To Kiss A Spy (2 page)

She entered the chamber, glancing over her shoulder as she did so. There was no one around to see her. The servants were all busy with the revels below.

She closed the door softly and stood with her back to it, looking around the room where she and Philip had spent so much companionable time. She was not the scholar he had been, but she had grown up in the care of a mother who was as learned as any man, and Pen knew well the pleasures of a still and silent companionship disturbed only by the rustle of turning pages or the scratch of quill on parchment. She could almost hear those quiet sounds now, almost see Philip at the big oak table, his fair head bent over the tablets he always carried with him in case the muse struck unexpectedly.

Suddenly she was hit by a wave of grief. It was a familiar occurrence although it happened less often now, three years after Philip’s death. But it was as sharp, as piercing, as ever. Dry-eyed she waited for it to pass, for the tightness in her chest to ease, the great ball of unshed tears to dissipate.

If only she had his child, the child they had conceived in so much love . . .

Her expression cleared, her mouth set, her hazel eyes focused. There were no more shadows in the chamber, no more memories. Only purpose. The hard-edged driving force of her existence. A child had been born. Somewhere in this room among ledgers and Bibles there would be some record of that birth. Even a stillbirth had to have its place in family records.

She had been so ill after the dreadful labor, her body racked with fever and pain, her spirit with inconsolable grief. Her mother and stepfather had arrived and removed her instantly from the Bryanston home in High Wycombe. It had taken close to twelve months under their loving care for Pen to overcome her illness and to put her grief aside, although she knew it would always be a presence in the deepest recesses of her soul. This evening marked the first occasion she had been under a Bryanston roof since the birth. It provided her with the first real opportunity to look for some record of her son’s birth. The Bryanstons behaved as if it had never happened, and her mother and stepfather encouraged her not to think of it, to put it behind her. But Pen could not accept that the child who had grown inside her, who had kicked and hiccuped and been a physical part of her, a child she had labored so sorely to deliver, could be so utterly dismissed from the world.

And neither did she believe that the child had been born dead. She had heard him cry.

This was her obsession. This was what drove her as she returned to the princess’s household and the life she had known before her marriage. To all intents and purposes Pen was her old self, but below the surface raged the conviction that somewhere her child lived.

Her eye fell on the great family Bible on the lectern in the window embrasure. Births, deaths, marriages were all recorded there. She stepped quickly across the chamber, hurrying to the lectern. The Bible was open at the Book of Psalms and she feverishly turned the wafer-thin pages to the front of the volume. The pages stuck to her fingers, which had grown damp in her haste and eagerness. She wiped them on the gray damask of her skirt before continuing. The front of the Bible carried no record of the stillbirth of her son on July 7, 1550. The date itself was not inscribed. She looked down the long list of marriages, births, deaths. Her marriage to Philip was there. Philip’s death was there. Miles’s ascension to the earldom was there. In bold letters, bigger it seemed than any other entry. But, of course, Miles was the favorite son. The son his mother was convinced should have been her firstborn and always treated as such.

Pen’s eyes swept the chamber. How much time did she have left? Where else could she look? She went to the cabinet where she knew the estate papers were kept. How often she had watched Philip working on them. The key was in the lock. She opened the cabinet and began sorting through the ledgers.

The door opened behind her. The door she had forgotten, in her eager haste, to lock.

Her heart raced, her scalp contracted. Slowly she turned. At best it would be Robin, at worst her mother-in-law.

But it was neither. For a moment speechless, she stared at the stranger, her first thought that he was a servant. But it was a fleeting thought instantly dismissed. No servant was ever this elegant, or ever bore himself with such cool arrogance. Was he an intimate of the Bryanston family? If so, not one she knew.

Black eyes beneath a broad brow and prominent but shapely eyebrows assessed her in the pregnant silence, and Pen returned the scrutiny with a slight lift of her chin. He had a long straight nose, a pointed chin, and a calm mouth. He held himself very still and yet she could feel a surge of energy around him. She couldn’t guess at his age. He was certainly older than Robin.

She found her voice at last. “The revels are in the great hall, sir. You seem to have lost your way.”

He bowed. “Owen d’Arcy at your service, madam.” His voice was musical, rich and soft, and Pen puzzled over the curious lilt. It wasn’t quite a foreign accent and yet like his dark complexion it was not purely English either.

“I have no need of any service, sir,” Pen observed tartly. She felt on her mettle, somehow. A prickle of irritation mingled with something else as he continued to regard her with a glimmer of amused speculation. It was as if he knew something that she did not.

