Chapter Three
Linnet strode through the wool merchant’s house, her heart pounding in her ears. The smell of the river seeped through the walls and permeated the air, carrying with it a flood of memories.
As she moved from room to room, she gave instructions to the clerk trailing behind her.
“Sell that… and that,” she said, pointing to an ornately carved chair and a side table as she passed. Most of the furniture had not belonged to her family, and so she did not want it.
This had been their London house. For as long as she could remember, she, Francois, and their grandfather had stayed here when their grandfather made his twice-yearly trip to trade with the London merchants. It was never grand like their houses in Falaise and Calais. Still, it seemed much smaller and shabbier than in her memory.
As with most merchant houses, her grandfather had conducted his trade on the ground floor. The kitchen was behind the house, and the family’s solar and bedchambers were above the shop.
Linnet paused on the threshold to the solar. She smiled, remembering the evenings she and Francois had spent playing chess or backgammon on the floor by the coal brazier.
“Anything you wish to keep in this room?” her clerk asked.
A footstool in the corner caught her eye. She swallowed against the lump in her throat as she recalled lifting her grandfather’s feet onto it at the end of a long day.
“Send that to my new house,” she said.
“The stool, m’lady?” The clerk looked up from the sheet of vellum he carried and raised his thin white eyebrows. “ ’Tis in very poor condition.”
At her nod, he put his nose to the sheet and scratched another note. She left him in the solar to step into the adjoining bedchamber.
Her throat closed, and she could not breathe.
Suddenly, she was eleven years old again, hiding under that heavy, dark oak bed with her brother. Hearts racing and holding hands, she and Francois had watched the men’s feet move about the bedchamber. Sweat broke out on her palms as she remembered the men’s voices, arguing over who would take what, and the silver end of a cane pounding on the floor.
She turned around so quickly that she jostled the old clerk and had to catch him by the arm. “Why don’t you rest here in the solar, Master Woodley, while I go up to the attic? ’Tis unlikely there is anything there worth keeping, and the stairs are steep.”
“Thank you kindly, m’lady,” he said, bobbing his head.
She left quickly, knowing he would not sit in her presence.
The walls and low ceiling closed in on her as she climbed the narrow steps to the two tiny rooms under the roof.
None of this was turning out quite as she’d expected. For five long years, she had worked diligently to achieve her goals. First, she married Louis to gain the funds and independence she needed to restart her grandfather’s business. Working through her brother, she had gradually built her trade in cloth.
Then she was ready. Her first attack was in their home city of Falaise, where they had retreated after losing everything in London and Calais. In half a year, she destroyed the trade of the “dear old friends” there who had taken advantage of her grandfather in his long illness.
As she had suspected, the men in Falaise were not the ones who had orchestrated the demise of her grandfather’s business. They were merely the vultures who picked at the remaining pieces left in Falaise.
From Falaise, she followed the trail of guilt to her grandfather’s former business partners in Calais. Those men were more sophisticated and clever. It took her four years to grow her business sufficiently to take them on one by one. Each of the Calais partners had taken a share of her grandfather’s trade and property. None of them, however, received the lion’s share.
When she finally had one of them in debt to her up to his ears, he confessed. A London merchant had been behind the scheme to ruin her grandfather’s business. The men in Calais never knew the London merchant’s name; all communication had been through intermediaries.
The queen’s letter asking Linnet to visit had come at an opportune time. The two of them had formed an unlikely friendship during the months Linnet spent in Paris before she escaped her father’s care. From the start, she felt protective toward the naive princess who came to the decadent court straight from the convent.
Linnet would do her best by her friend. But while she was here in London, she also intended to discover the identity of the shadowy figure who was her greatest enemy.
Finding him would be difficult, of course. London merchants resented foreign merchants and would protect one of their own. But she had the very finest Flemish cloth to be found in London. To get his hands on it, a London merchant might be willing to forget that she was both a foreigner and a woman.
Mychell was one of the men whose voices she heard from under the bed that awful day. But he was only a lackey, a bit player in the scheme. He was not clever enough to plan the demise of a business with interests from Normandy to Flanders. This house had been Mychell’s reward for the part he played. She should feel triumphant throwing him out.
But she did not.
Mychell did not know who had driven him into debt until yesterday, when they met to sign the deed. She swallowed back the bile in her throat as she recalled her meeting with the greasy-haired rodent.
“If you just give me a little time,” he had said, sweat breaking out on his brow, “I shall be able to pay.”