Chapter 25: The Seal in the Iron-Bound Chest

The snow fell thick as lamb’s wool, muffling the world until the manor of Wykeham seemed a thing underwater. Tom moved through it with a sack over his shoulder and a plan in his teeth that tasted of copper and dread.

Joan had argued against haste. “Hugh’s chest is never unguarded,” she’d said, her breath pluming in the cold of the stillroom. “Catesby sleeps in the chamber above. The dogs know every step you take.”

“Then I’ll need the dogs to know me,” Tom had replied, and she’d looked at him as though he’d grown a second head.

Now, in the blue hour before dawn, he stood in the lee of the brewhouse, watching the great hall’s shuttered windows. No light showed. The watchman—old Piers, who’d lost two fingers at Crécy—was making his rounds with a lantern and a wheeze that carried like a bellows. Tom waited until the wheeze faded toward the stables, then crossed the yard.

The door to the hall was barred, but Joan had told him of the priest’s door, a narrow postern behind the altar where a corrupt chaplain had once slipped out to meet a widow. The lock was rusted, the wood swollen with damp. Tom worked at it with a chisel from his warehouse stores, feeling the cold bite through his gloves.

It gave with a groan that seemed loud as a thunderclap.

He slipped inside. The hall smelled of woodsmoke, old rushes, and the sour tang of Hugh’s hunting dogs, who raised their heads from the hearth but did not bark. Tom had fed them scraps of salted pork earlier in the week, and they remembered. He crept past the long trestle tables, past the faded banners of forgotten de Lacys, and up the stair to the solar.

The door was ajar.

Tom’s heart seized. He pressed himself against the wall, listening. A snore, deep and rhythmical, came from within. Hugh slept drunk, by the sound of it. But the iron-bound chest stood beside the bed, and Catesby’s chamber was above, and the seal lay within.

He moved. The chest’s lock was a simple thing, but Tom had no key. He had come armed with a thin steel pry bar from his warehouse, and he worked it into the seam with the patience of a man defusing a bomb. The wood groaned. The snoring paused.

Tom froze.

The snoring resumed.

He levered the lid open. Inside: deeds, rolls of parchment, a velvet purse that clinked, and there—the seal, a heavy silver disc on a leather thong, stamped with the de Lacy arms. Tom closed his fingers around it.

A hand clamped onto his wrist.

Tom spun. Margery stood over him, her face half-lit by the embers of the hearth fire, her eyes bright with something like amusement.

“You’re good,” she whispered, “but not good enough. I’ve been following you since the brewhouse.”

“You’ll hang us both,” Tom hissed.

“I’ll hang if I’m caught, but you’ll hang if you’re caught with that.” She nodded at the seal. “Give it to me. I’ll carry it. You’re too valuable to lose.”

Tom hesitated. Then he pressed the seal into her palm. She tucked it into her kirtle and vanished into the shadows of the solar as silently as she’d come.

Tom slipped back the way he’d entered, his heart still hammering. The snow had deepened. The manor was silent. He crossed the yard and found Joan waiting by the barn door, her face pinched with cold and fear.

“Well?” she breathed.

“It’s done,” he said. “But I had help.”

Joan’s eyes narrowed. “Margery?”

“She took the seal. She’ll bring it to us when it’s safe.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

Tom had no answer. He looked up at the falling snow and thought of the letter he would write, the petition to King Edward, the careful words that would offer new crops and new cures in exchange for protection. It was a mad gamble—a commoner addressing a king—but the alternative was Catesby’s ledger and the bishop’s pyre.

“We’ll find her,” he said. “She believes in what we’re doing. She burned once for the truth. She won’t burn again.”

Joan said nothing, but her face said everything.

The next morning, Catesby summoned Tom to the great hall. The steward sat in Hugh’s chair, a cup of mulled wine in his hand, his cold eyes measuring the man before him.

“The lord de Lacy has heard of your remedies,” Catesby said, “and has decided to reward you. A cottage by the mill, a strip of land, and the right to keep a tithe of your own harvest.”

Tom kept his face flat. A reward—or a cage. The cottage was remote, half a mile from the barn that hid his warehouse. He would be watched, and watched easily.

“I am grateful,” he said.

“You will also provide a full accounting of your methods,” Catesby continued. “The lord wishes to know how you grow such turnips, how you cure such fevers, how you forge such steel. Everything.”

Tom met his gaze. “And if I refuse?”

Catesby smiled, and the smile did not reach his eyes. “Then the lord regrets that he will have to reconsider his generosity. And the bishop’s steward has expressed great interest in your affairs. A man who appears from nowhere, with knowledge that comes from nowhere—such a man must have a patron. Or a master.”

Tom understood. He was being squeezed, slowly and deliberately, between the lord who wanted his secrets and the Church that wanted his soul. The letter to the King was no longer a luxury. It was his only rope.

“I will consider,” Tom said.

“You will do more than consider,” Catesby replied. “You will comply. By Christmas.”

Tom left the hall with the snow falling harder, the world turning white, and the seal hidden somewhere in the dark with a woman who had already died once for the truth. He had one winter. Maybe less.

And somewhere, in the depths of his failing warehouse, the last of his battery’s charge flickered and dimmed, a small light going out in a world that was growing colder by the hour.