Spy in Chancery by Paul Doherty

Author:Paul Doherty [Doherty, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
ISBN: 0747236151
Google: iTxJdfFom50C
Amazon: B00GU35TAM
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2012-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

During most days Corbett wandered around the castle, on occasions he attended the court held in the Great Hall. Morgan would sit on the great carved chair, beside him Father Thomas, the castle chaplain and secretary, crouched mouse-like on his stool, fearful of the things he would have to see and transcribe on the long roll of vellum before him. Most of the crimes were petty, land disputes or minor squabbles over possession. Now and again though, the authority of the Lord Morgan was challenged by a counterfeiter, poacher, outlaw or thief and punishment was always relentless, dread, cruel but, in its own way, upright and rigorous.

Corbett saw a poacher tried, sentenced and hustled from the hall: the poor malefactor was sent straight to the castle yard, his right arm extended over a block where the hissing slice of a sword took his hand off at the wrist. The man screamed in a half-faint as the executioners hurried him from the block to stick the amputated arm into a bowl of boiling pitch to cauterise and heal the bleeding stump. A few even less fortunate were sentenced to hang: one was hustled up to the battlements, a noose put around his neck and he was hoisted over to a dangling, choking death while others were taken in a great two-wheeled cart to the scaffold on the headland above the raging sea.

There was an atmosphere of terror about Neath yet the mood could alternate, swinging from one extreme to the other. At dinner, minstrels were invited to recite poems and epic stories while long-haired bards sang mournful dirges of past glories and dead dreams. Corbett had to sit through them with an equally disgruntled Ranulf. Neither could understand the songs or the conversation because Morgan insisted, most of the time, on speaking Welsh. The English envoys just had to sit there, knowing by the grins on Morgan’s and Owen’s faces that they were often the brunt of some cruel joke. Corbett observed that Maeve joined in though, when she laughed, it was false, the smile never reached her eyes and there were times when he caught her looking at him sideways, a sad haunted look in her large blue eyes.

A few days after their arrival at Neath, Maeve decided to break the tedium of Morgan’s evening banquets and, while the bards prepared themselves with all the show and gestures professional minstrels could muster, she rose and came over to stand beside Corbett. ‘Do you like our music, Englishman?’ she asked, her eyes dancing with mischief.

‘My name is Hugh,’ he replied. ‘And your music is definitely better than your conversation, though I suppose that is not much of a compliment.’

She pouted, ‘Well, Huw,’ she said, deliberately pronouncing his name in the Welsh fashion, ‘Let us change this. You play chess? Perhaps you can teach me?’

Corbett looked at the solemn, beautiful face and loved her, biting his lip to stifle the cry which ached to burst out. He knew her serious face was

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