Maid of Deception

by Jennifer McGowan

  I could not even say what we talked about on those walks. Nothing of importance, surely. The garrulous Scot seemed insistent to keep the conversation light—on the caretaking of the gardens, the husbandry of the fields, and endless rounds of discussions on horses and stabling and bloodlines. When we came onto my father’s collection of manuscripts in the library, however, I was surprised again. Alasdair immediately homed in on one of our prized holdings, a folio from the Lindisfarne Gospels that Father had been given for safekeeping during old King Henry’s reign. Whether the good King realized my father had spirited the manuscript off to Northampton was anyone’s guess. But even as I thought on it, I locked the precious script away. It had already been pillaged once by an English monarch, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. I had no interest in it being lifted a second time.

  Still, Alasdair’s excitement about the gospel pages knew no bounds. He’d come alight with fervor at its clean lines, its rich colors. He’d seemed transported by its beauty, and as I’d watched him in his zeal, I’d found myself thinking less and less of him as a Scotsman here in England to garner funds and support for his people . . . and more and more as a young man, barely two years older than myself.

  Not that I cared for him, mind you, or had begun growing fond of him. Not even in the slightest. At all.

  But he was . . . easy to talk to, I’d give him that. And attractive, in his rough, masculine way. His hands were strong, his back broad. His smile easy. And sometimes, when he thought I wasn’t looking, he would gaze at me with eyes so hot and intent, I should think he was trying to imprint me on his very soul—

  Which did not matter at all. Truly.

  Unfortunately, respites are never meant to last. Marion was not Windsor, and a fortnight was too long to keep Elizabeth the Self-Indulgent in good spirits.

  Now the Queen was growing restless, some hidden peevishness breaking to the fore, and she’d demanded to be entertained this night “in a manner that outshines all others,” when we were all about to drop dead on our feet as it was.

  It was the tenth day of her visit. Although every preceding evening we’d had music and dancing and even the children’s guard demonstration—which Alasdair and his guards had helped carry off thoroughly and well—Elizabeth declared that she was bored.

  Bored.

  I’d long since cared about reviewing the accounts. Our chamberlain grew more ashen-faced with every passing day, and the servants, while cheerful enough in demeanor, roamed around the Hall like the desperately ill waiting for a surcease that only death would bring them. We dared not run out of provisions. It would be a shame to our household, which mattered little to the Queen. And to the Queen herself, which mattered a great deal. Our positions at court depended upon our abilities to entertain our monarch, even if we barely had two loaves of bread to rub together.

  And so tonight, at the Queen’s demand, we were to have another feast. My father and I stared across the table where we’d met to plan it. He looked as wan in the thin morning light as I’m sure I felt.

  “She’s trying to bankrupt us,” he said, with the grace to still sound faintly shocked. He refocused on me, and his lips twisted into a tired little grin. “I really didn’t think she hated you so much, my sweet, but it appears I’ve underestimated you once again.”

  “You did what you could.” I shrugged, too tired even to fight anymore. “We must have a dance—it’s the easiest plan. And we must bring up the village ale.”

  Father scowled. “Far too strong.” He shook his head. “Courtiers and ladies do not drink the way we do deep in the forest, Beatrice. They’ll not be able to handle it.”

  “I know, Father. But we’ve no other options. Our own stores are fully depleted, and we’ve still got at least a few more days of this lot. Don’t even get me started on the state of our larders. Were it not for our ability to barter, we’d have no food left at all to grace Her Majesty’s table.”

  “And I’ve no interest in betraying the true wealth of our holding,” Father mused grimly. “Thank God only the stones of Marion Hall know its secrets.”

  I felt irritation flash within me. This little mantra of Marion Hall used to be a favorite of his, back when I was just a child and before Mother’s dark days outnumbered the lighter ones. “Now is not the time for reminiscing, Father,” I snapped.

  He sighed, shaking his head. “You have the right of it, Beatrice, but promise me one thing.”

