Palace of Spies (35 page)

He sighed and looked at the grass at our feet, at the palace, at the willow branches overhead, and finally at me. “My full name is Hugh Thurlow Flintcross Gainsford, Earl Tierney. I am the heir of an aristocratic estate and a heritage that goes back in a line so straight it shows up the meandering heritage of the English Crown for the mess it is. Tierneys have had their sticky fingers in every disputed succession since the first prudent scion of our house met with a representative of William the Conqueror one dark night in 1065 to discuss remuneration for assisting with a landing at Hastings.”

“But whom do you serve?”

“My king. Ah.” His eyes twinkled with a mirth I in no way felt inclined to share. “I see you are about to ask who my king is. Well, now, Peggy Fitzroy, I will tell you. I will. I have been to France. I have met James the Second, before he died, obviously. I have met his son the Pretender since then. I have no love of our Hanoverian Georges, and I see trouble ahead with that family. The prince is already growing impatient for the chances the king denies him . . . but they are at least better men than the ones my father helped depose. And it is my belief that it is better for this nation that things should remain as they are now. Yet another war can do us no good at all.”

That was it, then. I twisted my hands together and asked the important question. “And my mother? What of her?”

“Your mother was an agent for Her Majesty Queen Anne, Peggy, as was your father. She was as trusted as she was secret. We were able to help each other from time to time.” He smiled at some distant memory. “She did not trust me much, I’m sorry to say.”

My mother. My beautiful, wonderful mother was a trusted agent of the Crown. Not a secret Jacobite. Not a secret courtesan. My mother was loyal and true and clever, and . . . and . . . a royal spy. So was my vanished father.

Oh, just wait till I tell Olivia! She’ll expire from envy
. I pressed both hands to my mouth. I knew I was being ridiculous, but it was the thought that came to me in that sunlit summer moment.

“There, now. That’s better,” said Mr. Tinderflint. “You should not be pale, Peggy, my dear. It does not suit. No, it does not.”

I set aside this bit of fine news. I had other questions, which might yield less pleasant answers, but I was determined to ask them, nonetheless.

“Do you know where my father is?”

The question seemed to take him aback. “I am sorry to say I do not. There are others who might, but I do not think they will be glad to have even his daughter know the truth.”

He looked at me. I looked at Mr. Tinderflint. “You owe me a debt, Mr. Tinderflint,” I said.

Mr. Tinderflint, who was Hugh Templeton Flintcross Gainsford, Earl Tierney, nodded. “I would be a petty man not to acknowledge there is a debt, and it is a deep one. Very well,” he said. “I will find out what I can regarding Jonathan Fitzroy. This may take some little time.”

“You will always find me at home,” I told him solemnly.

At this, Mr. Tinderflint laughed out loud. “Oh, very good! Very good! And in return, my dear Peggy, whenever you find yourself in need of a friend, you have but to call on your Mr. Tinderflint.” He stood and took my hand and bowed deeply over it. “May I escort you somewhere?”

“No. If you don’t mind, I think I’d like to go alone.”

“I understand. I do.” He took up his cane and bowed once more. “Fare you well, Peggy Fitzroy. You’re a fine young lady. However sorry I might be as to the circumstances, I am very glad to have met you.”

He took his leave of me and strolled down the gravel pathway toward the palace. I watched him for a long moment before I turned away.

For a time, I did nothing more than walk slowly on the riverbank, grateful that whatever instructions had been given to the soldiers and the maids, they did not include shadowing me, at least not so I could see them. My thoughts meandered here and there, dazzled by the turn of my fortune as much as by sun and summer warmth. I mourned Lady Francesca then, for the greed that ruined her chance at a good life. I mourned Robert Ballantyne and the trust and love he’d so badly misplaced.

And what of Peggy Fitzroy? What had I gotten myself into? Sophy Howe would be waiting for me when I returned to the palace. I was still not at all sure I’d plumbed the depths of her malice. And there was the mess I’d made of my friendship with Molly Lepell. Last but not least, there was the fact that I had been charged with ferreting out any remaining Jacobites in the court. How on earth was I to do that?

Olivia would try to talk me out of this. As would Matthew. But they would fail. Whatever else happened, I had truly made a life of my own, and I would live it.

I took a deep breath and turned in the direction of the cottage where Olivia and Matthew Reade waited for word of what was to become of me. Of all of us.

And I began to run.

CHAPTER ONE

London, October, 1716

I begin this newest account of my memoirs with a frank warning. Soon or late, there comes to the life of every confidential agent and maid of honor an order she wishes with all her heart to refuse.

In my particular case, it involved dinner.

For those as yet unfamiliar with these memoirs, my name is Margaret Preston Fitzroy, though I am more commonly known as Peggy. Until quite recently, I was an orphan girl, living in a state of dependency with my banker uncle, his kind but silly wife, and my dear, dramatic cousin, Olivia. This evening, I sat in my dressing closet at St. James Palace, trussed up tightly in my corsets and silk mantua, and trying to remember if I’d ordered everything necessary to entertain those same relations in royal style.

“You’re certain the kitchen agreed to the partridges?” I asked my maid, Nell Libby.

“Yes, miss,” Libby answered through clenched teeth. This was not because I had asked her this same question three or four times in the past hour. At least, not entirely. Rather, it was because she had a mouth full of silver pins and was endeavoring to fix my hair in the latest style.

“What about the jugged hares?” I demanded. My own voice was somewhat muffled from my efforts to keep my teeth from chattering. It had begun to rain outside. Even in the windowless dressing closet of my equally windowless bedchamber, I could hear the steady pounding over the roofs. Each drop carried winter’s brutal promise and dragged another icy draft across the wooden floor. My fire was roaring and I was being positively profligate with the candles, but my rooms remained cold enough that my fingertips had achieved a truly arresting shade of blue. “And the chianti? It’s my uncle’s favorite wine. Ormand did say he’d have an extra bottle laid by for us?”

