The Traitor's Daughter (17 page)

“A sound decision. Celibacy is not for a man like you.”

He managed a smile at her implication. “Very true. Yet I am a loyal son of the church and long to serve her, which is why I am so proud to have your husband's trust. As for my wife, she is so ardent in her faith she can sometimes be impetuous. If she approached Ambassador Castelnau it may have been to assure him of our loyalty—hers and mine—to the one true Church. If so, she should not have acted so rashly. I will chastise her.”

“Oh? Will you give her a tongue-lashing?” Excitement glimmered in her eyes and she leaned closer. Before Owen could react she flicked her tongue along his upper lip.

He let out a sharp breath, a pretense of being fired with desire for her. “You have me at a disadvantage, your ladyship,” he said, as if held back only by the huge gap between them in rank. “You are so far above me.”

She laughed at his discomposure. “Well, that can be overlooked.”

“Your husband—”

“Oh, never mind him. I told him to let me have you to help Anne. He thinks you're here for your Latin.”

“So I have you to thank for this Arundel diversion.”

“You do. And it is customary to repay the ones we owe.”

“I have . . . no words.”

She let out a throaty laugh. “It's not your words I want.” She cocked her head at him, her expression turning sober. “That's not quite true. Now that I know you are one of us there is some information I would have from you. Tell me about Lord Thornleigh.”

He tried to think how best to use this. He had won her trust—that was good. Better still, it seemed she had no real interest in Kate, had accepted his claim that his wife was just impetuously pious. Best of all, it was dawning on him that he'd been blinkered in focusing his attention solely on Northumberland. Sitting beside him now was a possible great source of information. He had often seen her in intense private conversation with her husband. She might even know details about the invasion plan. “Gladly, if I can,” he replied as smoothly as he could. “What do you want to know?”

“Is he really as stiff-necked a Protestant as the world believes?”

“He has always showed himself loyal to Her Majesty.”

“So do many who are secretly loyal to the pope. Is Thornleigh?”

“What makes you think that?”

“His son is back in England.”

Robert.
He remembered Kate saying her brother wanted to keep his return quiet. Owen had wondered why, and suggested she keep clear of him. Had his return now become common knowledge—or did Catherine and her husband simply have spies everywhere? He asked cautiously, “Robert Thornleigh?”

“Yes. He was raised among our exile friends in Brussels. But I hear that Lord Thornleigh has welcomed him back to the bosom of his family. Why?”

This was news! “I know not,” he said truthfully.

“Well, perhaps you can find out. In London. I daresay some of Lord Thornleigh's people at his house will blab to you. I will furnish you with enough silver to loosen their tongues.” She took his hand. “Will you do me this service?”

Owen himself was now keen to find out about Robert. But his mission was to watch Northumberland. “Unfortunately His Lordship, your husband, requires my attendance at Petworth.”

“Oh, he will give you leave. He wants this information.”

Aha! “Then I am your servant, my lady.”

“Good.” Suddenly, she gathered her skirt up to her knees and shoved his hand underneath. “And, tell me,” she said slyly, guiding his hand up between her legs, “will serving me suit you?”

With his wrist clamped in her grip, his fingers met her wet cunt. He was beyond astonishment now. She was as slick and yielding as summer butter. Her breaths quickened with desire. She closed her eyes, savoring his touch. Her mouth opened, her tongue pink and wet.

Owen made a quick decision to build her excitement. He withdrew his hand. “In London, of course, if that pleases your ladyship.”

“But here first,” she breathed, groping again for his wrist. “Now.”

He held up both hands, a gesture of reluctant protest. “As I said, I would not presume. Your ladyship is so far above me. . . .”

Anger flashed in her eyes. “I am, indeed. So you will do as you are bid.” Her breathing was still ragged. “If you do not, I shall tell my husband you molested me. Then he will have you killed.”

He met her eyes, matching her steel with his own. “Threats, my lady, are not the surest way to harden a man's cock.”

“I know other ways.” She reached for his groin and pressed her palm on his member and rubbed. Owen could not pretend indifference at the sensation—nor conceal the result. She laughed in delight. “Aha!
This
will serve.”

She unfastened his doublet, and he did not resist. Now was his chance to get details. “You and I trust each other, which is a great comfort,” he said, “but what about the others in this place?”

“
Comfort?
” she parodied, her voice husky as she opened his doublet. She spread it wide, then hurriedly untied the lacings at the neck of his shirt. “I'll have no
comfort,
and nor will you, while you're still in your breeches.” She reached again for his cock.

He caught her hand. “I'm serious, my lady. How far does the faith of our host take him?”

“Arundel? Don't worry, he is with us. So is Anne.”

All the way to treason?
he wanted to ask. Impossible to blurt that. “And his guest, this Captain Fortescue?”