  I sniffed, glancing back over the list of requirements for the night’s revel. “Now’s not the time for promises, either.” I should have known by my father’s long pause that I would not like his next words. I looked at him when he did not speak. “What?”

  Father’s face was set in implacable lines. “Allow Alasdair to court you in earnest tonight; if just for tonight.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I reared back, completely flustered. “What do you mean, ‘court’ me? I have spent my every waking moment with the Scotsman, and well you know it!”

  “You have held him at arm’s length,” my father snipped back. “Talking, talking, talking, fie. You’d talk a man to death to keep him from leaning too close or touching you.”

  “How dare you!” I gasped. “I have comported myself with honor and chastity, and—”

  “And the Queen wants you to swoon over the damn boy, so you should swoon!” Father crashed his fist onto the broad table, stunning me into silence. “We are here at this impasse because of your little stunt with Lord Cavanaugh. I cannot say I blame you for it, and it was neatly done. But Elizabeth clearly pays attention whenever you are with the young Scot. You do not need to tell me that she’s ordered you to squire him around; I know you well enough to know you would not tip your cap for a man without money or name. So the Queen takes pleasure in seeing you consort with someone you despise, what of it? Is it so impossibly onerous for you to do what you are commanded, to ensure that the Queen sees you in the young man’s arms, doing whatever it is she has asked of you? If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for the family—we need her favor, and we need her gone.”

  It was quite the longest and most earnest speech I’d heard my father give in years, and it extinguished my outrage like a pinched-off candle. I couldn’t even berate my father for his betrayal of his only legitimate child. He was a creature of the court, and he saw the truth plain enough: We had to placate the Queen if we ever wanted to get rid of her. She was my direst enemy, and she had all the power. It was like choosing the open sea as your foe.

  Worst of all, Father didn’t even know how close his words had struck. The Queen did want information out of Alasdair, along with watching me simper and pout, and here I’d spent the last several days immersed in conversations that had had nothing to do with anything. I was not doing my job, and sooner or later there would be an accounting.

  “Very well,” I said, bringing my father’s gaze back to mine. “Tonight we shall go a-courting.”

  We’d gathered up all of our papers when a clattering at the door to the chamber alerted us. A moment later Sophia and Meg burst into the room, their eyes wide with dismay.

  “We have a problem,” Meg said, noticing my father a second too late.

  Then she curtsied.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I managed to get my father out of the room on the pretext that the problem was no more than a girlish foible over a dress or a handkerchief. Whether he was truly stupid or he just didn’t have the energy to question, he left—though not without a parting shot.

  “You’ll remember to do your part?” he asked, ignoring Meg’s perplexed frown. Sophia was staring resolutely at the wall.

  “As if you’d ever let me forget.” My smile was forced, but he saw in it whatever he wanted to see, and he was off.

  “Now,” I said, rounding on Meg. “What is it? Did somebody die? Did a servant insult some lady-in-waiting?”

  “Don’t look at me,” she said, nodding to Sophia. “She’s the one who sounded the alarm. She should be the one who
tells the tale.”

  “All right, then, what tale?” I asked, endeavoring to keep the sharpness out of my tone. Sophia no longer looked like she would blow away in a stiff breeze, but there was still a . . . an etherealness about her, a fey quality that seemed to grow more pronounced even as she began to find her voice. “Sophia, did you, ah . . . see something?”

  “This place, this place,” she breathed, lifting long fingers to her brow for a second before recalling herself. “I am sorry, Beatrice, but yes. I can’t be sure it will come to pass—you know how my visions aren’t always quite accurate.”

  It is a testament to my supreme training as a spy that I did not throttle Sophia myself, just to get the words out of her throat and into the open air. Instead I waited her out as if I were in the midst of a curtsy long count, knowing that my misery would perforce be short-lived. Even Meg began to fidget, though, and Sophia blinked, once more back with us.

