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quick and painful death, but I, his sponsor--his better --a Boleyn. Three arrows felled him, one driven clear into his gut. Pardon my rough tongue, Your Grace--Elizabeth."
    "Never apologize for the truth," she insisted, standing and beginning to pace before turning back to him when he jumped to his feet. "You must tell me all of it, Harry. Are you certain you were the target? Can you describe your attackers?"
    "It is such a black whirl in my brain now. I never saw but only heard them, at least three, I think. I fear they were watching and waiting for me. Somehow I had been spied on-- they knew I would come to see my mother and when. And pox on it, but I might have fought back but their first volley missed when my horse reared, and I was thrown and fell on my own damned sword." He hung his head again like a whipped boy. "And was saved," he added quietly, "by a ragtag group of players to whom I owe my life."
    "You are certain it was not they who assailed you? Some country troupes are bands of thieves. They could attack, then hope for reward by miming a bold rescue. Or could it not have been local rogues just lying in wait for any hapless traveler? Times are terribly hard for the common folk, too, under Mary's taxes for her
    Spanish husband's foreign wars."
    He shook his head so hard his cap went askew. "No, I am certain the assassins were driven off by the player called Ned Topside. I believe him. He says he did not see them either, only heard their terrible shout from afar.
    He's yet my guest, staying at the
    Rose and Thorn in the village, and I've asked them to do some pretty speeches to cheer Mother tonight. But Elizabeth," he went on, stepping closer, "I know it is a plot because I, too, heard the blackguards--at least one of them--shout that threatening battle cry when they had to leave their murderous work undone."
    His eyes, now wide as coins, looked beyond her as if he saw it all again.
    "Their battle cry?" she prompted.
    He flinched as if he'd been struck, then spit it out between trembling lips. "Down with all the bloody Boleyns," he whispered, "even the royal one."
     
    Elizabeth ate and washed but refused to lie down, though she had a real headache working on her, as if an unseen tormentor screwed a tourniquet tighter about her forehead. She supposed it served her right for lying to her people at Hatfield. At least this head pain wasn't that crippling. Her stomach and balance seemed sound enough for now.
    She sat with her sleeping aunt awhile, then walked the walled gardens of the manor house with Harry again, trying to catch up on years apart and yet make some plans to counter this current danger.
    "Where did you bury him, your man Will?" she asked when she saw the churchyard with its mounded humps of turf and a few tilted gravestones just through an iron-gated door at the back of the grounds. A charnel house where old bones were eventually stored stood against the far wall of the graveyard. Over all loomed a stalwart stone church, one Harry had said lacked a minister since King Henry rooted out Catholicism from the kingdom.
    At first he only gestured in a general direction, but when she continued to peer through the bars, he took a big, rusted key from a chink in the wall and unlocked the gate. It creaked open. They walked through, just to the edge of the yard where several fresh graves lay bare of grass.
    "Will lies in this one," he said, pointing to a rectangle at their feet with a crude wooden cross stuck in the somewhat sunken ground. He sighed. "Sadly far from his home in Sussex. I have written to his mother, though she can't read.
    I had him buried quickly. I couldn't bear the way he looked. The arrows made black spots around the wounds, sores the likes of which I've never seen."
    "Spots? Small ones, like with the pox?" "No, black blisters dreadful to see, yet nothing like buboes of the plague," he added hastily, as if to comfort her.
    But a shudder racked her. She had risked everything to come here and found