The castle was not silent that day, even at so early an hour. Like mice in the walls, Margaret could already hear distant voices and footsteps and doors slamming. Her father had spent gold like a river over the previous months, employing a vast staff and even bringing dressmakers from Paris to do their best with his daughter’s skinny frame. Seamstresses had been working every night in the castle rooms, sewing and cutting cloth for her sister and three cousins, who had travelled from the south to accompany her at the ceremony. Over the previous days, Margaret had found the girls slightly irritating as they preened and giggled around her, but somehow she had gone from knowing the wedding was far off to the actual morning, without any sense of how the time had vanished. It was still hard to believe today was the day she would marry a king of England. What would he be like? The thought was so terrifying she could not give voice to it. Everyone said his father had been a brute, a savage who spoke French like a dithering geck. Would the son be the same? She tried to imagine an Englishman holding her in his powerful arms and her imagination failed. It was just too strange.
‘Good morning, my … husband,’ she said slowly.
Her English was good, so her old governess had said, but then the woman had been paid to teach her. Margaret blushed furiously at the thought of sounding like a fool in front of King Henry.
Standing in front of the glass, she frowned at her tangle of brown hair.
‘I do take thee to be my husband,’ she murmured.
These were the last moments she would have alone, she knew. As soon as the maids heard her moving, they would descend in a flock to primp and colour and dress her. She held her breath at the thought, listening with half an ear for the first footsteps outside.
When the knock came, Margaret jumped, gathering a sheet around her. She crossed quickly to the door.
‘Yes?’ she whispered. The sun was not yet up. Surely it could not be time already?
‘It’s Yolande,’ she heard. ‘I can’t sleep.’
Margaret cracked open the door and let her in, pushing it gently shut behind her.
‘I think I slept,’ Margaret whispered. ‘I remember a strange dream, so I must have dozed for a while.’
‘Are you excited?’
Yolande was staring at her with fascination and Margaret drew the sheet around her shoulders with some attempt at modesty.
‘I am terrified. What if he does not like me? What if I say the wrong words and everyone laughs? The king will be there, Yolande.’
‘Two kings!’ Yolande said. ‘And half the noblemen of France and England. It will be marvellous, Margaret. My Frederick will be there!’ She sighed deliberately, swirling her nightshift hem over the oak floorboards. ‘He will look very handsome, I know. I would have married him this year if not for this, but … Oh, Margaret, I did not mean anything by that! I am content to wait. At least Father has restored some of the wealth we lost. It would have been a pauper’s wedding last year. I just hope he has left enough to marry me to Frederick. I will be a countess, Margaret, but you will be a queen. Only of England, of course, but still a queen. Today!’ Yolande gasped as it sank in. ‘You will be a queen today, Margaret! Can you conceive?’
‘I believe I can bear one or two,’ Margaret said, wryly.
Yolande looked blank at her pun and Margaret laughed. Her expression changed on the instant to one of panic as she heard trotting footsteps in the corridor outside.
‘They’re coming, Yolande. Bloody hell, I’m not ready for them!’
‘Blerdy ’ell?’
‘It’s an English saying. John told it to me. Bloody hell. It’s like “sacré bleu!” he said, a curse.’
Yolande beamed at her sister.
‘Bloody hell, I like it!’
The door opened to admit an apparently endless stream of maids, bearing steaming buckets of water and armfuls of strange-looking implements to work on her hair and face. Margaret blushed again, resigned to hours of discomfort before she would be allowed into the public gaze.
‘Bloody hell!’ Yolande murmured again at her shoulder, awed as the room filled with bustling women.
6
With the sun setting, Derry let his head sag as the cart trundled along the road, cursing occasionally as the wheels dipped into holes and sent him lurching from one side to the other. He had been on the road for eighteen days, hitching rides whenever he could, with his nerves jangling each time he heard hooves. He hadn’t relaxed for a moment since his confrontation with the Duke of York and had certainly not taken the threat lightly. His own network of informers and spies around the fortress of Calais had brought him unpleasant news. The duke’s men were making no secret of the fact that they wanted a word with Derry Brewer. From a professional point of view, it was interesting to be on the other side of an effort to track him down, instead of being the one pulling the strings. That was little comfort as Derry scratched a dozen flea bites in the back of the creaking wagon.
The drover currently staring into the middle distance was not one of his men. Like hundreds of other travellers coming south from Normandy for a gawk at kings, Derry had paid a few coins for a spot on the cart and given up on the thought of riding hard and fast into Anjou. He’d slipped York’s men easily enough in the port, but then Calais was always full of bustling crowds. The tracks and lanes leading south into Anjou were a better place to pick up a lone traveller, without fuss or witnesses. At least the wedding would be over before he saw another sunset. Derry hadn’t dared use an inn for as long as he’d been on the road. It was too easy to imagine a quick sweep picking him up while he snored unaware. Instead, he’d slept in ditches and stables for two weeks — and smelled like it. He hadn’t meant to cut it quite so close, but his means of travel were all slow, hardly faster than walking. He’d kept count of the mornings and he knew the marriage was taking place the next day. It was almost an agony to know he was almost there. He could sense York’s nets closing around him with every mile.
Derry rubbed a grimy hand over his face, reminding himself that he looked more like a peasant than most of the real ones. A battered straw hat drooped over his eyes and his clothes had never been washed since the day they’d come off the loom. It was a disguise he’d used before and he relied on the stink and filth to keep him safe.
As he trundled south, he’d seen riders coming past in the duke’s livery half a dozen times. Derry had been careful to stick his head out and watch them, just as any farmer would do. The cold-eyed men had stared at everyone they passed, searching for a glimpse of the king’s spymaster.
He’d decided he’d use his razor on them if he was spotted. It was a finger-width line of the finest steel, with a tortoiseshell handle. If they found him, he’d vowed to make them kill him by the road rather than suffer the duke’s torturers or, worse, the man’s smug pleasure in landing such a fish. Yet the duke’s men hadn’t stopped at the sight of one more grubby peasant staring from the back of an ox-cart.
It could have been humiliating to be forced to go south in such a way, but in fact Derry enjoyed the game. He thought it was that part of him that had drawn old Bertle’s attention, when Derry was just another informer and ex-soldier, with his knees showing through torn trousers. Derry had been running a little fight ring in the London rookeries, with his hand in the pockets of all the men involved. It had earned him a fair bit, as he’d combined setting the odds with rigging the matches, giving strict orders to whichever fighter would win or lose.