The second was when he’d found a job for Sally, as promised. He’d written to me separately, asking for my account. The first was after Magistrate Aldebourne had told Lord Ashcombe what had happened. I’d only had contact with the King’s Warden twice since we’d stopped the plot against the city at the height of the plague. I tried to push his worry aside and think of why Lord Ashcombe would call for us. The more he spoke, the more the prospect of wasting away behind bars loomed large in my mind. Trust the baker’s son to critique the dungeon’s bread. And not the good bread, either, with poppy seeds and maybe a bit of cinnamon. “All you get is a single piece of bread, once a night. “Do you know what happens in a dungeon? There’s no food. “We’re not going to end up in the dungeon,” I said, not entirely certain of that. “We’re going to end up in the dungeon,” he moaned. After a night under guard in an inn, Tom was convinced we were headed for doom. “Not yet.”Īnd that was how Tom and I ended up bumping our way through the countryside in the back of this carriage. Oxford? That’s where the king’s Court was staying. “I was just ordered to bring you to Oxford.” Get Thomas Bailey and get in the carriage.īaron Richard Ashcombe, the King’s Warden, was the Lord Protector of His Majesty, Charles II. “You Christopher Rowe?” the King’s Man said. Behind him was a carriage, a second soldier waiting beside it in the street. I’d opened it to find myself face-to-face with one of the King’s Men, the royal coat of arms emblazoned on his tabard. Yesterday morning, Tom and I had been eating lunch in my apothecary shop when a heavy fist had hammered on the door. This whole business had come as a surprise. invitation, I suppose you’d call it, that had fallen to the floor of the carriage and thrust it at me. “Now you’re just stringing random words together.” “Maybe it was England’s pumpkin, to be entered into the International Pumpkin Fair. “Maybe it was a prize-winning pumpkin,” Tom said. “Maybe you destroyed an important pumpkin.” What does that have to do with anything?” “I’m not the one saying, ‘Hey, let’s blow up these pumpkins in the street.’?”

“I’m not the one setting fire to pear trees,” Tom said. Beyond the curtain, the lights of distant farmhouses dotted the darkness of the countryside. He folded his arms and turned away, gazing unhappily through the carriage window.

The blackthorn key book 5