The Traitor's Daughter (19 page)

But now, God had handed him a golden opportunity. Elizabeth would be in this very house in less than three weeks. St. Crispin's Day. She would be supping in private with a mere handful of Grandmother's guests. Robert had access to this house. He was family.

His mind and body thrummed at the stunning realization. In the whole realm he was one of the few who could come near Elizabeth.

Near enough to kill her.

12

The Signal

“L
ost your ponce, sweetheart?” The question made Kate turn on the narrow London lane. The shop fronts, shadowy in the dusk, were veiled by wisps of fog, but she could make out the speaker. A runty fellow with crooked teeth, he was leaning against a doorjamb. At the window beside him a man with the weathered skin of a sailor leaned on the sill watching Kate. Leering. Both of them. For over an hour she had walked this circuit of Salisbury Court and Fleet Street alone looking for Ambassador Castelnau's signal—the flowerpot of carnations on his second-story balcony—and she now realized that these men took her for a prostitute.

“Her ponce don't know his business,” said the sailor to the runt. Then to Kate: “No trade round here, chick, what with so many Bible men living near. Your fancy man should shift you over to Ludgate Hill.”

Kate carried on smartly toward Fleet Street.

“Best catch your eel before curfew,” the runt called after her. She heard them laughing. The other said, “She'd serve after a long sea voyage.”

She melded with the heavier foot traffic on Fleet Street, glad to be anonymous among the crowd. The dusk was a foggy murk, and people trod carefully to avoid stepping in horse dung. Ahead a link boy holding his lantern high guided a couple of men down a lane toward the candlelit windows of a cookhouse.

Curfew soon,
Kate thought anxiously. She could not keep making these circuits looking for Castelnau's signal. A full week had gone by since he had given her that instruction at the laundry.
Too long,
her fears told her. Had he abandoned their agreement? Had he found out about her? If so, every footstep behind her could be an agent he'd sent to get rid of her. It wouldn't be difficult. Drag her down one of these dark lanes and pull out a dagger and . . .

Stop it,
she told herself.
A week isn't that long.
Castelnau had said he would need to wait until he'd received enough letters to Mary from abroad to make the courier's journey to Sheffield worth the risk.
The courier—me.

An oily smell of fish clung to the fog. It was a chilly fog, too, with a hint of winter's bite. Changeable weather. Just yesterday when Robert had come to Lady Thornleigh's house the sunshine had made the orchard a blaze of autumn gold. Kate thought of her father with his seaman's knowledge of weather patterns. She remembered another orchard, at the house in Chelsea where she and Robert had been children. Remembered a day when she was about six, sitting atop Father's shoulders as he'd strolled under the springtime blossoms and pointed out clouds to her. The long, wispy clouds, he said, were called mares' tails. The pebbly ones, mackerel scales. He'd taught her the sailor's adage:
Mares' tails and mackerel scales tell tall ships to lower sails.
She had repeated it over and over in her child's singsong voice. Remembering, she could almost smell the cherry blossoms.

Only autumn leaves in the orchard yesterday with Robert. She'd been so relieved to learn that her fears about him were unfounded. He was an innocent, thank God. She wished she could say the same about their mother, plotting with her foolish friends. But she was just a bitter old woman no one listened to. Kate might have pitied her if she wasn't still rocked by the story Grandmother had told yesterday—that Mother had forced Father to marry her by threatening to inform on Grandmother. What an appalling foundation for a marriage! Kate now saw in a new light the tension between her parents when she was a child. Father's icy politeness. Mother's tears. The angry looks and snarled words. Father's escape had always been to his ship and the sea. Mother had thrown herself into building a grand new wing onto their Chelsea house. But they had never lived in that wing. Before it was finished, Mother had abetted her brother Christopher's attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth in that very house. When Christopher was killed she had fled, taking Robert and Kate.

Kate now realized that her parents' marriage had been blighted from the day they took the vows. Unlike her grandmother's marriage: thirty-four happy years. Kate had been eight when her grandfather had died and all she remembered of his craggy face was his fascinating leather eye patch, but even at that age she'd sensed the loving bond between him and her grandmother. She thought:
One marriage blighted, the other one blessed.