“Black Fortescue, we call him. That dark skin of his, almost like a blackamoor.” She resumed stroking his cock through his codpiece even as she slipped her hand inside his shirt and fondled the hair of his chest. “Like this lovely black hair of yours.” She kissed his mouth, opening her own.

Owen flicked his tongue against hers. She trembled with desire. He broke off the kiss and asked, “Where is he from? How is he friends with Arundel?”

“What?” she breathed, too distracted to follow.

“Who is Fortescue?”

“That's not his real name. It's Ballard. John Ballard.” She bent her head and licked his chest.

Owen drew back a little, leaving her with her tongue out. Then he rewarded her. He shoved her skirt higher and fingered her cunt. “Why the false name?”

Her head lolled back in ecstasy as he stroked her. She moaned. “He's come from . . . Paris.” She gasped as his finger slid up into her. “Before that . . . Rheims.”

By God, another priest sent by Allen and the Jesuits.
“Paris?” he asked. He itched to ask if Ballard was in contact there with Thomas Morgan, Mary Stuart's chief agent in France, but held back. She would ask how he knew about Morgan.

She grabbed his wrist to shove his finger farther up into her. He resisted, wanting more answers first, and withdrew his hand. She groaned in frustration.

But he was only starting. He licked his finger, wet from her. Watching, she almost swooned. He bit her earlobe. She gasped with pleasure.

He said, “I only want to be sure that everyone near you can be trusted. Is this Ballard known to my lord Northumberland?”

“So many questions,” she said testily. “What an interrogation!” The word seemed to snap her out of her carnal trance. She blinked as her mind cleared. “Why do you want to know all this?” Suspicion lurked in her voice.

Owen realized he had gone too far. He dare not ask anything more about Ballard. Not yet. He saw she was about to speak. To stop her he kissed her—a shameless kiss, probing with his tongue to stoke her lust. And his own. She moaned, her excitement fired again.

Owen had a jolting thought of Kate. Before the day he met her he had not lived like a saint, but since that day—since falling so completely in love with her and making her his wife—he had never even imagined being unfaithful. But if Catherine had crucial information this was the only way he was going to get it. And, try as he might, he could not deny the throb of pleasure he felt at gaining mastery over this insistent, lush woman.

He pushed her onto her back, hard enough to push Kate from his mind. Catherine fell back with a gasp of pleasure, her legs flashing white in the swirl of rose silk skirt. He grabbed her ankles and spread her. She laughed in delight. He unfastened his codpiece to free his straining cock and came down on her, stopping her laugh with his mouth.

11

Confession

K
ate sat at her dressing table at Thornleigh House struggling to decipher a letter in code. It was from Thomas Morgan, Mary Stuart's chief intelligencer in Paris, to a Captain Fortescue in Arundel, Sussex. Matthew's agent at Dover had intercepted it. The code's complexity was a brain-twisting challenge, and Kate had been at it since dawn. It was now almost noon; downstairs, her grandmother's kitchen would be preparing dinner. Looking for guidance, she flipped through pages of the
Stenographia
by the Abbot of Spand-heim, then scanned the notes on it by John Dee, the Queen's mathematician friend who had adapted the book's concepts for English code breakers. Today, though, these well-thumbed sources yielded no answers. The
Stenographia
was decades old. This code was new. Frustrated, Kate slapped the book shut.

It was impossible to keep her mind off Robert. She was expecting him at any moment. She had told her grandmother he had returned to England, and last night she'd sent him a note at their father's house inviting him here. She needed to talk to him about his misleading testimony to the royal councillors. Owen's words came back to her:
He has been raised among England's enemies. You should stay away from him until he can be questioned.
Kate had scoffed. Robert was her
brother,
for heaven's sake. She would no more mistrust him than she would herself.

But now he had been questioned and had told a lie. About Westmorland. Why?

No doubt there was a simple explanation—that's what she told herself. Robert had naturally been nervous in front of their father and intimidated by Lord Burghley, so he had simply forgotten meeting Westmorland. Except, he hadn't sounded nervous. His reply—
Goodness, my mother and I did not move in such high circles
—had been too measured, too definite, to spring from panicky forgetfulness. So why hide Mother's acquaintance with Westmorland? She conjured murky scenarios that alarmed her. Innocent men did not lie. Yet what could Robert possibly be guilty of? He was a poor doctor. He had cut himself off from Mother years ago. And in any case Mother was no threat. Suspecting Robert of deception made no sense. Yet his words
were
a deception. Kate needed him to explain it.

