The Awful Secret Read Online Free PDF

biggest in England, to look after alone. It was sometimes physically impossible for him to travel the long distances to cover all of his multifarious duties, but until he had broken his leg at the New Year, he had managed to get to almost every suspected homicide and serious assault, as well as to most hangings and sanctuary-seekers.
    He reached Martin’s Lane and slowly dismounted, leaving Odin in the farrier’s care. His left leg pained him as he walked across to his house, reminding him that he was not yet back to normal. Pushing open the street door of blackened oak, he went into the vestibule where he hung up his grey cloak and pulled off his riding boots. His old hound Brutus ambled through the covered passage to the back yard, where in one of the servants’ huts Mary had her kitchen and her bed. The maid bustled after the dog, who nuzzled de Wolfe in greeting. Wiping her hands on her apron, she announced that dinner was ready. ‘And she’s back,’ Mary added, with a jerk of her head towards the inner door.
    A handsome woman in her twenties, Mary covertly sided with John against the grim Matilda and her acidulous French maid Lucille. In the past, he had shared her mattress on more than one occasion, but lately she had resisted him: Lucille was getting suspicious and Mary valued her job even more than the pleasure provided by the lusty coroner. ‘Go in and make your peace,’ she suggested. ‘She’ll probably have guessed where you’ve been this morning.’
    As she vanished down the passageway, de Wolfe sighed and lifted the latch on the inner door to his hall. The house in Martin’s Lane was a tall, narrow structure of wood, with a shingled roof. It consisted almost entirely of one high room, but with a solar added at the back of the upper part of the hall, reached by an outside stairway from the backyard. The solar was both their bedroom and Matilda’s retreat, where she spent her hours when not at prayer or slumber in some indifferent needlework.
    At the back of the hall, most of the wall was taken up by a huge stone fireplace, with the tapering cone of the chimney rising above it to the rafters. Two settles and a couple of cowled chairs stood in a half-circle around the hearth, and down the centre of the gloomy room a long oak refectory table took up much of the space. The heavy boards of the walls were hung with sombre tapestries that helped to keep the draughts at bay. The floor was slabbed in stone, another modern innovation of Matilda, who scorned the usual rushes or straw strewn on beaten earth.
    When he entered, his wife was sitting at the far end of the table, waiting for her meal. Though there were benches along each side of the table, at each end was a heavy upright chair, used by de Wolfe and Matilda almost consciously for the purpose of staying as far apart as possible. He closed the door behind him and limped towards her.
    Matilda lifted her head to glare at him, her square pug face devoid of any welcome. ‘You’ve been overdoing it again, I suppose! I told you that it’s too soon to be riding that great beast of a horse. God knows where you’ve been on it, but I suppose I can guess.’
    The coroner threw his stick on to the table with a clatter and stared down at her. ‘I’ve been up to Rougemont to see your damned brother, if you must know! I need a new chamber that’s not almost on the roof of the cursed gatehouse, and all he would give me was a closet the size of our privy.’
    He stamped to the fire and threw on a couple of logs from the stack, as Brutus sidled in behind him and lay down to bask in the warmth. The mention of the sheriff imposed an ominous silence upon them: she had never mentioned her brother’s name since she had had to plead with her husband not to reveal him as a would-be rebel.
    De Wolfe stood warming himself by the rising flames and looked across at the back view of his sullen wife. Though never pretty, sixteen years ago when his father had arranged their