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had to accomplish my first assignment in the time allotted. Most of the discarded clothing needed a good soaking in vinegar to remove whatever detritus clung to it, yet seeing as I was no laundress I hid the nasty stuff from view and then went in search of water, finding an urn at the end of the passage.
    I returned and ordered Guilford to strip. The water ran brown off his flaccid skin, the raw bites on his thighs and arms indicating he shared his bed with mites and fleas. He stood scowling, naked and shivering, cleaner than he’d probably been since he first arrived at court.
    Unearthing a relatively unstained chemise, hose, doublet, and damask sleeves from the clothing press, I extended these to him. “Shall I help my lord dress?”
    He ripped the clothes from my hands. Leaving him to wrestle with his garments, I went to my saddlebag and removed my one extra pair of hose, new gray wool doublet, and good shoes.
    As I held these, I had an unbidden memory of Mistress Alice smoothing animal fat into the leather, “to make them shine like stars,” she’d said winking. She had brought me the shoes from one of her annual trips to the Stratford Fair. Two sizes too large at the time, to accommodate a still-growing boy, I’d proudly sloshed around in them, until one dark day months after her death, I tried them on and found they fit. Before I’d left Dudley Castle, I’d rubbed fat into the leather, as she would have. I’d taken it from the same jar, with the same wooden spoon.…
    My throat knotted. While I had lived in the castle I could pretend she was still with me, a benevolent unseen presence. The mornings spent in the kitchen that were her domain, the fields where I’d ridden Cinnabar in the afternoon, the turret library where I’d read the Dudleys’ forgotten books: It always felt as if she were about to come upon me at any moment, remonstrating that it was time I eat something.
    But here, she was as far away as if I’d set sail for the New World. For the first time in my life, I had the post and means to build a better future, and I was skittish as a babe at a baptism.
    Recalling this favorite saying of hers, I felt a surge of confidence. She had always said I could do anything I set my mind to. Out of respect for her memory, I must do more than survive. I must thrive. After all, who knew what my future held? Ludicrous as it might seem at this moment, it wasn’t inconceivable that one day I could earn my freedom from servitude. As Cecil had remarked, even foundlings could rise high in our new England.
    I slipped off my soiled clothes, careful to keep my back to Guilford as I washed with the last of the water and quickly dressed. When I turned about, I found Guilford entangled in his doublet, shirt askew, and crumpled hose about his knees.
    Without needing to be told, I went to assist him.
    The Tudor Secret

Chapter Four
    Though Guilford had been at court for over three years, presumably engaged in more than the satiation of his vices, he got us lost within a matter of seconds. I imagined being discovered centuries later, two skeletons with my hands locked about his throat, and took it upon myself to ask directions. With the aid of a gold coin secured from a grumbling Guilford, a page brought us to the hall’s south entrance, where the duke’s sons waited in their ostentatious finery. Only the eldest, Jack, was absent.
    “Finally,” declared Ambrose Dudley, the second eldest. “We’d begun to think Brendan had hog-tied you to the bed to get you dressed.”
    Guilford curled his lip. “Not bloody likely.”
    The brothers laughed. I noticed Robert’s laughter didn’t reach his eyes, which kept shifting to the hall, as though in anticipation of something.
    Henry Dudley, the shortest and least comely of the brothers, and therefore the meanest tempered, clapped my shoulder as if we were the best of friends. I was pleased to discover that I now stood a head taller than he.
    “How fare you, orphan?” he jibed.