Everything about the man unsettled Pen. His clothes were curiously exotic, like his voice and his complexion. He wore doublet and hose of black satin worked with threads of Venetian gold, his shirt was of black silk, the collar fastened with black enameled clasps. A short cloak of black velvet lined with crimson silk hung from his slender shoulders. He carried a rapier and a dagger in black velvet sheaths at his waist. It was immediately obvious that he knew how to use such weapons. Pen had the absolute conviction that he was dangerous.

“You seemed to be looking for something,” he said pleasantly, as if she had not spoken. “Perhaps I can help.”

“I cannot imagine why you should think so.” Reluctantly Pen closed the cabinet and turned the key. She could not continue her search in his company, or indeed any company, and she was filled with resentment at the stranger’s intrusion. There was no knowing when she would have such an opportunity again.

“Are you closely connected to the Bryanston family, sir? Familiar with their affairs, perhaps?” She swung back to him, her expression as challenging as her tone.

There was more to her than met the eye, Owen thought. At first sight she was as Noailles had said, fairly nondescript with her brown hair, regular features, and undistinguished figure. But her eyes. Now they were something else altogether. Very large, very clear, and a wonderful mixture of green and brown shot through with gold. They reminded him of sunlight on a forest pool. Noailles had been wrong about the temperament too, he decided. There was a distinct flash of spirit there. For the first time, Owen felt a stirring of interest in this task.

“I must confess total ignorance of all things Bryanston,” he said with a smile. “But I find myself very interested in you, madam. I couldn’t help but follow you when you left the hall.” He bowed and gave her his most winning, inviting smile.

Pen looked at him incredulously, her annoyance vanquished by this absurdity. “Are you attempting to flirt with me, sir?” She gave a peal of laughter. “You have the wrong sister, I’m afraid. My sister Pippa is an incorrigible flirt and will repay your efforts much more than I. I’d be happy to introduce you.” Still laughing, she swept past him to the door, her skirts brushing against him.

Owen was rarely disconcerted, and chagrin was a most unusual visitor. However, he was aware of both as he followed Pen from the chamber. Something had to be done about it.

“Lady Pen,” he called softly but with a degree of urgency.

She stopped in the passage, glanced interrogatively over her shoulder at him, wondering how he knew her name. They had definitely not been introduced. He stepped up to her. He caught her turned chin in the palm of his hand and swiftly before she had any idea of his intention pressed his lips lightly against hers.

“Forgive me,” he said. “But I have been wanting to do that all evening.”

“How extraordinary!” Pen declared. “Why on earth should you?”

He had expected shock, maidenly horror, indignation, fluster at the very least. Instead he received only this blank astonishment, this implication that he must have lost his senses. Surprise usually had a good effect in Owen d’Arcy’s experience. But not in this case, it seemed.

He looked at her closely, his eyes suddenly narrowed. “I have no idea,” he said slowly. “Forgive me.”

“Why, there’s nothing to forgive,” Pen returned with another laugh. “If you’ll excuse me.”

She hurried away, leaving Owen d’Arcy for once in his career nonplussed. Clearly he was going to need some more refined technique to gain the lady’s confidence. And he was damned sure she was not going to laugh at him again.

Two

“I have just had the strangest encounter,” Pen said as she descended from the gallery and found Robin awaiting her return at the foot of the stairs. She was still laughing, although with some puzzlement. She’d reacted at the time of that kiss with honest astonishment; in its aftermath she was aware of a deep pulse of excitement that confused her.

“I thought you were a long time,” he said, regarding her with a tiny frown.

“Who are you to question how long I take in the privy?” Pen returned with feigned exasperation.

Robin shrugged, accepting defeat. Whatever Pen was up to she was not about to share it. “What was this encounter?”

Pen glanced around, then indicated a deep window embrasure. “Let’s go over there.” She moved ahead of him, her step quicker than usual.

Curious, Robin followed. Pen seemed to exude an unusual energy this evening. He often thought that the twin tragedies of her life had left her somehow diminished, had bled the color out of her, so that she sometimes seemed to him only a shadowy reflection of the vital person he had known so well. Tonight, though, she was different. In the gallery he had sensed her impatience, sensed that pleased though she was to see him, he had interrupted something important. And now she seemed excited, her eyes larger and brighter, more alive than they had been for almost two years. She had taken on some emotional color again.

