My entire life, my mother had had all the answers. She’d ruled over our family like a four-star general. My curriculum. Hobbies. Where I went. Who I spoke with. When I ate, drank, slept. Every hour of my day dictated by her command. And now, when I needed her most, she’d gone practically catatonic.
“Sarah?” Phoebe blinked up at my mom through a storm of tears, only just now realizing that the pregnant woman standing close beside me was my mom. “My God. Sarah, what happened to you?”
Ignoring Phoebe’s comment, Mom turned to us. “Girls,” she said in a voice flat and devoid of all emotion. “They’ll hang him for this.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I got that. Now tell us how to get him out.”
Instead of answering, her blue eyes flicked to a spot over my shoulder. I turned to see her toad-husband marching toward us with William Lucie on his heels.
“Sarah,” Phoebe begged. “Hurry, please.”
But my fierce, capable mother was curling in on herself, cringing as Sir Henry Babcock brushed me aside and latched on to her arm. “Away to your rooms, wife,” he snarled. “In your condition, you should not be witness to such excitement.”
I knew by the way his gaze fixed on my mother’s low-slung belly that he thought the kid was his. He didn’t care about my mother. The baby. That’s all that mattered to him.
I shot a frantic look at William.
“Sir Henry,” William started, but Babcock ignored him and gestured toward a waiting manservant. “Jasper, take my wife to our chambers.”
Without another word, Babcock strolled off and disappeared into a cluster of men who were analyzing the whole event, like reporters after a crime spree. I glanced toward the high table. While Henry was laughing, having a high old time, Eleanor of Aquitaine appeared flushed and exhausted. Frown lines marring her brow, her eyes snagged on me.
Babcock’s thuggish guard planted himself at Mom’s side. “Let’s away, milady.”
With a furtive glance in her husband’s direction, Mom scrubbed at her face. The hanging sleeves of her ice-blue dress dropped back and I caught a glimpse of raised, angry scars circling each wrist.
I grabbed her arm. “What happened to you?”
It was all too easy to imagine what could’ve made those terrible mutilations. But she tore away from my grip and began whispering in ragged, desperate Latin.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Listen to me. We don’t have much time, and you must understand something.”
“Milady,” the guard warned.
Mom sighed then, and placed cold, trembling hands on each side of my head. Tears glittering, she stared hard into my eyes. “They will never let me escape. Trust me, I’ve tried.”
“But—”
The ridge of scars that ringed my mother’s wrists chafed against my chin as she pulled me closer and let her forehead rest on mine. “You must leave me here. There’s no other way.”
I felt Phoebe stiffen as Mom whispered in English, “Get Collum out. If you can.”
“H-how?” My voice wavered as the world around me began to shear away in great hunks.
My mother, the one person in my life who’d always had the answers, shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Behind me Phoebe whimpered. “Sarah . . .”
At Jasper’s grunted order, we exited through a side door where flagstone steps led to the upper, residential floors of the palace. The air smelled of lye and old fires. Past the wide, second-story landing, the stairs narrowed, the next levels obviously meant for lower-level guests. There, grime still edged the narrow risers, and a rank, musty stench lingered. As Phoebe and I trailed Jasper and my mother to the stairs that led up to the third landing, Mom stopped and planted her feet. She turned, her face set with a grim finality I recognized all too well.
“Stop,” she said. “You can’t come with me any further.”
“But—”
She held out a hand to silence me. “No, darling. I love you so much. But I can never leave. It’s far too late for me, but not for you. Go. Now. Both of you. They’ll have taken Collum to the Tower. Get him out. If you can. But you must get yourselves home to Lucinda. That is an order.”
With that, she turned away and disappeared down the shadowy hall.
I collapsed onto the bottom step. Phoebe slumped down next to me and buried her face in her knees.
How could Mom do this? She wouldn’t even try to escape? And Collum . . .
Oh God. Collum.
I leaned against the crumbly wall, scanning through everything I’d ever read about the twelfth-century Tower of London. What I remembered was bad. Very, very bad.
I bolted upright as boots stomped up from the landing below.
“We have to get out of here, Pheebs,” I whispered, “go back to Mabray House and figure this out. But we’re not leaving either one of them here. I swear it.”
I jerked on her limp arm as the footsteps grew closer. “Get up. We can’t help Collum if—”
“Mistress Hope, I thought I’d find you here.”
Slowly, so slowly, I turned. And oh, I knew that voice, but—
Impossible.
A clutch of men rounded the landing below. I squinted against the glare of a torch. As my eyes adjusted, my hands flew to my chest, pressing hard, to keep my heart from leaping out and flopping onto the floor like a landed fish.