The Boleyn King (8 page)

Suddenly she had his whole attention. “What did it say?”

“You can read it if you like. And the other pages. Perhaps you can make sense of them.”

“Other pages?”

“Full of nonsensical text. I can’t read them.”

Dominic was obviously thinking hard and fast, and Minuette felt a hint of unease. What else was going on that had him already worried?

“Do you think … should you let Lord Rochford know?” she ventured. “He is the one who arranged Alyce’s position at court. He’s known her family for years.…”

He hesitated before saying, “Lord Rochford has asked me to work for him. I think I should see them first. Then we’ll have a better idea of what there is to know.”

Although astonished that Dominic would agree to work for Rochford, Minuette was not going to argue with his logic. The Lord Protector made her intensely nervous. Far better to hand the pages over to Dominic and let him decide.

Dominic followed Minuette to a tiny rectangle of a room one floor above Elizabeth’s chambers. At first he was worried about the propriety of being alone with her in such a confined space, but the moment he began to look at the pages he forgot such cares. He even sat on the edge of her bed while she perched on her closed trunk and said nothing, anxiety vibrating through her.

“What do you think?” she asked finally. “Something to be worried about?”

He wanted to say no honestly; since he couldn’t, he at least wanted to keep her out of it. But Alyce had been her friend. She had trusted Minuette far enough to hand these over. Minuette deserved the truth.

“I’m worried about any correspondence that has been ciphered,” he said. “At the least, Alyce was receiving letters that the sender did not want read openly. For a lady so near Queen Anne … well, I don’t think it was a mere game.”

“So how do we read these ciphered pages, then?”

“It’s some form of substitution cipher, obviously. It might be as simple as one letter representing another—which could be broken with enough time and effort. But often these types of ciphers use a keyword, possibly a different one for each message. And if I’m to find these keywords, I need your help.”

“I don’t know anything about ciphers.”

“But you were her friend. You shared a chamber for … how long?”

“Two years,” Minuette said.

“Right. I rather hope these pages were ciphered with keywords, because in that case she likely kept a list. It would be readily available but not obvious, most likely amongst her personal belongings. We need to search the chamber.”

Minuette bit her lip, and Dominic prepared to overcome her scruples about privacy and the ethical ramifications of rifling through a dead friend’s belongings. But then she said decisively, “Wait here and I’ll be back.”

She didn’t wait for a reply, and Dominic was left awkwardly alone. He did at least stand up, since he was all at once aware of sitting on the bed where she slept. When his mind strayed to a fragmented image of her thin Greek dress and bare arms, he took to pacing like William. Although, could it be called pacing when he could take only four steps before hitting the window and having to turn to take the four steps back to the open door? Maybe he should close the door. Would it not cause comment if he was seen in here?

He was still debating the matter when he heard Minuette’s footsteps. They sounded triumphant, and her face, when she reached him, was bright with hope.

“Here.” She handed him a book, a volume of Petrarch’s sonnets in Italian. “I don’t know precisely what a list of keywords looks like, but Alyce gave us the hint herself.”

“She did?”

“In what she wrote to me.” Minuette plucked the covering letter from Dominic’s hands and read the postscript aloud. “ ‘Thank you for the loan of Petrarch. If I forget to return the volume, you may retrieve it yourself from my chest.’ ” She smiled. “This book was never mine. I don’t know where she got it, but it wasn’t from me.”

Dominic whistled softly. “That does indicate this book is the key. Alyce was clever.”
And frightened
, he thought.

“Can you solve it?”

“Probably. May I take these with me?”

“Will you promise to let me know what they say?”

So much for keeping her out of all this. “Give me a few hours, and I’ll let you know what I find.”

It took two hours for Dominic to locate the first keyword. The volume of Petrarch—all 365 sonnets written to his adored Laura in Italian—yielded a handful of randomly underlined words scattered widely throughout the text. Working on the assumption that Alyce had kept her messages in chronological order, he matched the first underlined word—
mirabil
in the second line of the fourth sonnet—to the first message, but it yielded only more nonsense.

He sighed. It was going to be a long afternoon.

He moved on to the next underlined word (
amor
in line six of the twenty-third sonnet) and through two more unsuccessful attempts before he had it. The keyword for the first message was
venir
, in the first line of the forty-seventh sonnet. Quickly, the random jumble of letters in Alyce’s message gave way to plainness:
What does she say of Mary?

Refusing to ponder the possibilities, Dominic moved on to the second message, prepared to go through another ten attempts at trial and error to decipher them all. But as he looked at the list he’d made of the underlined words and the sonnets they’d come from, he was struck by an idea. The first keyword had been in the first line of its sonnet. Was it the line order, rather than the sonnet order, that revealed the right keywords?

He went back to the fourth sonnet and
mirabil
, which came in the second line. Sure enough, using that word the second message was easily deciphered. The remaining nine messages revealed themselves just as quickly following that pattern until he had complete translations of every ciphered letter Alyce de Clare had been hoarding.

Success gave him no pleasure. When he was finished transcribing, he put his head in his hands and rubbed his aching temples. Then he reached inside his doublet for the folded paper he’d been carrying on him since last night.

He smoothed it out gently, for it was quite old and yellowed, with hints of foxing from damp. But the broadside—the sort affixed to buildings around the city as a means of news and persuasion—was only too legible.

Surrounding the vile depiction of a naked woman were words:
witch, whore, heretic
. Those words could have applied to nearly any woman against whom public opinion had turned. But there was another title as well, one all too specific:
the king’s concubine
.

Anne Boleyn.