In the window embrasure they were secluded, set apart from the noisy activity in the main body of the hall. Pen looked out into the night, where the darkness was pierced by the flaring light of pitch torches planted at intervals around the garden leading to the water steps. Torchbearers paced the snow-covered pathways and manned the landing stage where the guests’ barges awaited, their cressets flickering like a plague of fireflies as the boats bobbed in the river.

Robin propped himself against the wall, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his blue-and-silver-striped gown, careless of the way the rough movement caused the delicate satin to pouch. “Strange encounter?” he prompted.

“Oh, yes.” Pen turned back to him, shaking her head self-deprecatingly as if she’d completely forgotten what she’d intended to tell him. “It’s nothing really, I just thought it was a little odd. In the passageway upstairs I ran into a man. He said . . . he said he found me interesting so he’d followed me. And then . . .”

She paused, half embarrassed, and yet her eyes were if anything even brighter. “He kissed me, Robin. On the mouth, as if we were the best of old friends. Or . . . or . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to say there was something loverlike about that kiss.

“I can’t imagine why he would wish to flirt with me,” she continued. She gave another little laugh that failed to disguise her inner turmoil. “If he hadn’t known my name, I’d have assumed he’d mistaken me for Pippa. She’s the family flirt after all.”

Robin acknowledged this truth with a vague smile but fond though he was of his younger stepsister, Pippa could never distract him for long from Pen’s concerns. And he was now very interested in Pen’s response to a stranger’s kiss. Despite her dismissal of the incident as unimportant, something had caused her present liveliness and the renewed sparkle in her eye. He certainly didn’t think she had found the encounter disagreeable, and she wasn’t asking him for brotherly outrage at a stranger’s unwonted familiarity. He asked, “Who was the man?”

“I’d never seen him before, but he knew who I was. Maybe you passed him on the stairs? When you were going down and he was coming up?”

Robin frowned in thought. He had brushed past someone but they hadn’t made eye contact. He’d been too involved with his own thoughts. “I may have done, but I wasn’t really looking.”

“Well, he said his name was Owen d’Arcy.”

Robin turned abruptly to look out at the revelers, and Pen didn’t see the flash in his eyes, the sudden tightening of his mouth.

What could Owen d’Arcy want with Pen?

“Do you know him?” Pen inquired, looking across the hall herself, her eyes searching for the slim dark man who had accosted her, who had so unsettled her.

“No,” Robin replied, reflecting that it wasn’t a complete lie. He didn’t know Owen d’Arcy but he knew of him, knew what he did. Robin was in the same business himself but he freely acknowledged he was nowhere near d’Arcy’s equal. The other man was a true master of his trade. Robin was still a tyro, far beneath Owen d’Arcy’s notice.

“I don’t think he’s English,” Pen mused. “Although it’s hard to know why. He doesn’t have a foreign accent exactly, but there’s something strange about him. Something not ordinary.”

“D’you see him here now?”

Pen shook her head. “No, but it’s so crowded it would be easy enough to miss him.” But even as she said this she knew it wasn’t true. If he was in the hall she would see him. He was such a distinctive figure, so dark and calm amid the peacock brilliance of this chattering throng.

“Your mother-in-law appears to be coming this way,” Robin observed, not sorry to change the subject. He didn’t want to give Pen any indication of his own interest in d’Arcy; and she was so intuitive, particularly where her stepbrother was concerned, it wouldn’t take much for her to start probing.

Pen stiffened beside him. “I have nothing to say to her.”

“You must at least exchange the courtesies.”

“I have already done so at the beginning of the evening.” Before Robin could remonstrate further, Pen had slipped away, gliding into the throng and out of sight. He braced himself to greet Lady Bryanston. He knew how badly she had treated Pen, and like the rest of Pen’s family considered barbaric her precipitate removal of the stillborn baby before its mother had had a chance to grieve over its loss. But he was a guest in her house and the proprieties had to be observed.

He bowed as the lady billowed up to him. She was heavyset like her son Miles, and like him had an inordinate fondness for the most elaborate dress. This evening she was arrayed in puce damask trimmed with silver fox fur and encrusted with diamonds. Robin guessed that beneath her jeweled headdress she wore a wig. It was difficult to imagine that that particular shade of bright red could be natural, and the high color on her cheeks certainly owed its origins to paint, he thought scornfully.

“Lord Robin.” She acknowledged his bow with a faint nod. “I thought I saw Pen with you.”

Robin looked around with the appearance of surprise. “I don’t see her, madam.”

