Tori Phillips by Silent Knight

cobbled streets of that fair city since late August, but he had ignored them. Even when he heard that the king’s paramour, Anne Boleyn, had been taken ill, Roger had shrugged off the news as only a tidbit of court gossip. There had never been an outbreak of that strange illness at Snape Castle, not even the year before, when so many in the southern shires had died. Suddenly, within the space of a week, Roger had lost a number of peasants who tilled the home fields, then some of the household in the laundry and pantry, then a groom, a gardener, and, last of all, death had reached out his bony hand and dared to take Roger’s own.
    So merry at dinner the children had been; so very dead by that evening’s doleful supper.
    “Judex ergo, cum sedebit, quidquid latet, apparebit. ..” The priest droned on. Before the Judge enthroned, shall each hidden sin be owned.
    Roger shifted slightly, then glared at Edith’s coffin again. She had no sins, hidden or otherwise—of that much Roger was sure. She hadn’t had the wit to commit them. He, on the other hand... Zounds! Time enough for thinking of that later—when these same words were uttered over his own wooden box.
    A snigger from his blind side distracted Roger’s morbid meditations. He shifted his position so that his son’s profile came within his line of sight. Of late, Walter had taken to staying on his father’s right hand, even though he had known from early childhood this annoyed Roger. Though his left eye was still as keen as a swooping hawk’s, Roger’s loss of the right bored deeply into his vanity. Where once a silver-gray eye had regarded the world in unison with its mate, now a jagged white scar pressed the lid shut, covering the empty socket. A Border cattle raid thirty-two years ago, during Roger’s youthful days, when both his judgment and his fighting skills were green, had left him half-blind and twice as wise.
    With Edward and little Edith gone, his eldest son, Walter, remained the lone survivor of eight children — the result of Roger’s two misadventures in the marriage market. Women did not seem to last long here in the cold, wet north. Even as the funeral mass was being chanted, another woman—some chit from France—was on her way to Roger’s door. He wondered if Walter’s bride-to-be had put any meat on her bones since the last time he saw her, eight years ago. He remembered her as a scrawny pullet of nine or ten — all legs and arms, with large dark eyes and a high-pitched giggle. She had better be more filled out by now, or the winter would claim her before she got half a chance to breed Walter a son.
    Walter chuckled again, trying to muffle the sound in the folds of his thick woolen cloak. Roger frowned at his son’s disrespect. Walter had never taken to his stepmother, but he should at least show the proper manners at her funeral. As Roger turned to glare at him, Walter lowered his head, drawing deeper into his clothing, like a tortoise into his shell.
    Roger glared at the tall man next to him. Something was not quite right. He noted the pallor in Walter’s complexion, and the angry inflammation around his eyes. Sweet Christ! Not his only son! Feeling his father’s gaze upon him, Walter turned away. As he did so, the neck of his cloak slipped, revealing a small ulcerated lesion under his jawbone.
    Roger clenched his teeth as he spied another sore behind Walter’s ear and a third creeping into his hairline. As for the hair itself, Roger noticed for the first time that it looked more like an old, moth-eaten fur than the healthy brown locks Walter took such care to comb and perfume. God’s teeth! The boy was riddled with the pox!
    The bitter iron taste of bile rose in Roger’s throat. All his life he had devoted himself to one goal — to advance the Ormond family from that of the petty landless knight his father had been to one of England’s finest families, like that of his overlord, Sir Thomas Cavendish, earl of Thornbury. By the