Assassin's Masque (Palace of Spies Book 3)

by Sarah Zettel

  “What about the top?” Matthew came up beside me. With a bit of wrestling, I pulled the drawer from its rails and slipped my hand into the narrow space left behind. At the very back, my groping fingers brushed against paper. I scrabbled and pulled gently, coming up with a folded page that had been stuck to the top of the space with sealing wax. I laid this on the desk and reached in again.

  In all, I retrieved four letters from Mr. Tinderflint’s desk.

  “‘Walpole.’” I read the name aloud on the first letter. “‘Townshend,’ ‘Southerly,’ and ‘Sunderland.’” I swallowed. These were the men who ran the kingdom. Who ran the prince and, some said, the king. Mr. Walpole’s letter was the heaviest, I noticed.

  Unlike grand ladies, maids are allowed pockets in their skirts. I tucked the letters away before I could be tempted to try Mr. Tinderflint’s trick with blade and candle flame to find out just what these missives contained.

  “There it is, then,” said Matthew. “We’re done.”

  “We should go,” I told him, but I did not move.

  “We should,” he agreed, but also did not move.

  “We have run more than enough risks tonight.”

  “And you’ve found what you were sent for. We have no excuse to look about anymore.”

  “It would be rude, to say the least,” I acknowledged.

  “And it might indicate we did not entirely trust all we’ve been told,” he added gently. “By Tinderflint or by anyone else.”

  On the way here, I’d told Matthew about what had happened in the Tower. Afterward, softly, with many stumbles and much backtracking, I’d told him what I’d come to suspect when I’d lied to my father.

  I bit my lip and nodded once. In accord, we turned our backs on each other and set about searching the room.

  It was not possible that this place was Mr. Tinderflint’s home. This was a meeting place for conspirators. Someone did sometimes spend the night, for there was a broad cot with quilts and pillows and a nightstand beside it with a washbasin on top and a chamber pot (thankfully, clean) underneath. There was a trunk as well, which was not locked. At first it looked to hold nothing more than a few pairs of breeches and some plain shirts and stockings, all of them far too small for my patron. But as I lifted the shirts away, I found another box beneath. Inside that was a pair of pistols, complete with powder horn, a pouch of lead shot, ramrod, and wadding. There was also a leather satchel, which proved to hold a tinderbox, candles, a knife, a pouch with a handful of shillings and pence inside, and, most unexpectedly, a roll of cordage and iron hooks that proved to be a rope ladder.

  Whomever Mr. Tinderflint hosted in this room, he believed they might have to leave in something of a hurry, and possibly from an awkward position, such as the rooftop.

  “I don’t think there’s anything here,” I called to Matthew as I shut the trunk. I was relieved. I didn’t like the fact that we were searching Mr. Tinderflint’s rooms, even if it was only a bolthole. “We can go.”

  But all Matthew said in answer was “Peggy.”

  There is a lightheaded feeling that comes with the presentiment of danger or doom. It came over me now as I turned toward Matthew. He waited beside the nightstand and gazed into his hands. A fine chain dangled across his fingers, and it glittered gold in the candlelight.

  I moved to his side in order to see what so captivated his attention. Matthew cradled a golden locket in his palm. Inside, there was a painted miniature—a portrait of a dark-haired woman. The artist had caught her open smile and the tilt to her head that made her look both merry and knowing. In the other half of the locket lay a curling lock of black hair.

  My ears were ringing. My thoughts clamored and shouted, but I could not hear them. I refused to hear them.

  A gold ring had been threaded onto the locket’s chain. My hand trembled as I reached to pick it up off Matthew’s palm. I turned it over. Slowly. Because I was afraid of what I would see. Because memory had already tried to warn me of what it was.

  It was a signet ring, very plain, really, except for being gold. The surface was carved with two intertwined letters: a J and an E.

  I knew this ring. My hand remembered the weight and the touch of it. When I had been small, I could fit two of my fingers through it and would hold them up so my mother could laugh. My father wore the ring’s twin on a chain around his neck and had somehow, he said, kept it safe through all his years in France, in the Bastille, in the marshes with the Sandfords.

