Maid of Deception (5 page)

“Oh, Sophia, not at all,” I said, willing her quaking to cease. “You are doing the best that you—”

“No, I’m
not
.” Sophia straightened away from me, scrubbing at her face, the action merely serving to brighten her cheeks in lovely counterpart to her huge violet eyes. “I know too much and too little. I hear too clearly and not clearly enough. I see what isn’t there, what might be, and what may never be. I’m useless.”

I bit my lip and exchanged a long look with Anna, as Jane and Meg suddenly seemed endlessly fascinated with their own hands. Sophia
was
a riddle, there was no denying it. But she was far more powerful than even she realized.

I’d been in my position as a Maid of Honor a scant month when John Dee had come calling to Elizabeth’s chambers, with his arms full of charts and his words full of portents. As the new young Queen’s official astrologer, Dee had become a constant guest in the waning days of 1558. Together he and Elizabeth had puzzled out when the Queen’s coronation should be held, when every important meeting should be scheduled, who should be added to her list of confidantes and who should be turned away.

He’d brought his young ward, Sophia, with him after the third visit, and Elizabeth had quickly become fascinated with the girl. I’d been more wary, not that the Queen paid me any mind. Still, Dee had seemed too careful, too skittish around the quiet girl, too unsure of her even as he’d doted on her, too watchful and eager.

It hadn’t taken long for the Queen to realize that Dee thought the girl possessed a budding psychic gift, that he’d waited long years for that gift to manifest, and that—finally!—he thought the time was nearing for it to arrive.

After that the good astrologer hadn’t stood a chance.

Dee had found himself being “honored” by having his own niece swept away from him and taken into the Queen’s care, with vague assurances of access to her that never quite materialized. Then Lord Brighton had shown up, and all too quickly Sophia’s betrothal had been announced—with no apparent word from Dee on the subject. The astrologer barely darkened our doors after that, preferring to stay cooped up in his library at Mortlake, a western district of London that was a good hour’s ride from Windsor Castle.

It appeared all the same to Sophia. She swooned at least three times a week to avoid confrontation, she suffered from terrible headaches, and she was as pale and trembling as a newborn lamb. Her greatest fear appeared to be of her own betrothed. And truth be told, for all his generosity, Lord Theoditus Brighton was about two decades too old to be considered a decent choice for the girl. Sophia was only now nearing her sixteenth birthday!

I frowned, a new thought striking me. What would the Queen do with not just one of her Maids of Honor being married (myself) but two? How would she shore up the corps of spies she herself had created? Had she even given the matter thought?

Knowing Elizabeth, she had. Her Maids of Honor were important to her. We were governed by Cecil and Walsingham
in our day-to-day spying activities, but in the end we were the Queen’s women.

“Sophia,” I said gently now, returning to our less than easy conversation. “Have you learned something to make you particularly afraid?”

“Ah. Well, then, yes,” Meg interrupted. I shot her an annoyed glare.
I was speaking here!

But Meg and Jane were looking at each other fiercely, and I straightened to take their measure. “I think,” Meg said carefully. “I think it’s time that we share some news of our own.”

I narrowed my eyes. If one of them had become betrothed without my knowing it, I truly would lose my temper. There were certain things that were not to be borne, and the marriage of a common thief or a deadly assassin before mine was one of them. “What sort of news?”

Sophia had turned as well, her eyes impossibly wide now. Jane just grinned, leaning up against the wall. “One less secret to keep,” she acknowledged, and Meg gave a short laugh.

“Should I give them the long version or the shorter one?” Meg asked.

“I think you’ve already strayed into the long version,” I said, folding my arms. “Does this news have a beginning point? Or should we just start guessing?”

“Briefly, then; briefly,” Meg mused, looking up at the ceiling. I knew she was doing it just to bait me, and I was all the more irritated that it was working. I seethed quietly, about to burst, when she finally began speaking.

