“I see,” I laughed, enjoying Anna’s happiness despite myself. “What happened then?”
“Well, Beatrice here,” Anna said, casting adoring eyes at Beatrice. “Beatrice had her aunt put a word in with Lord Farley, whom you know is the patron of the vicar of Cleves, asking him to extend an invitation to Christopher. Lord Farley then proceeded to tell the vicar that his son could do worse than to consider marrying one of the young ladies of the court, especially a woman of gentle breeding and a scholarly mind. A scholarly mind! There would be nothing better to attract the interest of the vicar!” Anna fairly crowed. “Oh, Beatrice, it was masterful.”
Beatrice smiled indulgently, and Anna rushed on.
“So there I am in the Middle Ward, translating correspondence for Sir William, and who should step up to speak with me but Christopher Riley! He asked with a smile should I know any maid with a scholarly mind, and told me the tale altogether.”
Alarm flashed in Beatrice’s eyes, and I also blinked. Why would Christopher be telling Anna all of this? Surely he wouldn’t tip his hand so quickly regarding his intentions to woo her.
“We both got a fair laugh out of it,” continued Anna, blissfully unaware of Beatrice’s and my mounting concern. “An’ because he does not want to disappoint his da, he will be at the ball. Dressed as a vicar, he told me! Can you imagine?”
I fought the temptation to roll my eyes, but Beatrice did not. Fortunately, Anna wasn’t looking at her. Instead she had fallen silent, waiting for our response.
“That is a fine tale, indeed,” I said, springing into the sudden lull. “And do you think Mr. Riley realizes that you are the young maiden Lord Farley was recommending, the young woman of breeding and a scholarly mind?”
Anna stared at me in stupefaction. “Whatever are you talking about?” she asked. “I am hardly a young woman of—”
“Anna!” Beatrice blurted in astonishment. “You cannot be serious. Do you mean to tell me that you thought Lord Farley—at my direct request—would recommend someone other than you?”
Anna turned her gaze to Beatrice. “Whatever can you mean?” she asked again. “I—I just thought it was a ploy to get Chris to come to the masque.”
“It was a ploy to get him to come to the masque to see you,” Beatrice said, and moaned. “And now he must be thoroughly confused, because you played it off as if you had no idea what he was talking about.”
“But I didn’t know what he was talking about—I mean, I don’t think he was talking about anything—certainly not about me!” She looked from one of us to the other. “Did I do something wrong?” Anna’s soft face crumpled, and her large eyes began to fill with tears. I stepped forward quickly.
“This is the best thing that could have happened,” I said firmly, with only the slightest sense of desperation.
That arrested them both. They stared at me.
“It is?” Anna asked in a tiny voice.
“Absolutely,” I said. “If you’d simpered or blushed, Mr. Riley would have known his suit was already assured. By acting as if his attendance at the ball mattered not a whit to you—and in fact, laughing along with him at the notion of this mystery girl—”
“Well, not a mystery girl, precisely,” Anna said. “I suggested two or three girls that might suit—”
I smoothly cut off both Anna’s words and Beatrice’s groaned response. “Then he has no reason to suspect you had anyone put in a word for you. And why is that? Because you are so confident of his attraction to you that you do not need to play such games. You will now both be at the ball, and in perfect accord with each other, easy in your shared confidences. Even better, there will be no question of your finding each other. You’ll know your target when you see him the night of the masque. I cannot think there will be many other young men dressed like a vicar.”
Beatrice stifled a giggle, but Anna twirled around, her skirts flying. “Oh, Meg, you have to be right. And better than any of that, Christopher Riley is coming to the masque!” She turned faster and faster. “It couldn’t be more perfect!”
She collapsed in a heap on the bed and burst out laughing from the sheer joy of it. “It is almost as good as having deciphered your letters, Meg, verily I swear!”
Beatrice and I both froze, even as Anna continued chortling.
“Anna,” I managed as soon as I could draw breath. “You mean that you’ve found the key to the letters?” This was a stroke of luck if so—though we’d had the letters less than a day, I needed to return them!
