for their money. Tongues grow slack when bellies are empty, and the price on the girl's head as a double murderer will weigh heavier than a crown. There are those unscrupulous rogues who could find themselves sorely tempted, Master Raffe, and we wouldn't want to put temptation in their way, now, would we?'
Raffe was about to open his mouth to reply when Ma stopped him with a wave of her hand.
'Before you make up your mind, let's ask my angel, shall we?'
She reached for a small wooden box on the table. Ma's tastes usually ran to objects that were jewelled and elaborately carved, but this box was plain save for the carving of a single eye framed by a triangle in the centre. The eye had been inlaid with ivory, with a glistening pupil of blackest jet.
Ma gently slipped the hood from the sparrowhawk's head, and the bird shook out its feathers, staring around the room, its bright yellow eyes searching for something. With the bird's hooked beak inches from his face, and his finger still smarting, Raffe could not help but slide his chair back a little, and Ma laughed.
'She'll not harm you, unless you touch her.'
Ma flicked open the box and pulled out a handful of strips of parchment which she fanned out in her hand. Then she spread the other hand, the heavy rings flashing in front of the bird.
'Tell me, Master Raffe, what can all men feel, but none can hold? What is so strong it can destroy a forest with a single blow and yet is small enough to creep through the smallest chink?'
'The wind, of course,' Raffe said more sharply than he meant to, because he couldn't anticipate what she was going to do. 'Every child knows that riddle.'
'But how easily we forget what we learned as children, my darling. As you say, it is the wind, and it is the wind which carries this bird to the heavens. Every word men utter of truth and lies, knowledge and ignorance is borne on the wind, but only a creature of the wind may catch them.'
She held out the fan of strips towards the bird. Rapidly it leaned forward and pulled one, two, three strips from her hand and dropped them on the table as if it was plucking feathers from its prey. Ma laid the strips in a neat row, then reached for something in the shadows. It was a tiny wicker cage. She opened the door wide.
If the skylark had only stayed in its cage, it would have been safe, it would have lived. Whether the foolish creature didn't see the sparrowhawk, or whether it just made a wild, brave dash for freedom, thinking, if indeed it thought at all, that soaring upwards would save it, who can tell? But the skylark didn't even reach the topmost beam in the room. Raffe felt the hawk's wingtip brush his face as it shot past him and heard it land with a thud on the floor, the tiny bird dead between its claws.
Ma didn't even turn her head to look, but stared instead at the symbols on the three strips of parchment the bird had pulled from her hand.
'The wind carries treachery, Master Raffaele. But whether you are the betrayer or the betrayed, you alone know.'
Raffe rose, flinging the chair back. He strode from the room and thundered down the stairs. He didn't know what he had hoped to achieve in that chamber or what he had thought he would learn. He had meant to tell Ma not to admit Hugh again, but he knew that even had he begged her on bended knee she would do precisely what it pleased her to do. How much did Ma know about the message from France? Was that demonstration with the bird meant as a threat not to remove Elena or a warning of something else?
Without even thinking what he was doing, he hurried across the courtyard to the room where the boys entertained. It was deserted, as he expected it to be, since the noon bell had not yet sounded from the churches in the city.
He made his way to the back of the room and found the low doorway. He peered at it, looking for a latch, but the thick boards were smooth. It had been five years or more since he'd last forced himself to come here. How had Ma opened the door then? Surely there had been a latch? He tried to visualize