Free Kingmaker: Broken Faith by Toby Clements Page A

on the weather, and daily adds to the pile of eel traps that he is building up around his house.
    More than that, the barber surgeon’s assistant, Matthew Mayhew, had arrived after Christmastide, having left the Earl of Warwick’s household after a disagreement with the Earl’s physician, Fournier.
    At the heart of it all though, has been the thought of the boy, Eelby’s miraculous son John, named after his father and his father’s father, who is still alive against all expectation. He has been the rhythm and the reason for all this: the inspiration and the seed of hope that something is possible. When Katherine thinks of him, her heart feels full, and she smiles. And to think that after the boy’s mother had died – after Katherine had killed her – Widow Beaufoy had given him no chance.
    ‘However will you feed him?’ she’d asked scornfully.
    But Katherine had remembered the newborn in the village, and so she had paid that child’s mother to act as the orphan boy’s nurse. She had then spent many precious coins buying the woman mutton and beef and butter and ale from the markets, just to keep her fat and healthy, and so far her milk has kept the boy alive.
    And the longer he lived, and the stronger he grew, the more certain she became that the death of Agnes Eelby was tragic, but it was not an act of her doing. Rather it was an act of God’s. And with every week that had passed the more surely she placed her trust in others to come to the self-same conclusion.
    But now, in this inquest, she can see that she was wrong, that they have ascribed her far darker motives – that she disliked Agnes Eelby, or was jealous of her – and so at last she must react.
    ‘That is not true,’ she shouts. ‘I wished her only well. Otherwise I would not have fetched Widow Beaufoy or paid for her services out of my own purse.’
    Next to her, Widow Beaufoy has taken another distancing step.
    ‘Is that true?’ the coroner asks Widow Beaufoy. ‘Did she?’
    ‘She did,’ she agrees, reluctantly. ‘But I would have come anyway.’
    ‘Course she would!’ one of the hecklers shouts.
    The coroner cocks an eyebrow at Widow Beaufoy and Katherine sees he has understood something, and she feels her own ignorance as a sharp if familiar pain. The coroner nods and turns back to Katherine, and it is as if he has forgotten where he was, or perhaps, no. He has not forgotten. It is something else.
    ‘So,’ he asks. ‘Why did you hate the dead woman?’
    The question makes Katherine feel closed in upon, hemmed, surrounded.
    ‘I did not hate her,’ she spits. ‘I hardly knew her.’
    ‘But …?’ the coroner begins, gesturing to the jury, as if they are proof of the opposite.
    Katherine has had enough.
    ‘I do not know any of these men other than by sight,’ she counters, ‘and I am certain the same is true in reverse.’
    ‘Yet there seems to be some doubt?’ the coroner persists.
    ‘Oh, there’s doubt all right,’ the first heckler shouts and before the coroner can silence him, the second chimes in:
    ‘Yes,’ he calls. ‘If you hardly knew her, why’d you fetch Widow Beaufoy there? Why’d you pay for her services, eh? For someone you hardly knew?’
    ‘Doesn’t seem likely, does it!’ shouts the first.
    This second man is in the shadows but she thinks he is the one with the tall reddish hat. She does not think she has seen him before.
    ‘I knew her well enough to do my Christian duty,’ she states.
    ‘Did you?’ the first heckler replies. ‘Cutting her open? I’d hardly call that your Christian duty!’
    This gets a low laugh. The coroner is content to let the exchange run.
    ‘I did it to save the baby,’ Katherine shouts above the noise. ‘Is he not alive now, because of what we did?’
    ‘You only saved the baby because you wanted him for yourself!’
    This is too much.
    ‘Who are you?’ Katherine calls. ‘What village do you come from?’
    ‘Never you mind,’ he calls back.
    She takes a step