Maid of Secrets (43 page)

I nodded hastily, and allowed the man to draw me back toward the servants’ entrance. Surely Walsingham and Cecil were noticing this. Surely Beatrice would—she’d been facing me directly, after all, and had begun to look desperate in the shadow of the burly MacLeod. Surely she could see around the heads of all the earnest men dancing attendance upon her.

But what if she couldn’t? What if they hadn’t?

What if I was in this all alone?

As soon as we were clear of the Presence Chamber, I expected the Spaniard to flip me around. If he got a good look at my face in the bright torchlight, it would be the end of my disguise.

Instead he shoved me, hard, into an access passageway off the chamber, where the middle courses were stored for the royal feasts. There was no royal feast tonight, of course. Tonight, the passageway was empty.

The door closed behind us with a thump. Wrenching away from the Spaniard, I stumbled forward into the pitch black room, and turned around to try to get my bearings. Rich, mocking laughter rolled over me like a physical weight.

“I’ve watched you, Miss Morgan,” the Spaniard said. “Seen you practice your knife throwing as if it were some novel game. Seen you running in the park.”

I frowned.
Jane ran in the park? When did she have time to run in the park? And how had she gotten the boys’ clothes to do so?
I felt some sort of expression of Jane-like bravado was necessary, so I whispered harshly, “I’ll kill you.”

It . . . it felt rather good to say words like that, actually. But the Spaniard just laughed.

“No, no, Miss Morgan. I’ll kill
you
. With pleasure. And before your body is even cool, I’ll gather my information from your brave little friend, who will have no idea of your untimely death, and then your English whore will be off the throne for good.” He was circling now, and I struggled to follow his movements in the darkness. I knew how men moved, how they should move. But I did not know this man. I pitched my voice low, keeping it a whisper. “What do you want?”

“To finish my task, for God and country,
meu doce
,” he said. Something jolted in me, with those words.
Meu doce.
I’d seen those words before, in the letter to Lady Amelia, and I knew the trap had been sprung accurately. That wasn’t Spanish. It was Portuguese. This man was Marie’s killer, Lady Amelia’s attacker. I almost felt both women in the room, watching us, and it was all I could do not to cross myself in superstition.
Think!

“You cannot believe you can continue your game,” I said. “Your pope’s letters were passed to the wrong set of hands.”

He laughed harshly. “The cause of God will always prevail, and there are many willing hands to come to its aid. Those hands that no longer serve, we simply cut off.” He moved, and I moved with him, the two of us circling each other in the inky darkness.

“But yours are cut off as well,” I pressed. “Even now, Lady Amelia recovers. She will betray you as soon as she has the strength to write. And Lady Knollys—”

His snort cut me off. “Lady Amelia will betray no one, lest she betray herself. And Lady Knollys—if that old crow were devoted to anything but assuaging her own private grudges, she would be a threat. But she hides behind her curtain of respect and leaves others to do the work. You will never catch her in the act of treason.” I could hear the harsh smile in his voice. “Of course,
you
, my little fighter, will never catch anyone again at all.”

He lunged at me.

I felt him coming through the darkness, and I turned to flee—though where I would go, I had no idea. Then the Spaniard—Portuguese—whoever he was—attacked, all strength and sinew and a scent of spiced oranges. Recognition sprang in my mind, unbidden, even as we tumbled to the floor. Spiced oranges? Where had I captured that scent before?

I lurched forward, but he hauled me back, his hands at my throat, his left hand pressing down. “No garrote for you, my dear Miss Morgan,” he breathed into my ear. “I have grown accustomed to doing my work with my hands, not tools. Surely you can appreciate the difference.”

And he began to choke me. Left hand harder than the right.

Left hand harder than the right.

My hands flew down to reach Jane’s hidden knife in my bodice, but he kicked at my knees, and I crunched down, swimming in my heavy skirts. Unconsciously my hands reached up, grasping his thick forearms. I would never pry him off my back; I could sense that in a flash.

Even worse, my days of privation in the dungeon were taking their toll. I could not—I just could not
breathe
. Bright lights were flashing behind my eyelids. I saw spinning visions in my head. Beatrice, Jane, Anna, and Sophia. The Queen’s garden. The chapel. Rafe. The Lower Ward. The schoolroom. The cloisters . . .

The cloisters.

Nicolas Ortiz, raising his left hand in salute in the shadow of the church spires. The oddly back-slanted letters that Anna had noticed, written in Portuguese. The scent of oranges and spices.

Ortiz!

Sudden panic consumed me as my lungs began to heave, even as my mind chanted Ortiz’s name over and over again. I twisted my hands side to side, trying to improve my position—

And felt the nick of a blade against my forearm.

Jane’s wrist blade.
It was right there. I fought back horror as the breath was choked out of me, my chest beginning to burn, and focused only on the blade. The squat, fat, obnoxious blade that Jane herself had not yet mastered but had refused to have me leave behind. What had she said? What had she said?

And her words came back to me as clearly as the scent of oranges and spices.
You just flick your hand out, and it will slide into position, as easy as that.
As easy as that. I flailed my arm out in a panicked flutter, feeling the blade slide home into my palm even as Ortiz laughed.

“That’s it,
meu doce
. Let me chase you down to death.
Don’t give up too easily. Let me take you in a battle worthy of the name.” He breathed in guttural excitement, knowing my end was drawing near.

The knife was in my palm.

