I shifted uncomfortably. Her words sounded as though they came from some flowery poem of courtly love. ‘I am not sure I do, mistress,’ I answered. ‘People fall in and out of love, or do not speak until it is too late. As I did once, to my sorrow.’

She looked at me, then shook her head. ‘You do not understand. Even when Bernard married another, I knew that was not the end. And then his wife died, and he proposed to me. So you see, it is as it was meant.’ She stared at me with a sudden fierceness that was unnerving. ‘I would do anything for him. Anything.’

‘I am sorry for your trouble,’ I said quietly.

She stood abruptly. ‘We should be going on.’ She looked over to where Tamasin was showing a bored-looking Barak some richly dyed cloth. ‘Tamasin,’ she called. ‘We should be on our way.’

Tamasin packed up the cloth, brushed some fallen leaves from her dress and walked across to us, Barak following. Mistress Marlin curtsied to me. ‘Good morning, sir.’ The women turned and walked out of the churchyard, the servant following. Barak shook his head.

‘By Jesu, Tammy can be a tease. She made me look at those damned cloths, told me all about what they were. She knew it bored me, but I was a captive audience.’

‘She’ll domesticate you if you’re not careful.’

‘Never,’ Barak said; emphatically, but with a smile. ‘Sorry to leave you with Mistress Marlin.’

‘Oh, it seems we are becoming friends.’

‘Rather you than me.’

‘She told me more about her fiancé. And I learned more about our good Sir William.’ I told him what she had said about Maleverer and about Bernard Locke. ‘Mistress Marlin seems to have given her whole life over to that man. Her heart and her soul.’

‘Is that not a creditable thing in a woman?’

‘What if something should happen to him? She would be quite undone.’

‘Maybe you could step into his shoes,’ Barak said with a grin.

I laughed. ‘I do not think anyone could do that. Besides, Mistress Marlin’s intensity would be hard to live with.’ I looked down the road the women had followed. ‘For her sake I hope they find nothing against Master Locke.’

Chapter Thirty

THAT AFTERNOON we returned to the castle to deal with the last of the petitions. Aske’s bones had gone from the grass below the keep; there was nothing to show they had hung there save a thin red streak at the top of the tower. It looked like blood. Then I realized the chains must have rusted through.

I thought Giles uncharacteristically sharp with the petitioners, and I intervened a couple of times when he became impatient with some stumbling complainant. We finished around five, and Master Waters collected up his papers and bowed to us. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I bid you well on your journey to Hull.’

‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘Though Heaven alone knows when we get there.’

‘Yes, the King appears set for a long stay.’

Waters left the room, and I turned to Master Wrenne. He looked pale and tired, and when he stood up his big body stooped. He had brought his walking stick today and now he leaned on it heavily, in a way that reminded me for a moment, oddly, of the King.

‘Are you in pain, Giles?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘Ay. Would tha walk home with me, give me your arm?’

‘Of course,’ I said, touched by the way he had slipped into the old Yorkshire usage. I helped him down the stairs and out to the street, Barak following on. Giles shivered in the cold wind.

‘How long is the King going to let James keep him waiting?’ he said anxiously. ‘He’s not coming!’

‘We do not know what messages may be passing between here and the Scotch court.’

‘He’s not coming!’ Wrenne repeated forcefully. ‘Jesu, would you come into a foreign land and place yourself at the mercy of someone like Henry?’

Barak looked around him anxiously; fortunately no one was within hearing distance. ‘Keep your voice down, Giles,’ I urged him.

He spoke in lower tones. ‘I speak the truth, as tha know’st. Oh, God,’ he said with uncharacteristic vehemence. ‘I want to make it to London.’

We left him with Madge and returned to King’s Manor. I prayed for him to be given enough strength to make his last journey of reconciliation. We had arranged to meet Tamasin for dinner. There was a casual air in the refectory as we entered, people talking and joking and eating sloppily as they had before the King came; they were used to his presence now. Tamasin was sitting at the table we had made our own, at the back with a good view of the door. She wore a fetching blue dress, her bright gold hair unbound below a small coif and tumbling to her shoulders.

‘Have you had a busy afternoon, mistress?’ Barak asked her fondly.

‘Quiet enough, the King and Queen have been away hunting for the day again. Good evening, sir,’ she said to me, smiling.

‘Good evening, Tamasin.’ I sat next to Barak, feeling like a gooseberry. ‘I will spend the evening in the lodging house tonight, I think,’ I said. ‘I have some papers to go over.’ I did not, but it would allow them some time together. Tamasin, realizing my purpose, gave me a grateful smile.

‘I had an interesting talk with Mistress Marlin today,’ I told her. ‘She told me more about her fiancé.’

‘Poor Mistress Marlin. She tells everyone who will listen. She should take care her accusations do not get back to Sir William.’

‘I doubt she cares. She seems to think of nothing but Master Locke’s imprisonment.’

‘Is that not understandable?’ Tamasin asked. ‘With the man she has loved all her life in the Tower? Some of the maids make cruel remarks, and cruel remarks can hurt-’

‘I know that well.’

‘Yet she has never burst out in anger, always held herself under control. I could have wept for her sometimes.’

‘She told me she thinks it is destiny that she and Master Locke should be married. I am not sure that such a degree of devotion is a healthy state of mind.’

Tamasin smiled, a smile that had something of steel in it. ‘I admire her determination.’

There was an uncomfortable silence for a few moments. Then Barak leaned forward. ‘There is something we should tell you, Tammy. Master Shardlake was attacked again last night.’

‘What?’ She looked up at me and now I saw the strain in her face and the shadows under her eyes. Barak told her about the bear. When he had finished she took a long shuddering breath.

‘So, but for the soldiers coming, you might have been killed?’

‘Ay,’ Barak answered on my behalf. ‘If they had not been near, guarding the prisoner.’

‘The man Broderick?’ she asked.

I looked at her sharply. ‘How do you know about Broderick? His presence here has been kept quiet.’ I turned to Barak. ‘Did you tell her? The less she knows, the safer she is.’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘Yes. But quite a few know.’

‘We must be careful about what we say.’

Tamasin gave me look of unexpected hardness. ‘I am always careful, sir. Life has taught me that.’

‘Tammy says Lady Rochford is watching her carefully,’ Barak said.

‘That she is.’ As Tamasin helped herself to pottage from the common bowl, I saw her hands were shaking, and realized again the strain she had been under since that encounter with Culpeper. She was good at hiding it but tonight it showed.

A DAY PASSED, then another and another, and still there was no word of the Scotch King. The guards still stood before the pavilions and the tents, the surfaces of which were cleaned with fine brushes every day. One day, as Barak and I were walking in the courtyard, I saw Sir Richard Rich standing in the doorway of one of the pavilions. He was studying me coldly. We turned away.

‘Any developments on the Bealknap case?’ said Barak.

‘No. I wrote to London, telling the council we should proceed, that I had hopes of the matter now. I doubt it will have got there; Rich will have ordered letters from me be intercepted before they leave with the postboy.’