Her thoughts flew to Owen.
We are blessed.
Riches might never be theirs, but the love they shared was blessing enough. And as fellow agents of Her Majesty they also shared a deep and special trust. She thought of her grandmother's extraordinary revelation yesterday:
I helped persecuted people, smuggling them out of England.
Kate had always admired her grandmother and this new insight gave her a feeling of comradeship. Pride, too.

Walking south on Salisbury Court she was again approaching the embassy. She heard a faint splash and spotted a man urinating in a dark laneway. She smelled it, too. Hurrying on, she cursed the fog. All she could see of the embassy balcony was the balustrade, its rail wreathed by fog like rag shreds.

A shriek. She whipped around. A fat woman was shouting, pointing at a figure running toward Fleet Street. A cutpurse? A hubbub rose around the woman, people calling questions. Two young men dashed after the culprit. Kate was glad she'd hidden her own purse in a pocket of her underskirt. She turned back to the embassy and her breath caught at the sight. On the balcony, like a magic trick, a splash of pink.

Carnations.

 

The church of St. Bride's off Fleet Street was one of the most ancient churches in London. Kate opened its doors to the dim light of candles and the dank smell of old plaster. She kept her eyes down as she passed a scatter of people in the nave: a shuffling church warden, a scrivener at his desk writing a letter for a young man in fisherman's garb, an old woman with candles for sale, mumbling to herself.

Bells clanged faintly in the distance. Kate knew the sound—every Londoner did: the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside. Their ringing marked the end of the working day for the city's apprentices. It also signaled curfew. The city gates would close.

She went to the north aisle and stopped in front of a monument. Two stone figures, a man and a woman, lay side by side on their backs, their hands clasped in prayer. Faces smooth, they looked not much older than Kate. The inscription panel told they were Thomas Kimble, knight, and Dame Jane Kimble. Their stone garments were artfully chiseled, complete with pleated ruffs at their throats. The lady wore a stone cape round her shoulders; the knight, a stone half armor with his sword at his side. Their clothes were painted in gorgeous colors—pomegranate, popinjay blue, gold, spring green—and their heads rested on stone cushions. In the dim light the stained glass window of St. Brigit above them glowed duskily, like jewels under water.

Kate looked over her shoulder. The scrivener was still writing. His customer was doling out coins. The old woman was fidgeting with her candles, still mumbling. The church warden had disappeared. Kate turned back to the monument and reached into the narrow crevice between the stone cushion and its stone tassel. Her heart beat faster as her fingers met a soft wad of fabric. She tugged it out: plain brown cambric in a rectangle the size of a man's hand. Inside it she could feel the hard edges of tightly folded papers. Letters. Ambassador Castelnau's packet.

 

The walk from St. Bride's to Matthew Buckland's lodging on St. Peter's Hill would normally take less than ten minutes, but Kate took a roundabout route through lanes and alleys to shake off anyone who might be following her, so it wasn't until half an hour later that she reached Matthew's street. The fog had thickened, and her skin felt clammy, her nerves jumpy. The packet jammed into the lining of her cloak bumped against her thigh with every step. Could watchful eyes note the bulge?

Matthew lived near Paul's Wharf with its fishy reek of the Thames's mud banks. Voices on the water sounded ghostly, disembodied in the fog, yet the fog seemed to make every footstep behind Kate louder. Several times she hurried her pace. Once, sure that footsteps were gaining on her, she whirled around to face her pursuer only to find a dirty-faced boy engrossed in munching a carrot. He veered off on Carter Lane. She took a breath, telling herself:
Calm down.
She knocked on the door of Matthew's lodging. From an open attic window across the street came the sound of a woman singing a lullaby.

“A cold evening, Madame Lyon,” said the stout French landlady as she peered past Kate into the gloom. She was a Huguenot émigré. All immigrants in London paid double taxes, but Matthew had finessed a reduction in his landlady's rate, a fair trade for her trust. She gave a slight shiver. “We call this time
l'heure entre chien et loup.
”

“Well said, Madame Mercier.” The French saying—
the hour between dog and wolf
—was chillingly apt, Kate thought. She'd just had a taste of what it would feel like to be hunted.

The Frenchwoman lighted Kate's way with a candle up the bare wooden staircase to the second floor, then gestured for her to go on alone up the next flight. In the dimness, Kate knocked on Matthew's door.