But I could never kill a man,
I thought, the words coming back to me like a distant roar.
I would never cut a man.
I was too smart for that. I was an actor and a thief, not a thug.

I was not a thug.

But who am I, truly?

Ortiz’s fingers pressed hard upon my throat then. “Perhaps I should break your neck, my sweet? So fine and narrow in my hands?”

Ortiz would be wearing a stuffed doublet. Flaring trunks, puffed full of cloth and ribbons.

But Ortiz was also a dandy of the first order. Ortiz with his finely muscled legs and glorious silk hosiery. Ortiz with his well-turned ankles and flattering bows. Ortiz with his right leg pinning my hip, his thigh lined up alongside my right arm . . . just below the blade. Just below the blade.

Who am I, truly?

I struck.

I shoved Jane’s knife deep into Ortiz’s thigh, heard his high, strangled yelp as he leaped away from me. A skate of blood spurted across my hand. I’d not struck him deeply enough for him to die, but the blade was thick and true, and would slow him down. I pulled a second blade out of my bodice sheath, scrambling forward just as the door was flung open, and a dark shape barreled into the room, backlit by the passageway.

“Meg!” It was Rafe, and I gasped, waving him into the room, my mouth moving but no sound emanating from my bruised throat. Behind me I heard Ortiz unsheathe a blade.

“Guards!” I screamed in my tortured whisper, but Rafe was already past me, a wraith in the darkness. A knife clattered against stone wall, but there was no accompanying grunt of pain from Rafe. Ortiz had thrown, but missed. A thud and a gasp later, and Rafe was back.

“I’m so sorry, sweet Meg,” he said, cradling my face. I lifted my fingers to his cheek, frowning at him. His hands felt as cold as ice.
Sorry?
I wondered.
Why sorry?

“Guards!” I managed, my voice finally coming back in a desperate croak as my fingers curved over Rafe’s hands, feeling the weight of his ring against my palm. I shook my head, confused. “Guards!” I hissed again. “They will want to—talk to him. He knows—about Amelia. The letters, Rafe. Lady Knollys,” I babbled. “The—plot! He knows!”

“I know, sweet Meg, I know,” Rafe murmured, his voice soft and pleading. “Which is why I did what I had to do, and why I was never here. Forgive me?”

I looked at him, sick comprehension dawning. “What!?” I tried to scream, and inside, my mind was wailing,
Rafe, what have you done?

I clasped my hands around his, trying to hold him to me, but I was too weak. He sighed and pulled his hands away from me, rolling to his feet. Then he was gone, leaving me to flop in my sea of skirts back toward Ortiz, barely reaching the man to hold up a hand to his sagging, foaming mouth. Foaming? Arsenic! Rafe had drugged the last man standing
who could implicate the Spanish Crown in this treacherous plot. Ortiz still breathed, but not for long.

Rafe had completed his assignment.

Then pounding feet echoed through the passageway and I was enveloped by my friends.

Soon Ortiz would be dead. And all of his and Rafe’s secrets would die with him.

Well, not quite all.

I let myself be hauled up, clenching my hand around Rafe’s jade stone ring.

Things got a little complicated after that.

It was a full twelve hours later before I could break free from the castle, and I breathed in the crisp cool air with satisfaction as I watched the far boats of the Thames begin their journey down to London, and then away to the sea. I relished my privacy, seated against the castle walls. I’d not been alone since the melee of the night before, a melee the Queen had noted with appreciation had taken place in a passageway and not her Presence Chamber.

The Queen’s appreciation had shown no bounds, in fact.

I glanced down at the etched gold ring now gracing the longest finger of my left hand. She had called this ring “the Queen’s Grace,” announcing to all and sundry among her advisors and guards that I was never to be questioned or held without her express presence, that I was in her highest confidence, the first among her Maids of Honor to receive this award.

The first, but not the last.

The Queen was no fool, and she had ordered similar rings be given to Beatrice, Jane, Sophia, and Anna as well. Before the night was through, we’d all knelt before her to
receive these boons, no one understanding their importance perhaps more than I. If Cecil and Walsingham understood that same import, or the Queen’s motivation, they gave no sign. Nor did she give any sign of suspecting me of having eavesdropped on her in her bedchamber. I prayed it would never again be an issue. Elizabeth was too young to give up flirtation—even love. But if she needed to be protected from herself, then I would do it. While I served Her Majesty, I would do anything she asked.

Beatrice had already leveraged her part in the plot to get her wedding date set for a few weeks hence, but I half-suspected she’d hastened the happy event to keep a certain Scotsman at bay. As the marriage talk had then turned to the next eligible maid, Sophia had fainted with her best swoon yet. Anna—and the vicar’s son—had helped her to her chambers . . . and then Anna had returned more than an hour later, her eyes alight, her cheeks flushed.

Only Jane and I remained to talk with the Queen’s advisors.

We had recovered the letters from Amelia’s coffer and given them up. Most of them, anyway. At Beatrice’s insistence, we’d kept Lady Knollys’s letters for our own use later.

At first, the advisors refused to believe what we’d found for them.

Then, in the way of elders and men in general, they were angry that we had found anything at all.

But at length, finally, they’d realized the truth for what it was.

Here is how it all unraveled:

Ortiz, an agent for the pope, had two fatal flaws. The
first: He was too zealous in his passion for his church. And second: He was too careless in his affection for the women of the English court.