The Queen's Secret

by Victoria Lamb

  Her voice was shrill; the Queen was angry about something, Lucy realized with a terrible thrill of fear. If she were to ask now …

  But to Lucy’s immense relief she did not ask. Instead, the Queen sank back against her cushions as though exhausted and gestured heavily to someone out of sight. There was a series of staccato commands from the captain of the royal guard, the noise of shuffling feet, and Lucy saw that a space was being cleared for her on the dusty ground of the tiltyard.

  A space in which to dance.

  She descended from the platform and stood, waiting for the castle musicians to assemble before the Queen: drums, pipes, shawms, hautboys, and an ancient hurdy-gurdy with a wooden crank. One of the men spoke to her and she answered him without thinking, her lips numb and her eyes burning, her whole body on fire yet ice-cold at the same time, moving without awareness. She had chosen an old French lament for this dance, and had worked on the steps on her own in the mornings before anyone else was awake, humming the tune as well as she could recall it. Now she would have the musicians to guide her, but an audience too, and every opportunity to stumble or make a mistake. But it was too late to draw back now.

  Someone rapped out the beat, slow and sombre against the wooden frame of a tambour, then the music began. Lucy turned in the dance, her body responding instinctively, sweeping her feet one way and then another across the dusty ground, bending her waist to the haunting lilt and surge of the hurdy-gurdy.

  Here, she could be herself, without fear and with only the music for company.

  Sunshine burned on her closed lids. Opening them, she danced on, dazzled but alive. Her hands strong, graceful. Her feet pointed thus. Immaculate. The ring of their faces blurred slowly. A tree, shaken: white petals, blossom drifting on the air. Lucy turned, arms wide and spinning, into the last movement.

  After the music had finished, she dropped, trembling, into a curtsey below the Queen.

  ‘Rise.’

  Lucy straightened, listening to the spontaneous applause and foot-stamping of her audience. She found courage in their approval, eager to hear it, taking it as her due. Was it sinful to seek applause for her work, for these public performances? She had been hidden at the back for so long, unseen and unheard, that listening to their applause was like coming alive again, being born of a new mother. Perhaps, returning to hot, dirty London at summer’s end, she would be forgotten, sent back to the chorus by a furious Mistress Hibbert, outraged at her presumption in dancing and singing for the Queen without her permission. Then Lucy might wish she had taken less pleasure in her own skill, finding herself invisible once more, stuck at the back in a coarse gown and cheap shoes.

  The Queen had risen too, descending the steps from the dais. Her ladies hurried after her, catching and lifting her gold train so it would not be ruined in the dust. She paused before Lucy. At her back, Walsingham waited in silence.

  Queen Elizabeth’s eyes glittered, searching her face, then she bent her head, her words meant only for Lucy’s ears.

  ‘That matter of which I spoke to you lately in the gardens,’ she whispered. ‘Have you any news?’

  Lucy quaked inwardly. Her lips opened, trying to form an answer, but her mouth was too dry to make a sound.

  This close, the cloying scent of the Queen’s rosewater mixed unpleasantly with the odours of overheated flesh under the vast, gilt-edged ruff and jewelled, golden gown. Lucy stared at the sheer intricacy of the ruff, and told herself not to faint.

  The Queen frowned, drawing back slightly to look at her face, as though she already knew the truth and only needed Lucy to confirm it. Lucy tried but could not raise her eyes to meet the Queen’s. The desire to speak, to blurt out every tiny detail she knew and leave nothing unsaid, was almost overwhelming; it twisted and writhed in her gut, like a serpent about to bite its way out through her belly.

  ‘Speak,’ the Queen insisted, her impatience unmistakable. ‘What have you discovered?’ Her voice dropped to a hiss. ‘Have there been any letters?’

  ‘N-not yet, Your Majesty,’ Lucy managed, stammering. She could only curtsey again as the Queen swept past in a rustle of gold cloth, an overpowering smell of lavender wafting from the pomander hung about her neck.

