The Traitor's Blade by Kevin Sands (fiction books to read .TXT) 📕

“Our armies will crush them.”

“They’re not fighting our armies,” Lord Ashcombe pointed out. “They’re attacking us from inside.”

Speaking of which… “My lord?” I said.

Lord Ashcombe turned to me.

“Do you remember when we arrived at the palace yesterday?” I said. “A man shouted at you?”

“Niall Ramsay, Earl of Fife. What of him?”

“The man who was with him. The one wearing gold spectacles. Do you know who he is?”

“Domhnall Ardrey. He’s the Baron of Oxton. Why?”

“He was in the Banqueting House yesterday.”

Lord Ashcombe’s eye bored into me. “Doing what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He came in with a letter of his own, already opened. It looked like he was planning to meet someone. But he got spooked and left.”

“What happened to the letter?” Walsingham asked.

“He burned it.”

Lord Ashcombe turned to His Majesty. “Arrest him.”

“For what?” the spymaster asked quietly.

“Being Scottish.”

The king laughed.

“It would be a mistake, sire,” Walsingham said.

“I know, I know,” Charles said. “More fuel to the fire.”

“Not my point. If Ardrey is a Covenanter, as long as he doesn’t know we’ve tumbled him, we have an advantage.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I’ll put a man on him. Follow—ah.”

A knock on the door signaled the return of one of the servants. He’d found a rat somewhere. He carried the animal in a cage, which he placed on the table at Walsingham’s instruction. After he left, the spymaster spooned a pile of powdered sugar between the bars. The rat sniffed at it and began to eat.

“It’s not dying,” the king said.

“Depending on the dose,” Walsingham said, “it may take some time for the poison to work.”

“Am I supposed to sit here and wait?”

“What do you think we should do next?”

It took me a moment to realize Walsingham was asking me. I was startled. “You want me to decide?”

“His Majesty will decide. I asked for a course of action.”

I flushed. “Of course. Sorry.” Lord Ashcombe was already growing impatient; I hurried along. “I think we have a big problem. The first letter I got told us the Covenanters are after the king. And the two murdered servants make it clear: They’ve already infiltrated the palace.”

“Have you discovered why the girls were killed?” the king asked curiously.

“Not for sure. But… well, this is something Sally pointed out when we went to Paris. Nobody ever pays attention to servants. They come and go as if they’re invisible, because—er… forgive me, sire—no one thinks they’re important enough to matter.

“But they see and hear everything. That’s what I think: The murdered girls saw something they shouldn’t have. Someone trying to poison your food at Whitehall, maybe. The killer got rid of the girls, but now the palace is on alert. So they found another way to get to you. There’s a party scheduled for tomorrow at Berkshire House, so they moved the plot to kill you across the park.

“Here’s the problem,” I continued. “Someone had to poison all this sugar. How could they do this? There are guards all over the place, and servants are almost always in the kitchen. It should have been hard to get this poison in. But it wasn’t. That can mean only one thing: The Covenanters have already infiltrated Berkshire House, too.”

Charles frowned. “How is that possible?”

It looked as if he was still asking me. “Um… again, with the greatest respect, sire, that’s the easy part. The plague must have killed many of the old servants. The steward would be desperate to hire new ones. If the Covenanters brought forged references—that’s how the Raven infiltrated Maison Chastellain—they’d have been hired, no question. With the chaos around the sickness, the steward wouldn’t have bothered to check if those references were good.”

Charles looked at Walsingham.

“The analysis is sound,” the spymaster said.

“But that means nowhere is safe,” the king protested.

“Yes,” Lord Ashcombe said. “So we move again, out of London.”

Charles’s face darkened. “Absolutely not.”

“Sire—”

“This has been a terrible year. Hardest of all for this city. I cannot abandon my people. Some have already begun to blame me for bringing the plague. They say I’ve fallen from God’s favor. If I flee London so soon after I returned, their faith will collapse.”

Lord Ashcombe shrugged. “Better than a dagger in the back.”

“No. It is not.” The king stood, towering over us all. “My crown lies as precarious as ever. If it falls… I promise you, Richard, I will die before I leave England. I will never be exiled again.”

And Lord Ashcombe, who had stayed with his king for those miserable years, couldn’t help but understand. Death might be acceptable. Humiliation? Never.

“In that case,” he said, “we must still remove you from the palace.”

“And go where?” Walsingham said. “If Berkshire House is full of enemies, we must assume everywhere in London will be.”

“Not everywhere. There’s Hampton Court.”

The king made a face. “I loathe Hampton.”

“I know. And so does everyone else.”

It was, in fact, common knowledge that the king hated the place, and with good reason. Hampton Court was where Oliver Cromwell had lived while Charles was doomed to exile.

“Hampton,” Lord Ashcombe said, “is where no one expects you to go. So it’s less likely the Covenanters will have bothered to infiltrate it.”

“It’s still outside the city,” Charles noted.

“Fourteen miles. Close enough. We’ll say you wanted to go hunting. No one will fault you for that.”

The king looked to Walsingham. Slowly, the spymaster nodded. “I agree.”

“I swore I’d never go there.” Then the king smirked, half to himself. “Odd’s fish. I’ve broken so many oaths; what’s one more? We leave tonight, then?”

“Yes,” Lord Ashcombe said.

“No.” The spymaster shook his head. “If we leave tonight, it will tip off our conspirators. Leave tomorrow night, heading for the party as expected. Reroute to Hampton Court instead.”

Lord Ashcombe agreed that would work. The king sighed. He reached for his glass, then stopped. “Will somebody remove this blasted rat?”

Walsingham carried the cage himself. Outside the king’s parlor, he motioned for me to follow him—then turned sharply and walked over to where Tom and Sally waited nervously.

He looked Sally up and down. “Your mind is