Maid of Deception

by Jennifer McGowan

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Festival of the Moon was not an ancient pagan rite, though it was made to look like one. No, it was merely an excuse for another of Elizabeth’s balls.

  For myself, I ordinarily did not mind the Queen’s penchant to spend what money she had in her coffers on revels and routs. I had enough clothing for anything Her Willfulness could foist upon us. But I knew Jane would sooner have her teeth cleaned than stand in the overstuffed Presence Chamber for hours on end, and Sophia was usually a quivering wreck at the idea of a public presentation. At least that had changed. Tonight Sophia would be in attendance, and even hoped to dance with her “betrothed,” should Lord Brighton appear as well.

  I put my hand to my head just thinking of the complexity of that trial. They should not remain betrothed. For all that it was inspired merely by a father’s need to protect his daughter, it still was not seemly for this charade to continue.

  “Beatrice, can you help with—oof!” Meg was turned around and almost tripping over the enormous court gown the Queen had chosen for this night. We were once more in our schoolroom chamber, and Meg’s disguise was masterful: a flame-red wig beset with jewels, the Queen’s favorite indigo-blue gown, and Meg’s skin powdered to porcelain perfection. As long as the girl could keep from sneezing, she would achieve the impossible. She would be Queen.

  The Festival of the Moon would begin in the deepest dark of late evening, with only a scatter of candles lit throughout the Great Hall. Rumors had been put out that Elizabeth would mingle among the guests in a deep blue gown, allowing any and all to bend her ear. Cecil and Walsingham had already made a great noise about how they needed to “protect” Her Majesty, and so they would follow around Elizabeth proper, who would indeed be wearing a dark blue gown.

  Except she wouldn’t be the only blue-garbed Elizabeth in the room. And in the darkness, no one would know precisely which Elizabeth they’d seen.

  After an hour of what would no doubt be a highly raucous interchange between the lords and ladies of the court, the “moon”—a great candelabra of white candles—would be lit by unseen hands and lifted to the sky. Then the real Gloriana, Queen of the Night, would return to the ball with a triumph of music, now miraculously dressed in a gown of pure white to bring the revel to a full burst of celebration. Meg, for her part, would leave the Presence Chamber as well, returning to the festivities as a simple maid once more.

  I hurried over to Meg and tossed a cape over her shoulders, but she was still bent over and endeavoring to remove her wig from the bodice’s lacings when Anna bit out a command. “Cecil,” she said to us, her voice low and urgent. “Be quick!”

  There was nothing for it. Meg stood frozen in the center of the room as Cecil bustled in in a flurry of black robes.

  “Sir William!” I protested. “Have a care. The Queen is not—”

  “What the deuce are you doing here and not in your chambers, with your own servants to dress you?” Cecil demanded as Meg hunched farther over and bit out a curse that sounded precisely like a peeved Elizabeth. “I cannot talk to you like that!”

  “Mayhap I could help you?” I asked as Anna rushed by me to take over my ministrations with the Queen’s wig and effectively urge Meg farther into the shadows. “What message can I give the Queen when she is fully dressed?”

  “This entire enterprise is folly,” gritted out Cecil, in a voice low enough for only me to hear. “Three days of celebrations—” He caught himself, as if remembering to whom he spoke, and he straightened. “Very well,” he said, raising his voice loud enough to be heard across the room. “Your Grace, remember that you must remain with me or your guards at all times tonight prior to returning to your chambers to change for your revelation.” He said this last word without any sneering inflection at all, and I had to admire the man. I don’t think I could have managed it. “Although there will be no opportunity during the ball itself for us to speak, I can join you in your chambers after you have left the event and provide you with the update that you requested.”

  “Oh, Your Grace,” Anna said, a little too loudly. “We’ll need to undo the back of your gown to get it straight.”

  Cecil stiffened. “I will speak with you this evening, Your Grace” he said again. Then he turned on his heel and fled the room.

  “Master stroke,” I said, turning back to Anna and Meg, the latter of whom was looking a little too red-cheeked for good health. “Are you well, Meg?”