“Oh, yes. It wasn’t so difficult as all that.” Anna sat up on her bed, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Once I’d steamed open the wax seals of the rest of them—don’t worry, they’re back in place now pristinely perfect—it was easy to find the pattern. Deciphering a code comes much easier when you know that the code is there to decipher. I canna tell you the number of letters I’ve read that had no more code to them than cow’s milk—”
“Anna!” Beatrice interrupted, sharply enough to stop even Anna’s stream of chatter. “What did you find in the letters?”
She blinked at us. “Well, the ones I had were quite specific, to members of Lady Amelia’s family. They spoke of ‘waiting for the signal’ to indicate that a major request was being made, but in the meantime to carry out some minor tasks.” She grinned. “You remember the milk crate incident? That fell to Lady Agnes, Amelia’s great-aunt. And the sour milk being stirred into the courtier’s ale? That was Amelia’s cousin Bailey.”
Beatrice frowned. “Lord Bailey hasn’t been at the court since midspring,” she said. “He nearly died in that fall at the hunt in Shropshire.”
Anna bit her lip. “Well . . . the letter was from about that time. Wait.” She dove into our side cupboard, and pulled out the packet. “Yes, March. So it’s possible that the writer didn’t know of his fall. But still . . . ” She regarded Beatrice thoughtfully. “The sour milk incident did happen. It caused quite a fuss.”
“And I don’t recall Lady Agnes remaining in the court either, given her son’s injury.” Beatrice tapped her chin. “So who could have carried out the requests?”
“Lady Amelia?” I asked, but Beatrice shook her head.
“Lady Amelia wouldn’t have harmed Marie, though. Not so violently. And she wouldn’t have set the vestments on fire.”
“Oh, no,” Anna agreed. “There was something in the letter about stealing vestments—but not burning them. And it was not even posed as a question, more of a ‘if only we could . . . but it would be too dangerous.’ That, too, was in the letter for Bailey. And that one was one of the letters I don’t believe was truly penned by Dona Victoria.”
“What about the love letter? Were there any codes in those?”
“Only the code of true love—and written in the same hand as Bailey’s letter, I will say that.” Anna sighed. “It’s all so very tragic, in its way.”
I grimaced. “Yes, tragic. Remember, that lovestruck swain knew information about Marie’s death that only the killer would know. Why would he warn Lady Amelia about what happened to Marie?”
While we were considering that, a chambermaid appeared at the door. “Miss Knowles?” the young girl squeaked. “A Lord Cavanaugh is asking after you.”
That arrested us all. Beatrice recovered first. “He must have heard of the Queen’s intention for me to replace the ailing Mathilde,” she said, and smiled. “La, how word travels fast.”
“La,” I agreed flatly. And then she was gone, leaving Anna and me to ponder. Me perhaps more than Anna.
I gathered up the letters from her and reattached the lavender ribbon. “Anna,” I said. “The letters you think were not written by Dona Victoria, can you tell me anything else about them?”
“Well—I don’t know much,” she said. “He tried very hard to match Dona Victoria’s writing, and he was quiet good. Still, the inconsistencies were consistent, if that makes sense?”
“It does.” I nodded. “And it is definitely a ‘he’?”
“Oh, yes. Men’s handwriting has a distinctive feel even when it’s trying to be otherwise. It’s more . . . chaotic than a female’s writing. Also, he was not a native Englishman speaking Spanish, nor even a native Spaniard, unless I miss my guess. Based primarily on the love letter, I believe he is Portuguese.”
I nodded. “You’d mentioned that, I think before—”
“It only happened a few times, but he chose a word from that tongue in place of its Spanish cousin.” She shrugged. “I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. And he wrote with . . . ”
Her words tapered off as she gazed out the high window, over the quadrangle, and toward the Round Tower. “Oh, no,” she breathed.
“What?” I looked over to where she was staring, but could see only the crenellated top of the Tower, striking in the afternoon sun.
