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skulled her, out on the Moorfields.”
    “The Moorfields? I can’t imagine—”
    “And, John,” she breathed, leaning forward, her eyes attractively wide, “I think I may have seen her. Coming out of the abbot’s private chapel, right before she lifted it.”
    “What sort of a book?” I asked, trying to keep up.
    “I know nothing of its content, I swear to you. Only rumors.” To my surprise I believed her. “And now Braybrooke is involved, asking my duke all sorts of ugly questions. You know how suspicious everyone is since the council, and that crazed friar’s rantings last year. As if my duke and the king are mad dogs in a ring, circling one another, waiting for the next chance to lunge for a neck.”
    This gave me pause. “Why would the bishop of London be after the same book as Chaucer?”
    “Suppose it’s less innocent than you suspect. Not one of those romances everyone is reading. Not a saint’s life. But a book of prophecies.” She narrowed her eyes. “Heretical prophecies.”
    “Prophecies.” I recalled the preacher spewing his verse out on Holbourne, and Chaucer’s agitation when I recited the man’s words. “Wycliffe’s work?” John Wycliffe: a heretic, thoroughly condemned and recently dead, but all the more dangerous for that.
    “Lancaster doubts it, though—”
    Swynford’s chin lifted. She stood. I twisted my neck as I rose to see the figure of Joan, Countess of Kent and the king’s mother, standing at the arched doorway. Greying hair pulled back from slivered eyes, widow’s weeds on a figure to make any man pause despite her considerable age. High cheekbones, set beneath a wide brow, and cobalt eyes that flashed as they settled on Swynford.
    “Where is my brother?” she demanded as she approached, four of her attendants stepping aside. “He summons me up from Wickhambreaux, yet I am kept waiting at Westminster half a day.” I winced inwardly at Gaunt’s treatment of his sister-in-law. In the nine years since the death of Prince Edward, Gaunt’s elder brother and former heir to the throne, the countess had seen her status slowly decline. Had her husband survived the ancient King Edward, she would have ascended to queen consort, and helped the younger Edward rule with the same flawless grace and deliberation she had shown so many times on public occasions. Though still the most beloved woman in the realm, Joan was becoming more and more of an afterthought.
    Katherine put a hand to her breast. “He just left us, Countess. An appointment at Fulham.” She straightened her skirts and retook her seat, the other ladies doing the same; a subtle insult.
    Joan’s lips tightened. “Tell the duke my patience wears thin. I shall return to Wickhambreaux tomorrow.”
    “I will tell him, Countess,” said Swynford.
    Turning to leave, the countess looked at me. She sucked in her cheeks. “John Gower.”
    I bowed deeply. “Your servant, Countess.”
    She regarded me closely. “I’ve gazed into your mirror, Gower.”
    “My lady?”
    “I have read your great work, the Mirour de l’Omme .”
    My cheeks flushed. “You surprise me, Countess.”
    “Why is that?”
    “I would not expect such a humble work to make its way to so noble a reader as yourself.” Nor its writer’s name to be remembered.
    She waved a hand. “Rot, Gower. The breeding of Death and Sin, the bastard births of Hypocrisy and her sisters—why, you could be describing the household of Lancaster!”
    Swynford gasped, staring in hatred at her lover’s sister-in-law.
    The countess gestured with her chin and turned away. Chaucer’s book forgotten, my head swimming with the rare flattery, I followed her through the gauze curtains and out onto the small terrace.
    “I am too hard on Lancaster, you know,” she said as we circled. “It was a unique humiliation for a man like Gaunt, to bounce his king on his knee.” She walked along the parapet, pausing to pick dead leaves out of a pot. “Though it has to be said