  Mr. Tinderflint had my mother’s ring. That merry, smiling dark-haired woman in the miniature was Elizabeth Fitzroy. I was eight when she died, but I had not forgotten her face, or her scent of lavender and chamomile, or this ring.

  “Wh . . . ?” I choked. “Where did you find this?”

  Matthew nodded toward the nightstand. There was a drawer and it was open. There was a box in the drawer and that was open too.

  Mr. Tinderflint had my mother’s ring, and her portrait, and a lock of her hair, and he kept them at his bedside. There was one very obvious reason a man might keep such tokens in a place where they would not be found even if his own house was searched by his many enemies.

  “He . . . he . . . loved her, from a distance. It must have been from a distance.” It was not possible that Mr. Tinderflint had carried on an assignation with my mother.

  It was not possible because my mother would never do such a thing with such a man, especially not while her husband, my father, was away in service. Even if she suspected my father of trading information to anyone who could pay. Even if those suspicions were why she’d used Mrs. Oglethorpe to have him arrested. Jonathan Fitzroy was her husband. Other women might do such things. But not my mother, and not with Mr. Tinderflint: old, scheming, rich, untrustworthy, grossly fat, spy and master of spies . . .

  She signed her letters Mrs. Tinderflint.

  The next thing I knew, I was bent over the washbasin, violently ill.

  “Oh, Lord, Peggy.” Matthew was there, pushing my braid back from my face, rubbing my shoulders. “It’s all right, it’s all right.”

  “It is not all right!” I shouted over the foul taste of my bile. “It cannot possibly be all right! He must have robbed her when she died! He robbed my mother! He robbed me! He lied! He . . . he . . .”

  I dissolved into an entirely useless and incoherent storm of tears. Because it was impossible that my mother had made a lover of Mr. Tinderflint. It had to be impossible, because a woman who had a lover . . . might also have a child by him.

  Mr. Tinderflint had brought me into his web of spies and schemes because I was the daughter of Jonathan and Elizabeth Fitzroy, as well as the entirely ignorant and accidental relation of a mass of important Jacobites. He had not, could never have, sought me out because I was the natural daughter of Hugh Thurlow Flintcross Gainsford, Earl Tierney.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  IN WHICH AN ILL-TIMED EVENT OCCURS IN BED, WITH UNMITIGATED DISASTER TO FOLLOW.

  Matthew held me until I was able to stop crying, mostly. He then left me alone while he ran downstairs with a basin to fetch some cool water. I spent an eternity staring at my mother’s portrait and ring, trying to believe that the most reasonable explanation for their presence here was that Mr. Tinderflint had stolen them.

  He might have spoken tenderly of how much he admired my mother, what an astounding woman she was, of her skills and her intelligence. What of it? That was not him speaking like a man in love. He was a master reminiscing about a valued servant, nothing more. His unprecedented rage at being accused of her murder was because such accusations wounded his aristocratic honor. Any man would respond thus. He had known about me because he kept track of the lives of his spies, and because he was careful, and because it was his business. There was no affinity between us beyond what he had told me from the beginning—that he hoped I had inherited my parents’ skills.

  She signed her letters Mrs. Tinderflint.

  No. My mother had not spied against my father. That was a lie M
rs. Oglethorpe told. My mother had not played the lover with Mr. Tinderflint to pass his secrets to the Old Fury. That was not why Lord Lynnfield and Mrs. Oglethorpe had let Sebastian and Sophy lead me to the enciphered letter, which he would accept in perfect trust from my hand.

  I knew the truth. The truth was that Mother had fooled Mrs. Oglethorpe so thoroughly that when she came to me, the Old Fury thought she was saving the daughter of a friend. She did not realize my mother had been her cleverest enemy. For their part, the Sandfords had pressed the betrothal because they wanted me safe under their control to use against their banker Uncle Pierpont and keep him in line, or possibly against Jonathan Fitzroy, should he make an appearance. Their plan was not, was never, to use me against Mr. Tinderflint because I was his . . . his . . .

