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around. He cursed himself for not looking last night.
    Tools of the trade hung on pegs above worktables. But the numerous armor pieces—greaves, breastplates, poleyns, cuisses—were strewn about. Such careful armorer’s art, now dented and scratched. A chunk of unfinished mail hung from a splintered table edge, and even the ashes from the forge were spilled out and made a gray matting over the floor. The window overlooking the Thames still had its shutters wide open and Crispin examined the floor up to it. In the widely scattered ash, two long streaks showed the floor beneath. The streaks climbed the wall toward the window and then widened to an uneven gray swipe across the sill.
    He looked to the side and the ash was a hatching of swirls in all directions, suggesting a struggle. Darker spots mixed with it here and there. More blood. In other spots, gray footprints scattered and dispersed. He crouched and examined and swore that there were two sets of footprints, possibly more. Some were smaller than the others. A woman’s? Rising, Crispin rounded a table and found the ash had collected in neat ninety-degree angles, leaving a clean spot in the midst of it.
    Striding to the window, he looked out. The Thames, just catching the morning sun through the clouds and casting it in shades of gold and green, churned onward below. Jack came up beside him and looked over the sill.
    “That’s a long way down,” he said.
    “Indeed,” said Crispin.
    “Did all this happen this morning?” asked Jack, gesturing all around him. He tilted his head toward the woman.
    She shook her head. “I do not know. My father and I were out most of the evening. We hadn’t yet returned when the night bell was rung. Roger often worked late, and he frequently clattered and made loud noises in his work. But last night I lay next door without a wink of sleep. I would know if there had been a sound this morning.”
    “Are you convinced now, damosel?”
    She looked around. “It proves nothing. He was an untidy man. Only God can know what transpired here.”
    “Master,” said Jack, turning to Crispin. “She’s right. How can we know?”
    Crispin fit his thumbs in his belt. “What do you observe in the room, Jack?”
    His apprentice swiveled his head again and took in the scene. His eyes followed the same view, the same swirl of ash, the two long streaks across the floor and up to the window.
    He pointed to the floor before the forge. “Looks like a fight here.”
    “Yes. And blood.”
    “Oh aye. I see it now, mixed with the ash. It’s darker in color. Not too much, though.”
    “No. Not there, at any rate. Perhaps a bloodied nose. What else?”
    “The struggling stopped, for these are the marks of two feet or heels dragged to the window.” He looked up at Crispin for confirmation.
    “Very good, Jack. And the sill. See how the ash was stirred up enough to leave traces of something large going over.”
    “Aye, I do. That’s horrible, sir.”
    “What does this tell you, then?”
    “It tells me that whatever happened here, a man did not go willingly out that window.”

 
    4
    ANABEL WINCED. HER FACE, pale and beautiful, betrayed the emotion she seemed so keen to hide. “You have proved nothing to me,” she said stonily.
    Stubborn woman. Why does she insist? “You said you came this morning and found it thus?”
    She nodded.
    “Why did you not venture here last night?”
    “What would be the point? Roger was dead.”
    A thin veneer of fine ash lay on the worktable nearest him and he ran a finger over it. “Was the door locked?”
    “No.”
    “No?”
    “As I said,” she answered with agitation.
    “Did you touch anything?”
    “No.”
    He stared at her a long time before speaking to Jack, though he did not turn his gaze from hers. “Jack, is anything missing from this room?”
    “Sir, how is a body to know? I knew him not and there’s all this chaos strewn about.”
    “Observe, Jack.”
    Jack screwed up his face and looked