  “But this vision keeps returning, swift and sure,” she said. “It involves one of your maidservants, though she is not to blame. She has caught the eye of Robert Dudley.”

  I flashed a startled glance at Meg, who looked bleakly resolute. “I knew you would see the import of this,” Meg said, and Sophia began wringing her hands.

  “He finds her in the stable and steals a kiss from her, and that is all well and good. She is modest and maidenly, in the first blush of her womanhood, and her response to Dudley’s kiss is chaste enough. But the Queen has seen and she realizes—she realizes all that she cannot have, even in the midst of her grand luxuries and power. She sees her own weakness and her own vulnerability to a love she can neither fight nor forget. She sees, and—she does not react well.”

  “The maid, the maid,” I whispered, trying to imagine which of the serving girls would have found herself in the stables, at the mercy of a Queen’s man. “Does the Queen see her face? Could she identify her?”

  “No—no, it is not that. The Queen can see only that she is a young woman being kissed by Dudley and then reacting with shock and dismay. The girl backs up, her hands to her cheeks, and shakes her head quite clearly. She does not invite Dudley’s advances, even though he is quite dashing in his riding attire, only just returned from his exercise with the Queen.”

  “Does the man have no sense?” Meg muttered, and I had to agree. If he’d only just arrived back, then so too had the Queen. For him to corner a maiden with his monarch so close by showed a marked lack of concern for his own head.

  But Sophia was continuing. “But the Queen also sees Dudley stepping forward, as if determined to have another kiss from the girl. The girl stumbles back, the Queen calls out as if she is newcome to the stable, and the scene clears.”

  I gave a low groan. “He forced Elizabeth’s hand. He forced her to break up a tryst else see for her own eyes his perfidy.” I gathered up my skirts. “Has this already happened? Is it a vision of the future or the past?”

  “I—I don’t know,” Sophia said as we rushed into the hallway and down the long corridors to the side entrance to Marion Hall. The stables were just a short dash away from that doorway, and if we could catch Robert Dudley before he followed his flirtatious whims, we could perhaps forestall the Queen’s mighty fury before it landed on all our heads.

  But it was not to be. We’d no sooner reached the doorway than we saw the Queen striding forth from the stable doors, a grinning and strangely smug Robert Dudley trotting along in her wake, his eyes drinking in the sight of his jealous Queen.

  “He knew! He is doing this merely to bait her!” I breathed.

  Meg swore beside me. “I have to think you’re right,” she said, and Sophia gave a soft mew of distress.

  “Oh, Beatrice, your lovely hall,” Sophia whispered. She raised her stricken eyes to me. “There will be a rout.”

  I grimaced, thinking of the casks of too strong ale that even now were being stacked along the walls of Marion’s Great Hall, and knew Sophia wasn’t relying on any second sight to make this prediction. The first sight would serve well enough.

  “Drink well this night, both of you,” I said, and sighed. “It looks like we’ll need it.”

  * * *

  It was even worse than I’d imagined.

  The Queen crackled with anger all through dinner, her wit shrewd and cutting. She abused my father, myself, and the whole of our staff. She raised her brows in disparaging disapproval at the renewed absence of my mother. She turned back dish after dish of exquisitely prepared meats and breads, contenting herself only with sugared pastries and sweets that she washed down with our heavy ale. Even that she took exception to, but only until the sheer volume of its potent brew hit her squarely.

  Then came the dancing.

  Robert Dudley, for his part, claimed the first dance with the Queen, but she rebuffed him in a brilliant rebuke that merely had him grinning back at her even as he bowed and stepped aside. He was delighting in egging her on, and the Queen demanded that fresh ale be served all around.

  “A dance, my lady?”

  I jolted to hear Alasdair’s voice at my side, but I turned to him with a practiced smile. “Of course, good sir,” I said, and he raised a brow as he escorted me into the line of dancers. It was a Volta, and the Queen had chosen one of the most well-built earls for her dance partner over Dudley. This was a wise move—first it showed her off to good effect during what was undoubtedly her favorite dance, and second, it gave Dudley the opportunity to see another man squiring Elizabeth.

