I wished I’d been there to see it. She should be here, with us; she deserved to be.

And as that occurred to me, even dizzy as I was, it struck me as odd. Telling Sally about the pension could have waited a day. He could have brought her here this morning, told us all together.

But he hadn’t. What’s more, we’d been told there weren’t any spare quarters. Yet an irate knight had been displaced from his parlor to accommodate Tom and me. The same could have been done for Sally, if Charles had wished it. Which meant…

“You don’t want Sally at Whitehall,” I said suddenly.

The king looked at me sharply but said nothing.

Barbara the spaniel decided she wanted more than a scratch and climbed carefully into my lap. I stroked her fur, long and soft. “Is it because of Mary’s murder?” I wondered aloud. “No, it can’t be. Not alone. There must have been something else.”

Now Charles looked at Lord Ashcombe.

The King’s Warden shrugged. “You wanted him sticking his nose in.”

“Clearly, I was right,” the king said, and he nodded for Lord Ashcombe to tell me.

Ashcombe dismissed the two servants, shutting the door behind them. Then he spoke.

“There have been two murders,” he said quietly. “Another servant girl was found in the Thames, the day before we returned to London. She’d been stabbed in the back, like Mary, but since she was fished out east of the Tower, no one imagined the murder had happened in the palace. It was assumed she’d gone to market and fallen afoul of thieves. Given yesterday’s circumstances, it’s fair to assume the deaths are connected—that she was killed here, and her body dumped in the river.”

“Was it done with the same type of blade?” Tom asked nervously.

“No blade was found in the body.” Lord Ashcombe shrugged. “Could have washed out in the Thames.”

I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to bring up here, but I did anyway. “There was a letter waiting for me at Blackthorn,” I began, and the king nodded.

“Richard already told me,” he said. “That fits in well with my plans.”

“Sire?”

“I want you to meet someone today.”

“Of course, sire.” I looked from him to Lord Ashcombe. “May I ask whom?”

The king smiled. “Your new master.”

CHAPTER 11

I DREW A BREATH. “MY… new master?”

“It’s clear the Apothecaries’ Guild was never going to arrange it,” Charles said. “So I decided to take care of it myself.”

I didn’t know what to say. In a way, this was an even bigger shock than the pension.

My stomach churned. Part of me had wished for this to happen. To have a new master. To be back in the workshop as an apprentice. To return to the life I’d once known. The life I’d never imagined at Cripplegate, the life I’d discovered I never wanted to leave.

And yet… it wasn’t just being an apothecary’s apprentice I wanted. It was being Master Benedict’s.