Heart of Ice by Alys Clare Page B

that nobody except an observant sailor spotted him. Kelsey went home and shortly afterwards fell sick; his spinster sister baulked at nursing him and delegated the task to her maidservant. Kelsey died and, with a cruel opportunism, that same night someone broke into the house and stole a few trinkets. The maidservant fell ill and went home to her family, whose surviving members are even now recovering here at Hawkenlye. Or so I pray?’ He looked at her with raised eyebrows.
         ‘The boy and the baby girl are better,’ she confirmed. ‘The simple uncle died yesterday.’
         ‘Ah.’ He muttered something under his breath; probably, she thought, a blessing on the poor man’s soul.
         ‘Go on,’ she said when she could no longer endure the wait; a matter of all of four heartbeats.
         ‘Nicol Romley fell ill soon after returning to Newenden,’ Josse said, ‘but there’s something else: the lad was mortally afraid that somebody was following him.’
         ‘You mean—’ she began, but stopped herself; Josse would tell his tale more succinctly and swiftly if she refrained from interrupting him.
         With a quick nod, as if he understood her thought, Josse went on, ‘Nicol’s master tried to treat him but failed and instead sent the lad off to Hawkenlye. He got as far as the Vale, but then someone attacked and killed him. It’s unlikely that this was a simple case of robbery because, although it appeared that Nicol’s purse had been searched, the coins hidden at the bottom of it were still there when he was found.’
         He waited to see if she wanted to comment but she shook her head.
         ‘So, my lady,’ he concluded, ‘a virulent and deadly pestilence has come by evil chance to our land. At the same time, some unknown assailant whose purpose we cannot begin to guess follows a young man home from France and kills him.’ With a helpless shrug, he said, ‘Would you care to propose a likely explanation?’
         ‘Not yet,’ she replied with a small smile. ‘Although one or two things occur to me  . . .’
         ‘Let’s hear them!’
         ‘Well, I am thinking about those coins that were overlooked in the apothecary’s purse. It seems that there is a similarity between this and the few trinkets stolen from the merchant’s house.’
         ‘Aye, that had crossed my mind too. In addition, the merchant’s sister’s best guess was that he died in the small hours, and she claimed that the ransacking of the house took place between the time that her brother died and when she found his body soon after daybreak.’
         ‘The house was ransacked?’ Helewise asked. ‘Did the sister not hear any sound?’
         ‘Apparently not, but I have an idea that she may have exaggerated the offence; my guess is that the intruder broke in, quietly looked into one or two rooms and, finding a dead man in one of them, took advantage of his good fortune and made a quick search, taking anything that caught his fancy and was small enough to carry away.’
         ‘Supposing,’ she said slowly, ‘good fortune had nothing to do with it?’
         ‘You mean—’ He stopped, had a think and then, as he realised exactly what she meant, said, ‘My lady, I had got as far as wondering if our mystery assailant had been watching Martin Kelsey’s house and, guessing that it would be an easy matter to search the house of a dying man, took his chance and by coincidence chose for his intrusion the very night that Kelsey died. But you, if I hear you aright, would go one step further?’
         ‘I am thinking,’ she said, ‘that, for some reason, the man who slipped aboard the Angel of Mercy has need of total secrecy for his mission in England, whatever it is. Therefore he had to make sure that the two men who might have seen him – the merchant and the apothecary’s apprentice – could not live to give testimony to the fact of his having made the crossing