Maid of Secrets

by Jennifer McGowan

  The knife was in my palm.

  But I could never kill a man, I thought, the words coming back to me like a distant roar. I would never cut a man. I was too smart for that. I was an actor and a thief, not a thug.

  I was not a thug.

  But who am I, truly?

  Ortiz’s fingers pressed hard upon my throat then. “Perhaps I should break your neck, my sweet? So fine and narrow in my hands?”

  Ortiz would be wearing a stuffed doublet. Flaring trunks, puffed full of cloth and ribbons.

  But Ortiz was also a dandy of the first order. Ortiz with his finely muscled legs and glorious silk hosiery. Ortiz with his well-turned ankles and flattering bows. Ortiz with his right leg pinning my hip, his thigh lined up alongside my right arm . . . just below the blade. Just below the blade.

  Who am I, truly?

  I struck.

  I shoved Jane’s knife deep into Ortiz’s thigh, heard his high, strangled yelp as he leaped away from me. A skate of blood spurted across my hand. I’d not struck him deeply enough for him to die, but the blade was thick and true, and would slow him down. I pulled a second blade out of my bodice sheath, scrambling forward just as the door was flung open, and a dark shape barreled into the room, backlit by the passageway.

  “Meg!” It was Rafe, and I gasped, waving him into the room, my mouth moving but no sound emanating from my bruised throat. Behind me I heard Ortiz unsheathe a blade.

  “Guards!” I screamed in my tortured whisper, but Rafe was already past me, a wraith in the darkness. A knife clattered against stone wall, but there was no accompanying grunt of pain from Rafe. Ortiz had thrown, but missed. A thud and a gasp later, and Rafe was back.

  “I’m so sorry, sweet Meg,” he said, cradling my face. I lifted my fingers to his cheek, frowning at him. His hands felt as cold as ice. Sorry? I wondered. Why sorry?

  “Guards!” I managed, my voice finally coming back in a desperate croak as my fingers curved over Rafe’s hands, feeling the weight of his ring against my palm. I shook my head, confused. “Guards!” I hissed again. “They will want to—talk to him. He knows—about Amelia. The letters, Rafe. Lady Knollys,” I babbled. “The—plot! He knows!”

  “I know, sweet Meg, I know,” Rafe murmured, his voice soft and pleading. “Which is why I did what I had to do, and why I was never here. Forgive me?”

  I looked at him, sick comprehension dawning. “What!?” I tried to scream, and inside, my mind was wailing, Rafe, what have you done?

  I clasped my hands around his, trying to hold him to me, but I was too weak. He sighed and pulled his hands away from me, rolling to his feet. Then he was gone, leaving me to flop in my sea of skirts back toward Ortiz, barely reaching the man to hold up a hand to his sagging, foaming mouth. Foaming? Arsenic! Rafe had drugged the last man standing who could implicate the Spanish Crown in this treacherous plot. Ortiz still breathed, but not for long.

  Rafe had completed his assignment.

  Then pounding feet echoed through the passageway and I was enveloped by my friends.

  Soon Ortiz would be dead. And all of his and Rafe’s secrets would die with him.

  Well, not quite all.

  I let myself be hauled up, clenching my hand around Rafe’s jade stone ring.

  Things got a little complicated after that.

  It was a full twelve hours later before I could break free from the castle, and I breathed in the crisp cool air with satisfaction as I watched the far boats of the Thames begin their journey down to London, and then away to the sea. I relished my privacy, seated against the castle walls. I’d not been alone since the melee of the night before, a melee the Queen had noted with appreciation had taken place in a passageway and not her Presence Chamber.

  The Queen’s appreciation had shown no bounds, in fact.

  I glanced down at the etched gold ring now gracing the longest finger of my left hand. She had called this ring “the Queen’s Grace,” announcing to all and sundry among her advisors and guards that I was never to be questioned or held without her express presence, that I was in her highest confidence, the first among her Maids of Honor to receive this award.

  The first, but not the last.

