Dad Hears My Thoughts novel · Chapter 25 of 32

Chapter 25: The Physician

I sat the physician down on my one good stool and gave him the widow's tea.

He held the cup in both hands and didn't drink it.

"She'll be standing near you at the masque, Mistress Harcourt," he said. "She'll make sure of it."

"And then?"

"And then she cries out and falls. I come running, because I'm paid to. I tell the Queen she's lost a son."

He looked at the floor.

"And I tell the Queen it was your hand on her arm that did it."

The Duke was still on the flour sack. He'd gone very quiet.

"You took her money," he said.

"Every crown, Your Grace. If I'd refused, she'd have found another man."

He set the cup down on my counter.

"I've delivered half the babies at court. I've never delivered a cushion."

Tristram laughed once, short, from the doorway.

"Why come to us?" I said. "You don't know me."

"I watched you drink a cup you thought might stop your heart." He pushed his spectacles up.

"I've known a great many ladies. Not one of them would have done that for an old man's tea."

Tuppence crawled to his boot and pulled herself up on it.

She looked into his face for a long moment.

Spectacle man is gold, she said. Plain gold. Like bread.

Tristram and I looked at each other over her head.

"She likes you," I said.

"She's chewing my bootlace."

"That's how you can tell."

The Duke got up off the sack in three tries, waving off Tristram's hand.

"Then it's done at the masque," the old man said. "All of it. In front of every one of them."

"The King will hang me the moment the music starts," Tristram said. "There'll be no stone on the cushion."

"Yes," said the Duke. "And the Queen's guard will take you."

"The captain of the Queen's guard carried you off a field once, if you remember. You'd taken a lance in the leg."

"I remember he complained the whole way."

"He still complains. He'll take you out of that ballroom with the whole court watching. And then he'll stand you behind the gallery curtain."

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