Ravenspur: Rise of the Tudors Read Free Page B

the castle and could be sealed against an army. Pembroke had been built for defence, though it had one weakness to those who knew it, one secret, kept well hidden.
    Henry skidded as he reached the lower feast hall. He saw the earl’s constable there, a florid man in earnest conversation with one of the castle factors, both poring over a scroll as if it held the meaning of life and not just some record of slates broken or hundredweights of oak and beech. He slowed to a stiff-legged walk as he crossed the end of the hall furthest from them. Henry could sense the men looking up, or perhaps he imagined it, as they did not call out. Without even a glance back, he reached the door and opened it into the heat of the kitchens beyond.
    Pembroke had two dining halls, with the kitchens running beneath the grander of the two. Staff and unimportant guests ate in the first. Henry had spent many evenings chewing bread and meat in near darkness there, begrudged even the cost of a tallow candle. He’d sat alone, while reflected light and laughter spilled from the windows above, the greater hall where the earl entertained his favoured guests. Henry would have risked a beating even to enter that place, butthat night he was concerned with the kitchens themselves – and what they concealed.
    The maids and serving staff barely looked up as he entered, assuming the skinny boy was bringing back a bowl, though he usually ate off a trencher and took the slab of hard bread away with him to gnaw or to feed to the jackdaws on the towers. Even so, Henry was familiar to them and he could not see the cook, Mary Corrigan, who would have shooed him away with her big red hands and a flapping apron. In the steam from bubbling pots, the air was thick and there was bustle on all sides as the staff dug into piled ingredients and measured them out. The sight made him lick his lips and he realized he had not eaten. Should he wheedle a little food from the cooks? His gaze flickered over a pile of peeled apples, already turning a honey brown. Slabs of cheese bobbed next to them, in a pot of watery whey. How long would it be before he ate again?
    As he stood there, with the clatter and smells and sheer hard work of the kitchen going on all around him, he could sense the door on the far side. Set into the stone wall, it was narrower than a man’s chest, so that a soldier would have to turn to pass through. An oak plank blocked the doorway, resting on thick iron braces in the mortar. Henry could feel it there as he looked anywhere else but directly at it. He knew every stone of Pembroke, in winter and summer. There was not a storeroom or an attic or a path he had not walked, though none of them had gripped his attention as had that single door. He knew what lay beyond it. He could feel the dampness and the cold already, though his skin was sheened in sweat.
    He walked across the kitchen and the staff parted before him like dancers, carrying pots and trays. They would feed six hundred men and some eighty women that evening, fromthe high table in the great hall and those closest to the young earl right down to the falconers and the priests and, in a later sitting, the guards and the boys who mucked out the stables. Food was a vital part of the compact between a lord and his people, a duty and a burden, half symbol, half payment.
    Henry reached the door and lifted the bar with a heave, staggering under its weight as it came free. He spent precious moments steadying the plank against the wall. Breathing hard, he took the key from where it hung, and as he inserted it, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Mary Corrigan peering at him. She was no taller than he was himself, but seemed three times his weight in meat and bone.
    ‘And what are you after?’ she said, wiping her hands on a thick cloth. Henry could feel himself flushing, though he did not stop working the key until the ancient lock clicked open.
    ‘I’m going down to the river, Mary. To catch an