Maid of Secrets

by Jennifer McGowan

  “Then take them we shall,” Jane agreed. She tucked the packet of letters into her bodice and grinned at me. “I just want to be there when Anna starts translating, especially the love letter. She’ll be in bliss.”

  I laughed, and we carefully rooted through the rest of the coffer. There was nothing else of import. We’d just decided to expand our search to the rest of the room, when the castle clock struck midnight, startling us with its intensity. Quickly we packed up the little boxes and put them back up on their respective shelves. We slipped out the door even as Jane was muttering again about looking for secret panels. But there was no time for anything like that, and well she knew it.

  I worked the lock with my tools, taking a few precious moments to carefully reset it. Then we hastened toward our rooms.

  We were only halfway down the corridor, however, when we heard the rapid footsteps of a dozen or more people bearing down on us—most of them women.

  The ladies-in-waiting were returning.

  “In there!” I hissed, and we dove for a side chamber that was barely more than an indentation in the wall. Pressing up against one of the columns that flanked its entryway, I peeked worriedly out.

  “Keep your eyes down!” Jane whispered fiercely.

  I looked over at her, cocking a brow. “What?”

  “Keep your eyes down—else they will catch the firelight of the torches as they go by.”

  I dropped my gaze, and not a moment too soon. A horde of feet walked by us, slippered women and booted men, in a knot of murmuring, exhausted people. Opposite me, I heard Jane tapping the wall panels quietly. The shallow room was something like a guard’s sanctuary, I realized, meant to discreetly house the men assigned to protect the ladies’ chambers without forcing them to stand directly in the corridor.

  A . . . guard’s sanctuary? Belatedly, I noticed the wooden stools on either side of the paneled alcove, and the ornate chest between them. The stools did not appear like they were included in the alcove for mere ornamentation.

  I reached out and jerked hard on Jane’s arm, gesturing furiously that we needed to get moving. The women would enter their room quickly enough, and if the guards decided to return to this place as their evening resting spot, we would have nowhere to hide.

  “A moment, just a moment,” Jane muttered. She was running her hands along the wall.

  “We don’t have a moment!” I hissed. “They’ll be here in a moment.”

  “There’s something—not right about this.” Her hands moved down the panels, pressing inward. She hesitated, but even I noticed the slight inward give to the wood.

  The guards bid the women good night, and then we heard them discussing in low tones the details of the night watch. “Jane . . . ,” I warned, just as I heard a tiny but distinctive crack.

  “I knew it,” she breathed, her words rich with satisfaction. “Do you have your candle?”

  “Yes, but— What is that?” I tore my gaze away from the guards and stared down in horror. In the half-lit gloom, I could see a yawning black cavern beyond the knee-high panel.

  “That,” she said, “is the real way to get around Windsor Castle.”

  We both scrambled into the space, and Jane replaced the panel just in time as we heard footsteps passing outside. We could see the sconce light from the hallway beyond through two perfect circles cut into the panels—spy holes! I fitted my eyes to them, and was rewarded with a charming view of a guard’s wool-clad calves. Rocking back on my heels, I saw identical spy holes above me. The panel opened low, but the holes had been hollowed out along the wall’s entire length.

  I stood slowly with Jane, both of us clutching each other. “We’ll need that candle,” she said, whispering into my ear.

  I turned and squinted into the passageway beyond. It was dank and clammy . . . and as black as pitch. “We should take some steps away from the panel before we light it, though, lest they see us as easily as we can see them,” I said. There was also the issue of the flint strike, which was quiet but not soundless.

  Beside me, I felt Jane nod. “Never been in so dark a place as a castle, I will tell you that,” she muttered. I thought again of what her life must have been like on the high plains of North Wales. I thought of my own life, in the village streets. We’d spent many a night camping in barns and open fields, but there’d always been music, dancing—and light. This darkness that pressed onto us seemed like an early death. “Off with us, then,” I said.

