The Traitor's Daughter (5 page)

“And how do I gain entry?” Owen asked, incredulous. “March in and tell His Lordship I have orders to spy on him?”

“His secretary died last week. The post is vacant.”

“Ah,” Owen murmured, the light dawning. “You want me to apply for it.” He gave Matthew a flinty look. “Double the purse.”

“Done.”

“But why
you?
” Kate protested. “Matthew, don't you already have someone there?” He had spies in many great men's houses.

“I did. A porter. But we've just learned he's working both sides. I'm arranging now to have him dealt with. That leaves no one at Petworth.”

“But surely you can find someone else!” she insisted.

“No one with your husband's bona fides. His Oxford education. His Catholic cover. His friendship with Doncaster. He's perfect.”

“It's true, Kate. Someone has to watch Northumberland and I might be able to get that secretarial position.”

Where you could be found out and killed,
she almost blurted. But she bit back the words. She glared at Matthew. Curse him!

Owen squared his shoulders, signaling to Matthew that the thing was settled. “Get Doncaster released. He'll vouch for me to Northumberland.”

“Good, I'll arrange his release today. Connect with him immediately. How soon can you leave for Petworth?”

Owen turned to Kate, the look in his eyes telling her:
I'm sorry, I wanted us to be alone, too.
“Wednesday,” he answered. Kate muffled a groan. The day after tomorrow! But what could she do? Matthew wanted him to take this mission and Owen would not shirk. She knew how much he wanted the gold. He took her hand. “We'll still be together. If I get the job I'll bring my wife.”

She mustered a smile. True, they would be together, though perhaps among the enemy. She could be useful, keep an eye out for any danger that might threaten him.

“No, I'm sorry. That's impossible,” Matthew said. “Kate stays.”

Her dismay leapt. “What?”

“I cannot send intercepted letters to you at Petworth, Kate. Too dangerous. You can see that.”

“Let others decode them,” she said. “You have able men throughout London.”

“Several have decamped. Fled. Because . . .” He hesitated. Got to his feet and went to the shuttered window, where he stopped, his eyes on the shutter barrier, unseeing. His unsettled state, so unlike him, unnerved Kate. He turned back to them. “I'm afraid I have some bad news. Roger Griffith is dead.”

They both stared at him, appalled. Kate had never met Griffith, but she knew he was Matthew's most valuable agent, a double agent, the link between the French ambassador in London and Mary Stuart. The ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, received letters for Mary from her supporters in France, Spain, and Rome. Castelnau gave the packets of letters to Griffith, whom he trusted as one of Mary's loyal supporters. Griffith couriered the letters north to Sheffield Manor, where Mary was in custody, but first he brought them to Matthew, whose band of decipherers copied and decoded them. Griffith then delivered the letters to Mary's agent in Sheffield, who smuggled them in to her. It had taken Matthew months to get Griffith in place. Now, this indispensable courier was dead.

Matthew went on grimly, “He was killed in a street brawl. Two days ago, on Ludgate Hill. Seems he and his cousin left the Belle Sauvage Inn and three of the owner's men came after them. The cousin gave me the details from his sickbed, where he lies with a broken arm and broken ribs. The men from the inn stopped them in the street with angry words, saying Griffith left without paying for their ale. Griffith insisted he
had
paid. Insults flew. Then blows. Two of the inn men set upon the cousin. Griffith drew his dagger. The third man pulled a knife. Griffith's throat was slit.” Matthew shook his head. “The three from the inn have disappeared.”

“Christ,” Owen growled. “To die for a reckoning over ale.”

A chill fingered its way up Kate's spine. “Or
was
it over ale?” she asked Matthew. His pale face told her there was something darker to this story.

“Ah, you have guessed it, Kate,” he said. “We fear the brawl was staged.”

Owen stiffened in alarm. “You mean . . .”

“Yes. Mary's people. I think they'd unmasked Griffith.”

