The King's Daughter Read Online Free Page B

your grace.’
    Abel came out of the horse barn.
    ‘I’ve said I’m going for an early ride,’ I told him in Scots, with a glance over my shoulder at Anne retreating across the yard.
    Abel looked worried and jerked his head back at the barn. ‘I’ve told them I’m riding on an errand for you but not where or why.’ He continued in Scots to confuse any curious Warwickshire ears inside the barn.
    I nodded. I’d untangle our stories later. I stroked Clapper’s muzzle until Anne had disappeared again through the stable yard gate.
    ‘Go first to Windsor. If Prince Henry isn’t there, go on to Richmond then on to Oatlands and last London and Whitehall. Don’t rest till you find my brother and give him my letter.’
    He mounted. I looked up at him. ‘Let no one but my brother see that letter,’ I repeated. With one hand on Clapper’s neck, I walked beside them out of the stable yard.
    Clapper’s hoofs rang like gunshots in the cold morning air. I looked up at the house. No curious faces appeared at the windows. It made no difference now, in any case. The absence of man and horse could not be kept secret for long on this small estate.
    From the gate of the main courtyard, I watched Abel trot away up the long tree-lined avenue burdened with treason, my life tucked inside his jacket. Even on Clapper, he seemed a frail vessel to carry so much weight.
    I could not bear to go back into the dense vaulted shadows of Combe Manor, once an abbey, now turned private house. I felt that God had never quite loosed His chilly grip on the place, even though He had been turned out more than sixty years before. I limped around the brick-paved courtyard along the walls of the three wings of the house. Still not ready to fall back under God’s stern eye, I turned right into the gardens lying in the elbow of the river Smite, where I soaked myshoes leaving a dark ragged trail through the dew on the grass. I was not good at waiting.
    The Haringtons returned before sundown. They brought no news of disturbance abroad nor death in London. Lady Harington, short, wiry and as sharp-eyed as a sparrow hawk, at once spotted my wet shoes and sent me to change them. I waited for Lord Harington to ask me about Abel White and Clapper. But he said nothing about the absence of either horse or groom. We prayed as we always did before every meal. I would have begged to eat in my bed again but Lord Harington always fussed so much over my health that it seemed easier to brave the table than his concern.
    Supper passed as quietly and tediously as always. The Haringtons, never talkative, chewed and sipped quietly as if a demon might not, at this very moment, be crashing about doing damage I could not bear to imagine.
    I half-raised my spoon of onion and parsnip stew then set it back down on my plate. A pent-up force seemed to distend my chest. Any moment, it would burst upwards and escape like lightning flashing along my hair.
    ‘What news?’ I wanted to shout. ‘What is happening in the world outside Combe?’
    At Dunfermline and Linlithgow palaces, when I was merely the girl-child of a Scottish king who already had two surviving sons, I had stolen time for games in the stables with the grooms, including Abel, and with the waiting footmen, maids and messengers. I had known all the kitchen family and listened while they thought I played. I heard all their gossip, suitable for my ears, and otherwise. Now that I was at last old enough to understand what I heard, I had been elevated into an English princess, third in line to the joint crowns of England and Scotland. Who must be kept safely buried in this damp green place where everyone treated me with tedious and uninformative respect.
    I knocked over my watered ale.
    Lord Harington gazed at me in concern with his constantly anxious eyes. ‘Are you certain that your injuries yesterday weren’t more serious than you say, your grace?’
    ‘Perhaps a little more shaken,’ I muttered. Though I sometimes