  Daughter.

  Because I wasn’t. I couldn’t be.

  By the time Matthew returned, I’d dissolved into tears again. He found a rag so I could bathe my face. He uncorked the bottle on the mantel and poured out some of the dark wine to help wash the bitterness from my mouth.

  I wrapped my arms around him so tightly, it might have seemed I meant to press him into my heart and hold him there. He kissed me to help ease my confusion and despair. He laid me back onto the bed, so that we might embrace and kiss and murmur all the things that lovers say when they’re alone. We touched and kissed and were both unable and unwilling to stop.

  Then it happened. It happened so swiftly and softly I was not able to muster even token resistance: I fell asleep.

  I feel I should perhaps apologize to the more worldly among my readers who might have been expecting some coy lines about rising early from my couch much changed, or finding that the maiden’s innocent blush had drained from my cheeks. It was not so. The changes that came over me when I woke in Matthew’s arms were caused solely by an abrupt plummet into terror, because gray daylight now pressed against the greasy windowpanes and I was not in my right bed.

  Matthew stared at me, his eyes wide, his face ashen. “Don’t panic,” he advised.

  “Don’t talk nonsense!” I shouted back as I scrambled off the bed and ran to the door. I grabbed the handle to throw it open and cursed as I remembered I’d so intelligently locked the door when we came in. So intent was I on getting myself out, I paid no attention to whether Matthew followed me or not.

  I barreled into the coffeehouse, which was empty.

  “Help!” I cried. “Help!”

  An enormously fat woman heaved herself out of the doorway, knuckling her eyes. “What the hell’s that about?” she mumbled.

  “I need a coach, a chair, anything. I have to get to St. James, now!”

  She blinked and looked me up and down.

  “And you’ve got the money to pay for it, I suppose?”

  That was the moment I remembered my maid’s costume.

  “Of course I have!” I slapped my purse down onto the counter. Unfortunately, Matthew rushed through the door just then and came right up behind me.

  The proprietress looked at Matthew and at me. She snickered, but she also shrugged. “Well, since you’re paying, I’ll see what can be done.” She heaved herself back through the doorway, shouting for somebody named either “Tommy” or “You lazy sod!”

  I faced Matthew. “No one has missed me yet,” I told him firmly. “It’s too early. We can be back in time and no one will notice one more maid slipping into the palace.”

  “Yes,” agreed Matthew. “All will be well.”

  It was a year before the battered cart pulled up in front of the Cocoa Tree. It was a century before we made our way from the crooked streets filled with milkmaids, scissor grinders, ragpickers, and laborers trudging past with hods and shovels into the wider, straighter, cleaner avenues around the palace.

  As soon as I spotted the red brick tower over the gatehouse, I shouted at our slouching driver to stop. I scrambled down from my place on the boards and pressed some coins into his hand. “You’re to take the gentleman to Great Queen Street,” I said.

  My rough appearance was at odds with my educated accents. This caused enough confusion for the driver that first he blinked, and then he bit the coin, testing whether it was genuine.

  “Are you sure?” called Matthew to me from the back of the cart. “I could—”

  “What? What on earth could having you with me possibly do now?”

  He swallowed his reply and instead fished in his pocket. “Peggy . . .” He held out something that glittered in the cold sunlight. It was the locket and ring, of course. I closed my hand around the jewelry, and my throat around my anger and tears. I had important things to do. I would take part in no more violent displays today.

  As it turned out, I was entirely mistaken.

  Slipping back into the palace proved an almost trivial matter. I yanked my hair free from my cap so it straggled across my face. With my features thus obscured, I made my way across the courtyard at a trot, like a maid late for her post, which I certainly was. Inside, I joined the flow of scullions and washerwomen making their way through the back stairs.

  I was a fair way up the steps before I took note of how so many servants, in livery and out of it, stood in knots on the landings and in the narrow back corridors, talking in low voices. Once I did notice this, my ears pricked up of their own accord and I began to understand the murmur of their conversations.

