Free Great Maria by Cecelia Holland Page A

kitchen, where the cook was standing bolt upright before the gap in the wall, like a sentry.
    Richard went on before her into the pantry. She stopped to send the cook outside again. When she reached her husband, he was kneeling by the chest, swearing in a soft monotone in the darkness. His hands ran over the leather straps and the lid.
    “Give me a fire-box.”
    She handed him her tinderbox. He got the charred linen burning and used its feeble light to go quickly over the locks on the chains that held the chest to the wall. The light flickered out. He set the tinderbox impatiently aside, tried to force the lid and could not, pulled and shoved at the chest without moving it at all, and sat back on his heels.
    “Devil damn me,” he murmured. In the dark she could not see his face.
    “Whose is it?” Maria asked.
    “Mine, now.”
    He took hold of the chest and strained to move it. “That knight who was with me, just now—he was master here when I came, but he had only been here a few months, and this has sat for years, this box, look at it.” He put his hands lovingly on the chest. “He’ll cry all night when he hears of this, will Walter Bris.”
    Maria put her lips together to keep from saying anything about Walter Bris. Richard stood up straight to draw his sword. The light from the kitchen leaped along the blade. With its edge he burst open the lid. The hinges shrieked. Maria craned her neck to see.
    “Well,” Richard said. The chest was packed with dark cloth sacks. He lifted one, and the rotten fabric gave and chips of dull metal fell out, flooding over the edge of the chest into the dirt. Maria grabbed one and spat on it and rubbed it to a patchy shine on her skirt.
    “Silver.”
    Richard got up. “Come on.” He pushed her toward the door and they went out into the kitchen. The cook hung in the doorway. Richard pointed to him.
    “Go get Ponce Rachet down here. He’s in the hall.”
    The cook strode eagerly away. The three kitchen knaves crowded into the doorway; when the cook went up the steps they pressed him with questions. Richard held out his hand toward Maria.
    “Give me that money you took.”
    She handed it to him. He went up into the doorway, to look at it in the sunlight. “Saracen. Somebody’s treasure horde. Walter Bris is going to weep.” He put the coin in his wallet. “Get those people away from there.”
    She herded the knaves and the little crowd that had gathered behind them back across the ward. Richard stood in the kitchen doorway, his eyes intently on nothing and his arms folded over his chest. Maria went over to the serving women to get the baby.
    The women surrounded her, bursting with questions, and she shook her head. “I know nothing. It is all nothing to me.” Ceci was playing on the ground among them. She looked up and beamed at her mother. Maria lifted the baby and settled her on her hip, smiled at the ostler’s daughter, and went to the Tower.
    On the steep outside stairs she passed Ponce Rachet, hurrying down from the hall. Richard was still in the kitchen doorway. Maria went up to her bedchamber on the top of the Tower.
    There was no one in the room. She changed the baby’s clothes and put her to bed for a nap. From the window, she watched Ponce Rachet carry a heavy leather sack up from the kitchen, pause to ease his arms, and start across the ward. Maria rubbed her palms together. She wanted to kill Walter Bris, but she did not know how. She would have to get him alone, in a lonely place. He was strong, a grown man in his prime, so she would have to catch him by surprise. She could poison him, but someone else might die by mistake, and she put aside that idea.
    The door downstairs banged open. Feet tramped up the stairs toward her. She went to the rack beside the cupboard where Richard kept his weapons and got a dagger with a long thin blade. God expressly forbade murder, but she would think of that later, when it was done. What he had said about her was worse than