Death Comes Hot by Michael Jecks

Author:Michael Jecks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448304578
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2020-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

FIVE

It was a relief to see him go. With my conviction that Raphe would inform about all of my activities as soon as he met his uncle, Blount must be impressed to hear how I dealt with Seymour. I only hoped Seymour was not somehow a friend to Blount.

I sat back, musing over the affair once more. So much had happened: it was baffling. But I am always a careful fellow. Not for me the panic and tantrums of the feeble-minded. Not for me the sudden burst of terror. I am made of sterner stuff. Instead, I started to think about the people involved in the affair. Geoffrey was only interested in his brother’s death, of course. He wanted to know who had tampered with my powder. Hal Westmecott was responsible for the condition of the powder since he had possessed the bag that evening. I had thought that the fool might have got the powder damp by accident, leaving it on a wet table in a tavern, but what if he had meant to disable it? Could he not have made the powder wet on purpose, so that he had an excuse to blackmail me into helping him find his wife? He could have so dampened the powder as to make it unusable. After all, I had wondered whether someone could have met Westmecott in a tavern somewhere and made the powder damp. But who could have known where he would be, and that he would have a bag of black powder on his person? No, it was ridiculous.

What if he didn’t want Moll because she was his wife? What if he was only ever in the pay of the Seymours? Perhaps he wanted Moll because they told him to find her? But no, that was lunacy. The Seymours were happy with the service Geoffrey’s brother had provided in baptizing the boy. Why would they willingly let Hal kill the priest? Unless, of course, he had not mentioned to them that he was going to do that. They might have had no idea that he contemplated giving Geoffrey’s brother a slow, lingering death just so that he could blackmail me into finding Moll.

In any case, I began to feel more comfortable. I allowed myself to think that, with a little good fortune, the whole affair would soon be over for me. The boy had disappeared courtesy of Humfrie, the woman Moll was in the care of the Seymours, and Hal Westmecott knew where she was. My tasks seemed to be coming to an end.

After all, if my master demanded to know why he had not heard of the child’s death, I could happily tell him that the child had been ‘removed’, and the mother was even now at the house of Edward Seymour. Master Blount need never hear of them again, once we had liberated Moll. She had to be removed, else her evidence ended up in Queen Mary’s hands.

If Blount chose to question my integrity, or demand to

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