  We took one step, then another, cleaving together like sisters in the passageway. It was broad enough for two stout men to walk abreast, but after the faintest touch to discern the walls on either side, we kept our hands and bodies close to the center. Three more steps, and I felt the wall in front of me only moments before I would have smacked into it.

  The corridor branched off to the left and right. Pulling Jane with me, I sidled to the left, then made short work with the flint striker, lighting my candle and holding it high.

  “Charming place.”

  The corridor was lined with cobwebs and was filthy in an abandoned-looking way. “We’ve got three choices,” I said. “To the left, to the right, and back to wait for the guards to leave.”

  Jane looked up at the bare, rime-encrusted walls. “We can’t go back. They may be there all night.”

  “We can’t get lost in here either,” I pointed out.

  “True.” She seemed to be pondering a complex problem. “Let’s just go down a few steps and see what we may find.”

  We prised a stone out of the wall and set it a few inches out into the corridor, to mark that we’d been by this turn. Then we set off down the corridor, Jane muttering that we were heading south, toward the quadrangle of the Upper Ward. Sooner or later we would get to an exterior castle wall, she reasoned, and possibly a staircase down to the ground level.

  The passageway split, and split again, and we were moving down the third turn (each carefully marked) when something struck me as different.

  I stopped, holding my candle aloft, staring at the corridor around me. It had broadened, and was almost spacious here, with high walls and ceiling, and even empty sconces at regular intervals. And there was something else about it, too. Something that made a knot of dread ball up in my stomach.

  “It’s clean,” I said.

  Jane, who’d moved a few paces ahead of me in the dancing candlelight, stopped as well. “You’re right!” she said excitedly, her hands reaching out to the walls. They were as blank as ever, but they had been brushed down. No dust or grime coated their surface. I swept the candle low. The stone walkway had also been swept bare. Whoever had cleaned this route had stopped short of spreading the floor with rushes, but that was all that had kept it from being any other corridor in the castle. That, and the walls weren’t hung with warming tapestries.

  “We must be close to something important,” Jane mused. “Except, if I’m right, we’re near very the quadrangle.” She turned to face me and peered past my shoulder down the wide, tidy corridor. “Should we go back the other way?”

  That caused an even greater clutch in my stomach. “No,” I said evenly. “We need to get out of here and back into our own beds before we are caught out.”

  She nodded, seeing the sense in that. We fell silent as we turned and proceeded down the hall, wondering where it would take us.

  We didn’t have to wait for long. The corridor ran in one long, wide swath, without turning. I could hear Jane count off measured steps as we moved forward, her mind—so indifferent in our classroom studies—now bent to a task for which it seemed to be made. The walkway was almost welcoming in its forthright direction too. Right up until it dead-ended into a wall that looked like it was made of solid yew. Clearly, the opening to this corridor had been paneled over—which meant it could contain a hidden doorway!

  Jane clapped her hands together, as happy as I’d ever seen her. The flickering candle showed the eagerness in her eyes. “This is it!” she said. “A way out!” She placed her hands o
n the wall, then pulled them back just as quickly, then tried again, her fingers pressing against the wall, searching. “It’s not an entrance to the outside, though. Given that it’s night after days of rain, the panel isn’t cool enough.”

  “Well, what folly would that be, in truth?” I asked. I set the candle at the base of the wooden panel, the better to search as well. “It’s one thing to allow deeper access within the castle, but an outside entrance would be a threat.”

  “Hmmm,” Jane murmured to herself. “But where is the fun in not being able to leave the castle proper? Surely there would be a secret escape passage somewhere, for the royal family if nothing else.”

  I nodded. That made eminent sense. “Still, we should consider ourselves lucky this isn’t it, then,” I said. “Or we’d likely find a guard on the other side of the wall.”