“The Tower!” Anna gasped. “The symbols!” She pulled apart the letters again, rifling through them, folding two open that had the fancy girlish scribbling she’d remarked on before, when I’d first given her the letters. “Look here—and here!” She pointed, and there in the swirling, looping scrollwork I could see it too, buried in the design: the image of a cross, surmounted by an inverted triangle. Except here, surrounded by all of the twirling lines and swirling leaves, it looked almost like—“A thistle,” Anna said. “It’s a Scottish thistle.” She stared at me, wide-eyed. “If this means what I think, then an alliance between Scotland and Spain is under way. And they are bold indeed if they sought to mark Elizabeth’s own castle with their symbol.”
“Beneath an English rose that would wither in the rain,” I said. “They had to know that it would be found.”
She shook her head. “The marks were faint—not many would have looked for them, or even seen them if the roses had faded with time, which I’m sure was their intention. Only if they’d known what they were looking for, would anyone have seen them at all.”
“A symbol to put a new plan in motion,” I said. “Another disturbance? An attack on the Queen?”
“Whatever it was, they missed their chance,” Anna said. “The symbol never played out. Her shields covered it up before any could see it.”
“And that is only thanks to you.”
“And you.” Anna blushed. “We are all in this together.”
“As you say.” I bit my lip, knowing it was time to take the next step. I’d gone too long trying to read my hidden book myself, I decided, and I simply couldn’t do it. “I have a . . . book,” I said. “That my grandfather gave me. But, well—”
If I’d expected Anna to be surprised, I was mistaken. Of course she’d known I had a book. There were few secrets we maids could truly keep from one another. In truth, Anna may have even undone the knots on my packet, just for the practice of doing them up again. Now she looked at me gravely, her green eyes gentle. “Would you like my help reading it?” she asked.
I burned with shame at her soft words. “I . . . Well, if you could take a look at it . . . ” I went to my corner of our cupboard and fished out the package, then untied my lock knots carefully. The small, innocent leather tome gleamed in its cheap cotton wrapping, and with a sigh I gave it to Anna. “I can’t make any sense of it at all.”
“Well, I’m sure it’s just . . . mmm . . . ” She paged through it, her brows lifting higher in surprise with each turned page. When she looked up, she was grinning from ear to ear.
“Well, Meg, it’s no wonder you couldn’t read it,” she announced in triumph. “It’s all of it written in code!”
Anna now had enough decoding work to keep her happy for days, but I couldn’t rest until I’d returned Amelia’s letters. I didn’t even dare wait for night. Instead, I slipped out during the evening meal and placed the letters back safely in their coffer while Amelia was attending the Queen.
After that, the next five days flew by rapidly, and my fellow spies and I were pulled in different directions. Our formal instructions in the dark arts of spying, elocution, and courtly manners had ended, at least for the short term, and I couldn’t say I missed them. Both Cecil and the Queen had me following around half the court, and reporting on their conversations. Further, just to be able to tell Cecil and Walsingham that I was in fact doing my best to secretly spy on the Queen, I’d stopped into Saint George’s Hall a half dozen times—always, happily, finding no one.
Anna was making headway with my little leather book, though she’d deciphered nothing but a string of dates back from King Henry’s reign. Secretly, I harbored hopes that the book was a diary of one of my parents, but I shared that dream with no one. After all, if this were true, why would Grandfather have kept such a thing from me?
Beatrice had been moved into her temporary role as a lady of the bedchamber within a day, the expected malady that befell the hapless Mathilde seeming suspiciously more like a mild case of poisoning than a true illness. Either way Mathilde had been relegated to the sickroom posthaste, and Beatrice put in place with a minimum of fuss. The official story was that there was no reason to bring in the next lady-in-waiting on the list for bedchamber duties, as Mathilde would be returning within a few days. However, there were plenty of women old and young to whom the honor could have fallen. That Beatrice had been chosen caused enough chatter to circle around the castle a half dozen times. Lord Cavanaugh was much in evidence, and rumors were flying that Beatrice’s assignment was only the precursor to the formal engagement of the two.
