A Spy for the Redeemer Read Free Page A

died in childbirth – a stillbirth – the previous autumn. But his wealth and good reputation made him the hope of all parents of marriageable young women. Who would be his next wife was a topic of much excited conjecture in the city. Roger had no need to woo a married woman.
    Lucie looked down at the letters in her hands. Where to begin? She untied the string that held them together. Owen had marked on each the place and date of writing so she might read them in order, and so follow his journey. In the first letter he mentioned Sir Robert’s cough, his dizziness. The river crossings had been difficult in the early spring, from the border country to Carreg Cennen. There was much in the letter about Owen’s mixed feelings upon returning to his own country, but Lucie skimmed to find news of her father. Owen wrote of constant bickering between Brother Michaelo and Sir Robert, good-humoured on the monk’s part. A later letter mentioned Brother Michaelo’s tender nursing of her father. The monk perplexed Lucie – in the time she had known him he had metamorphosed from a self-serving sybarite to a trusted servant of the Archbishop of York. Practical changes, she had thought, still self-serving. But this tenderness towards her father – this was change of a deeper sort. God had watched over Sir Robert, to grant him such a companion on his final earthly journey. In the last letter, Lucie at last found the news that calmed her. Not only had her father reached St David’s, but he had been granted a vision at St Non’s Well, a vision that had given him the absolution he had sought over many pilgrimages. Sir Robert had died in peace, a happy man. Thanks be to God.
    For a long while Lucie sat, head bowed, the pile of letters in her lap, remembering her father. Melisende, her ageing cat, curled up at her feet. Faintly Lucie heard her children’s voices.
    The church bells chiming Nones woke Lucie from her reverie. She must return to the shop. Gathering up the letters, she took them to the workroom, tucked them on a shelf that had once held wooden dishes and spoons when Lucie and Nicholas, and later Owen, had lived in this house behind the shop. It was Sir Robert who had given them the fine house across the garden. He had tried hard to make up for his earlier neglect. Lucie hoped her father had known, in the end, how much she had loved him.
    Jasper raised his head as Lucie entered the shop. ‘Does the captain say when he might return?’
    ‘In his last letter he said he hoped to be home within the month. That was over a month ago.’ She nodded towards the package he was wrapping. ‘Is that for Mistress Skipwith?’
    ‘Do you want to check it?’
    ‘I should.’
    Jasper unwrapped it. Lucie poked about with a mixing stick, found nothing amiss and handed it back to Jasper.
    ‘By the time she has cooked this in lard it will be useless anyway,’ Jasper said glumly as he refolded the parchment and placed it on the counter.
    ‘She believes that it helps her sleep. A little on the temples.’
    Jasper hung his head.
    Lucie hated seeing him like this. ‘I shall close the shop while I am at Freythorpe Hadden. I must tell Phillippa of her brother’s death.’
    ‘I could go to Freythorpe.’
    ‘You will stay here. It needs a woman’s delicacy. And I need you to see to the stores, and the garden.’
    ‘But the roads –’
    ‘Take the remedy to Mistress Skipwith!’
    Jasper grabbed the package.
    ‘And hurry back. We have much to do.’
    As Lucie walked out on to Davygate the next morning, a hooded figure stepped out of the shadow cast by the jettied upper storey.
    ‘Have you found the counterpoison for my jaundice?’ Alice Baker asked.
    Lucie felt her blood rise to her face, her heart pound. It was not her nature to enjoy confrontations. ‘I told you what I thought caused it and what you must do to undo it.’ She repeated the advice, hoping this time Alice would hear it. ‘An infusion of vervain and dandelion root. Nothing