“And staged this to finish him . . . without tipping their hand to us.” Owen whistled in reluctant admiration. “Crafty.”

“We'll keep the search on for the murderers, but . . .” He spread his hands in a gesture that said how impossible he believed it to be.

“So, what now?” Owen asked. “Have you got someone to take Griffith's place?”

“Two candidates. Good men. But it took months to get Griffith in. God knows how long it will take to place a new man. If I'm right that Griffith's cover was blown, Castelnau and his people will be on their guard.”

“But they have to move those letters somehow. It's essential to Mary's cause that she corresponds with her supporters, and Castelnau knows it. And
we
need to keep reading what passes between them. Her Majesty's life—the life of the realm—depends on it.”

“You don't need to tell me that,” Matthew growled.

Owen said no more, accepting the rebuke. He turned away, running his hand over his stubbled head in exasperation. Matthew frowned at the floor as though to regain his sober composure. Kate watched them both, but her mind had skidded elsewhere. Her skin prickled at the thought that had gripped her.

“I can do it,” she said.

The men turned to her. Matthew looked puzzled. “Pardon? Do what?”

“I can be the new courier.”

They both gaped at her.

“No, I'm not mad.” Though she hardly knew where her voice had come from to volunteer. She had to clear her throat before she found the control to speak again. “You spoke of bona fides, Matthew. Well, mine are impressive enough to convince even Mary Stuart herself. For one thing, my mother is a known traitor. For another, I lived among the exiles for years. And if those credentials are not enough, my husband is a felon convicted for the very thing they hold most dear, the Catholic faith.”

They continued to stare at her, amazed, and she felt a nip of fear. Never had she imagined doing anything so dangerous.

Owen broke the silence. “No, absolutely not,” he said, his eyes flashing. “Don't even
think
of doing such a thing.”

Matthew held up a hand to forestall him. He was regarding Kate with keen interest. “It is something to consider.”

“No, not for a moment, Buckland. Think! If Mary's people should suspect her—” He didn't finish. He didn't need to. Not with the image of Griffith's slit throat hovering in all their minds.

“England is in mortal peril,” Matthew said to Owen. “You saw today how Her Majesty's enemies get closer to her with every attempt. We all must do what we can to stop them.”

“Kate is already doing more than enough. She's your best decoder.”

“She may do more. Kate, you are indeed an ideal candidate.” Matthew spoke as though discovering an extraordinary truth he should have seen before. “Trusted by our people because you're Lord Thornleigh's daughter. Trusted by the Catholics because you're Lyon's wife.”

“Exactly,” Owen said, a threat in his voice. “She's
my
wife.”

Matthew looked at him. “You don't know how strong she is.”

“I know it better than anyone. That's no reason to place her in peril.”

They both looked to her for her answer. Matthew's gray eyes bored into her from under his brow. Owen said, “Kate, you do not have to do this.”

Fear seeped into her as she recalled Matthew's words:
The enemy sleeps not.
But she felt a tremor of determination, a sense that now
she
was the one who could not shirk. “I believe I do.”

Owen said in dismay, “It's too dangerous, I tell you. How could we even get you in place? You have no connection to their world.”

“Actually, I do. Marie de Castelnau.”

Matthew exclaimed, another discovery, “Of course!”

Kate saw Owen's alarm. But he knew she was right. The French ambassador's wife was her friend.

3

The Good Doctor

I
n the south of England, ten miles from the sea, the River Ouse cut a gap in the chalk hills known as the South Downs. The town of Lewes nestled here under the great amphitheater of the hills. On a high point overlooking the river the Saxons had built a rudimentary castle as a defensive stronghold. After the Norman invasion William the Conqueror rewarded his brother-in-law, the first Earl of Surrey, with a swathe of land along the river from the coast to the Surrey boundary, and the earl built Lewes Castle on the Saxon site. For five hundred years the castle's twin towers and forbidding barbican had looked down on this town in which, during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary, seventeen Protestants had been burned at the stake in front of the Star Inn. When Mary died her half sister Elizabeth became queen and made Protestantism the religion of England, but the Catholic faith had by no means died out. It had gone underground.