  “I was hanging upside down that whole time!” Meg gasped. “You try it, and tell me how it feels!”

  We finished our preparations and cloaked Meg in a hooded robe of ermine, then waited for the guards to arrive. I thought about the guards that surrounded Elizabeth at every turn. Were they protecting her—or entrapping her? It was a question I wasn’t sure I wanted answered.

  I trailed the “Queen’s” procession with Anna at my side, and wondered at her stillness. Normally she would be all abuzz with the excitement of another ball, but perhaps she too was tiring of the eternal round of forced merriment.

  Anna spoke before I could ask her what was amiss. “I’m going to move off on my own this night,” she said. “Will the rest of you be sufficient to make sure Meg comes to no harm?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Jane is her watch, in any event. That girl can see clearly in the dead of night. I’m just to be on the periphery in case I need to distract anyone.”

  Anna favored me with a smile. “ ’Tis a task for which you are well suited.”

  “I suppose.” I smoothed my hand down my own gown of embroidered silk. For all that it was grey and supposedly in keeping with the sumptuary laws that guided our every clothing decision, it still made me feel light, almost ethereal. Like I could slip away on the mists of dawn, never to return.

  Of course, where, then, would I go? I’d been aghast at the idea of being removed to Lord Cavanaugh’s estate, far away from Crown and court. Where did I most want to spend the next months and years of my life?

  I found I had no answer. So much of my youth had been spent in tireless pursuit of my own wedding, I had no idea what might transpire once I achieved the married state. And now that my wedding had been postponed, I didn’t find myself thinking of Cavanaugh as often as I would have expected.

  Why was that?

  My mood turned unaccountably sad, but entry into the darkened Presence Chamber chased away all other thoughts. The Queen, once again, had outdone herself. The musicians played a haunting melody of lute and harpsichord to evoke an eerie late-summer night, and I found myself drifting along in the sudden darkness in time to the music. I felt Anna leave my side almost immediately, and with a swish of her gown Jane stepped up in her place.

  “You look like you’ve lost all your sunlight,” she gibed. “And the night holds naught but shadows for you.” She was peering around the darkened room with narrowed eyes, but showed no discomfort.

  “It’s what I deserve, I daresay,” I muttered, hearing too late the sadness still in my voice. Jane glanced sharply at me, and I quickly waved her off. “Pray, don’t wait for me. In this darkness I will lose sight of Meg the moment she steps into a knot of three people.” I made to move away, but Jane caught my hand.

  “He is behind the first banquette and to the left,” she said, her voice flat and hard, as if she were giving me the location of a murderer or a madman. “And you do deserve better, Beatrice.”

  I blinked at her “What?” I asked, completely at sea. “What do you mean?”

  At my words, Jane’s face took on a cast of bone-deep weariness. She’d thought she was doing me a favor. And instead she’d just realized she was delivering some sort of blow. “I thought you knew,” she muttered. She glanced around, but there were no other girls with us. None but myself and Jane, uneasy friends at best—but fellow spies, too. Spies who looked out for each other. I thought you knew. You deserve better.

  There could be only one person who could betray me, I realized in a flash. “Cavanaugh?” I asked,
my words barely audible. The sadness that had been growing within me now made a certain kind of sense.

  Jane didn’t even bother with a nod. “He—is behind the first banquette and to the left,” she said again, the words no longer angry but hollow now. Defeated. “Not alone.”

  I swallowed, willing myself to speak. “How long?” I asked. “How long have you known? How long has this gone on?”

  “Beatrice—”

  “Fie, Jane, how long?” Stupid, stupid, stupid! I’d been cow-eyed and blind. So wrapped up in my own plans that I’d missed the most obvious of threats to my perfect plan with Lord Cavanaugh.

  Another woman.

  Jane paused a moment. “I noticed them in each other’s company at odd moments early this summer, but not inappropriately so.” She said the words stiffly, as if she were giving a report to the Queen. “It was of no concern to me. You were not betrothed to the man, just dangling him.”

  I opened my mouth, but swallowed the words just as quickly. Jane wouldn’t have known of all my years of planning. She couldn’t have known. This wasn’t her fault.