  However, that wasn’t much help to me. Alasdair and I joined the group of dancers who ringed the main attraction, the Queen and her partner—Henry, the Earl of Rutland, a favorite of hers said to be on track to become lord president of the north. The Volta was an only barely civilized dance, and the Queen, now well in her cups, preferred it played violently fast, with the pipe and tabor, cittern and shawm, clanging together in an almost frenzied urgency.

  Alasdair noted the change in tempo immediately. “It appears your Queen has a mind for exercise,” he noted, grinning as we circled each other, drawing close together, then stepping apart in sharp, rapid steps. He bowed to me flamboyantly, and I sank into a curtsy, nervously eyeing the neckline of my gown to make sure his now hungry eyes did not see too much. I was unaccountably panicked in the circle of his attention, and I sought an easy retreat.

  “If you cannot keep the pace, good sir, you’ve but to say the word.” My words came out more flirtatiously than they should have, but there was danger here. Alasdair had lost the softer edges of the young man who’d attended my wedding all shaven and smooth. His beard was coming in more fully now, and even his clothing seemed less kempt, rougher and earthier. His hands on my face and against my arms were firm and strong, and would not be denied.

  “Beatrice, you ever know what words might fire my blood the most,” Alasdair said, his jaw as tight as his tone. “And never cease but to speak them.”

  He stared at me as the music picked up another pulse of energy. By dictates of the dance I was then required to leap up into his arms, and I did so with my face set in its haughtiest lines, feeling a jolt of awareness as his hands clamped over the thick folds of my dress at my hips and he lifted me high. He lowered me back to my feet with a bit less speed than necessary, his eyes smoldering as a wicked smile curved his lips. “I think this is my favorite English dance,” he said, then swung me out again.

  I bristled, but there was nothing for it. The next steps of the dance pressed his chest up against my back, and I arched my arms gracefully in the air, swallowing as he drew his hands firmly past my elbows to the outer curve of my arms and shoulders, then farther down the line of my torso, his fingers just barely grazing the fullness of my breasts. It was perfectly chaste, and exactly in line with what the dance required, but I was still startled when he then swept me up in his arms, turning me round and round in time to the ever-quickening music.

  “But surely you did not come all the way to England just for the chance to dance?” I managed, not needi
ng to force the breathlessness into my voice.

  He pulled me closer to him still. “I came to England to secure the treasure of my homeland,” he said, turning me ever faster. “But, aye, I just may stay to complete the dance.”

  Alasdair set me back to my feet but grudgingly then, eyeing me possessively while I flitted away from him and gave a flourish. His grin turned even more wolfish as I followed the next prescribed steps of the dance, running back to him and jumping into his arms. I gasped as he clasped his arms around me, staring at me as we twirled around the floor to the climactic crashing music. He set me down and lifted my hand high—so high I had to arch up against him on the tips of my slippers, until he allowed me to sink into the final curtsy of the dance.

  Alasdair brought me up again as everyone wildly applauded the Queen, the two of us lost on the edges of her triumph with her ginger-haired courtier, as Robert Dudley, finally chastened, seethed and looked on.

  But I could not tear my gaze away from Alasdair’s. He still held me, tight and close, the heat from his fingers searing mine, his heart pounding loudly enough for me to hear through his crimson doublet. In his gaze I felt something I had never experienced before, a suitor who stared at me not as if I were his servant or his toy, or even the altar on which he would sacrifice all. I felt—real. Empowered. Safe.

  “My lady,” Alasdair rumbled in a voice thick with emotion and something else, something I could not quite identify but desperately wanted in that moment to understand. Then he seemed to catch himself, his next words almost strangled. “I canna stay with you at this revel tonight,” he said. “Promise me you’ll stay safe?”