Paul Doherty - Assassin in the Greenwood

'No, Maltote!' he ordered.

The messenger dropped it as if it was hot and Ranulf grinned at him.

'I have told you before,' he whispered. 'Old Master Long Face hates you to touch weapons.'

'I heard that, Ranulf,' Corbett shouted over his shoulder. 'Maltote, you are one of the best horsemen I have ever met but you know my orders. Never, in my presence, touch a sword or dagger. You are more dangerous than a drunken serjeant waving his sword around a packed tavern.' Corbett stared at him suspiciously. 'You are carrying no dagger?'

The round-faced messenger stared owlishly back, his childlike eyes full of apprehension.

'No, Master.'

'Good!' Corbett murmured. 'Then finish unpacking. Go down to the castle buttery. Steal or beg something to eat and drink and then ride to Southwell. I showed you the way as we entered Nottingham. Go to the crossroads and take the Newark road south. You'll find Sir Guy of Gisborne lodged at the sign of The Serpent. Tell him that we have arrived in Nottingham and that tomorrow we enter the forest. However, he is not to move until he has spoken with me. Bring him back with you, not to the castle but ask him to lodge at the tavern at the foot of the crag. What was it called?'

'The Trip to Jerusalem,' Ranulf added. He was sharp-eyed for any ale house they passed, to slake his thirst, draw the unsuspecting into a game of dice or sell his 'miraculous' medicines to those stupid enough to buy them.

'Bring him there,' Corbett ordered.

Maltote nodded, washed his hands and face at the lavarium and scurried out.

'You are too harsh on him, Master.' Ranulf grinned. 'He has great ambitions to become a swordsman.'

'Not whilst I am alive,' Corbett muttered. 'Ranulf, he's lethal. Did you see him at the Lady Maeve's supper before we left Bread Street? He was gutting a piece of meat and nearly took his fingers off.' Corbett turned back to his packing. 'And who is this Master Long Face?'

'No one,' Ranulf guiltily replied. 'Just someone we both know.'

Corbett grinned to himself, laid the last of his clothes in one of the chests and hung his two robes on a peg. He tried not to think of his wife Maeve who had so neatly folded everything, chattering like a magpie as she tried to hide her unease at her husband's departure. A picture of her flashed into Corbett's mind: ivory white skin, those deep blue eyes, that beautiful face framed by long golden hair.

'I should be with her,' he muttered. 'Going with her, baby Eleanor and Uncle Morgan to our manor at Leighton.'

Corbett opened his saddlebags and took out his small writing tray, neatly laying out parchment, ink horn, knife and quill. He looked up. Ranulf was moodily staring through one of the arrow-slit windows.

'Come on!' Corbett urged, sitting down in the chair. 'Let us unravel the mysteries here, eh?'

Ranulf made no move so Corbett shrugged, picked up a quill and dipped it into the blue-green ink.

'Primo,' he announced, 'the King's business in London.'

He unrolled the greasy piece of parchment his servant had brought back from Paris. Corbett smoothed it gently. Bardolph had paid for this with his life and Corbett guiltily remembered visiting the dead man's wife in Grubbe Street near Cripplegate. The King had promised her an allowance but the woman had just screamed, cursing him, until Corbett had retreated from the house.

'What did Bardolph die for?' he declared loudly. 'What does this cipher mean? "Les trois rois vont au tour des deux fous avec deux chevaliers".'

'The three kings,' Corbett translated, 'go to the tower of the two fools with the two chevaliers.'

Corbett closed his eyes and tried to picture the crude map of northern France his clerks had drawn up at Westminster. Philip now had his armies massed there, tens of thousands of foot soldiers, squadron after squadron of heavily mailed knights, carts full of provisions. Once the harvest was in his army would cross into Flanders. But where? Did this cipher hold the secret?

'Where will the blow fall?' Corbett murmured to himself. 'Will the French army roll like a wave or will it form into an arrowhead and strike along one road against a certain city?' Edward's Flemish allies had sent importunate pleas for such information. If they only knew Philip's route of march, his battle plan, they would counter it; but their army was small, too thinly spread to provide against all eventualities.

Corbett remembered the King at Westminster, white-faced with rage.

'We are like a cat watching a thousand rat-holes. Where will that bastard in France aim his blow?'

Corbett had replied by urging his myriad of agents in Paris to worm the secret out. Now they had the information but it made no sense.

'What does it mean?' the King had shouted. 'By God's tooth, what does it mean?'

Corbett had quietly explained that the cipher was new, concocted by one of Philip's principal clerks. It would be known only to the King, his inner group of counsellors and his generals on the French border.

'Why can't you break it, Corbett?' the King had begged.

'Because it's like nothing we have ever seen before.'

The King had raged and mimicked him.

'Your Grace,' Corbett quietly insisted, quoting a famous maxim from logic, 'any problem must always contain the seeds of its own solution.'

'Oh, God be thanked!' Edward had snarled and gone on to stare at Corbett with his half-mad, blood-shot eyes. 'And what happens if you unlock the cipher, Clerk? Philip now knows we have it. The bastard might change it!'

Corbett disagreed. 'You know Philip cannot do that. The military preparations are made – any change in plan would cause terrible chaos. He has time on his side and could invade any time during July.'

'In which case,' the King snarled, 'you have only days!'

Corbett closed his eyes. Just before he'd left Westminster his conclusion about Philip was proved correct: the French had taken other precautions about the cipher with deadly consequences for himself. Corbett sighed, opened his eyes and stared down at the cipher. The briefer such messages were, the more difficult to unravel.

' "The three kings go to the tower of the two fools with the two chevaliers." What does it mean, Ranulf?'

His manservant still gazed gloomily through the window.

'Do you miss London?' Corbett asked. 'Or are you still smarting over the Lady Mary Neville?'

Ranulf heard his master but stared bleakly at the sunset, trying to control the rage seething within him. He had loved the Lady Mary Neville with every fibre of his being: her dark, lustrous hair, those lips he had crushed against his own when she had invited him into her bed, wrapping her cool white body round his. Then she had discarded him as she would a piece of needlework. She had fluttered her eyelashes and said she really must return north in the company of Ralph Dacre whom she described as a distant kinsman. Ranulf knew different: Dacre was a court fop with his curled, prinked hair, tight hose, buckled shoes and a blue quilted jerkin which hung just above his elaborate codpiece. So Lady Mary had tripped out of his life, leaving him to seethe with discontent. Ranulf glared over his shoulder at Corbett. Affairs of the heart were his personal business.

'It's not just the Lady Mary!' he snapped. 'You mean the clerkship?'

'Yes, Master. Thanks to you, I am skilled in French, Spanish and the use of protocol, but the King still refuses to elevate me to the position of clerk.'

'He is playing with you,' Corbett replied. 'He wishes to test you.'

Ranulf sneered. 'Thank you, Master, but I suspect the clerkship will slip as easily through my fingers as the Lady Mary Neville did.'

Corbett went across, grasped his manservant's shoulders and swung him round.

'Is this the famous Ranulf-atte-Newgate, the lady's man, the roaring boy! I need you, Ranulf, yet you lean against the wall like some lovelorn maid!'