Free The Winter King by Alys Clare Page B

her well.
    ‘Do you always have to account to your father for your comings and goings?’ Sabin said quite sharply as they left the courtyard. ‘This is meant to be secret, Meggie!’
    ‘It
is
secret,’ she had replied. ‘I told him nothing that would give us away. As to accounting for myself to him, I do it not because he orders me to, but because I love him and he worries. All right?’ She kicked her heels into Daisy’s sides and trotted on.
    She had spoken rather more sharply than she had intended. However, it had the benefit of shutting Sabin up, for which she was quite grateful.
    Her offer of help the previous night had been instinctive, given almost before she’d had a chance to think it through. Now, although there was no question of withdrawing the offer, she was well on the way to regretting it.
    She drew rein slightly, allowing Sabin to come up beside her. ‘Go through it again,’ she said. ‘The body is in a cellar, but you think we might be able to get down there without anyone seeing us?’
    ‘Oh, they’ll
see
us,’ Sabin relied, ‘and there is no way we can avoid it, for the manor is heavily guarded. My hope is that our arrival will not arouse curiosity. They will recognize me,’ she muttered, as if reasoning with herself, ‘but that is probably to the good.’
    Meggie waited. When Sabin did not elucidate, she said, quite sharply, ‘Well? What do you plan to do?’
    ‘I’ll just have to tell them I’ve become uneasy about my diagnosis of the cause of death,’ Sabin replied, frowning, ‘and wanted to consult you.’
    ‘So now that’s two canons from the Augustinian house in Tonbridge, the town apothecary and a forest healer,’ Meggie remarked, not without irony. ‘Won’t Lord Benedict’s household start to be suspicious?’
    ‘Oh, I think they already are,’ Sabin said grimly. ‘That’s why … why …’
    ‘Why you want to be absolutely sure that suspicion can’t fall on you.’ It was, Meggie thought, high time for some blunt words.
    Sabin hung her head. ‘Yes.’
    Meggie sighed. ‘Very well. Come on. The sooner we’re done, the sooner you – and I – can relax.’
    They rode up to Medley Hall to find the place eerily silent. It stood alone on its low rise; the surrounding land was marshy, dotted here and there with watery areas of bog, for they were deep in the valley here. Whoever had sited Medley up on its mound had chosen well.
    As Sabin had predicted, the men on guard duty at the gates recognized her, and accepted without question her explanation that Meggie was a fellow healer. They were permitted to pass through the gates with nothing worse than a few ribald comments.
    Meggie, looking round, noticed that there was a large, central house made of mellowed old stone, with two new-looking wings running out on either side. There were faint sounds of sawing and hammering from somewhere out of sight, and a voice yelled out something, followed by gruff male laughter, abruptly cut off. Lord Benedict, it appeared, had been in the process of extending his dwelling when death had interrupted.
    Sabin called out – not very loudly – and after a while a young stable lad came to take the horses. It did not appear to be part of his duties to ask their business or usher them inside, for he did neither, simply leading the horses to a corner of the yard, where he tethered them before ducking back inside whatever building it was that he had just emerged from.
    ‘What now?’ Sabin asked in an anxious whisper.
    You’re asking me!
Meggie thought, amused. ‘We’d better go inside.’ She strode across the courtyard and up the steps to the imposing front door, which was made of oak banded and studded with iron and looked new. It stood slightly ajar. She pushed it, and it opened on to a wide hall in which a fire smouldered in the hearth. The hall was hung with beautiful tapestries, their glossy sheen and the faint, woolly smell they emitted suggesting that they, too, were brand new,