  The Queen was no fool, and she had ordered similar rings be given to Beatrice, Jane, Sophia, and Anna as well. Before the night was through, we’d all knelt before her to receive these boons, no one understanding their importance perhaps more than I. If Cecil and Walsingham understood that same import, or the Queen’s motivation, they gave no sign. Nor did she give any sign of suspecting me of having eavesdropped on her in her bedchamber. I prayed it would never again be an issue. Elizabeth was too young to give up flirtation—even love. But if she needed to be protected from herself, then I would do it. While I served Her Majesty, I would do anything she asked.

  Beatrice had already leveraged her part in the plot to get her wedding date set for a few weeks hence, but I half-suspected she’d hastened the happy event to keep a certain Scotsman at bay. As the marriage talk had then turned to the next eligible maid, Sophia had fainted with her best swoon yet. Anna—and the vicar’s son—had helped her to her chambers . . . and then Anna had returned more than an hour later, her eyes alight, her cheeks flushed.

  Only Jane and I remained to talk with the Queen’s advisors.

  We had recovered the letters from Amelia’s coffer and given them up. Most of them, anyway. At Beatrice’s insistence, we’d kept Lady Knollys’s letters for our own use later.

  At first, the advisors refused to believe what we’d found for them.

  Then, in the way of elders and men in general, they were angry that we had found anything at all.

  But at length, finally, they’d realized the truth for what it was.

  Here is how it all unraveled:

  Ortiz, an agent for the pope, had two fatal flaws. The first: He was too zealous in his passion for his church. And second: He was too careless in his affection for the women of the English court.

  His fervor as a Catholic had moved him to go beyond his assignment of merely receiving letters from de Feria and handing them off to English sympathizers, letters that gave suggestions of how members of the court might disturb and distress the new Queen, giving rise to discussion that she was not fit to rule. No, he’d had to do more. So he’d opened the letters, read their instructions, written two new letters of his own, and even set some of the disruptions in place himself—including those that went far beyond what the pope had ever intended. Eventually those disruptions had turned deadly, when the maid Marie had discovered what he was doing.

  And that took us to the second error in judgment Ortiz had made. He’d fallen for the easy smiles and winsome beauty of the maid Marie, not realizing she was spying on him. When he realized, too late, that she had figured him out—he’d had to kill her. But rather than making it seem like an accident, he’d done so ruthlessly and with pleasure. He’d then been careful for the tiniest of whiles, but all too quickly the fair Lady Amelia had caught his eye. He’d known she was no spy; she was merely a zealous Catholic, and a willing hand in his plot. He’d even written her a love letter, which Amelia had kept like a victor’s spoils. But the woman’s very lack of cunning proved a liability to Ortiz when Turnip Nose was killed.

  The letters Rafe had given to de Feria were not truly from either the pope or the Spanish king. They were crafted by the new ambassador, Bishop de Quadra, to ferret out the conspiracy—and positioned Rafe to get rid of the rogue conspirators quickly and quietly. De Feria had handed these letters off to Ortiz, as was their custom. Then Ortiz read the new letters, which named Rafe as a potential comrade in arms. He instructed Turnip Nose to contact Rafe, to bring him into the fold. When Turnip Nose had met with Rafe, however, he’d summarily died—but it wasn’t clear if Rafe had killed him. And that’s when Ortiz had gotten nervous.

  Ortiz realized that Lady Amelia, if questioned, could betray him. She had to die. He chose Moon Face to do the killing, but in the end Ortiz couldn’t stay awa
y. His thirst for murder had grown too strong. When Rafe and I arrived and disrupted Ortiz and Moon Face’s attempt to kill Lady Amelia, Ortiz had known he’d need to leave Windsor Castle . . . but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do so. He wanted something else before he departed, one last piece of information to further the Catholic cause and hasten Elizabeth’s dethroning—or, failing that, another death.

  He got what he wanted, in the end.

  So there it was: the very first Catholic plot of the Queen’s reign, doomed from the beginning by the main conspirator’s own zealous hand. And though Rafe had set his own gambit in motion at the same time, the Maids of Honor had found the original letters Ortiz had given to Lady Amelia, and had understood them for what they were, deciphering the mark of the Scottish thistle, connecting it with the disturbances, and identifying the writer of the letters as a Portuguese man—who later turned out to be Ortiz. We’d discovered the threat to the Queen, and we’d destroyed it. We’d proven our worth a dozen times over. And our work was just beginning.

