Maid of Secrets (3 page)

And then I was facedown against the stone ledge of the river wall, a wickedly sharp blade a bare inch from my eyes. My neck was locked down so tightly, I feared it would snap like a chicken’s.

“Sorry, but I canna chase you all day.” It was a girl who held me down, her voice as plain and flat as a board. She came from Wales, from her accent, and she sounded younger than I would have expected, for hands so strong and cruel. Perhaps eighteen, but no older.

“Who are you?” I gasped, my body tensing to flee at the first opportunity. Could I bribe the woman? Somehow break away? Would Master James find me in time?

She grunted as she positioned her knee more squarely into my back. “They’ll be angry enough that you gave them the slip, especially one Sir William Cecil. I don’t need him mad at me, too. You would have made it, though, if I hadn’t been watching.” She sighed, a soft whisper of regret in the sound. “I didn’t have the sense to run when they came for me.”

“Let me go!” I tried again, but the girl just clamped harder on my neck, cutting off my breath.

“I canna do that,” she said, reasonably enough, as my sight dimmed to a pinprick. “You sealed your own fate when you lifted Cecil’s purse a fortnight past.
He
might not want anything to do with you, but the Queen does. And she’s what counts.” She hesitated, and when she spoke again, her voice sounded like linen washed too often over the rocks: thin, cold, and resolute. “And I’m Jane, by the
way. Beggin’ your pardon again, but this is the only way.”

I heard the
whoosh
of something slicing through the air, ending in a curiously loud
thunk!
against my temple.

And then there was nothing.

THREE MONTHS LATER

WINDSOR CASTLE, WINDSOR, ENGLAND

I’d never hated words before I’d been brought to Windsor Castle.

Here, they’d become a plague.

“Again, Miss Fellowes,” Sir William Cecil snapped, his voice striking out at all angles into the cramped room. He shoved the book at me, and I leaned over it dutifully, dread balling in my stomach.
Bahrrrr . . . barrruuss . . .

I’d never really hated Mondays before Windsor Castle either.

On Mondays, the most loathsome day of the week, we studied and translated texts in Latin, French, Dutch, and Spanish. Tuesday, the subject was politics. Wednesday, social graces. Thursday, observation skills.

On Fridays, we learned about poisons. Strangleholds. And less dignified ways to die.

It seemed like a lifetime had passed since I’d first been hauled to the Tower and charged with stealing royal gold. That first day, I still thought I could escape. That first day, I’d been astonished, then furious with myself at my own stupidity for being captured in the first place.

Sir William had marked me with ridiculous ease, as it turned out. Using a trick so old and tired that I’d stopped looking for it in any village with more than two goats to its name.

Apparently assuming that his riches would be lifted the moment he stepped outside, Sir William had etched a secret symbol into his coins before leaving the safety of the castle. He was a skulking coward, I’d decided, a panic-stricken fool.

Well . . . perhaps not a complete fool. Because before night had fallen on that accursed day, Sir William had found me out. After waiting the shortest of whiles, he had sent men to follow Tommy, and they’d trailed the boy to the pasty stand. After that, it had been a simple thing to ask the stand’s keeper to hand over the coin Tommy had just used to buy his treat. The shilling had borne Sir William’s mark, of course.

I secretly prided myself that it had taken the Crown nearly a full fortnight to lay hands on me after that, and in the end they’d needed two maids to achieve it.

Or had they? Was that a lie too? In the long days of my captivity, I’d had ample time to learn the depths of Sir William’s cunning. After three wretched months in his questionable care, my life with the Golden Rose was naught but memory, a freedom I feared I would never fully grasp again.

Gone were the days of shouting lines back and forth over the morning fires, of sewing late into the night to stitch back together costumes that had become more thread than cloth. Gone was the unfettered joy of sleeping under the summer stars, or bundled together in pitch tents while a child exclaimed over the first snowfall. Gone was little towheaded Tommy Farrow.

