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.
And then, in late winter last, a tragedy of her mother’s making brought Petra, the daughter of Kate’s eldest brother, into the household. The child had been orphaned by Eleanor’s careless rekindling of an old feud that had earlier cost the lives of two of her sons. That winter her last son died as well as three others, strangers, and, if it had not been for Petra’s help, Kate’s ward Phillip would have been murdered as well.
Her niece was a dear child for whom the city was even more alien than it had been for Kate six years earlier. But however much Kate welcomed her, Petra’s arrival upset the fragile balance of the household; now Marie and Phillip needed to be reassured that with her niece’s arrival, a blood relative, they were no less cherished than before. Indeed, Marie’s rivalry with Petra had hastened her brother’s decision to lodge in the home of Hugh Grantham, a master mason at the minster stoneyard under whom he was apprenticed. Though Phillip was realizing his dream with the apprenticeship, Kate worried that he had felt pushed out betimes.
On the heels of the tragedy, Eleanor Clifford herself arrived unexpectedly in York, announcing that she meant to establish a Martha House in the city with three beguines who accompanied her from Strasbourg. Newly widowed, for a second time, Eleanor gave no explanation for her hasty departure from Strasbourg on the death of Ulrich Smit. To say that Kate did not welcome Eleanor’s return was an understatement.
And now her mother had moved into a house just across the hedgerow.
As Kate shut the gate behind her, her kitchen door opened and her Irish wolfhounds rushed out to greet her. Lille butted Kate’s hand, wanting her ears rubbed. Ghent leaned his warm bulk against Kate, lifting his head so she might scratch his throat. Here she was welcome, loved, treasured.
“Did they enjoy the tarts?” Her cook, Berend, had followed the hounds from the kitchen, his powerful, battle-scarred bulk a reassuring presence.
Kate gave each hound one more round before she straightened. “The sisters blessed you for them, but Mother took the offering as an opportunity to lecture me on my lack of piety.”
Berend chuckled. “A riddle. How is a fruit tart like a penance? I should hope it would be received as a blessing.”
“You are a blessing, Berend. And no doubt Mother is now happily partaking of one of your berry tarts with the beguines. Who can resist them?”
“Perhaps. But I doubt she is any merrier than you are,” he said.
“She is troubled, I know. And that is the cause of this vexing behavior. But why she will not confide in me – why she instead attacks me, despite choosing to live so close …”
“God tests you.”
Kate heard the smile in Berend’s voice. He was her cook, and so much more. Confidant and confessor, Berend was the person she most trusted. He was bemused by the contradiction in her sense of responsibility for her mother’s welfare despite their contentious relationship.
“I tell myself she chose the only house that was offered to her. It is as simple as that,” Kate said.
The tenant of the house, Agnes Dell, a recent widow, had offered to transfer her lease to Eleanor if she would accept her as a sister, or beguine. It was a house of modest size, smaller than Kate’s. With Eleanor’s maidservant and Agnes’s maidservant Nan, who now assisted the four sisters, it was crowded, though not intolerably so. Many large families lived in less space. It had not been an unreasonable choice.
“She will come round,” said Berend.
“By then she may have difficulty picking over the rubble of my future.” Kate told him about her mother’s threat to inform the children she ran a discreet brothel.
“She is too late to shock Phillip and Marie. They already know the nature of your guests.”
“But Petra.”
“Your niece is more worldly-wise than her grandmother. She would not flinch.”
Berend was right; her mother’s words held no danger unless she took them to heart. “I should go in. See how Petra is feeling.”
“I’ve not noticed her hurrying past to the privy this evening as she did last night.”
“So her stomach is on the mend. That is a blessing. Sleep well.”
Kate called to the hounds to follow her into the hall for the night.
She woke to the deep-throated barks of her wolfhounds. Kate sat up, listening for running footsteps, her father or one of her brothers calling the warning – Attack! The Scots!
But it was her manservant Matt she heard addressing the hounds down below in the hall, his voice rising in questions. She was in York. She was not on the borders, she was in the city of York, her cage, her home. Her brothers and her father, all dead. Her mother – this was not the time to think of her.
The hounds continued barking. They would not be silenced. Did Matt recognize the tone, that these were not about a passing dog or a demand to be let out, but warnings? Danger.
That was real. The danger. It might be York, not the borders, but it was still a place of danger. Especially now.
Kate threw off the light covers, grateful it was summer and her feet would not meet an icy floor.
“Dame Katherine?” her niece, Petra, called from outside Kate’s door. She and Marie slept in opposite ends of the solar to keep the peace, with Kate’s chamber in between. The girls were as different as night and day, but Kate hoped that, in time, they might grow close.
“Come in, come in. I’ve heard them. I’m dressing.” Kate was fumbling with the bone buttons on her gown.
The girl, a seven-year-old version of her aunt, all wiry dark hair and tall for her age, began to enter but paused, tilting her head to listen as the door opened down below and the hounds’ warning barks subtly changed. “Jennet,” Petra whispered. Kate’s maidservant and, like Berend, fiercely loyal and ever ready to defend the household. “They think she’s come to let them out to search.”
“Stay up here, in the solar, you and Marie, until I return.” Kate finished her preparations by concealing her knife beneath her belt, then she kissed Petra’s forehead and hurried down to the hall.
Her mother was not the only threat to the peace of York. Henry of Lancaster’s return from exile was why Matt slept down below now, not out in the smaller house across the yard, on the street – to assist Kate in protecting her niece and ward. Duke Henry was believed to have landed just northeast of them, on the coast of the North Sea. A royal messenger had arrived in the city several days ago with orders from Edmund, Duke of York, to hold the city against Duke Henry. The sixty knights and esquires and hundred archers who had been readying for a march to Ware were now to defend the city. The city sheriffs were paying out money for carpenters, plasterers, and masons to repair the defenses. That Henry had chosen to return almost as soon as King Richard himself landed in Ireland in the company of most of the military might of the realm meant to Kate that Duke Henry was here to wrest the crown from his cousin, the anointed but not-so-beloved king of England. Blood would be shed before their feud was resolved, and she doubted that both would survive.
No one in York slept easy at present. In times of war, civic law and order suffered. She had learned that all too well in her childhood on the border with Scotland. And York, the great city of the north, a wealthy city of merchants, seat of the second most powerful archbishop in the land, one who might be persuaded to support the Lancastrian army – Duke Henry might find it an irresistible first stage in his coup.
Armed men had been passing through the four gates of the city for a week or more. Strangers. Each of them lusting for a fight. Had one of them found a combatant in the night? Is that what had set Lille and Ghent to this insistent barking? Or did the hounds sense an intruder on the property? Had a siege begun? Or was it merely her mother, marching through the hedgerow to resume her tirade? For once, that was Kate’s hope. But the hounds knew Dame Eleanor; they would not be so alarmed were it her.