  My individual work too, it seemed. Although we’d saved the Queen, I had not, in fact, delivered Marie’s killer to Walsingham and Cecil in time. Dead spies were of no service to the Maids of Honor, they had informed me stiffly. Nor were they of service to the Queen, nor to England. In Cecil’s and Walsingham’s eyes, I had not fulfilled our bargain, and so I would remain in service to the Queen until I had.

  I found that, for the moment, I could live with those restrictions.

  My parents had been spies for King Henry, my Queen’s beloved father. They had left the court under cover of darkness and had hidden deep in the countryside. They’d remained with my grandfather only long enough to have me, then had pushed on. According to a note he’d penned himself on the final page, he’d later received their precious diary from a courier who’d explained only that their death had been swift and without terrible pain. Out of fear for my life, grandfather had never told me the first word about them, and yet here I was . . . so much my parents’ daughter that I was standing in the Queen’s court, ready to serve and protect.

  Who am I, truly?

  I am a Maid of Honor.

  Beside me in the castle wall, a door scraped and swung open. Suddenly, I was no longer alone on the green hills rolling away from Windsor.

  “Good morrow to you, Meg Fellowes,” said Rafe Luis Medina, Count de Martine. He’d become many things in the short time I’d known him. A mark. An assassin. A friend.

  Perhaps, something more.

  I stood with him against the cool stone castle walls as he gazed out over the wide rolling plain. It was not even a quarter-hour walk to the Thames, and he would need to make haste. There would not be time for much discussion.

  Where he’d disappeared to last night, I had no idea, but under the remarkably polite questioning accorded to royal ambassadors, de Quadra and de Feria had stoutly protested that Rafe had been with them since the moment he’d left my side. They’d had enough to manage, with having to explain to the furious Queen about Ortiz and his letters. They claimed that Ortiz had acted without sanction, from either the pope or King Philip. That Spain had no part in a Catholic plot against the Queen or any other Protestant monarch. That King Philip was Queen Elizabeth’s brother, not her enemy. Ortiz was dead now. The other guards in his employ were dead. Everyone else was protesting their innocence with loud and long lamentations.

  No one believed them, of course, but it was a battle for another day.

  My battle, I realized now.

  “Good morrow, Rafe Luis Medina,” I said. I nodded to the door he had carefully shut behind him. “Did you know that particular passageway before this morning?”

  He smiled, eyeing me warily. “I did not. Jane was kind enough to accompany me. I think she expected the request.” At my smile, he chuckled. “I thought as much. It is time for me to leave if I have grown predictable. She guards your safe passage back just inside the door.”

  I nodded. “You’ll be in London long?”

  “Not at all. I leave on the first ship out.”

  “That is wise, I think.”

  We stood there, strangely awkward in the shadow of the castle.

  That was it, then. Rafe had to leave, and summarily, before Cecil and Walsingham came up with something specific to question him over. He was still at risk, remaining here. He was not an official ambassador; he was a spy for King Philip. The rules of polite questioning did not apply to him, and Cecil’s or Walsingham’s frustration would eventually play itself out.

  “You’ll be safe?” I asked, glancing away, hating the stupidity of the question. For everything else I could do, I still could not make intelligent conversation.

  “Probably not,” Rafe said with too much gravity. “I suspect I’ll be dead before nightfall.”

  I looked at him sharply, and his teasing grin finally chipped away a piece of my armor. I opened up my mouth to speak, but found the words would not come. I pulled up my arms to cross them under my chest. I shrugged. After a moment I tried again. “Well, if you must go, then you must go. ’Tis the way of a spy, I suppose one could say.”

  He ignored my prattle, his eyes searching mine. “I would ask a boon of you, sweet Meg, one spy to another, then?”

  I tensed, not backing down as he took a step toward me. “I should think my allowing you safe passage from the castle would be gift enough,” I said. “Even though you deliberately thwarted my own attempt to secure Ortiz alive. You were rather quick with your poison.”

