Free We Speak No Treason Vol 2 by Rosemary Hawley Jarman

and ‘temptress’, I held the wine to her lips and my mouth to her breast for an instant before she leaped away, calling for her ‘cousin’. Margetta, Margetta, where were you then?
    ‘Sirs, we wish you a good night,’ said the witch of Bruges, near the doorway.
    ‘I’ll stay,’ said the little one, her eyes on Richard.
    ‘Tell me,’ murmured my undoing, as I spun her cloak about her, longing to remove that high cap. ‘Tell me, Sir, of your friend. Is he not the Duke of Gloucester?’
    I nodded, casting back to where Dickon sat, calm and comfortable and light, while my lady flitted across to her ‘cousin’, bidding her good evening with a kiss, and a trifle of whispering, which I did not heed and cared naught for.
    Margetta was not with me as I hurried after the woman of Bruges, whose tall shadow tripped ahead like a banshee, I cajoling and she laughing and headshaking all the while... and Margetta was not with me in the mad-breathing darkness of the passage when I caught that woman and bent her over my arm; and she struck me a great blow amidships with her slender thigh, and I knew then what Sir John meant.
    It was Margetta whom I betrayed that night, yet, strangely, Margetta who lay with me; and fumbling in dawn’s twilight for my clothing I heard my bedmate say, even while she stretched to detain me, like Potiphar’s wife... ‘Heart’s joy, you are very forgetful.’
    ‘Why for?’ I said, mazed by the stirrings of shame.
    ‘My name is Anneke... all night you called me otherwise.’
    (God preserve me, I shot better than ever the following day. I had heard that bedsport improved a man’s marksmanship, and had dismissed this as all fable and nonsense. Yet it is true.)
    Yea. I betrayed Margetta. I have said my
culpa
for that, but the night stayed with me for years. Not for that strong supple body, and the alien delights showered upon me. Not for the wine, the laughter or the music. But for the fact that I sat shoulder by shoulder with Dickon of Gloucester, as equals in exile, and we shared the follies that plague and enchant all young men.
    When I saw him some days after, he gave me one look only, sufficient to declare that which needed no speech; thus we both knew what had passed between us two, and the women of Bruges.

    My tongue is a dry stick in my mouth. Here in Leicester Gaol, we, the privileged traitors, have to ourselves a cell which stinks of past fear, and pride, and piss, and death. Here, thought rides me like a nighthag. There are pauses in the hammering without, for building a scaffold is thirsty work. I have lately seen a skull cleft as an apple and the bursting brains spattered upon the outer wall not far from my face. And all that my mind told me was: ‘He was one of Norfolk’s men, and Norfolk is dead.’ So, oddly, it was fitting that he should fall in flight. I am filled with envy; beside my destiny and doom this hasty ending was honourable. Ah, Tacitus, how could you foresee such circumstance as mine? And Tacitus wrestles, in answer, with Saul’s armour-bearer, who fell upon his sword.
    The chaplain has gone. I think he was one of Morton’s priests. Yet, none the less, I saw him only as a man of God and loosed my sin-sorrow into his pale hands. Despite my dear lord’s words to us all, I am of a mind he would not wish me to pawn my own soul. For there are other sins than those of slaying my fellows... acts born of impulse and folly and the unwitting devil which led me once. My tongue is a sere bough betwixt my lips. Would that it had been torn out long ago. It would have been kindness. The mischief it has bred. Yet I was one among many. Many. I lave myself with possets of this vain comfort, as William Brecher kneels beside his son who has broken at last. He lies in the straw, a boy, a child, his broad placid face like stone, yet stone which the masons have attacked with chisel ill-tempered; his flesh is cloven into a thousand little lines of despair. He has shoulders like a bull,