by Jeane Westin
Praise for the Novels
of Jeane Westin
His Last Letter
“[B]eautiful scenes and a fast-moving yet easy to follow story line…it is a testament to Westin’s writing that when we reach the end of this tale, we’ve become so wrapped in the story and the characters that we can feel Elizabeth’s pain almost as keenly as she does. His Last Letter is guaranteed to be a pleasure for anyone who has even a passing interest in history or historical figures.”
—Fiction Addict
“This realistic, well-researched portrait of Elizabeth answers questions about her lifelong friendship with Dudley—her “Sweet Robin” and beloved “eye.” Westin walks a fine line, depicting the sweetness and sadness of Elizabeth’s middle years, when political turmoil supersedes personal needs. Her lively storytelling and remarkably real characters make for compelling reading.”
—Romantic Times
“Engaging, heartfelt, and touching.”
—Passages to the Past
“I thoroughly enjoyed this novel…. This book will have you smiling and crying; it grabs you, draws you in, and tears at your heartstrings. It is a joy to read and I now want to repeat the experience and read it all over again!”
—The Anne Boleyn Files
“With hundreds of books already written about Elizabeth’s life, it’s a challenge for any author to come up with something new. But Jeane Westin does it with her novel about Elizabeth’s affair with Robert Dudley.”
—am New York
“A captivating and powerful love story set against the backdrop of a perilous time in Elizabeth’s reign. Westin brings Elizabeth and Dudley’s tempestuous relationship vividly to life…. I cannot recommend this book highly enough!”
—On the Tudor Trail
The Virgin’s Daughters
“This is a Tudor novel not to be missed…well told and well researched…. What might have been merely two love stories truly became history brought to life. Highly recommended.”
—Historical Novels Review (Editor’s Choice)
“Takes the reader on a poignant journey into the hearts and minds of three dynamic Elizabethan women, including the queen herself…a compelling, unforgettable historical novel.”
—Karen Harper, author of Mistress of Mourning
“Two well-crafted love stories set against the backdrop of the court of Elizabeth the First create high drama and at the same time paint an unforgettable portrait of the last Tudor monarch.”
—Kate Emerson, author of At the King’s Pleasure
“Vivid characters and compelling dialogue illuminate the Elizabethan court, where danger lurks in the shadows, love can be treason, and every step could be the last. You’ll find yourself looking over your shoulder in this engrossing read.”
—Sandra Worth, author of The King’s Daughter
“Westin has brought the Elizabethan court vividly to life. Her heroines walk a delicious knife edge between love and disaster. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Anne Gracie, author of Bride by Mistake
“Westin knows her history, and the inner workings of her characters’ minds as well. She presents Elizabeth I through the eyes of two of her ladies-in-waiting. Rich, colorful details of court life, captivating characters with suppressed sexuality, scandal, and intrigue thrust the reader into the era in this top-notch novel.”
—Romantic Times (4½ stars)
“[A] fantastic story…here is a unique approach to showing us more of Queen Elizabeth. I loved the way the author weaves two stories into this look at the queen—both distinctly separate, yet still connected…utterly fascinating and a must for everyone to read.”
—The Romance Reviews
OTHER NOVELS BY JEANE WESTIN
His Last Letter
The Virgin’s Daughters
The
SPYMASTER’S
DAUGHTER
JEANE WESTIN
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
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First published by New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, August 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © Jeane Westin, 2012
Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2012
Excerpt from His Last Letter copyright © Jeane Westin, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Westin, Jeane Eddy.
The spymaster’s daughter / Jeane Westin.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-59439-1
1. Courts and courtiers—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History—Elizabeth, 1558–1603—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.E89S69 2012
813’.54—dc23 2012013110
Set in Adobe Garamond
Designed by Ginger Legato
Printed in the United States of America
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
To my husband, Gene, and my daughter, Cara.
In the end family is everything.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always I acknowledge with gratitude the help of Shirley Parenteau as first reader. Her encouragement and friendship are invaluable and I can’t imagine being without them. And with thanks to Georgia Bockoven, novelist and renowned wildlife photographer, who brings me a dose of reality when I’m too high and lifts me up when I’m going in the wrong direction.