  That quieted us, and we searched in silence for a few moments more. Spy holes had once existed in this door, but they’d been covered over in thick pitch, at least the pair that we found at knee height. The pitch was old and brittle; it looked as if it had been there for years. Whatever lay beyond this door apparently hadn’t needed scouting for some time. Eventually, my fingers came across a telltale edge in the rough-hewn wall, about shoulder high. “I’ve got something,” I whispered, holding the place while I fished my picklocks out of my waistband.

  Jane lifted the candle high for me to see, and I blessed my grandfather’s memory once again. I was now using his gift twice in one night. Had he known the value of the picklocks when he’d given them to me?

  The lock had been oiled recently, and the door as well. I heard the lock turn with a click. “Put out the candle,” I directed Jane, and with a soft breath we were plunged into darkness again. I felt her hand touch my arm, and I drew the picklocks out of the lock and replaced them in my waistband. Without a word, Jane and I clasped hands, and I pulled the door inward.

  It opened soundlessly . . .

  To reveal an abandoned hall.

  A hall that I recognized immediately.

  “Saint George’s Hall,” I whispered. No one ever frequented this hall that I had ever seen, on my many treks to amuse the Queen with my skills at recovering her treasures and secreting them back into her hand.

  We stepped quickly through the door, ducking out from under a torn but expensive-looking tapestry that hung off-kilter, into the large chamber. Jane pulled the door closed behind us, and the lock snicked into place. She eyed the hidden doorway, just visible in the thin moonlight that was peeking through the leaded glass windows. “Look, this tapestry is pulled just so that nothing might be disturbed if you were to enter,” she said. “And the hall is clean enough—but jumbled enough—that there would be no trace of someone passing through. Just enough rushes strewn about to make tracking impossible, just enough light from the windows for one to not need a telltale torch, and no way to put anything out of place. It’s the perfect place to misdirect someone!”

  She glanced over at me, then stopped. “Is something wrong?” she asked into my staring face.

  Jane was right. Saint George’s Hall was the perfect place to misdirect someone—or the perfect place for a secret meeting. “All is well,” I managed. “Just getting a feel for the place.”

  “I can help you there.” She grinned. “The place is a wreck. And probably as haunted as they say.”

  We turned and scanned the piles of broken furniture and discarded or damaged tapestries, hanging down from enormously tall racks. From what I could see, this would not be a comfortable space in which anyone would linger, especially not a Queen. Far down the length of the room, I knew the hall opened onto a chapel, which would likely be in even worse repair. Surely there would be no sign of disruption there, would there? Even if the Mass was no longer celebrated in it—would that not be sacrilegious?

  I almost thought I heard something creak, far in the depths of the hall, and I stilled. Was someone in the chapel even now? Even worse, was it the Queen?

  I had to find out. And in this, I couldn’t take Jane with me.

  “We should go back to the rooms,” I said, and Jane nodded, finally pulling her gaze away from the wall and the configuration of the secret doorway. She handed me the candle, and I pulled a bit of linen out of my waistband to wrap it, before tucking it safely away.

  “We should,” Jane said, her eyes straying back to the panel. “I want to get all of this down on paper. Start mapping it. Now that we know where to begin, imagine what other passageways exist in this old hulk of a castle.” She was as excited as a child, I realized, and I smiled. She’d seen the maps I’d been drawing up of the castle; it now seemed I had a partner in the effort. Still, we couldn’t tarry here.

  “Do you think we should go separately, to be safe?” I asked.

  “Mmm-hmmm,” she said, still distracted. She lifted the fingers of her right hand to tap her mouth. “I wonder if this would be considered a main exit point,” she mused. “Given how large the panel opening is?”

  I gave her a little push toward the southwest doors of the hall. “You go that way. I’ll exit through the chapel.”

  She wrinkled her nose, finally coming back. “There’s an exit through the chapel?”

  I had no idea. I just needed to see what was in that room. “There’s an exit down through the kitchens,” I lied convincingly. “I’ll probably beat you back to our chambers.”

  “No chance, Rat,” Jane scoffed. “But you can try. I’ll see you in our chambers in a quarter hour.”