The High Street of Lewes occupied the west bank of the Ouse, climbing steeply up from the bridge, and where it intersected with St. Nicholas Lane stood a fine oak-framed house, its gardens facing the Downs. This was the home of Gilbert Levett, a cloth merchant, and his wife, Agnes, and their thirteen-year-old daughter, Judith.

For ten months a young man had been living with the Levetts as their guest. He had come to them on a chill, wet night, the last day of October, showing Levett a letter of recommendation with a signature that moved the merchant to welcome this stranger into his family. The signature was that of Charles Paget, an exiled English nobleman known to be a champion of Mary Stuart, the deposed Queen of Scotland. Gilbert and Agnes Levett cherished the old church they had been brought up in and they hoped for a day when Mary, a pious Catholic, would become Queen of England, for they knew she would return the realm to the eternal truths and mystical beauties of Catholicism—return England to God. They had heard whisperings among their secret Catholic friends that influential exiles like Charles Paget were making plans to bring Mary to the throne by force of arms. Gilbert and Agnes wondered if the stranger who had come to them might be part of this grand scheme. If so, they felt privileged to give him the refuge he required. He had told them no details and they had asked for none. For his safety and their own, silence was essential.

The young man alone knew how truly dangerous his position was. The name he had given his hosts was Robert Parry, for he did not dare divulge his true identity. He was Robert Thornleigh, son of the traitor Frances Thornleigh. Raised by her among the exiles in the Low Countries, he would be under immediate suspicion if the English authorities knew who he was; they were vigilant in watching for Catholic infiltrators. In Dieppe harbor he had paid a handsome sum to the shipmaster of an English bark, a small ship out of Seaford on the coast of Sussex, for passage on the bark's return from delivering a cargo of hides to Dieppe. Using some of Robert's money the shipmaster had paid off the Seaford harbor official whose job it was to check arriving ships and their passengers. The payment had bought the harbor official's silence. Waiting until dark, Robert had been rowed ashore at nearby Newhaven. He made his way alone on foot to Lewes. At four in the morning he had reached the safe house of Gilbert and Agnes Levett.

The ten months since then had been sufficient for Robert to quietly establish himself in Lewes, the first stage of his mission. The Levetts had told their neighbors he was the friend of a merchant colleague's son. Robert had come prepared. At the University of Padua he had studied medicine—physic, it was called in England—and he was now well-known amongst the neighbors in Lewes as a young physician skilled beyond his years, clever at treating their agues, fluxes, and various persistent maladies.

Robert felt confident that the authorities did not know he was secretly back in England, but soon, if the plan he had set in motion succeeded, one of the most prominent among those authorities
would
know: his own father, Baron Adam Thornleigh. Robert had not seen his father in ten years, but he had come to loathe everything he stood for as a friend and defender of the heretic Queen Elizabeth. That revulsion had fueled Robert as he'd bided his time in Lewes under the cover of dispensing physic.

“Has the wild pansy calmed her cough?” Robert asked the Levetts.

He was sitting knee to knee with their daughter Judith at the girl's bedchamber window, examining her sputum, which she had spit into a glass. Her parents stood beside Robert, anxiously watching. Pallid-faced, the girl sat slumped in her chair, exhausted from another night's attack of asthma. The sun was up, but she still wore her night clothes. Her sleep had been so racked, she said, she had left her bed at dawn because being near the window gave her some comfort.

“The pansy did some good at first,” Agnes answered hesitantly, hands clasped at her waist in concern. Robert heard in her voice her real meaning:
None at all.
She was being polite. Trusting his skill, she did not want to gainsay him. “But oh, Master Parry, at midnight her wheezing was so bad I feared she'd never catch her breath. Terrible to watch. Terrible!”

