“Let him soak it and bandage it, Lucan,” Padraig reasoned. “He’s nae cleaver in his hand now, doos he?”
“Thank you, Master Boyd,” the priest said stiffly, but he didn’t quite meet his eye.
“I’ll help you keep Sir Lucan under control,” Padraig said easily. “If, while you tend him, you tell me why you think my da’s pin belongs to you.”
Now Kettering did turn his eyes to Padraig’s.
But it was Lucan who came to the priest’s rescue, turning his head to regard Padraig. “Did Tommy tell you how he came to be in possession of the pin?”
Padraig shook his head. “Nay. Only that it and the man who’d given it to him had once saved his life.”
Kettering’s temper was just barely in check; Padraig could see it by the color returning to his cheeks. The priest went to the hearth to dip ladlesful of steaming water into a metal dish. When he returned to the bedside he seemed to be under a bit more restraint.
“Thomas Annesley wasn’t given it. He stole it.”
Padraig opened his mouth to argue that his father was no thief, but Lucan again inserted himself in the argument.
“I don’t think he stole it,” Lucan said quietly as Kettering helped him into a seated position on the side of the bed. “Thomas Annesley told me the tale of the night he ran from Darlyrede House. The night he met your father, Kettering.”
Padraig felt his head draw back. “Your father was also at Darlyrede?”
“No,” the priest said in a clipped voice. He set the pan on the floor and added cooler water from a ewer near the bed. “He was only passing on the road with his friend, Blake, that night.”
“Yes, Blake,” Lucan agreed. He hissed for a moment as Kettering guided his foot into the water. “Thomas claimed he was direly wounded in his escape from Darlyrede, and that your father stopped on the road to help him. Thomas’s injuries were so severe that your father gave him his hat pin upon which to bite so that he could seat Thomas on his own horse.”
Kettering looked into Lucan’s face for a solemn moment. “Yes,” he agreed quietly. “That is something he would have done, even not knowing who Thomas Annesley was.”
“But when Thomas heard that the two men unwittingly planned to return him to the very place from which he was so desperate to escape, he became more frightened, and he used the pin to spur the horse onward, thwarting their good intentions to help him.”
“Ah-ah,” Kettering said, his thoughtful expression fleeing before the frown that cascaded over his feature. “Even was the story you were told true up until that point, Sir Lucan, you—or Thomas Annesley—have left out vital information.” Kettering looked directly at Padraig now.
“My father and his friend were found dead on the road only a half mile from Darlyrede House the next morning. Thomas Annesley had robbed them both of their horses and their possessions—the pin, Blake’s prayer book, what little coin they carried—and then he killed them before escaping.”
Padraig felt his stomach in his throat. Yet another crime of which Padraig’s father was accused that Lucan had concealed the details of. He was shaking on the inside now. It made sense why Kettering had asked about the prayer book in the corridor when Cletus died, and Padraig couldn’t help but remember all the times Tommy had prayed over their meals, prayed over their flock, or prayed over Padraig’s own mother as she lay dying.
As if Kettering had read his thoughts, he asked quietly, “Do you have the book, Master Boyd?”
“I already told you—nay,” Padraig said in a choked voice. “Da never had one that I saw in all the years of my life. I swear to you.”
“It’s simply not possible that Thomas Annesley killed those men on the Darlyrede Road,” Lucan interjected. “By the time he’d gained Scotland, he was nearly dead himself. He’d been shot and nearly bled to death.” Lucan paused a moment, letting the idea of that settle about the room like the first smoke of a new fire, waiting for the scent and the sting of it to be realized, accepted.
Padraig understood right away. “How could an unarmed man so gravely injured overpower, rob, and then kill two grown men outfitted for travel?”
Lucan nodded. “Precisely.”
“Then who did?” Kettering demanded.
Lucan paused for a long, long moment, and then simply shook his head. “I cannot say for certain. I’m sorry.”
Kettering walked toward Padraig’s cot and sat down at the foot of it with a sigh. The priest stared at his hands, bloodied from his work on Lucan’s foot. He lifted the towel lying across his lap and wiped at his stained fingers absently.
“It was a hat pin,” Kettering said. “At least, that’s what it became. It had originally been a shard of a battle shield from Agincourt, where my father had been a soldier when he was little more than a boy himself.” The priest paused, shook his head. “The English never should have won. The fighting was so fierce, they were so outnumbered. My father had been wounded and thrown to the field—he said he could see nothing for the hooves and mud and bodies. He knew he was going to die. He crawled beneath the long battle shield of a fallen French soldier, and he prayed without ceasing through the night, begging God to spare him.”
Kettering looked up toward the end of the room where the wall met the ceiling, but Padraig didn’t think he was seeing anything in the chamber. “When the fighting was over and he finally crawled from beneath that shield, it was in pieces. Splintered, my father said, by the sheer number of arrows that had pierced it, the horses that had trampled him. He took a splinter of the shield and vowed there, on that field, that he would