  “Then you became engaged, and I did not see them together again—until I did. And did again. Last week. This week. The day before your wedding. And then the day after. It seemed I could not look but see them. And when you did not lash out against Elizabeth’s cancellation of your wedding, I thought . . . Well, I thought . . .” She shook her head and cursed, looking away.

  It was a postponement, I wanted to say. A postponement, not a cancellation. The wedding would still happen. All my plans would still work out. But the words would not come.

  I reached out and touched Jane’s arm. “Thank you,” I whispered. And I almost meant it.

  Jane stared back at me another moment, hard. Then she melted into the darkness, and I stood there, my mind scrambling. Perhaps Jane was wrong, I thought now, and instantly hope rekindled in my veins. The more I thought on it, the more I knew it to be true. Jane was wrong—had to be wrong. She’d seen a man and a woman together, and had considered it suspicious. I had no doubt her concerns were well intended. For all her strength of sinew, Jane did not have the resolve to lie so easily and well. But what did she know about love? Or of the court, for heaven’s sake? Men and women consorted all the time in the halls of Windsor Castle, laughing and flattering and paying undue attention to each other. It was all part of the royal game. But Lord Cavanaugh loved me; I knew he did. He’d promised me his hand in marriage. He’d promised to share his life with me.

  And I would prove Jane wrong.

  I turned smartly to my right, to where the long tables of refreshments had been placed against the wall, in easy reach of the servants who would be keeping the nobility satisfied with food and drink throughout the long night. My eyes grew accustomed to the murky light, and with a skill born of long practice I shifted through the groping knot of men and women. Court events were always a crush, and darkened revels, well—you knew what to expect going into them.

  I’d just come up to the first banquette when I saw them, and I almost shouted with triumph. Ah! So there it was, and I had been vindicated. A man and a woman had paused together, yes, loitering by the refreshment tables. But this was not an issue, given the woman in question. There was no way that Cavanaugh would—that he would choose such a . . . such a—

  The scene shifted just a bit, and I stiffened beside a thick stone column, my entire body going cold.

  Lord Cavanaugh now stood against the wall, shrouded in what I am sure he thought was total darkness. But the woman gazing up at him seemed lit from within, her beauty plain and without artifice, her eyes wide and clear, her expression luminous. She was a lovely woman, but that was not what made my heart catch in my throat. That was not what had made me assume that this couldn’t be a true lovers’ interlude. Even until the very end, I had been blinded by my own class prejudices. And who would blame me?

  The woman was a serving maid.

  And she was also, apparently, Lord Cavanaugh’s . . . mistress.

  I had never seen her before, exactly, but I knew her station by the cant of the head, the cut of the dress. This was a commoner pressed into royal service, whether for the night or for the season, to fetch and carry for the Queen and her court. She likely had rough hands and chapped lips, straw hair beneath her cap and loose teeth, but at this moment, as she stared into Lord Cavanaugh’s—my betrothed’s—face, all I could see was the ardor of her passion.

  And she was Lord Cavanaugh’s mistress!

  Worse—so much worse, so much more impossibly worse—Lord Cavanaugh stared back at her, his face suffused with an adoration so intense, it almost hurt to see. He’d never looked at me like that—never! Even when he held me close, even when he stole kisses from me in a laughing, arrogant seduction, chuckling at my blushes and palming my body as if I were already his own. Never had he once stared at me with eyes full of wonder and a mouth gone slack with desire. Never once!

  Fury and humiliation roiled in my gut. I knew it should not matter who it was that Cavanaugh had tumbled. But I had worked so hard and so long to merit the hand of a true nobleman. The idea that he would cast me aside for anyone burned badly enough. But to know that I was so worthless, that I was so meaningless to him, that my rank and station and education and charm counted for nothing at all, that he would cast me aside for—for—

  “My lady.” I felt the hand on my shoulder, turning me round even as I felt my vision blur. “It is dangerous for you to move unescorted through such a rough crowd. A pursuer might get quite the wrong idea indeed.”