Waiting for him, uneasy about how to question him, she again applied herself to the decoding task before her, the intercepted letter from Thomas Morgan in Paris to Captain Fortescue in Arundel. She now knew that Fortescue was the alias of John Ballard, a Cambridge graduate who'd become a priest at Rheims and was now back in England. Matthew had told her this; he had learned it from Owen's report sent from Petworth. She wished Matthew had also been able to reassure her that Owen was not in danger. His report said that Northumberland had had his spy drowned when he'd learned of the man's double-dealing. That made her shudder. “Be very careful, Owen,” she whispered to herself.

Thomas Morgan was said to be a clever and determined man. His code was so challenging she had been able to decipher only a third of his one-page letter so far. Most codes were simple substitution ciphers in which a combination of numbers, letters, and symbols stood for names, places, and common words, so deciphering them was based on the frequency of use of letters of the alphabet. The letter
e
accounted for thirteen percent of all letters used in English, whereas
z
occurred only one percent of the time. Whatever letter, number, or symbol was used, it retained its original frequency of use, so the problem had to have a mathematical solution. By analyzing the frequency of the letters used in a code, Kate could work out the consonant or vowel each substituted letter represented. In the most rudimentary substitution
a
was
z
and
b
was
y,
et cetera
. The last will be first and the first will be last,
as she'd told Owen, quoting the Bible.
Child's play.
But the code before her would require a child of freakish wit. Morgan had run words together with the breaks between them removed so as to avoid giving clues. And, to disguise his message further, he had included many nulls—letters that were fakes, representing nothing, and thus altering the rules of what must have been the original code.

Nevertheless, Kate had worked out some of his symbols. Two question marks together meant King Philip of Spain. A capital
X
followed by a backslash meant Mary Stuart. A backward
B
meant the Spanish ambassador, Don Bernardino de Mendoza. A zero with a diagonal stroke through it meant the French ambassador, Castelnau. The number five meant “ship.” The number eight meant “packet”—a reference, Kate deduced, to the letters that Castelnau received from Mary's European correspondents. The references to Philip of Spain—“his wise decision”—and Mary—“she awaits word”—and Castelnau were tantalizing, but so far Kate had unearthed nothing that Elizabeth's government could take action on. Also, one symbol, repeated three times, was a complete mystery: an
L
inside a circle. What did it signify? What was Morgan telling Ballard?

Packet.
She knew that Castelnau's embassy on Salisbury Court was the depot for letters to Mary from her European supporters. He bundled them into packets to be forwarded to Sheffield by a courier, and thence in to Mary at Sheffield Castle by some method still unknown to her English watchers.
That courier will be me,
she thought with a shiver.
If Castelnau ever gives me the signal.
It had been six days since her meeting with the ambassador in the humid laundry room. He had told her to watch for his signal: a flowerpot of carnations set out on the west, second-floor balcony of the embassy. Every day she had walked past the building, but no carnations had brightened the second-story balcony. This afternoon she would go again.

She puzzled again over that recurring symbol in Morgan's letter: the circled letter
L
. None of the suspect names on her list began with
L,
and in any case the circle must surely give it added meaning. No combinations she had tried on her mathematical grid had yielded a clue. The symbol refused to give up its secret identity. Dipping her pen, she was sketching out a new grid when faint voices reached her through her open window. A boat arriving?

She went to the window. Looking over the tree tops of the orchard she could see the riverside landing. Robert was climbing out of a wherry onto the water stairs. How finely dressed he was! A doublet of peacock-blue satin, fashionably slashed to reveal its crimson lining, and a blue satin hat that glinted with gold piping. He was fashionably attended, too, by a couple of servants wearing the smart, Thornleigh livery.
He's been transformed,
she thought. The modest, retiring doctor, now their father's proudly acknowledged heir. Emotions clashed inside her. She was glad for Robert, of course—this status was his birthright. But the favor their father showered on him made her feel even more cut off. Robert was living like a lord in Father's house while she was banished from its doors.

She watched Robert jauntily go up the stairs and pass through the garden of trellised roses that lay between the river and the house. Reaching the building he disappeared from her view. She steeled herself.
Don't let fantasies unsettle you. He'll have a simple explanation. Ask him.

She gathered Morgan's letter and the
Stenographia
and her notes and set them in the strongbox in which she kept these sensitive materials. She locked it, then kneeled beside her bed and jostled the box back into its hiding place between joists under a floorboard beneath the bed.

Downstairs in the great hall she found her grandmother with four musicians she'd been conferring with, and Robert, making a courtly bow to her. Kate put on a cheerful face as she joined them.

“Oh, I so wanted to be the one to introduce you two,” she said.

“Introduce?” said Lady Thornleigh in high spirits. “Do you think I would not know my own grandson?”

“Well,” Kate said, “it's been ten years.”

“Years that seem no more than a day, my lady,” Robert said to their grandmother, “for I see no change in you.”