I don’t believe I had put in as much effort preparing for any court function as I did for this meal. I had spent the better part of the last two weeks arranging for room, food, and drink, all the while assuring the clerks of the household (mostly truthfully) that I could pay for it all, and that, upon my sacred honor, my little entertainment would not add extra expense to the royal housekeeping.

Had it been up to me, I would have never laid eyes upon my uncle again. He might have taken me in after my mother died, but we had never warmed to each other. Matters rather came to a head this past spring when he betrothed me to a young man with whom I later shared a mutual misunderstanding. That is to say, I attacked him. To be perfectly fair, though, he did attack me first. This wholly rational argument, however, failed to carry any weight with my uncle, and his response was to throw me out into the street. That the entire unhappy affair ended with my taking up residence in the royal court came as something of a surprise to all concerned. As did the interlude in which I masqueraded as one Lady Francesca, who, it was discovered, had been murdered.

I hasten to add that none of this was actually my own doing or idea. Well, almost none. That is to say, very little.

This admittedly extraordinary run of events had an appropriately extraordinary ending. I now enjoyed a certain amount of royal favor and a post at court. It had not, however, served to mend the rift between myself and my uncle. For my part, I had rather hoped to let that particular matter lie. Unfortunately, my new mistress, Her Royal Highness Princess Caroline, had other ideas.

“Sir Oliver Pierpont is your uncle and legal guardian, Miss Fitzroy,” she reminded me, with a hard tap of the royal index finger against the back of my hand. “Whether or not you relish the relationship. You will make peace with him, or trouble will come of it.”

She was right. More important, she was the Princess of Wales. That fact severely limited the replies I could make to being lectured, or poked. I could not, for example, inform Her Royal Highness that I would much prefer to simply be removed to some place of quiet retirement, such as the Tower.

“I’ve made sure of everything, miss. I promise you.” Libby might have been behind me, but the face she pulled showed clearly in the looking glass on my vanity table. “Now hold still, or I’ll have this pin right in your scalp.”

“On purpose, too.”

“Now, miss, would I ever do that?”

“I’m not entirely sure.”

“Then you’d better be sure you sit still, hadn’t you? Miss.”

The perceptive reader will see by this exchange that my luck with maids had not improved since we last communicated. When I first came to court, my maid was a large, raw-boned woman called Mrs. Abbott. We had what might be charitably described as a troubled relationship. That I once accused her of plotting murder did not assist matters. Libby, by contrast, was a tiny girl about my own age. She was so tiny, in fact, that she had to stand on a footstool to properly pin and pomade my hair. Her olive skin and dark eyes might have indicated descent from a Spaniard, or a Roman, or a gypsy rover. Libby pretended ignorance on the matter and I pretended to believe her.

I might have tried to find a different, gentler person with whom to entrust the care of my person but for one grave and overwhelming concern. Libby had mastered the New Art of Hairdressing.

It was a dread and terrible time to be a maid of honor, for we found ourselves in the midst of the storm of revolution. For women, the wig had gone out of fashion.

The wig, or more properly, the
fontage,
had been seen as an indispensable portion of the fashionable lady’s toilette since the days of Queen Anne. Its purpose, as far as I could tell, was to ensure Woman’s rigid adherence to the first two of the Great Rules of Fashion. I will set those down here as a warning to future generations.

Rule 1: Any item of dress for ladies must be both more complicated and less comfortable than that same item for gentlemen.

Rule 2: No woman can show any portion of her personage in public without it being severely, and preferably painfully, altered.

The fontage satisfied both criteria admirably. It was an assemblage of horsehair and wire framework pinned and strapped to the lady’s Delicate Head, over which her own hair was then arranged to create sufficient height and approved shape, with the whole topped off by a tall comb or similar adornment. But recently, some daring woman had appeared before the new regent of France with a smooth, sleek head of her own hair on full display. Instead of being shocked beyond endurance, the regent liked it. He liked it and he said so. Aloud. In public.

Thus are mighty storms generated by the tiniest gust. En masse, the ladies of Versailles cast off the fontage to freely and wantonly display their own tresses. Many were scandalized, but where Versailles’s ladies led, we lesser mortals were condemned to follow.

For me, this all meant an extra hour in front of the mirror. The fontage might have been consigned to history alongside the neck ruff and the codpiece, but Rules 1 and 2 were not to be altered with in any particular. My coarse dark hair could not be shown in public until it had been cemented into orderly ringlets and lovelocks, then pinned with pearls and flowers and other such maidenly adornments. This was a feat that, unfortunately, Nell Libby the Sharp could easily accomplish.

There was a knock at the door. Libby snorted and jumped off her stool. By then, however, the closet door had opened and Mary Bellenden was sauntering in.

“Hello, Peggy. I’ve come for that bracelet you said I could borrow.” Mary was not a friend to me, or to anyone as far as I could tell. She was, in fact, one of the few genuinely careless people I’d ever met. A diamond and a hen’s egg were both the same to the lively Miss Bellenden, as long as they were accompanied by a flattering turn of phrase and the chance to make a good joke.

Without pausing to do more than smile at my reflection, Mary flipped up the lid on the first of the jewel boxes set out on my vanity table and began rooting through the contents. I was not surprised. Mary Bellenden did not believe in pausing for such trifles as permission.

“It’s here.” I pushed a smaller, sandalwood box toward her, trying not to move my head as I did so. Libby had resumed her stool and taken up her pins. She held one up for me to see in the glass. It was a gentle reminder that she was in a position to make my life yet more uncomfortable if I executed any sudden moves.