“It always strikes her worst at night,” Gilbert said.

Robert glanced up at the couple's worried faces. Judith was their only daughter. Their four grown sons had homes and families of their own. Judith was the last chick in their nest.

Judith coughed. Her parents tensed. “It's like my chest clenches up like a fist,” the girl said weakly.

So much for the wild pansy,
Robert thought. Heartsease, people called the herb. Such a sweetly English name. So much about the English countryside moved him strangely. Brussels, Paris, Rome— for thirteen years these great cities had shaped him, taught him, succoured him. Urban Europe was his home. Yet now that he had returned to the land of his birth the sights and sounds and smells of his English childhood induced in him a primal upwelling of emotion.
Home.
If the grand plan in which he had come to play a part succeeded, England would be his home for good.

The Enterprise of England—that was King Philip's name for the invasion plan. How Robert itched to see it triumph! He had chafed during the months spent impotently watching from this backwater as several of his brethren in religion, Jesuits sent by Rome, had been imprisoned and hanged. But he hoped to emerge soon from his self-imposed exile in Lewes. His plan depended on his sister. Kate would have received the letter by now, signed by their old tutor, Master Prowse. That had been Robert's first move. This morning he had awoken with a ripple of queasy excitement, knowing his next move had to be today. A visit to Prowse in Seaford.

He opened the satchel at his feet between him and Judith. “Try this,” he said, drawing out a linen pouch tied with twine. “Butcher's broom and balsam of Peru.” The first ingredient the Levetts would be familiar with; the herb grew in southern England's gentle clime. The second was more exotic: the scorched bark of a tree in the New World. “Mix it with treacle or honey and boil it to a syrup. It will help clear her chest of phlegm.” But will do nothing to stop the attacks, he thought. What was at the root of them? Asthma had been written about for centuries, but its cause was still unknown. Fragments from his textbooks flitted through his mind. Greek:
asthma,
meaning a short breath, a panting. Latin:
asma.
He remembered the Levetts saying Judith's attacks had started when she was ten. But why?

“I'll have the kitchen start right away,” said Agnes, bustling out with the pouch. Gilbert moved to Judith, offering her a cup of water, murmuring words of comfort.

Robert regarded the multipaned window beside the girl. She said she felt a little better when seated here. Why? She had not opened a pane, so outside air was not the reason. Did the garden view calm her mind and therefore her chest? Or was it sitting upright that helped, while lying in bed brought on the attacks? He looked across at the rumpled bed. Gilbert Levett was well-off and had furnished his daughter's bedchamber with a carved oak bedstead, velvet curtains of buttercup yellow, and fine Holland linens.
Always worst at night,
Gilbert had said. That had to signify somehow, Robert thought.

He stood and went to the bed. The rumpled, cream-colored sheet had an embroidered hem. He fingered the delicate pink embroidery, pondering. He picked up one of the pillows and absently plumped it back into shape as a memory surfaced: fitful sleep when he was six on a scratchy straw mattress in the rude Irish inn where his mother had first fled with him and Kate. Then another memory, when he was perhaps eleven, of lounging in luxurious bedsheets in the Brussels mansion of the Duchess of Feria, his mother's friend. He set down Judith's pillow, and a feather's sharp tip, protruding, pricked his thumb. He drew the small feather out through the linen weave and examined it. Feathers. Latin:
plumis.
Another memory surfaced: Giordano, a fellow student in Padua who said he never slept with pillows because they gave him a crick in his neck and a stuffy nose.

He turned to Gilbert Levett. “Has she always slept here?”

The merchant looked up from his murmured talk with his daughter. “Pardon?” The question seemed to puzzle him.

“Has this always been her bed?”

“Oh. Yes. Well, since she left the nursery.”

That would have been when she was four or five, Robert thought. “And has she always had these pillows?”

“Pillows? Yes, I believe so.”

