The floor swivels away from my feet, and I clutch for the table. Queen Bethany had a baby. The Instrument Maker darts forward and takes my arm to steady me. The warmth is startling. When was the last time I was touched? Paul closing the wound in my neck? Paul’s touch was a bird scratching. This is like finding something I didn’t know I had lost. The missing of it is there now, niggling at the little plum stone in my heart. Before I can help it, I’m clutching him back.

The thoughts swell up in my head, crashing like water down a mill wheel. Queen Bethany had a baby, and Corliss wove the secret into a tapestry in a language none but the most learned would know. Paul and Frederick didn’t even see the shapes as letters. I only took them for Anglish because I know so little.

Notions push like key bits against the wards in my jammed lock. The lock isn’t open yet, the wards are still jammed, but I’m starting to get the shape of the jam.

The murdered babe I ate two hearts for, it belonged to Queen Bethany. No, she wasn’t Queen yet. She was of an age with me, as Tilly said, but in line to the throne, unmarried and living with her stepmother Katryna. What would she and her dearest friends have undertaken to save her from ruin? Corliss, her governess; Tilly, a midwife – would they have killed her royal bastard?

If this news were to come out, Bethany’d be ruined, even after all this time. The Norman prince and the other suitors would refuse her. She would most like lose her throne. A woman who beds out of wedlock is a whore. And a whore who kills her own child is worse than that. What folk would accept such a woman as their ruler?

An enemy of the Queen is killing the women so the world will see their coffins and know the truth like Mr Fox in the fairy tale.

But there’s a second secret. The babe didn’t die. Hearts were placed on the coffins to make it look like it did. The key knocks against the wards in my lock again. The more I think on it, the less sense it makes.

All I know is the Queen had a baby. The ladies who knew are dying. And the Queen’s bastard may be alive.

23. SALT

I STUMBLE HOME AFTER dark and crawl onto my mattress. In my dream, Ruth’s placing stones on my chest, one for each sin I’ve eaten. Fornicating, gossiping, not praying as one ought. A whole pailful for greediness and lust. Incest. Killing a royal baby.