  Fumbling to cross herself and ward off any evil she might have invoked, Lucy waited in silence, head bent to hide the fear in her eyes. The rest of the court streamed past, following the Queen’s party back into the outer court.

  No, she had not lied. Nor yet had she told the Queen the whole truth. It was a lie by omission. A lie of conscience. She had concealed what she knew in order to protect his lordship, who had been kind to her and given her this chance to perform before the court. But she did not know how much longer she could continue to tell these lies and half-truths to the Queen before her disobedience was found out and punished.

  Master Goodluck might make his living by deception, and find it no great work to conceal his heart. Yet the truth had always been written clear in Lucy’s face for all to read. To unlearn honesty was the hardest thing in the world.

  Forty

  THE BENCHES IN the great hall had been pushed back to allow more space for those wishing to be present at the knighting ceremony. With the courtiers standing about in their rich costumes and fancy hose, and two brightly plumaged birds perched in a hanging cage, and sunlight streaming in through the high arched windows, the place had the air of a holy day street pageant, a brilliant tableau of characters and strange, exotic creatures from a world beyond the everyday.

  Lost in a wave of nostalgia, Goodluck remembered a certain player whose clear delivery and impressive strutting had thrilled him as a boy. The man had inspired him to make his living the same way – though fate had intervened, of course, prompting him into the greater thrill of espionage.

  ‘Make way there!’ someone called out, knocking against him in passing. A stiff-backed young man carrying a velvet brocade cushion before him, on which had been laid an ornamental sword, jolted Goodluck back to the moment, to the ceremony ahead, and the risk he ran by being here.

  Still standing in the doorway at the rear of the hall, he shrank back into his hood and searched the faces of the courtiers for the man he had come to see. It was important that he was not too conspicuous. He had stolen this suit of blue livery so he might pass for one of Leicester’s men, but any of the earl’s officials would know him at once for an imposter.

  At last he caught sight of Walsingham, standing discreetly behind a row of courtiers to the right of the Queen, apparently absorbed in the proceedings but in fact searching the room in much the same way as Goodluck himself.

  Their eyes met for a few brief seconds, and Walsingham stiffened. Then he nodded, almost imperceptibly, and Goodluck slipped out of the great hall and made his way down the stairs to the next floor. Here, he was away from the music and the calling out of names of those to be honoured, and the armed guards patrolling the place who might have asked awkward questions if he had lurked in the doorway any longer.

  There was a small communal privy on this floor. Goodluck had never been inside, but he could tell the function of the room by its smell as he approached. A courtier came out, hurriedly adjusting his hose before taking the stairs back up to the hall two at a time. Goodluck stood at the door a moment, listening until he heard the sound of someone quietly descending from upstairs, then slipped inside.

  The privy was windowless, very close and hot. There were three narrow cubicles with doors, and an open area for pissing – a shallow, rancid gutter set into the floor sloped away into a chute to the gong farm, presumably for use when the weather was too poor to venture outside in the fresh air. He glanced into a cubicle and saw that the original stone seat had been ‘improved’ with a shiny new wooden frame. In the stifling heat, the smell from the chute below was revolting, and Goodluck’s nose twitched in protest. But at least it meant few people would care to linger in such a place, unless they had come for the obvious.

  Thankfully, he did not have to wait long
. The door creaked a moment later and Walsingham entered, a look of mild distaste on his face. He hesitated, glanced at the three closed cubicle doors, and raised thin, dark eyebrows in a silent query.

  ‘We’re alone,’ Goodluck supplied.

  ‘I cannot be long here. Lord Burghley’s son is to be knighted this morning and my absence will be noted. Besides, his wife has never been one of Her Majesty’s favourites, so I may be called upon to smooth ruffled feathers before the end of the day.’

  ‘I’m sorry not to have sent a message, sir, but I couldn’t trust the new code you sent. Not for this.’

  Walsingham raised a fragrant pomander to his nose, sniffed at it delicately, then let it fall again on the chain about his neck.

  ‘Go on,’ he murmured.