  Rafe dismissed that with a careless wave of his hand. “Ortiz was mine before he was yours. ’Tis the way of a spy, as you say.”

  I let that comment pass. For now. “You should go,” I said heavily. “The longer you stay here with me, the more risk you take. You should—”

  “And you should be still and let me speak,” he said, and chuckled. He lifted a hand to my face. I jerked away, but he followed the movement with his usual grace, capturing my chin with his hand.

  It was a simple, almost inconsequential move, and yet it more effectively trapped me than anything Cecil and Walsingham had ever visited upon me. I could not move. I could not speak. Rafe held me with his eyes, and I longed for this moment to stay exactly so, forever keeping precious what he was and what I was and what we had been together, if only for a moment.

  “What else do you want from me?” I asked with, I thought distantly, a pleasing amount of exasperation in my voice. Never mind that my feet were rooted to the ground, a nervous tremor unsettling me. “It sounds like you have everything you require.”

  “Not quite,” he murmured, his fingers distracting me, moving along my jawline. “There is the question of my mother’s ring, which I suspect you slipped from my fingers.”

  “Say you haven’t lost it.” If only he knew. It hung even now around my neck, as I dared not lose sight of it while he was still on English soil. I deliberately mimicked his words from the first time we’d ever spoken. “Perhaps you simply loosened it, and it fell away as you ran?”

  Rafe grinned, remembering as well. “I do seem to have a habit of losing it around you.” He nodded. “If you care to, you may return it to Beatrice. She has more need of it than I do.”

  I thought of Beatrice, and her words just yesterday. Another slight. Another indiscretion. How many sins of her father had she redressed? What else had she done to maintain the prestige of her family? “Thank you,” I said simply.

  “I do regret, however, that I have only your favor to remember you by,” Rafe said.

  “My favor?” I asked, and he dropped his hand and fished inside his cloak. A moment later he drew out a creased and many-times folded white ruff, late of the Queen’s midsummer ball.

  Something broke inside my chest.

  Rafe smiled and tucked the ruff away. When he lifted his hand to my face again, I felt him brush away a tear. His eyes were dark with intensity now, and his gaze leveled on mine. “I will return to keep you safe. On that you have my promise.”


  I felt my brows shoot up. “I’ve no need of your protection.”

  “Needed or not, I will come back to you, sweet Meg,” he murmured, his fingers now firming on my chin. “There is naught in the world that would keep me away. But before I go . . . this is the boon I would ask. Our first kiss.”

  I blinked at him. “We have kissed before.”

  “We have kissed when you were stealing from me. When I was stealing from you. And we have kissed in haste and danger, never knowing when we’d have to run,” he said. “For once, my beautiful Meg, I would like to simply kiss you. A perfectly ordinary kiss.”

  He tilted up my chin.

  There are moments in my life that I believe I’ll remember forever. A perfect sunset, the sight of ships coming into port, the first breath of spring.

  And the moment of a perfectly ordinary kiss from Rafe Luis Medina, the Count de Martine.

  It was nothing at all like I’d expected it to be. It was strong—but curiously soft at once, and Rafe exhaled a strangled breath that sent a thrill completely through me as he crushed my body to his. In that moment, his lips over mine, it seemed he poured his very soul into me, his soul and all his memories and everything he was, everything he would be. I could not get enough of him, and when he lifted his face away, I wanted him back, immediately.

  “You will return?” I gasped as he trailed soft kisses over my lips and cheek, straying to my neck. This part I remembered from before, but now his touch took on a new level of magic, like tracings of fire that were now branded deep into my skin, warming me in the darkness that even now I felt drawing close.

  “I will return,” he vowed. “The Queen’s birthday is hard upon us, and I would be a very poor courtier indeed to not show her my appreciation for her gracing the world with another year of life. And, I’m given to understand, there is to be a wedding at Windsor soon as well.”

  I smiled, thinking of Beatrice. “It will be an event not to be missed,” I agreed.

  “With a fortnight of de Quadra’s diplomacy and with a handsome gift from the Spanish monarchy for the Queen’s troubles, I suspect I will be a welcome guest.”