These kind of broadsides had plastered parts of London more than twenty years ago, when the populace was furious with the woman who had replaced their beloved Queen Catherine. Why had this one been preserved all this time, and why had Dominic found it in the possession of a woman of the queen’s household? He had been the one last night to carry Alyce’s broken body to a nearby chamber. He had heard the rustle of paper inside her bodice and, with more than a twinge of apology, had worked it free from her tight corset while Minuette was alerting the guards.

If Alyce de Clare had been spying on the queen … well, that was one thing. Everyone reported on everyone else in this court. But the ancient broadside had a new addition. Scrawled across the bottom in large, angry letters was nothing less than treason:
England will not have a Boleyn king
.

He would have to tell William. And Minuette would never let him forget his promise to tell her what he’d deciphered, so he might as well tell them together. And if it was the three of them, then it should definitely be the four of them.
Honestly
, Dominic thought,
Elizabeth will likely be the calmest of us all and with the most practical suggestions
.

And yet, as he wrote the messages that would set in train a private meeting tonight, Dominic knew it was a mistake. He should be reporting even this minute to Lord Rochford, laying out the broadside and the letters and the key. Rochford was the queen’s brother and Lord Protector of England; Dominic was nothing. Only a king’s friend.

William’s triumph at having brought his oldest sister to heel lasted through only one course. Then he remembered why he was perfectly content to let Mary go her own way—she was a crashing bore. She never laughed, she never let up, and she never stopped pressing her point. Politely, of course. Mary was every inch royal and well bred to a fault. But she had never learnt to use charm as Elizabeth did, and William privately thought that her greatest failing. If she knew how to flatter men, how to lead them on and implicitly promise and inspire … just as well for William that she did not. Mary with the ability to rally men to her personally rather than just to a bloodless cause would be extremely dangerous. As it was, William mostly found her a nuisance. He thought wryly of his mother’s cold anger at being asked to stay secluded in her rooms tonight so as not to upset Mary and wondered how he always seemed to be caught between temperamental women.

Tonight Mary chose to be temperamental over the French treaty. Proof that secrets were difficult to keep—she seemed to know all the pertinent details.

“You are reconciled to this marriage?” she demanded of Elizabeth.

“We all do what we must for England,” Elizabeth said drily. “Marry … or not. As the king wishes.” She raised her glass to William with a mischief that their sister entirely missed.

“But is this truly your wish?” Mary asked him anxiously. “Or that of your councilors? I fear they do not always look to your interests as much as to their own.”

“So do all men,” William answered.

Beneath the irritation and boredom, he filed away every word Mary spoke. As long as she lived, William could never be entirely at ease. Just by breathing, she was a focus for rebellion. In the seven years of his reign, at least a dozen Catholic plots had been uncovered. Several of them had involved little more than a comment made at the wrong time and place. But there had been two or three that could have been disastrous—like the Aylmer plot.

Even now, the thought of his former tutor was enough to tie William’s stomach in knots. He had liked Edward Aylmer, a gentle scholar who had made the schoolroom a place of intellectual adventure. Aylmer had been part of his household when William was still Prince of Wales, and he’d been a familiar and comforting presence during the bewildering transition to king. No one had not known Aylmer was an unrepentant Catholic—not until the night he was dragged out of William’s bedroom with a dagger in his hand.

Aylmer had claimed he meant no harm to his king, that he only wanted to take William away from the Protestant regent, Lord Rochford, and into the care of less-hated men. In the week following Aylmer’s arrest, four minor members of the Catholic nobility had been implicated in the plot. They were arrested, tried, and executed before anyone could draw a deep breath. Aylmer’s death was the last—and the bloodiest. Where the others had been neatly beheaded, Aylmer’s middle-class status was not enough to protect him from the full weight of the traditional sentence. He had been hung, disemboweled, and beheaded.

Though he was years distant from the memory, William could hear his uncle’s unbending voice echoing in his head:
You must sign the warrant, Your Majesty. You are as yet too young to be merciful. Mercy is appreciated only when strength has been established
. So he had signed, and Aylmer had died.

By the time a page entered the dining room with a message in Dominic’s handwriting, William’s head ached and he wondered what he had been thinking, demanding his sister’s presence. He seized gladly on Dominic’s request for a private meeting (
Bring Elizabeth if it pleases you
, he had written) and dismissed Mary to her chambers with near rudeness.

She began to protest at spending the night under the same roof as his mother, but William cut her short. “I do not require you to meet with those unpleasant to your sentiments. Tomorrow you may return to Whitehall. But I will not trust you to the river after dark. You would not have me trifle with your safety, would you?”

What could even Mary say to that? It wasn’t as though she would have to stay anywhere near Anne—William had made sure their rooms were separated by as many wings of the palace as he could manage. She curtsied and bade him a sour goodnight. No doubt she would not sleep, but rather spend the night in prayer against the influence of his mother.

Dominic and Minuette were waiting for them in the privy garden, a secluded honeysuckle arbor that William and Minuette had often escaped to when avoiding lessons as children. They had always been the ones straying—with Dominic and Elizabeth always the ones dragging them back to duty.

Tonight looked to repeat that pattern. If William had thought escaping Mary meant relaxing, one look at Dominic’s face told him differently. “What’s wrong?” he asked as Elizabeth joined Minuette on the bench.

“Minuette received a letter this morning from Alyce de Clare,” Dominic said.

William let out a disbelieving laugh. “The dead Alyce de Clare?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to tell me you were right, aren’t you? That there is something to worry about in her death.”

“Alyce asked Minuette to keep for her some papers until she saw herself clear of her trouble. Obviously she intended them as some sort of hold over whoever wrote them.”