  ‘Do you recall the steward’s assistant, Malcolm Drury, the man who drowned? I believe the Italian may be in possession of one of his keys—’

  ‘This is old news, surely?’

  ‘Sir,’ Goodluck inclined his head respectfully, ‘I was mistaken there. I thought at first it meant nothing, that holding keys to the inner court would be a useless advantage, since they would inevitably fail to get past the guards posted at every entrance. But there is another possibility I hadn’t considered.’

  Walsingham looked at him enquiringly, and raised the pomander to his nose again. ‘I do not consider myself an impatient man. But the privy is perhaps not the best of places for a protracted conversation.’

  ‘Briefly, sir, there’s a key on the missing set that opens an underground storage room to the north-west of the Queen’s apartments. It fell out of use about eight years ago, and I’ve been told it’s kept permanently locked now. But there may be a way to access the new state apartments through a roof hatch that leads up into the storage room above.’

  ‘And you believe the Queen’s enemies hold the key to this chamber?’

  Goodluck nodded. He felt the blood beating in his throat, his head light, and put a hand on the wall to steady himself. He knew instinctively that the older man was not going to listen. That nothing he said would make any difference. Yet still he had to make the attempt. ‘For all we know, the Queen’s Majesty is in greater danger with every night that we delay. I very much fear that we have been watching the wrong people. I have not yet established who is pulling Massetti’s strings, and the bear-tamer has proved difficult to watch. He is too good at slipping away from those who follow him.’ Goodluck shook his head. ‘Sir, we must act now.’

  ‘And by act, you mean …?’

  ‘Make arrests. Starting with Massetti and the bear-tamer, and any other Italians with whom he may have made contact since arriving here.’ Determined to state his case fully, Goodluck added, ‘The dead man they dragged from the mere – I smelt something odd on his breath. I didn’t connect the two at the time, but there was a vial of colourless liquid in Massetti’s room with the same sickly odour to it. I think the man was poisoned by Massetti and then dumped in the mere to make it look like a drowning.’

  ‘Poisoned by Massetti? Let me be clear, my friend. Even if Petruccio Massetti is involved in this latest plot, which I find hard to credit, it is not in him to act so violently. Do not forget how well I know this young man. From what you say, some Catholic sympathizer at the English court may have attempted to recruit him. Or made some overture of friendliness towards him, hoping to turn him against the Queen. No, arresting Massetti and his associates is not the course we should follow. We must watch and wait, in the hope that a greater man is hooked on this particular line. Besides, Her Majesty is concerned that even the hint of a new Catholic plot may precipitate some fresh taste for sedition among our secret Papists here in England. Which it certainly would, of course.’

  Francis Walsingham moved to the wall where the stinking gutter ran to the chute, tugged at his hose and began to urinate.

  ‘You disagree with my decision?’ he asked idly, not looking at Goodluck. ‘Well, no doubt you have reason to do so. The Queen’s life is in danger and her would-be assassins rub shoulders with us here in this castle, a stronghold intended to keep out her enemies, not pamper them with soft beds and fine wines. But nothing is as simple as it appears, my good friend. By making these arrests now, we remove the body of the threat but not the head, and it will merely return in a new and perhaps more deadly form.’

  Frustrated though he was, Goodluck had to concede that Walsingham was right. There was a longer game to play than this one, a summer plot too swiftly brought to an end by arresting Massetti. Yet the threat to the Queen remained, and it was Goodluck’s difficult business to ensure that the assassin himself – whoever he was, and wherever he was hiding – could not reach his target. Otherwise everything he and the others had done here at Kenilworth, the risks they had run, would have been in vain.

  ‘What now, then?’

  There was a faint sound outside the door, barely audible. Both men fell silent.

  Had they been overheard?

  Walsingham turned on his heel and left the privy without another word, the scented pomander raised once more to his nose.

  Goodluck squeezed into one of the hot, dirty cubicles and closed the door with a noisy clatter, listening to hear if anyone else had entered the room. Sweat rolled down his back in the tight blue livery as he waited. But there was no further sound from outside and, after a few more minutes, he slipped out and down a narrow set of back stairs to the lawn behind the great hall.