  “. . . looks bad, don’t it?”

  “. . . says that fancy man-midwife wouldn’t touch her, for all he’s English . . .”

  “. . . already dead . . .”

  I stopped in my tracks.

  “Who’s dead?” I cried. “What’s happened?”

  Three of them turned to stare at me—a lady’s maid, a page, and a footman. They drew themselves up when they saw my cap, loose hair, and rumpled skirts.

  “The little prince, o’ course,” said the page. “Her Highness was taken to bed after the drawing room last night an’ it’s been a disaster since. Where you been that you ain’t heard?”

  I snatched at my skirt and bolted up the stairs.

  Desperation has been said to clear the mind, and it did mine now. I was able to make my way to the princess’s gallery with only one false turn. There were yeomen and footmen on guard, and an entire crowd outside the antechamber. I shouldered my way through them all and shoved the doors open before anyone had a chance to stop me. The antechamber was nearly as crowded as the gallery, with persons of all ranks and distinction. I ignored them and charged through to the inner threshold. The footman there recognized me and, with a wary glance at his companion, opened the second set of doors.

  The drawing room beyond was empty, except for Mrs. Howard and Molly Lepell, who stood in hushed conversation. They both whirled around as I ran forward.

  “Dear heavens, Peggy, where have you been!” cried Molly. “Everyone was searching for you all last night.” Her voice was hoarse; her face was strained.

  “I was . . . I was out, on business. I must . . . I have to . . .” I made to run forward.

  But Mrs. Howard caught my shoulders. “No, Margaret. Don’t. You shouldn’t even be here.”

  “Quite right, Mrs. Howard.” The door to the bedchamber flew open and we all dropped instantly into our curtsies as the Prince of Wales strode toward us. “She should not be here.”

  The next thing I knew, His Royal Highness had clamped one great hand about my arm and was dragging me toward the antechamber. Mrs. Howard and Molly stared in shock and bewilderment and did not move an inch. The footmen stared as well, but they opened the doors.

  “Out!” bellowed the prince to the assemblage in the antechamber. “Out, all of you!”

  He was hurting me. His voice shook with rage. The persons murmured and bowed and the footmen threw open the doors and started herding them all out. Prince George did not let go of me until the doors were shut in both directions.

  The slam of the doors was still reverberating when His Royal Highness whirled me around to face him and grabbed both my
shoulders.

  “You little slut!” he shouted in German, each word accompanied by a violent shake. “She trusted you! I trusted you! We allow you the run of our home and the friendship of our daughter, and this—this—is how you repay us!”

  I tried to drop into a curtsy. I couldn’t. He wouldn’t let go. “Please, Your Highness, there is an explanation . . .”

  “Explain! Explain how you were cavorting with your man while . . .” He choked on the words. “My son is dead,” he whispered, his voice cold and sharp as winter steel. “My wife is broken almost past endurance, and you have the gall to come here with your explanations.” He pulled me closer. He smelled of sweat and brandy and the sour, sweet odor that comes from fear. “You will get out of my house,” he hissed. “You and that sneaking cousin of yours, you will never enter here again!”

  He shoved me away. I stumbled and my heel caught my skirt and I fell. The prince did not move. The footmen who had witnessed the scene did not move. I couldn’t breathe. My arm hurt. I crawled to my knees and made myself stand. Trembling, I curtsied.

  I heard the prince curse me and turn on his heel to snap his orders to the footmen as he marched away.

  I straightened and stared, numb with disbelief, at the men by the door. One of them smirked. The other had a look of something close to pity. He was the one who opened the door for me.

  The crowd might have been cleared from the antechamber, but the gallery outside was still brimming with the great and the near great. They had all heard the Prince of Wales shouting at me. Those who understood German had heard him order me out of the palace.

  Some of them looked bewildered. Some of them smiled. A very few of them drew back so I would not touch them as I passed.

  I made my way back to my own rooms only through a combination of blind luck and habit. I certainly was not watching my way. My heart hammered. My arm ached. I stumbled and stumbled again.