  “Done,” I said. I watched her move swiftly down the long hall, disappearing in the gloom of the doorway. Then I turned toward the chapel.

  And just like that, I saw it.

  I blinked, squinted. And there it was again.

  Ahead of me, in the reedy light, something shifted in the shadows.

  I moved forward through the room as silently as I could manage, my eyes adjusting to the murky light. Saint George’s Hall had some fine bits of furniture still, but generally it housed the furniture and paintings not considered valuable enough to hang in the main castle chambers. The floor was covered in old rushes that were probably changed only once a season, and the air had the fetid smell of moldering hay and chimney smoke, doubtless from the enormous stoves that lined the undercroft below, where the kitchens were. This grand hall had fallen into disrepair in King Henry’s time, and neither Edward nor Mary nor Elizabeth had seen fit to spend the extensive monies needed to refurbish it.

  And as Jane had helpfully pointed out, it was rumored to be haunted.

  Still, I rather doubted that whoever was moving around in the chapel this night was a ghost.

  I passed a large painting propped up against a large, ornately carved chair, then paused, considering. The painting was covered in a dust cloth of plain linen. It was a little large for an apron, but it would do if I were seen at a distance. I slid the shroud off the painting in one light pull, and fastened it roughly around my waist. It covered a good part of my skirts, furthering my disguise. I almost looked like a chambermaid now. Almost.

  “This had better be worth it,” I muttered, suddenly feeling foolish. But I’d come so far. I couldn’t turn back now. I schooled my features into bleary-eyed stupor, in case I needed to play part of sleep-addled maid, and moved forward on cat’s feet.

  I’d just reached the doorway of the chapel when I heard them: soft, lilting tones of Spanish, floating across the dusty air. My heart sank. I really needed to learn that language, and quickly. Memorizing was all well and good, but it was far easier to remember words that actually made sense, versus the hypnotic lifts and falls of a foreign tongue, as elusive as fading music. Two men were speaking, and I edged farther into the shadows, peeking around a tall screen as the conversation seemed to scale up a notch in anger.

  I recognized one of them immediately, of course. Tall, slender, and sumptuously dressed, looking every bit as splendid as he had the night of the ball.

  Rafe. My heart sank. Why couldn’t he be fast abe
d this dark night, instead of engaged in conversation with another skulking Spaniard?

  And why were they speaking here?

  His partner was unknown to me, thick and bulky, his tiny pig-eyes squinting over an enormous nose that was roughly the size and shape of a turnip. Clearly the man had been on the losing end of several fights, though his clothes were certainly well made. If they didn’t fit as well as Rafe’s doublet and trunks, his silken hose and fine boots . . . well, what could one expect? No one could look as dashing as Rafe this night, certainly not a boorish Spaniard guard who seemed to vibrate with increasing anger even as Rafe’s tones took on a placating sensibility.

  I let the cadence of their words wash over me as I scanned the room. The chapel was almost devoid of furniture other than the pews and the glowering cross of Christ. It did not have the feeling of a Catholic chapel; there was no ornamentation other than the rather austere crucifix, and no tapestries lining the walls, which gave the room even more of a chill. As I’d suspected, the only other exit from the chapel was an archway built into the wall that led down a curved staircase to the undercroft. If I went that way, I would have to thread my way through the kitchens and storage rooms, then back up another staircase, which would take too much time. I could not afford to be caught by one of the castle guards—I was in no mood to explain to Cecil why I was roaming the corridors at this hour! Still, I was determined to stay and learn what I could from Rafe and the turnip-nosed Spaniard’s conversation. Then I’d return to my chambers through Saint George’s Hall.

  The men’s words grew quieter, but they were still clearly displeased with each other. Rafe trying to be diplomatic, the bulky Spanish guard having none of it. From time to time a word made sense: “castle,” I recognized, and “lady.” Even “Queen,” although only Rafe used that term to describe Elizabeth. The other man’s word for her was decidedly less flattering, and I recognized it from de Feria’s speech of the other week.