“To visit Mag Tunk at the alley’s end, by the river, My Lord,” she replied, with more respect than she had been wont to accord him.
“Then, I will accompany you part way, my friend, and, perchance, you can give me a hand with some packages I left behind me in the skiff I have moored there.”
And so the two walked together through the dark alley to the end of the rickety, dismantled dock; the one thinking of the vast reward the King would lavish upon her for the information she felt sure she alone could give; the other feeling beneath his mantle for the hilt of a long dagger which nestled there.
As they reached the water’s edge, De Vac was walking with his right shoulder behind his companion’s left, in his hand was gripped the keen blade and, as the woman halted on the dock, the point that hovered just below her left shoulder-blade plunged, soundless, into her heart at the same instant that De Vac’s left hand swung up and grasped her throat in a grip of steel.
There was no sound, barely a struggle of the convulsively stiffening old muscles, and then, with a push from De Vac, the body lunged forward into the Thames, where a dull splash marked the end of the last hope that Prince Richard might be rescued from the clutches of his Nemesis.
CHAPTER V
For three years following the disappearance of Prince Richard, a bent old woman lived in the heart of London within a stone’s throw of the King’s palace. In a small back room she lived, high up in the attic of an old building, and with her was a little boy who never went abroad alone, nor by day. And upon his left breast was a strange mark which resembled a lily. When the bent old woman was safely in her attic room, with bolted door behind her, she was wont to straighten up, and discard her dingy mantle for more comfortable and becoming doublet and hose.
For years, she worked assiduously with the little boy’s education. There were three subjects in her curriculum; French, swordsmanship and hatred of all things English, especially the reigning house of England.
The old woman had had made a tiny foil and had commenced teaching the little boy the art of fence when he was but three years old.
“You will be the greatest swordsman in the world when you are twenty, my son,” she was wont to say, “and then you shall go out and kill many Englishmen. Your name shall be hated and cursed the length and breadth of England, and when you finally stand with the halter about your neck, aha, then will I speak. Then shall they know.”