  His heart was racing as he burst out into the sunlight, gasping at fresh air.

  He leaned on the wall for a moment, suddenly sickened, possibly from the relentless heat and stench of the privy. But deep down he knew it was fear, and despised his own weakness.

  Goodluck could not help but think this assignment had the stink of disaster about it. His meeting with Walsingham had been not only risky but inconclusive. Walsingham’s affection for the young Italian must be clouding his judgement. He was widely considered the most ruthless man in England, yet he would not have Massetti touched – and why? Because Massetti had once saved his family from a bloody end. What other explanation could there be? Unless it was indeed true that Walsingham was involved in a deeper game, seeking to discover the name of some high-ranking traitor at the English court by leaving Massetti to play out his part undisturbed.

  Not that Massetti appeared to be anything but a pawn, a decoy, a dupe who had mistaken his role in this conspiracy. Massetti was clearly the man they were supposed to be watching – no doubt while the true assassin made his way by some secret means into the Queen’s apartments and killed her without a single guard raising the alarm.

  And if this true assassin should succeed?

  If the Queen were to be assassinated in the safety of her own rooms, while they had full knowledge of this plot and knew even the whereabouts of some of its key conspirators, Goodluck might as well hang himself now from the nearest roof beam and have done with it.

  Straightening, he hurried down a further flight of steep steps and through a cool, dark archway towards the lakeside. He had an urge to kneel down at the water’s edge and splash his face, wash away the stench of failure. With his gaze fixed on the glint of sunlit water ahead, he almost did not see the dark shadows passing across the mouth of the passage.

  Young, slim-hipped shadows in green livery, cracking jokes in Italian, laughed in the fresh sunshine, arms linked warmly about each other’s waists.

  As Goodluck emerged from the passageway, one darted ahead of the others and threw herself in a rolling cartwheel across the grass. A burst of laughter followed. Then she rose to her feet and, clear as a warning bell across open fields, called out a name that froze Goodluck where he stood, his heart suddenly a stone.

  ‘Alfonso!’

  One of the Florentine acrobats, a young man with a thin curling moustache and lazy smile, turned to give his friends a mocking little bow before he too launched himself into a cartwheel, knifing through the sunlit air.

  Forty-one

  LUCY
CLIMBED THE stairs to the royal apartments, the stone walls lit by warm patches of sunlight at every turn. A serving girl ran past her in tears on the first-floor landing, almost tripping down the stairs in her haste to escape. From above, the sound of the Queen’s voice raised in anger made her pause, gripping the rope set into the wall to aid her ascent. If she had not been summoned to attend the Queen for luncheon and then at the hunt, she would have turned round and made her way out to the Brays, where the smoke from the camp fires would leave her eyes smarting but at least she would be free and unwatched. The stuffy, closeted atmosphere of the Queen’s apartments these past few days had felt like a prison, with her smallest misstep noted and censured. More accustomed to the homely, ramshackle chaos of the domestic staff quarters in London, Lucy found herself almost hating the propriety and hush of the Privy Chamber at Kenilworth.

  A burly guard was coming down the stairs, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, taking up almost all the narrow space. As he descended, he was whistling a tune which she recognized as a ribald soldiers’ song about the Queen herself. And in the royal apartments too!

  Flattening herself against the wall so this insolent guard could pass, Lucy glanced up to find dark, twinkling eyes and an unmistakable beard.

  ‘Master Goodluck!’

  ‘Hush!’ Goodluck lifted her hand to his lips, and she could not help smiling at his mock-gallantry. ‘Don’t give me away. I make a fine soldier, don’t you think?’

  He was wearing the badged livery of Leicester’s men, the blue doublet straining across his large body. She stared, perplexed. ‘Yes, indeed. But how did you—?’

  ‘It helps, when searching a place, to make yourself appear to belong there.’

  ‘You’ve been searching the Queen’s apartments?’