An Air of Treason

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It was the devil’s own job, it truly was, thought Hughie Tyndale. How the hell had he agreed to it? Why had he agreed to it?

The internal voice that never missed a chance to jeer at him was quick with an answer. So ye wouldna hang, it said, why else?

“I’ll hang if I manage it,” Hugh said back to the jeering voice.

The jeering voice said nothing because this was plainly true. If you got caught killing someone, you generally hanged. All the more if they found out why you were killing him, which they probably would if they used the boot or the pinniwinks or whatever it was the English authorities used when they urgently wanted to find out something. And killing a cousin of the Queen would most certainly draw their attention.

He’d tried before to get close to the man he was to kill and failed miserably. Several times. That time in St. Paul’s Walk by Duke Humfrey’s tomb. The place had been crowded despite the plague running through London. It was full of ugly men in worn jacks, while Carey the Courtier, the man he was supposed to kill, had wandered by dressed in many farms’ worth of velvet and pearls, deep in conversation only a yard away.

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