Maid of Deception (6 page)

He reddened then, and his gaze swept to mine. I met it evenly. I didn’t need the man’s pity, and he knew it. But Cecil, for all his many flaws, was at least becoming more predictable in his changes in temper. Now I could see that he felt bad for how my day had turned. Still, I tilted up my chin a little higher, silently reassuring him that I was well able to carry out any task he might have in mind. I could not afford
to have him thinking of me as weak. If my father had taught me nothing else of value, he had taught me that.

Cecil nodded. “You, if anything, should choose something a bit less dramatic, Beatrice. The task at hand this day requires discretion and humility. Try to remember that, all of you.” He swept out of the room with a rustle of his black cape, and the five of us split off—Sophia and Anna to go find some mead to help Sophia choke down whatever refined poison Anna was experimenting with, and Jane and Meg to help me unlash myself from my wedding finery. I would swear the gown was more stitches than fabric, but we still managed to get all of its pieces disassembled without creasing the garment. It would keep until month’s end, if I would wear it again at all.

I sighed then, fingering the heavy cloth. Everything I had worked for all these long years, gone just like that. I shook myself. Of course I would wear it again. Of course I would still marry Cavanaugh.

Of course I would.

We gathered in Cecil’s office less than a half hour later, as he’d requested. To get to his chambers we had to run the interminable gauntlet of Spaniards who seemed to have made the public antechamber off the main Presence Chamber their personal gathering spot. I saw Meg brush by Rafe with the barest of nods, but I watched closely and was rewarded for my care. He’d given her a letter in that brief moment, and Meg’s color was just a tiny bit higher in her cheeks as she strolled into Cecil’s office.

I found myself unaccountably annoyed, and stiffened my
spine against it. I should not care about Meg and her grubby Spaniard. I had problems of my own to solve.

But now Cecil was talking. “What do you know about the Scottish rebellion?” he asked, looking pained.

Anna jumped in immediately. “It’s been an uneasy thing for the Scots for nearly two decades,” she said. “With King James dying seventeen years ago, and his French wife, Mary de Guise, remaining, the Scots have chafed under the threat of French control for longer than they ever expected. Now Mary de Guise serves as regent for her and King James’s daughter, Mary, the true Queen of Scots—but young Mary just wed the French dauphin last year. So the French remain a threat, and Mary de Guise is of a mind to make trouble. Especially of late, she seems determined to enforce French will upon the Scots.” Anna made a wry grimace. “The trouble is, you can’t force a Scotsman to do much of anything unless you’ve got him at the edge of your sword, and that never works for long. I should think Mary de Guise is making more enemies than friends for her daughter, and that will not serve the young Queen of Scotland in the end.”

If anything, Cecil now seemed more irritated. “I did not ask you what you
thought
, Miss Burgher, merely what you
know
.” He rubbed a hand over his brow. I wondered if he had a headache like Sophia, who was looking markedly better than she had in weeks. Well, he would spend a cool day in hell before Anna would give him a posset, if he expected her to stop thinking.

“My apologies, Sir William,” Anna said smoothly. She then launched into a purely factual accounting of how the
devoutly Catholic Mary de Guise, mother and regent of the young Scottish Queen Mary, was advocating for French (and Catholic) rule of Scotland. And, further, that while most of that barbarian land was, in fact, Catholic, they most certainly weren’t French. Nor did they like France. Of course, they didn’t like England, either, but at least we weren’t trying to rule them. Yet.

“Now even more Scotsmen are opposing Mary de Guise, including the clergyman John Knox, who is the loudest of them all. With him having just returned to Scotland after more than a decade in exile, there will be only upheaval to come,” Anna said. Then she colored again, immediately recognizing that she had employed her mind once more without express permission. “Forgive me, Sir William. I mean only to say that John Knox has returned, and rumors have started that he also means to incite the Protestants to rebellion against Mary de Guise and her Catholic sympathizers.”

“Knox isn’t alone,” I put in, carelessly. “He’s finding able support from the Lords of the Congregation.”

Cecil’s gaze sharpened on me, and I instantly realized my mistake. Anna was the only one of our number whose brain was supposed to be sharp. I was merely the manipulator, the wide-eyed miss whose cunning was confined to the way I played the people around me. But truly, I wasn’t an idiot. Since the Scots had deposited themselves on our threshold in early August, they’d talked—and I’d listened. Even my own father muttered on about the Scots and their rebellion when he was in his cups, which was often. Our estate was well south of the Scottish border but still well north of Windsor.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that he would care about a war that close to his home.

“What do you know about the Lords of the Congregation?” Cecil demanded. I felt even Anna’s eyes on me, though Anna, God bless her, wanted only for me to do well. I didn’t like the set of Cecil’s jaw, however. “Where have you heard them mentioned?”

“Oh, la,” I said, airily waving a hand. “You can’t expect me to be surrounded by Scotsmen morning, noon, and night without hearing them go on about the most audacious of their countrymen playing ‘wreck the church hall,’ ” I said. “I’m not certain which of them started the conversation, but they seemed all to know the Lords well enough, though none could say for certain who these august lords truly were. It seems to be something of a grand secret, though they’ve spent endless hours of speculation on it.”
When they weren’t busily draining the Queen’s store of ale, that is.

“Pay closer attention going forward, then,” Cecil said. He didn’t snap the words, but they were an order nonetheless. “The Lords of the Congregation are, in fact, a group of staunchly Protestant noblemen who would rather not see France hold sway in their homeland. To that end, they are approaching us for our aid. Secretly, I might add, as far as the bulk of the court is concerned. We expect them to join us within the next few days, and to remain for a week, little more.”

“They’ve called before and met with grief,” Sophia said, her voice striking and lyrical in the musty half darkness. “Lord and servant to their belief.”