And to Lady Ashley Lucas, computer whiz, who periodically untangles my program problems on a machine that continues to mystify me after so many years.
My sincere thanks to all the antique book dealers in the U.S. and U.K. who collect and make available old books and manuscripts, without which novels like this one would be far more difficult and much less fun.
Lastly, to my ever-encouraging agent, Danielle Egan-M
iller. And to the very best editor an author could have, Ellen Edwards—her fame is deserved.
The
SPYMASTER’S
DAUGHTER
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Author’s Note
About the Author
Readers Guide
His Last Letter
CHAPTER ONE
“…the heav’n of Stella’s face.”
—Astrophel and Stella, Sir Philip Sidney
Lammas Day, August 2
In the Year of Our Lord 1585
BARN ELMS, SURREY
At the sound of rapid hoofbeats drawing closer, Frances, Lady Sidney, lifted her head from a forbidden cipher book. She pushed away all the paper on her writing table that she’d used to break the hidden meanings of the Steganographia and ran to her bedchamber window. On the road from Mortlake, dust swirled behind a royal post rider bringing mail for her father, the queen’s spymaster. And perhaps for her husband, Philip.
It was the possibility of Philip’s mail that urged her toward her bedchamber door. He was hiding something. She suspected the truth and had set herself to discover it no matter what the hurt. Better a short pain than a long, dark ignorance. She paused only long enough to throw her shawl over the books she had taken without permission from her father’s library, books that, according to him, should never interest a lady wife.
Hurrying into the corridor above the great hall, Frances heard her aunt Jennet’s angry cry from below. “Frances, your lord husband requires your presence for dinner!”
Her old, foolish hope was smothered. Philip required. He no longer desired her presence anywhere. She doubted he ever had.
Frances sank back into the shadows of the corridor outside her bedchamber. If she meant to intercept the royal post rider, she must hug the shadows until she could get away. “Anon, Aunt, I am now to the privy in some urgency,” Frances called, her fingers crossed against Satan’s hearing the lie. Not even her aunt Jennet could deny her the privy’s comfort. And Frances knew that her aunt, who had been her nurse when she’d been young, was not so angry as she sounded, merely given to the reproachful manner that afflicted many a graying woman, unmarried and with no prospects but the continued sufferance of her powerful family.
Casting aside all other thoughts but the post, Frances sped down the back servants’ stairs toward the sound of horse’s hooves on the graveled carriageway approaching Barn Elms. She did regret deceiving Jennet—she knew the pain of deceit, being deceived herself by her own husband. Did one deceit justify another? The fleeting question slowed her steps for a moment, but she pushed through concern for her soul and ran on down the steep servants’ stairs.
Philip had once written in his famous sonnet sequence:
I swear by her I love and lack, that I
Was not in fault, who bend thy dazzling race
Only unto the heav’n of Stella’s face
Counting but dust what in the way did lie.
That particular verse haunted Frances…Stella’s face. Frances knew that she was not Stella, nor ever would be. Where Philip’s real inspiration was petite, blond, with o’erflowing breasts, Frances admitted to being tall, raven-haired, and small in the chest. Though some had called her a beauty, she always wondered whether their opinion was shaped by the desire to earn the favor of her father, the queen’s spymaster.
Yet she refused to become the unknowing, cuckolded wife! Better to know and learn not to care.
Dashing through the flesh pantry to the surprise of sweating cooks bent over their steaming pots, she held her breath against the strong scent of hung, aging hare brought down by her father and his hounds. She ran out the open door and on down the wide path. Before her the summer sun sparkled on gravel wet with morning rain, until tall yew hedges hid her from curious eyes. A bit breathless, she waved the post rider to a stop. “I am Lady Sidney come to take the post to my father, Sir Francis Walsingham…and, of course, to my husband, Sir Philip.”
“These are official from Whitehall Palace, my lady,” he said, bowing in the saddle but not reaching toward his post bag. “I am instructed to deliver them into the lord secretary’s hands.”
“As my father’s daughter, I am quite aware of that.” Her fingers still crossed, she made her voice as arrogant as the man would expect, though arrogance was an attitude new to her and as yet not easily come by. “Would you rather I called my father and husband from council on Her Majesty’s urgent business? Trust me, sir, you will receive no thanks for it.” She allowed herself a half smile. “Yet, if you so command me…”
“My lady, I meant no command and humbly beg pardon,” the rider said, hastily drawing one packet and a single letter from his bag.