“In the hunt for the killer of Marie Claire last month,
Jane and I stumbled on secret passages cut into the very walls of Windsor,” she said. “Quite by chance, I assure you.”

“Quite,” agreed Jane, with the slightest twist of her lips.

“But something found cannot be unfound, and so of course, we began mapping the passageways below the castle.”

“Are we drawing near a point sometime soon?” I asked. “What is this great discovery you are dying to share?”

“I’m getting to it, I’m getting to it!” Meg grinned at me. “In our searching we encountered a section that stretches all the way down to the Lower Ward, into the areas behind the Cloisters.”

Beside me Sophia gave a little gasp, and even Anna was leaning forward now. I’d known about the passageways—well, some of them—for many years. But before Jane and Meg had begun their mapping, even I had had no idea of the labyrinth of corridors that had been cut beneath Windsor. You could spend days trying to find their ends, as Jane and Meg certainly had. But this was the first they’d spoken of what they’d found down there.

“Once we’d found our way behind the Cloisters,” Meg continued, “the passage allowed us access into the apartments. We were running late, and, again quite by chance, we stumbled into the living quarters of Lord Brighton.”

Sophia stood frozen, but it was Anna’s turn to gasp. She clapped her hands to her face. “Oh, say that he wasn’t there!” she moaned. “That would be a disaster!”

“It would have been at that, but we, um, were lucky. He wasn’t in residence. However, his papers were.”

I lifted my brows, approval curving my lips. “Do you
mean to tell me that you spied on Lord Brighton? Rifled through his belongings?”

“It wasn’t like that!” Meg protested, but Jane just shrugged.

“The papers were there and we were there, and the good lord wasn’t,” Jane said.

“But it wasn’t like we went looking for things,” Meg countered quickly. “And we stole naught but information, if you can even call that a theft.”

You could, and I certainly did. “So what is it you found?” I prompted, if only to allow Sophia’s heart to beat again.

Meg took a deep breath. She walked over to Sophia and took the girl’s hand in her own. “We learned why you are so worried about Lord Brighton, Sophia. Do you already know the truth?”

Sophia had begun trembling again, and I looked from one maid to the other.
What is this?
“I . . . I couldn’t be certain,” Sophia said. “It is all so confused!”

“Of what couldn’t you be certain?” Anna demanded, saving me the trouble. “What is it you learned about Lord Brighton?”

“He’s been carrying on a gambit of his own, he has,” Jane said, gesturing toward Sophia with her knife. I frowned at her. When had she pulled out her blade? And was now truly an appropriate time for her to be cleaning it with the edge of her kirtle?

“He has, yes,” Meg said, her eyes still trained on Sophia. “He has masqueraded as a suitor to ensure that Sophia is not married off to anyone while she is still so young.”

“But why would he go to the trouble?” I asked, barely repressing my need to stamp my foot. Elegant noblewomen didn’t stamp their feet. Even when their need was great. “I mean, if he didn’t want to marry her himself, then why would he—”

“Because he is my father,” Sophia said, her voice a tortured whisper. She stared from Meg to Jane and back again, as Anna and I both stiffened in shock. “That’s it, is it not?” she asked. “That’s what I have feared all these months, since he first stepped foot in the Queen’s Presence Chamber. That’s what I have seen. Lord Brighton is not Lord Brighton at all—but a wraith, a ghost, a—”

Meg closed her fingers over Sophia’s hand. “A father, Sophia,” she said quietly. “He lost your mother years ago, when you were barely a babe in arms. Then you were taken from him— The papers were not clear on what had happened, but it appeared that from that moment forward your father was determined to find you and ensure your safety. He sold all of his belongings and arranged his own death. He re-created himself as Lord Brighton. He amassed great wealth and security, and then he came looking for you.”

“He found me,” Sophia said, her words stronger now even though she had begun to tremble again. “He found me and tried to protect me, by offering his hand for mine.”