  Alasdair MacLeod was there. Of course he was there. Of course he would see this—see me in all my humiliation—and seek only to amuse himself. And I was too numb to deny him.

  I could not tell you where we walked, or how, only that an instant later we were swallowed up again in the noise of the ball. Had he seen what I’d seen? Had he seen even worse? I could not speak; I certainly could not stop him. My heart was now hollow, my very face somehow heavy. I felt as if I had tears flowing down the inside of my body, though none would dare escape my eyes. A few steps farther, and I realized we were in the thickest part of the rabble, the laughter and chatter rising above the crash and ramble of music. This was also the darkest part of the room, and a dim part of my mind registered the danger of that. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to care.

  I could not bring myself to think.

  Everything was lost to me, everything was gone. Lord Cavanaugh was in love—and not with me. Never with me.

  Everything was lost.

  Alasdair tilted my chin up, and I could almost see him now, though my eyes were blanked as if by fog. He shifted closer toward me, and I caught the scent of vanilla and lavender, mixed with the earthier fragrances of leather and open sky. He’d been out riding today, I suspected, no doubt trying to keep pace with the very wind. He shifted again, and I knew he wanted to kiss me. He always wanted to, though I never allowed it. He always looked at me with his dark and intense blue eyes flashing from within the hard, sun-bronzed planes of his face, his powerful hands gentle around me but insistent, so insistent, and his heat so strong, it seemed to light the very air on fire, causing it to flare up around us. He would stare at my eyes, my lips, and his own mouth would open, and it seemed that he could well and truly survive only if he could taste the barest hint of me. And his face would lean toward mine, and his eyes would hold my own gaze—just like now—and he would look at me as if I were his entire world. And I would feel a stirring unlike anything I’d ever felt before, a stirring that I could not control, could not plan for and could no more deny than my own next and ever-more haggard breath, and then—

  I blinked.

  Alasdair’s sigh was ragged. “When you look at me like that, my lady,” he breathed, his words low and husky, “you place yourself in greater danger still.”

  Then suddenly it was all gone—all of it, and I was laid bare before him with only one question that seemed to matter, one question that bu
rned inside me no matter how stupid, how dense, how impossibly pointless but that still I could not keep myself from asking, so desperate was I to know. “Do you—” I swallowed, then blurted my words in a rush, as if I were eight and not eighteen, a stammering girl instead of a full-grown woman. “Do you find me at all a-attractive— Do you, could you— Oh, never mind!”

  I turned to flee, at once mortified by the words that should have never ever crossed my lips, and certainly not to this oafish Scot who would just as easily laugh at me as speak. But no sooner had I angled away than Alasdair hauled me back again, hard, my back pressed up against his chest as he leaned forward and inhaled deeply, as if he were finding his life’s breath anew. His mouth was excruciatingly close to my ear, and when he spoke, his lips brushed against the tender skin, sending a jolt of sensation across the whole of my body.

  “Lady Beatrice Elizabeth Catherine Knowles,” he murmured, “you’ve become my very breath, my beating heart. I canna sleep but that I dream of you, I canna wake but that I think of you. You are life and love and magic, in every step you take.”

  In front of him, my breath hitched, my heart now pounding violently as he moved his left hand down the fitted waist of my gown, firm and powerful and sure.

  And then, of course, he kept talking. “But you are as skinny as a chicken, I will give you that.”

  “Oh!” I thrust myself away from him and propelled myself on sheer anger through the crowd, my cheeks burning as I heard him laugh in a long and knowing roll. So incensed was I that I almost missed Anna entirely, bustling through the crowd on a tear.

  “Beatrice!” she squeaked. “There you are. You never will believe— Meg fell into conversation with the young Earl of Southwick, who, due to Meg’s magnificent clothing, bearing, mimicry skills—and, no doubt, the darkness of the room—well and truly thought she was the Queen. She picked his pocket before he’d gotten out his tenth word, and passed this along to Jane.” She flared a letter in the murk, and I picked up her excitement. “We must read it and quickly, or the Queen’s reveal will be here and we’ll not have a chance to return it!”