Frances nodded, saying no unnecessary word, as she was learning to do. She smiled as the post rider whipped his horse back toward London, kicking his mount’s flanks to speed it. She would yet make a good intelligencer for her father. A threat implied and a certain scorn were better than too many harsh words that could reveal less assurance.
Concealing the post under her tightly laced kirtle, she ran back, stopping at the privy, to turn her lie into partial truth, and raced up the back stairs to her chamber, throwing her father’s packet on her bed. The writing on the single letter addressed to her husband was flowing, familiar. She sniffed at the lavender scent and sat down at her writing table. This was the same scent that she had detected on Philip’s doublet after his last trip to London as a maid had taken it for brushing and airing, a mix of sweet lavender and the musk of a woman who gave her body fully and often to a man. Or, it was rumored, in the case of the Baroness Penelope Rich, to many men. Stella! The name seemed to have lost its haunting quality. Frances smiled at the thought.
Locking her door with a trembling key, Frances pulled one of the candles on her writing table close. She had never opened one of Philip’s letters, lifting a wax seal and replacing it undetected, though she’d developed the skill on sealed letters of her own making. But these past days some secret had been on Philip’s face and in his every quick glance away from her. She must not be caught unaware, only to dissolve in hot tears in front of all, to beg, to be disgraced by open pity. She was a Walsingham, and would never again expose her heart or suffer the amused sympathy she had already seen in the faces of Philip’s friends.
Her hand still trembling, she passed the baroness’s letter just far enough above the flame and exactly long enough to loosen the edges of the red wax seal. Frances frowned with concentration. Philip was still in love with Lady Penelope Rich, the Stella of his sonnets. She knew it, felt it with every beat of her heart, but needed only one clear proof that he was still deceiving her. All England knew that he had once been engaged to Penelope before she had rejected him for Lord Rich, a man of vast wealth. A year later, Philip had accepted Sir Walsingham’s offer to be his heir and take his young daughter, Frances, to wife.
She had hoped that he would write sonnets just for her. Instead, he had learned to be considerate, treating her with only slightly less distant affection than he gave his favorite hunter carrying him faithfully through the Barn Elms deer park.
She laughed, but stopped abruptly, unable to bear the harsh sound. It would be unseemly to be jealous of a horse.
During their first yea
r, she began to understand that Philip wanted a son of her body, but not her, nor her dreams of being the new Stella. Over that year and the next, her tears unshed, she had discarded her dream that Philip Sidney, famous throughout England as the symbol of a young man’s intense love, would love her as deeply.
Frances was learning to forbid woe to assail her. Sadness must be banished from her heart or she would soon have the same tight-lipped face as Jennet, showing the world she was aging and unloved. She, a Walsingham, the daughter of one of the most powerful men in the realm, would not invite such pitiable feelings.
Philip was kind to her and furtive enough to keep her from the open humiliation visited upon other wives. She would not complain, but neither would she continue yearning for his love. She must rid herself of all such foolish hope. Her husband had most of what he wanted from her, having become her father’s heir, though not yet achieving a son of his name. And someday, by the rood, she might, nay, must have what she desired. Someday she would prove her worth to her father and be named an intelligencer, helping him to keep England safe.
She almost laughed at herself for her girlish fancies, yet what was youth for, if not wonderful dreams. Since she was denied a soldier’s sword, she would have another ambition worthy of a Walsingham.
Though she had eagerly given Philip her body and love, he had given her what he could, and more than that she no longer expected…or wanted. She clenched one hand with the other and knew her girlish dreams of love’s complete contentment were gone, and in their place had come a dream of achieving her father’s ambition for a son to join his work. That dream now replaced everything.
Frances held the letter steady, shuffled through her cipher worksheets, and found the sharp penknife she used to trim candle wicks and quill nibs. She heated it just enough and slid it deftly under the softened wax seal. She paused to steady her hand. Was this wrong? Philip was not her enemy; he liked her well enough. Didn’t he come to her bed often?