Beatrice still considered me the reason behind her good fortune, and I could never find the right time to change her perception. She seemed so happy. And grateful. And, well . . . happy.
I tried to avoid her.
Instead, Jane and I had taken to splitting our time between following the Spaniards and navigating the secret passageways that led down and through the castle grounds. With as many passageways as we uncovered, I couldn’t imagine how the castle could still remain standing.
Even now we paused in the entryway of yet another branch of the underground corridors. Jane bent over her parchment, and I held the candle aloft as she scratched the newest juncture onto the page.
“I just can’t believe it,” she said for what had to be the fiftieth time. “How could we not have known about these passageways? Cecil and Walsingham have to be aware of them.”
“Remember, though, they are only just come to the castle this year. It’s not as if they were welcome during Queen Mary’s reign, and not during Edward’s either.” We’d discussed whether or not we should tell our advisors of our find. So far it had seemed wiser to keep the discovery to ourselves. “I don’t think some of these corridors have been disturbed since King Henry’s time. Like this place, for example.” I shivered in the damp, reaching out to strike the loose strands of a spiderweb away from Jane’s bowed head. “Not exactly the crossroads of civilization.”
“We’re right underneath the Round Tower, I think,” Jane mused. “If we go that way”—she nodded forward into the gloom—“we’ll still be east of Winchester Tower. It wouldn’t surprise me if there is an exit there.”
“And this way?” I asked, gesturing into the murk.
“Farther into the Lower Ward. But that’s a great deal of wide open space to cover, and we’ve been gone for hours, with nothing to report.” She grinned up at me. “Unless you’ve seen any Spaniards down here?”
“Not yet.” I smiled back at her. “But we’ve still got time.” An image of Rafe suddenly sprang to mind. Was he familiar with all of the secret passageways through the castle?
Jane stood, careful not to smack her head on the ceiling. “Let’s go toward the North Terrace. I have a feeling that’s where we’ll find the dungeons.” She grimaced as we moved forward. “I don’t think they’d hide them under the visitors’ apartments, and they won’t be under the Lower Ward.”
I nodded. It made sense. “If we come across any well-lit passages, that’s likely to be our first clue.”
“Our second will be the smell.”
“You have the right of that.
” As Jane and I both knew from personal experience, dungeons were not known for their cleanliness. I had no doubt the dungeons of Windsor were equally as inhospitable as those of London. We didn’t speak for another several feet. Twice there were branching corridors that she noted in her plans but we didn’t pursue. Then we turned a natural corner in the passageway, and stopped cold. Before Jane even needed to tell me, I’d pinched out the candle.
A light flickered in the distance.
“Sconces?” I whispered. “Or torchlight?”
“Better hope for sconces,” Jane breathed. “But the light grows no brighter. That bodes well.”
“Go forward or retreat?”
“Forward,” she said. “You come up with a good story if we’re caught out.”
I nodded. We’d fallen into this easy pattern between us, Jane mapping and me crafting plausible exit scenarios should we be discovered somewhere we weren’t supposed to be. “If the corridor is well lit, the entryway must be close. It wouldn’t be unusual for us to explore a lit passageway if we stumbled upon it. As long as the entryway was not impossible to find.”
“And as long as there are no guards,” Jane muttered.
“And that,” I agreed. We crept forward, barely willing to breathe as the corridor opened up into a markedly different passageway from what we’d become used to beneath the halls of Windsor Castle. First, there were sconces (not actual torchlight, thankfully, since torchlight would entail someone carrying the torch) at regular intervals down the long hallway. Jane squinted into the distance to the northeast.
“That passage goes beneath the public receiving rooms of Windsor. Easy access to bring a prisoner down.” She sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?”
“And I hear it,” I said. “Running water.”
“An underground aquifer?” Jane’s disbelief mirrored my own. “A redirection of the Thames?”
“There had to be some reason they chose this location for the original castle,” I said, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it. How had they gotten water to flow beneath Windsor Castle?
Maid of Secrets Page 21
