Read Chapter 10: The Chancellor's Letter

The last chime of Laudes had barely faded when Claude heard the boots.

Three men in the duke's livery rounded the corner of the Rue des Tanneurs, their halberds catching the grey morning light. Claude pressed himself into the recessed doorway of a shuttered chandler's shop, pulling the hood of his lay brother's robe low over his face. His heart hammered against his ribs as the patrol passed within an arm's length, their conversation drifting back to him in fragments.

"—searching every warehouse between the bridge and the mill..."

"—clerk, they say. Brown hair. Young."

Claude waited until their voices dissolved into the city's morning noise before he moved. That fire had been a mistake—necessary, but a mistake. The burned warehouse would draw scrutiny, and scrutiny would draw questions he could not answer.

He took the long way back to Saint-Jacques, through the fish market where the stink of herring covered his passage, past the cathedral's south porch where beggars knew him only as Brother Claude, the chancellor's quiet helper who asked too many questions. He was becoming known. That was dangerous.

In his cell, he knelt before the small crucifix as if in prayer, but his hands worked beneath his robe, pulling out the folded report he had composed before dawn. The wax tablet lay beneath his pallet, pressed against the floorboards. He had not looked at it since the night Marguerite left him in the candle maker's shop. He did not look at it now.

He wrote quickly.

*To His Excellency Nicolas Rolin, Chancellor of Burgundy.*

*The network in Compiègne is more vast than first believed. I have identified the principal channels of communication: tapestries woven with coded patterns, delivered to the town's most prominent households. I have obtained a fragment and have decoded sufficient portions to confirm the following:*

He paused, the quill hovering.

He could write it now. One sentence, and the chancellor's men would be at the hospital by noon. His sister's neck would stretch from the gibbet before the week's end. The duke would reward him, promote him, give him a clerkship that would make their father's name ring proud across Burgundy.

*The network is directed by a figure known only as the Spider. I have reason to believe this figure maintains contact with the French command at Chinon through intermediaries operating under religious guise.*

That was true. She did. And it did not name her.

He wrote on:

*I have cultivated a source within the network—a double agent of considerable reliability—who has provided intelligence on French supply routes and troop movements currently in my possession. This source has also alerted me to the presence of additional operatives whose identities I am working to confirm. I request patience. The full harvest requires a few more days.*

He did not report Étienne Vaux's death. He did not report the warehouse. He did not report the two men who had seen his face and would know him if they saw him again. He did not report that he had held the Spider in his arms and she had asked him to betray everything he had sworn to protect.

He sanded the page and pressed his seal into the warm wax. The letter would go to the hospital's courier, who rode for Dijon each morning with the prior's correspondence. By day's end it would be in Rolin's hands.

The armoire in the corner of his cell held his meager possessions: two spare robes, a worn psalter, the cloak he had worn from Noyon. He moved the psalter aside and drew out the letter he had taken from the Armagnac leader's cache—the one he had told the chancellor he burned.

He had lied. He was not sure why, except that something in the letter's language had caught at him. The hand was trained, courtly, with the distinctive loop of the Bourbon chancery.

He unfolded it now for the tenth time since the warehouse fire.

The letter was addressed to a captain at the garrison of Senlis, responding to a request for reinforcements. The bulk of it concerned troop dispositions and supply. But the final paragraph had been composed carefully, with words chosen to survive a casual reading while bearing another meaning to one who knew the code. He had puzzled out most of the patterns from Vaux's tapestry fragment. He had not finished with this.

*A meeting is proposed at Auberge du Lys, five days hence, at the hour of Nones. Our friends from the north will attend regarding the matter of the harvest. The weather favors an early reaping.*

Harvest. Meeting. He frowned at the words. The date was too specific, the mention of northern friends too deliberate. The Auberge du Lys lay on the frontier, neutral ground. And the duke—

The duke was expected to ride toward Picardy within the week, to pursue the truce negotiations that would end the Armagnac raids on Burgundian trading towns. If the "harvest" referred to something other than grain—

Claude folded the letter carefully and slid it beneath his pallet, beside the wax tablet. He had intended to burn it. He told himself the residue of code patterns might still yield meaning if he could find the right key. He told himself a great many things.

A knock at his door made him start.

"Brother Claude?" The prior's voice, thin and querulous. "The courier is leaving. Did you not have a letter for Dijon?"

Claude composed his face before opening the door. "I do, Father. Forgive me—I was at prayer."

The prior's eyes flicked to the pallet, to the slight disturbance at its edge, and away again. He was not a suspicious man. Claude counted on that.

He handed over the report to Rolin, watched the courier saddle his horse in the courtyard, and stood a while at the window as the rider's form shrank along the Dijon road.

The report would satisfy Rolin for a week, perhaps two. It named no names. It described a network vast and deep—true—and a double agent reliable—false, but he could make it true if he had time. And time was what he needed. Time to finish decoding the letter. Time to understand what the Armagnacs planned. Time to decide what he would do when he did.

He reached beneath his pallet and drew out the letter again. The candle guttered as he leaned close.

*Aubert, the glass merchant.*

The name surfaced from the text like a fish rising to a fly. Glass merchant. The duke had granted a monopoly on window glass to a merchant of Amiens, who was known to supply the court's own glaziers.

Claude's blood went cold.

He was still sitting with the letter in his hands when the evening bell rang for Vespers, and he had not moved when the candle burned down to a stub and the wax tablet glimmered faintly in the dark beneath his bed.