“Ah,” he said the moment he opened it and saw her. Even with that bent-head posture of his, Kate saw the eagerness in his eyes. He knew she would not have come unless she'd collected the packet. “Come in, come in.” He closed the door behind her. “No trouble? No one followed you?”

“No. I was careful.”

“Excellent.” He beckoned her toward the hearth where two wooden chairs and a small table faced the glowing embers. A sooty kettle hung on a hook above. No carpet softened the wooden floorboards. Tallow candles on the table and mantel gave good light, but sent up oily tendrils of smoke. The two dormer windows were shuttered.

She looked around. They seemed to be alone. She was aware of Matthew taking the moment to hastily straighten his doublet and flick fingers through his trim, sandy beard as though to brush it of crumbs. She saw that she had interrupted his supper. On the table a half loaf of brown bread, a wine decanter and goblet, and a bowl of something oniony-smelling lay beside a sheaf of papers. Matthew had obviously been reading while supping. He seemed to be always at work.

“You have it with you?” he asked.

She nodded. Before pocketing the bundle she had unwrapped its loose cloth covering enough to check that it did indeed contain letters; no point in coming here otherwise. Unfastening her cloak now she pulled out the bundle and handed it to him. “Five letters. All from Paris.”

Matthew discarded the fabric, setting it on the mantel. He shuffled the letters, examining the inscriptions. Kate had not broken the seals and neither would he. They would await his expert for that. But Kate had seen that the letters were addressed to commonplace names: Mistress Bainbridge, two letters. Henry Pitt, esquire, one. Dame Farquhar, also two. Kate and Matthew were familiar with these names: codes for Mary Stuart.

“I'll send for the others,” Matthew said. “We must begin immediately. Can you stay?”

“Yes. I just need to send Lady Thornleigh a note to let her know.”

“Caruthers will deliver it. And the Harts will cover for you.” He nodded toward the adjoining room, gave Kate the letters, then opened the door to his bedchamber to summon his servant.

Kate took the letters to the adjoining room, one familiar to her. A windowless space, perhaps once used as a storeroom, it was now a communal workroom. Four desks, crammed together, were messy with papers, scrolls, inkwells, quills, and penknives, and the bookshelf was stacked with mathematical volumes and codebooks. Kate sat down and jotted a note to her grandmother, explaining that because of the fog she would spend the night with Alice and Roger Hart, the friends she had said she'd come to visit. Owen's friends, actually. Kate had met them only once, amusing gypsy-like theater folk. Matthew paid them to vouch for his agents who needed a cover story.

Matthew came in with his servant, Caruthers, who took Kate's note for Lady Thornleigh and Matthew's instructions to first alert the men they needed.

“Have you supped?” Matthew asked her when they were alone. “I can have Madame Mercier bring you something.”

Kate realized she was hungry. But felt too keyed up to eat. Her eyes were on the letters. “No, I'm fine.”

“How soon can you leave for Sheffield?”

“Right away, in the morning. But, Matthew, it may take days to decode these.”

“We haven't got days. Griffith usually set out with the packets the same day he got them. Castelnau will expect you to be as swift.”

Griffith, the murdered courier. Kate understood. Any delay could put her under suspicion.

“Tomorrow, then,” Matthew said. “Can you still use the story you'd planned for Lady Thornleigh?”

“Yes.” They had agreed that she would tell her grandmother she'd be riding north to visit her aunt, Lady Thornleigh's daughter. Isabel and Carlos Valverde lived north of Sheffield and Kate had an open invitation. “She'll be pleased I'm going, actually. She's always eager for news of Aunt Isabel and the children.”

“Good.” His eyes went back to the letters. So did Kate's. Questions rang in her head and, she was sure, in his. Who had written to Mary? Had her correspondents revealed an invasion plan? Would Mary endorse it, finally proving herself a traitor?

“Come back to the fire,” Matthew said. “Gregory will be here soon enough. Let me give you some wine at least. You must be cold.”

They returned to the main room, to the table by the hearth. Kate sat, and Matthew fetched a second goblet from the sideboard and poured her some wine, almost filling the goblet. He handed it to her. “This will help.”