Gone was Master James.

Acting, thievery, and deception, however, were still very much a part of my life.

I’d carried nothing with me to the Tower but the much-mended clothes on my back and my two precious gifts from my grandfather, hidden in my shift. On his deathbed, sick and pale with fever, my grandfather had given me a slim book of verse and a set of golden picklocks—without ever explaining why. For luck, I’d sewn those gifts into my shift just hours before I’d been arrested. And as luck would have it, they now were the only possessions I still owned in the world.

That first day, as I’d woken up in my cell deep in the bowels of the Tower with a lump on my temple and my ears still ringing with pain, I’d prayed they wouldn’t take my clothes from me. But I’d been prepared for it.

In fact, I’d thought I was prepared for anything. As a first-time offender and a woman, I knew I would not be killed or visibly maimed. But I’d expected their questioning to be painful—perhaps involving thumbscrews or white-hot tongs. And when they’d yanked me from my cell and marched me into to the foul-smelling heart of the Tower of London, my hands and feet bound with chains, I’d fully believed I would be humiliated, reviled, and left heartily wishing I was dead.

What they’d actually done was much worse.

In a dank and barren corner of the Queen’s dungeon, they’d . . . sat me at a table. Served me spiced wine. And explained my new life to me in clear and simple terms.

If I did not do exactly what they told me to do, exactly how they told me to do it, it would not be merely me who suffered.

True, I’d be imprisoned for the rest of my life. But more to the point, Master James and the other principal actors of the Golden Rose would be hunted down with whips and blades, paraded through the city as thieves, and then left trapped in the stocks for five whole days, at the mercy of any Londoner with a stone to throw.

The news of their arrest would be spread throughout England as fast as a horse could ride. The troupe would be ruined.

They would all starve.

Alternatively, if I performed my duties well and honorably, if I completed my assignments and served the Queen as a loyal subject and spy, then perhaps—just perhaps—I would be allowed to go free, eventually. I could return to the Golden Rose to live out my days, with a small purse of coin besides, a token of the Queen’s thanks. So my options were these: imprisonment, ruin, and the starvation of my troupe . . . or service to my Queen as a spy.

I knew I was missing some hidden deception in their words, but what choice did I have? After that miserable morning, I’d done everything they’d asked.

I’d learned to eat with silver utensils without palming (nearly) a single one. To laugh at every courtier’s joke. To find the Queen’s bracelet in the far corners of Saint George’s Hall and slip it back into her hand with no one the wiser. Just three months in, and I also already knew how to kill a person six different ways. Which, despite my colorful upbringing, was six more ways than I ever planned to use. I would never kill anyone. I would never even
cut
anyone. I was a thief, not a common thug.

As it happened, the art of thuggery was the specialty of another maid in our less-than-merry troupe: the plain-voiced girl from Wales who’d walloped me with her dagger hilt the day I’d been caught. Jane wasn’t stuck in the room with us this day, at least. Cecil had sent her away on some errand. Now, she was probably out somewhere sharpening her knives. I’d nicknamed her “the Blade.”

“Miss Fellowes,” Sir William prompted. “Repeat the passage Miss Knowles just completed. Only with better form.”

I sighed and looked down dejectedly at the book before me. Despite all my newfound abilities, there was one skill that I could not seem to master, no matter how I tried. It was the one skill I most craved to possess too, since I could then read for myself the words of bards and playwrights. And yet . . .

“Say the
words
, Miss Fellowes.” Sir William—or Cecil, to those who knew him well—jabbed his thin finger at a passage of finely wrought letters that mocked me from the page. I tried to sound them out in my head:
Bahrrrr . . . barrruus . . . hick . . .

I could not read.

It was the one indulgence Grandfather had never allowed me, though he’d taught me how to speak all the words in the world, with the richness of speech favored by the noblest of men.
We doona have the time to read, lass,
he’d tell me when I’d ask and beg and plead.
I doona have the energy
. So it was all the more ironic when, on his deathbed, Grandfather’s first of two gifts to me had been . . . a book.