“Aha, Continental manners have made a courtier of you, Robert. I hope our blunt English ways do not dismay you.”

“Everything English delights me, for England is the home of my heart.”

His earnest declaration moved their grandmother, Kate could see. She could not help feeling the same. She so wanted to believe in him.

“As it should be,” Lady Thornleigh told him warmly. “You're back with your father, where you belong. Welcome home, Robert.” She opened her arms to beckon him. He came to her and she held him in a tender embrace. When he stepped away, Kate saw a film of tears in his eyes.

One of the musicians shuffled his feet. Lady Thornleigh turned to him. He looked apologetic for interrupting her conversation. “Master Wallace, forgive me,” she said. “This is something of a family reunion, you see. You and I will resume our discussion later. And,” she said to the others, “I thank you, good sirs, for coming so far.” Kate noticed that sheets of music were spread out on one end of the long table. “Please, take your leisure here in the hall,” her grandmother continued. She turned back to Robert and Kate. “Come, join me in my library, you two. I am eager to hear of your adventures, Robert. You must tell us everything.”

“No,” Kate said.

They both looked startled. “No?” said Lady Thornleigh.

“That is,” Kate managed to say, “I assume you're discussing the music for your remembrance feast, my lady. Please, continue. Robert and I don't wish to disturb you. We'll take a stroll in the orchard.”

“Feast?” Robert said with interest. “Tonight?”

“No, not tonight,” Lady Thornleigh said. “And it's just a small supper.”

“But a very important one,” Kate told Robert. She took his elbow to guide him away. “Please, carry on with Master Wallace, my lady.”

She led Robert out of the hall and down the screened passage. They stepped outside onto the broad terrace at the east of the house by the orchard. The sun shone and the air was apple scented with autumn's briskness. She guided him down the steps. “Let's walk,” she said, indicating the graveled path through the apple trees.

“I'm so glad you asked me here,” he said. “It's wonderful to see Grandmother looking so well. And this grand old house. What memories it holds.”

His easy chatter unnerved her. “Come a little farther,” she said, checking over her shoulder for anyone near. The knot garden with its late blooms of marigolds and salvia lay to the right. Kate could see no one there. To the left, near the far wall, two gardeners stood on ladders against a damson plum tree, pruning the boughs. A hedge of gooseberry and currant bushes ran between the gardeners and Kate and Robert. She tugged him farther along the path. Her skirt hem brushed the herb border of thyme and lavender, releasing their perfume. The autumnal peace—the herbs and sunshine and flitting birds—felt at odds with Kate's anxiety, all the more confusing because she could not name her fear. Evidence was forcing her to confront Robert, but her heart disbelieved the evidence. They reached the sun-splashed tunnel of apple trees and slowed their pace. Here they had privacy. The low-hanging foliage, tawny and russet and gold, surrounded them, masking them from the gardeners' view.

“Kate, there's so much to say. So much to thank you for. Indeed, I thank you with all my heart, for because of you I am reunited with Father. You don't know what it means to me to have you as my champion.” He gave her a tender smile. “Just as you were when we were children.” His smile turned sad as he added, “But who shall be
your
champion? I've learned from Father that your husband was recently in prison. For attending a mass, he says. Is it true?”

The question flustered her. Then she answered steadily, “Yes. Owen made an error. He has paid the price, six months in the Marshalsea. I trust that is the end of it, for I want no part in these religious wrangles.”

“Yet you are loyal to him. Father told me. It grieves him.”

“I took Owen for better or worse. I believe better days lie ahead.”

“Where is he? He does not live with you here?”

“He has taken a position as secretary to the Earl of Northumberland.”

Robert seemed surprised.

Kate looked away, uncomfortable. This was not what she wanted to talk about! She stopped walking.

“Why did you lie?”

He stopped, too, startled. “Pardon me?”

“Your interrogation at Whitehall. You told Lord Burghley and the others you had never met Westmorland. But you did. We both did. Why did you say you hadn't?”

Looking at her, he was still. His face, mottled by the leaves' shadows, was unreadable. He asked, “How do you know what I said?”

She was prepared for this. “I saw the transcript of your testimony. I paid the clerk to show me. So many people were ready to believe the worst about you, about Mother's influence on you, I simply had to know what happened when the council brought you in. So I found the clerk and paid him. Now, please answer me. That day at Westmorland's house when we were children, it meant so much to Mother she drilled you afterward on how to properly address him. We made sport of it for days, you and I. So why did you mislead Burghley?”

He stared at her for a long moment. “Mislead? I did no such thing. How could I, knowing Lord Burghley held my life in his hands?”

“I don't know
why
you did it, but you did. Everyone knows Westmorland is an enemy of England, so Mother's connection to him would hardly slip your mind.”