I pursed my lips, trying to make sense of it. A father who’d lost his daughter and then found her again, in service to the Queen. What choice did he have? He could not demand Sophia’s return—the Queen had already claimed her, and her trusted astrologer had presented the girl as his
own niece. Brighton could not even declare his own existence as a father wronged, for fear those who’d stolen Sophia away from him long years ago would return to repeat the act. And so, he betrothed himself to her, perhaps never seeking to fulfill that contract, just to keep Sophia unwed until he had time to come up with a plan. It made a certain sort of sense, I supposed.

Oddly enough, Sophia did not seem as shocked as she should have been. Relief shone in her eyes; the most important prediction of all had just been verified. Then her expression dimmed and her skin turned noticeably paler.

“My head . . . ,” she murmured, lifting a hand to her brow. “Whenever I listen to thoughts such as these, it hurts so bad—”

“I’ve just the thing for that,” Anna said quickly, hopping off her perch and bustling over to Sophia, some random posset in her hand. “I have been wanting to try this. Mix it in with mead, and you’ll be right as rain.”

Sophia smiled, accepting the posset. “I thank you, Anna,” she managed, but Anna was already looking back at me.

“ ’Tis a dangerous game her father is playing,” she said. “No monarch would take kindly to being toyed with, our Queen least of all. If she were to find out—”

“Well, she cannot find out,” I said, surprising even myself with the firmness of the statement. “It is not her place to stand between a father and a daughter, no matter who she is.”
Or thinks she is.
“However”—and here I slanted a glance at Meg—“Lord Brighton also can’t stay betrothed to Sophia. That’s just . . . unseemly.”

Jane barked a laugh, and even Meg looked at me in amusement. “Unseemly!” Meg repeated. “Yes, yes, it is at that, Beatrice.” She grinned. “But how in heaven’s name will we unshackle Sophia from her father’s well-meaning chains? Do you know how it’s done, the unmaking of a betrothal?”

I paused, considering. I knew, certainly. I’d been working so hard to get and stay betrothed, however, that the dissolution of such a happy event seemed foreign even to consider. But there
were
ways, of course . . . ways that could be put into motion . . .

“It can be done,” I said. “But it would help if—” I shot a glance toward Sophia and drew in a tight breath. “I don’t suppose your, um, father . . . has any affection for a woman in the court?”

“Surely he wouldn’t dare!” Anna breathed, outraged at the betrayal of even a sham romance.

“Why wouldn’t he?” Jane shrugged. “He was at the wedding this morning with a woman, was he not? Some older woman—but not too old—a widow or some such, I think?”

“Lady Ariane,” Anna supplied, as of course she would. “Her husband died this Christmas past, and Lord Brighton has taken to squiring her to official functions when Sophia is not in a mood to endure festivities.”

“Which is often,” Meg put in with a grin, and Sophia blushed.

“Still, she is the soul of propriety,” Anna protested. “There has not been a whisper, nor even a hint—”

“There doesn’t have to be.” I waved Anna off, my mind churning now. If Sophia’s father were to be caught in the
arms of another woman—no matter how innocently, no matter how chaste—it would be cause enough for the Queen to withdraw her blessing from the forthcoming union. Elizabeth was ever going on about the virtue of her court and the value of marriage for everyone but herself. Now we would see how much she truly believed her own prattle.

Now I could disrupt the Queen’s own plans, as surely as she had disrupted mine.

I allowed the first genuine smile to form on my lips since the moment Elizabeth had arrived in Saint George’s Chapel.

“I have an idea,” I said.

CHAPTER FIVE

No sooner had the words come out of my mouth than a clatter sounded down the hallway. Moments later the door to our chamber was swept open. Cecil stood there, glowering at us.

“Good,” he said sourly. “You’re all here, though I refuse to speak with you in your bedchamber. Meet me in my offices at the quarter hour, and for the love of heaven, Jane, sheathe the knife.”

Jane started, and as quick as a breath, her knife slid out of view. Cecil continued to stare at us a moment more, nodding. “You’re at least dressed presentably. I suppose I have the wedding to thank for that.”