Her words silenced the room.

Cecil turned and narrowed his eyes on the girl, just as she nervously laid one of Cecil’s silver pens back upon his desk. “And just what do you mean by that, Sophia?” he asked.

“Oh, God’s bones. It’s not a secret,” Jane said, her loud, plain voice brooking no argument. “There was that boy who came over the Channel from France and remained in London for—what—a week? When the Queen made haste to London last month. He stayed at your own house, Sir William, and took tea with the Queen at Hampton Court. He might not have been one of these Lords, but he was tied to them, ’tis certain.”

Cecil turned a steely look upon Jane. “I thought you remained behind at Windsor during that trip.”

She shrugged. “Even if your guards do not tell tales to outsiders, they canna always remain silent among themselves. And if I happen to be tucked away when they have a conversation, then I hear it as well, no?”

Cecil exhaled a disgusted breath, and I watched the glance of unspoken satisfaction between Jane and Meg. Though Jane had originally spoken to draw the attention away from Sophia, her words had betrayed more than she realized, at least to me. There could be only one place where Jane could have hidden to overhear the Windsor guards speak of such a tightly held secret that even I had not caught wind of it: the hidden passageways beneath the castle.

Entire new realms of possibility opened up to me in that moment. What secrets could I hear had I access to passages such as those—and with those secrets, what power could I
wield? I’d have to ask to tag along on Meg and Jane’s next foray beneath the castle.

“Very well,” Cecil said at length, as if coming to a grave decision. “If you know the half of it, you should know the whole, so that you have the story correct. The Earl of Arran, the boy Jane just referenced, had been a prisoner of the French Catholics. He was returned to his father from France this summer, with the aid of the Queen.”
By that Cecil means with his own aid, his and Walsingham’s foreign spies.
“His father, the Duke of Châtellerault, had previously supported the French—and the Catholics. With his son’s return, however, he has become one of the most prominent members of the Lords of the Congregation. There is no doubt that the rescue of the duke’s son made his conversion to the Lords’ cause possible. Which provides additional opportunities for us.”

“We return the son, and ensure that powerful men in Scotland are allied with England and not France,” I said. “Nicely done.” Cecil’s glance flitted back to me, but I didn’t mind his scowl. This
was
my area of expertise, the give-and-take between friends and enemies, boons granted and debts repaid. “And now is the time when you will discuss the resulting agreement between England and the Lords of the Congregation?” I asked. “Who will be arriving?”

“A half dozen of the Lords, and their guards, of course,” Cecil said. “While we meet with them, your roles are to watch everyone else in the court. If you see anyone talking with any Scotsman too closely, I want to know about it. Immediately. I expect the Queen will have her own tasks for you as well.” Once again the tiniest thread of irritation
underlaced Cecil’s words. “But, Beatrice, you must begin at once.”

“I must?” I opened my eyes just so, all winsome innocence and frail pain.
I was supposed to get married today, you cur. Do not even begin to tell me that you are attaching me to—

Cecil finished my thoughts. “Alasdair MacLeod,” he said flatly. “The young Scot is clearly some sort of leader of the delegation, and his family is old and well regarded.” This meant he had money, in Cecil’s manner of speaking. As if a stone fortress on a wind-battered island off the Scottish coast could have cost anything more than a herd of sheep. “There is some rumor he is tied to the Lords of the Congregation, though I cannot believe it. Still, if that is the case, it changes things.”

“Such as?” I asked, unable to help myself.

“Such as, if the Highlanders all the way up to Skye are ready to support a cause against the French, then we need only send a token force to Scotland to show our own support,” he said. “Or perhaps we need not send any support at all, and instead let the Scots deplete their men rather than risk our own.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but at Cecil’s black look I thought better of it. “Very well, Sir William,” I said sweetly.
You skittering, slithering snake.
“I cannot imagine a better use of my time than to play court to a loutish Scotsman.”

That did cause him to smile, though in the gloom of his chamber it looked more like a sneer.

“Funny,” he said. “Neither could the Queen.”

CHAPTER SIX

We were given the rest of the day to prepare for our various tasks—Anna to learn the histories of the men who would likely be arriving from Scotland; Jane and Meg to see what else might be known from either the Scots’ guards or our own. Sophia claimed a headache and so escaped to a quiet room to, as Cecil put it, “do whatever it is you do.”

But I was not so lucky.

With the promise of a wedding having fueled the influx of visitors into the Lower Ward, an unofficial Market Day had been assembled, all the more boisterous because the wedding had not, in fact, come off. It was into this rabble I was headed now.

But not before I was stopped a dozen times. First to endure, counter, or spread, as necessary, gossip related to my own interrupted nuptials. Windsor loved a story, especially a story of a noble being rebuked. It was my task and honor to supply enough fat for the court to chew on long after the taste had gone out of the tale. Second, I had to reinforce my own position in the castle. There was no question that I had been
delivered a terrible blow, and yet—this was important—here I was looking as fresh and unspoiled as washing-day linen. I parried this query and that, none more frequent than “Had the Queen spoken to my lord Cavanaugh directly? He looked so amazed, so distraught!”

To that I said simply that what my Queen and my future husband discussed was not for me to know. This was the virtuous answer, this was the maidenly and modest response. It made me want to retch, but such was the price of position.

Now I stepped into the bright light of the Upper Ward, the easternmost area of the enclosed walls of Windsor, a quadrangle of manicured lawn and walkways that made any approach instantly known to those watching from the high windows of the most royal section of the castle. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I took a bare moment to grimace in peeved annoyance. The sun
would
choose this day to shine forth in glorious splendor. It was supposed to have been my wedding day. Even the stars in the heavens were doubtlessly planning to shine the brighter for it.
God save me from a meddling Queen.