Page 56 of The Queen’s Witch

“Your name?” Crekett demanded.

“Sarah Lond.”

“The abbess says you are a healer.”

“A rough one, sir. My father was an apothecary and taught me simple tisanes with herbs and roots.”

“Your father, you say. Where do you come from? Your accent is East Anglian.”

“Yes, sir. Bishop’s Lynn.”

“How does the daughter of a Bishop’s Lynn apothecary come to live at an abbey in Berkshire?”

“A nun, Sister Margaret, was much afflicted with age and illness. She was distant kin, and I was brought here to nurse her. She died last year. I stayed, having nowhere else to go.”

“You are not married?”

“I was, sir. He died of the Sweat in 1528.” A woman who had never married was automatically suspect as a witch.

“Hhhhmmmm. Are you a loyal subject of His Majesty King Henry?”

“I am, sir.”

“When the time comes to swear on the Holy Bible, will you do so?”

“Yes, sir.”

He seemed not only perfunctory but bored. Then he poleaxed me.

“What do you know of the birth of the abbess’s bastard son?”

“I . . . Roger?”

“There is more than one?”

“No, of course not. I know nothing of his birth, sir. I have been here only a few years.”

“But you know that he exists. You have seen him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And who is his father?”

“I have no idea.”

He snapped his fingers for more ale, and the other man poured it into his cup from the abbey’s best pitcher. “You have heard no rumors?”

“No, sir.”

“But you know that this house has been the scene of immorality, to produce a bastard. What other immorality have you seen here?”

“None, sir.”

“You would swear to that?”

“Yes. I would.”

“Even knowing that to lie under the king’s oath is to deserve death?”