A book I could not read.

“Sometime before I grow old and die, Meg,” came the irritated whisper behind me.

Beatrice Knowles, dressed in a spectacular gown of dawn-pink silk, sighed dramatically to underscore her taunt. With her shining blond hair and sky-blue eyes, her gorgeous clothes and flawless skin, I’d been tempted to hate Beatrice on sight. Then she’d opened her mouth, and I’d given in to the temptation. Proud, haughty, and mean-spirited, her head filled with court gossip and very little else, Beatrice would have made a grand character in a play . . . as long as she ended up dead by the third act. Or at the very least married off to some pompous old fool.

But of course, Beatrice the Belle had not been chosen to join our group because of her sweet and sunny disposition. She’d been chosen because she possessed an uncanny ability to convince
any
of the male species to do her bidding, whether he was a six-year-old stable boy or a sixty-year-old lord. She cooed and fluttered, simpered and preened, and flirted outrageously at every turn.

Beside her, the quiet Anna Burgher shifted her feet. Currently clad in a sturdy overdress of soft yellow wool, with a high collar and heavy sleeves that tidily covered her plain white smock, the green-eyed, ginger-haired Anna the Scholar could be excused for having no patience for idiots. And sure enough, as I hesitated, I could hear her grinding her teeth.

The more I tried to actually read the words before me, the longer we’d be forced to stay in class. So I alone was causing their discontent. Though usually only reasonably tolerant of each other, Anna and Beatrice were now clearly united in their desire to escape this airless room. Even with my eyes trained on the page, I could feel them both from the side. Glaring at me.

“Miss Fellowes?” There was neither scorn nor pity in Sir William Cecil’s voice as he watched my struggle—only cunning. He undoubtedly knew I could still not decipher those strange tracks marching across the page. He probably preferred it in some devious way, if only to keep me under his boot heel. Cecil did not relish spending time on a ragged, scrappy thief who’d fooled him once—and nearly twice. I suspect he would have kept me in the dungeon without a backward glance, if it hadn’t been for the Queen’s demand that I be trained as a spy. He made no secret of the fact that it was Elizabeth who had selected me for this service, not him. He did not trust me, he did not like me, and he did not want me here. And I, for one, did not blame him. I didn’t want to be here either. I far preferred the swiftness of the chase, the swish of stolen silk, the cool feel of silver in my palm.

Barbaruuuss . . . hick . . . ehhgo . . .

But I feared that Cecil was
also
beginning to suspect I could do something far better than read, something that might be of particular and unexpected use to him and his Queen. And now he wanted me to show my hand.

Under the weight of the girls’ combined stares, and Cecil’s insistent tapping, I gave up the pretense of translation. I had other options.

Beatrice had been the last girl to translate, and her words still hung low in the air like overripe fruit. Without lifting my head, I opened my mouth, taking those same words and making them my own, as I’d done countless times while working with my fellow actors. Since Grandfather had never taught me to read, I’d learned to play the world by ear, and had
become the perfect mimic to help the troupe’s actors learn their lines. Now, after more than a decade of practice, I had only to hear an entire three-act play spoken aloud one time, before being able to repeat it back word for word.

One short passage of unintelligible babble was child’s play to me.

“Barbarus hic ego sum,”
I began, careful not to repeat Beatrice’s cadence exactly, faltering just enough that it seemed like I was, in fact, reading something of what lay in front of me. I knew Beatrice had made errors, so I would be making the same ones as well, but I added a few additional smell variances just to keep Cecil guessing. The Latin flowed like music, and its companion English translation sounded harsh, almost unnatural in its wake. “ ‘. . . understands me,’ ” I completed the translation triumphantly, and then I finally saw a word I could decipher—one that Beatrice had not spoken. I looked up to meet Cecil’s gaze. “By Ovid.”