Maid of Secrets (29 page)

“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?

Jane looked at me, and I could tell she wanted to explore the corridor further. “No,” I said resolutely. “We can’t afford getting caught there. And any Spaniard we’d find in the dungeons proper wouldn’t be someone we could report on.”

She sighed, turning the other direction. “Very well. But these sconces were lit recently. They haven’t burned down much. Why?”

“Perhaps Cecil and Walsingham are expecting trouble from the foreign dignitaries?”

An uneasy chill slid through me as I said the words, and we both picked up our pace. Suddenly, sneaking around in the dungeon corridors didn’t seem like the best of ideas.

We moved as one, bent over slightly in case the ceiling height suddenly changed. I held my hands out in front of me like a blind woman. I had gotten good at this process, which is why I went first, my feet somehow knowing where to go even in the blackest corridor. But I felt a newfound respect—and
horror—for those who had been truly blinded by accident or birth or injury. It would be no way to live.

I swiped the air just as my feet came into hard contact with a stair riser, and we both tumbled forward in a flurry of skirts. I smacked against the chiseled stairs with my hands, managing to turn my face only at the last minute to avoid cracking my teeth. As it was, I knocked my temple hard enough that bright lights exploded against the backs of my eyes, at the same time that Jane crashed into me, shoving me for a second time against the cold stone.

“Staircase,” I moaned, smiling weakly as Jane giggled.

“Are you well?” she managed as she peeled herself off me and I struggled upright, half-crawling up the stairs. I felt my head and neck for blood, and found none. A knot was already forming above my ear, but at least my hair would cover it.

“I’ll live,” I said, still climbing. The staircase went straight up, ending in a wide platform and another door, but this one possessed no obvious peepholes to give a clue what might lie beyond. We turned around, and both of us slid to a seated position, catching our breaths before making the final run.

Jane laid her hand upon the door. “It’s warm and it’s full day outside, with a hot sun beating down,” she said. “It’s got to lead to the outdoors, but I don’t remember any unaccounted-for doors in the castle’s exterior walls.”

I didn’t either, and I’d paced the grounds often enough to know each stone by heart. “Are we up high enough for the North Terrace?” I asked. “It didn’t feel like the stairs had gone up that long.”

“No, but . . . there is something here.” Groaning, Jane
stood, and I hauled myself up beside her. “Lock,” she said a minute later.

I took out my picklocks and bent to the task. A few moments later we were rewarded with a telltale click.

We opened the door a hair’s breadth, wincing as bright sunlight poured in.

“God’s teeth!” Jane hissed, pulling back as I also flinched away. Once our eyes had adjusted, we peeked out again through narrow eyes.

Wide, rolling grasslands greeted us, ending in a copse of trees.

We were outside the castle.

Free.

Jane and I pushed the door open a bit farther, meeting the resistance of some artfully placed bushes. Opening it just enough to escape, we peeked outside, then pulled back again, staring at each other. The sun still warmed our faces.

“Your troupe is still in Windsor,” Jane said, putting voice to what I had myself been thinking.

“It is,” I said. I smoothed my skirts and looked north to where the Thames lay, close enough to see the boats clustered upon it, Eton in the far distance across the river.

“You could be in London by nightfall,” she observed.

“I could,” I said. We fell silent for a moment, each lost in our own thoughts. I could leave, easily, with just the clothes on my back. I had no money that I was leaving behind, no belongings but Grandfather’s book, which Jane could secret out to me. I was far more adrift inside the castle than I was without.

“Why do you stay?” she asked, interrupting my reverie.

“Why do you?” I returned. “I’m not the only person who knows the world outside of these walls. You also were not born to castle life, in service to the Queen.”

Jane chuckled. “True enough,” she said easily, not affronted by my candor. “But I will die in that service.” She spoke with far too much certainty.

“Why?” We’d pulled back inside the shadowed alcove more firmly now, and could see that the platform was broader than we’d first thought, almost a mini corridor. The sun was still upon us, and I looked at Jane’s dust-smeared face, knowing that I looked scant better. We would have to find somewhere to clean up before we reentered the castle.

If
we reentered the castle. I thought of all the people I had in the world; the thirty-odd members of the Golden Rose, who perhaps had not missed me, all of them, but who would still be happy to see me return, if only for my pick-pocketing skills. And some of them I’d be happy to see as well.