“No,” Judith said, her voice still weak. “Remember, Father? You gave them to me as a Christmas gift.”

“When was that?” Robert asked.

Father and daughter looked at each other, puzzling to recall. She said, “It was the Christmas the river froze so early, remember?”

“Ah, that's right. Fine goose down. A delivery from Brighton.”

Judith said to Robert, “I must have been ten.”

Ten. When her asthma attacks had begun. Robert picked up one of the pillows. “Judith, sleep without the pillows tonight.”

“Why?”

“Just try it.”

 

Seaford, one of the Cinque Ports, lay ten miles from Lewes. Above its tidal mudflats and salt marshes the white cliffs of the South Downs faced out to sea. The clean, crisp September weather should have made Robert's ride there on his host's borrowed gelding a pleasure, but he took no joy in the pitiless task that lay before him. Would he be able to go through with it? Did he have the strength of will? He thought of his mother, of her unflinching determination in spite of everything she had suffered—or perhaps because of it. Her resolve spurred his courage. He had to prove himself worthy.

In the clear morning light he could see the massive cliff of Seaford Head long before he reached the seaside town. Terns swooped around the cliff. Seagulls screeched. He reached the humble cottage that lay halfway up the slope above the shingle beach and dismounted. The wind that bent the marran grasses had the faintest knife-edge of winter in it. Robert's face felt sticky from the sea salt carried on the breeze. On the beach below he could make out the red berries, called bittersweet, that grew low to the ground as protection from the coast's strong winds. The berries, he knew, were poisonous.

He turned to the cottage door. Behind him his horse munched the grass. He knocked.

Inside, a dog barked. The door opened and from the interior gloom a frail-looking man with tufts of white hair peered at Robert. He held a knobbly cane. “Yes, sir?”

“Master Tobias Prowse?”

“Yes, I am he.” Behind him the dog, a shaggy gray wolfhound, barked in nervous warning. “Hush, Smoke,” the old man ordered. Then kindly to Robert, “Can I help you, sir?”

“Good Master Prowse, I am come to pay my respects.”

“Indeed?” Prowse looked vaguely surprised, but the cheerful expression on his face spoke of eagerness to be enlightened. “Do come in, sir.” He beckoned Robert across the threshold.

Robert had to duck his head under the low doorway. The dog bounded to him. Robert stiffened. He didn't trust dogs.

“Oh, Smoke will never harm you,” Prowse said, gesturing with his cane as he closed the door. “He's almost as old as I am. A cast-off from my lord's hunting pack years ago. A hound with a broken leg was not welcome there.” The animal, its rear leg slightly crooked, contented itself with sniffing the stranger's boots. Robert relaxed. He scanned the dimly lit room. A floor of beaten earth. A narrow stone hearth where a low peat fire smoldered. A schoolroom desk messy with books and papers. On one wall, in pride of place, a bookcase crammed with volumes. Robert felt a tingle of surprise at recognizing several books' spines. Tomes that Prowse had used to instruct him and Kate.

“Have we a mutual friend, sir?” the old man inquired. A natural enough question following Robert's claim of paying his respects.

Robert turned to him and smiled. “I see you do not remember me.”

“Remember?” Prowse squinted at him. “Forgive me, but I do not. Are we acquainted?”

“You taught me and my sister, Katherine, when we were children. I am Robert Thornleigh.”

A bolt of surprise straightened the old man's posture. “Bless my soul. Not young Master Robert? You quite surprise me, sir. Why, it must be fifteen years!”

“Thirteen, to be exact. That's when you last corrected our Latin scribblings. Kate and I went to Flanders after that.”

A polite silence. The old man surely knew that Robert's mother had fled with the two children. News of treason travels fast, especially such a spectacular attempt against the Queen's life all those years ago by Robert's late uncle, his mother's brother.
If only they'd succeeded,
he thought. He changed the topic. “Glad I am to see you so hale, Master Prowse. The years have been kind to you.”