, as twins, Kate and Geoff shared souls, life force. There could be no sundering. Her twin’s spirit lived within Kate, and she feared the bond between mother and child, though not nearly so strong as that between twins, might allow Eleanor to sense his presence. Apparently not. Or at least, not this night. A mercy.
Her mother’s tumble did not prevent her from pursuit. “You are a young widow whose husband left you mired in debt and burdened with his two bastards, and yet you have turned away all the prominent men who have asked for your hand,” Eleanor proclaimed from the doorway.
Kate knew she should keep walking. In such a mood, her mother could hear nothing. But the word bastards. If Marie and Phillip learned she spoke of them that way … “I have asked you not to call them that, Mother,” Kate threw back over her shoulder.
“It is only the truth.”
Kate paused, turned to shake her head at the gray-robed, white-wimpled taunter in the doorway. “You do not say that of your grandchild Petra, though it is equally true of her.”
Eleanor took a step across the threshold. “If you care for the three of them as you claim, you have a duty to remarry. Yet look at you, bone buttons instead of silver, your hair untidy, skimping on the cloth in your skirts – you are revealing your penurious situation, frightening off future suitors.”
“A duty to remarry?” Kate stepped closer so that all the neighborhood might not hear. “Were you not listening when I explained Simon’s will? I lose the business if I remarry.”
“You will not need it.”
“No? After all my unpleasant discoveries about Simon, I trust no man.”
“You have a duty to those children–”
“As did you to me. Yet you betrothed me to Simon Neville without a care as to his true circumstances. Or did you know of his profligate ways? Perhaps you knew he had a mistress with children in Calais. But you were so eager to be rid of me that you handed me over to the first man who showed an interest.”
“The marriage was to protect you.”
“Protect me? I was barely fifteen, Mother. My parents should have protected me. I was grieving for my twin brother. And my brother Roland. Did you ever stop to think of my feelings?”
“How can you say such things to me?” Eleanor raised a hand to slap Kate.
Kate blocked her, turned, and hurried away through the hedgerow gate, cursing herself for again being caught up in the fray.
Of course Kate was aware of her delicate situation. It kept her awake at night, it curdled her food. When Simon had died over two years earlier she discovered that he had left enormous debts and a will that left her in control of his business only until such time as she remarried, when it would go to his brother, Lionel. And then, almost a year to the day of Simon’s death, Lionel appeared on her doorstep with the unpleasant surprise of the recently orphaned Marie and Phillip. Swallowing her pride and hurt, Kate had taken them in, determined to love and care for them as her own.
For more than a year she had worked hard to care for her wards while using all her wits to accrue wealth at a speed sufficient to appease her creditors with frequent payments, while quietly setting enough aside that she would someday have the means to choose whether or not to marry, according to her own desire. Once she had set aside sufficient funds in her own name, she would sell off the assets of Simon’s business, pay the remainder of the debts, and hand Lionel his brother’s business, with pleasure.