Lady Bryanston’s thin lips almost disappeared. “I have something to say to her. When you see her, tell her so.”

“May I also tell her what it is you wish to say to her?” Robin inquired, trying to keep his voice bland, his angry contempt from his countenance.

“She has something of Philip’s that I believe rightfully belongs to the earl.” Lady Bryanston was not a clever woman, but she had a certain malicious cunning, and an overweening avarice that masqueraded as intelligence. Her brown eyes glittered with spite as they fixed upon Robin, then she gave another nod and left him, making her way across the hall to where her son and his wife were still at the card table.

“Bitch!” Robin muttered. She was probably after some memento of Philip that was particularly precious to Pen. It would be her way. He looked around for Pen but there was no sign of her.

What did Owen d’Arcy want with her?
It was possible that his interest in Pen was quite innocent, that he was simply attracted to her. Robin could well understand that. But he also felt that Pen wasn’t dramatic enough to attract Owen d’Arcy. He felt rather disloyal thinking this, but in cold clarity it was true. So d’Arcy must have some purpose in his pursuit.

Robin was only beginning to learn the intricate art of espionage, but knowing what he did, it wasn’t hard for him to guess at that purpose. Pen was an intimate of Princess Mary’s. D’Arcy worked for the French ambassador. If they wanted an opening into the mind of Mary and the designs of her cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor, with whom the princess was in close but clandestine touch, Pen could provide the key. In the present volatile climate, with a sickly king who had no offspring, such insights would be invaluable to the French.

Pen was no fool, and like Robin she’d lived among court intrigues for most of her adult life. She would not be easily taken in. Robin was fairly certain that she had guessed at his own involvement in the world of espionage although she respected his reticence, but d’Arcy was a master of his art and surely Pen would be no match for him.

Robin decided he needed to discuss Owen d’Arcy’s interest in Pen with his own people. There might be nothing sinister in it, but it was not a judgment he could make alone. Robin took one last look around for Pen but there was still no sign of her.

The Duke of Northumberland was in the group around the princess, and as Robin approached, a pale thin girl also in the group smiled shyly at him. Her dress was very plain compared with the richness of those around her, and she looked uncomfortable, shifting from one foot to the other, glancing longingly towards the door.

Robin felt sorry for her. In his years in the Duke of Suffolk’s household he’d had ample opportunity to witness the general bullying and browbeating that the duke’s daughter Lady Jane Grey suffered at her mother’s hands. He put an arm around her as he came up and squeezed her shoulders with the easy intimacy of a family friend. She smiled up at him, grateful as always for any show of kindness.

Northumberland turned his fierce gaze to Robin. His customary air of haughty disdain softened slightly. “You wanted to speak to me, Robin?”

“When your grace can spare me a moment,” Robin said cheerfully. He had learned from his father, Hugh of Beaucaire, now the Earl of Kendal, the art of never being intimidated by the wealth and position of those around him. He was never awed and he never flattered. It brought him the genuine liking and respect of both the young king Edward and the lofty members of the Privy Council.

Northumberland nodded and moved away from the circle, indicating that Robin should accompany him.

Pen hastened along the passage to the library, the cone-shaped farthingale that supported her damask skirts swinging from side to side with the speed of her progress. She had taken no precautions this time to ensure a discreet departure from the hall while her mother-in-law was engaged with Robin. She was filled with a sense of recklessness that she knew had something to do with her encounter with Owen d’Arcy. If the Bryanstons discovered her going through family papers, so be it.

She entered the library, and this time locked the door at her back before opening the cabinet. The ledgers it contained were mostly account books, and she was about to discard them when her hand fell on the ledger for the year 1550. She turned the pages, looking for July, and then for the entries under the day of her son’s birth. The midwives would have received payment. They had all been strangers to her, brought in by Lady Bryanston when Pen had suddenly gone into labor four weeks before her due date.

Maybe she could get a name from the ledger, some way of contacting some woman other than her mother-in-law who had been present in the chamber on that dreadful day.

She found the page and stared down at the list of entries. There were names, sums allocated to the names, but no indication of what service the names had performed to warrant payment. Pen’s fingertips prickled as if with pins and needles. Without thinking, she tore out the page, folded it, and slipped it into the small embroidered purse suspended from the fine gold-linked chain she wore at her waist. Then she replaced the ledger, locked the cabinet, and left the library.

She was alert, her heart pounding against her ribs. Now that she had something to hide, she feared discovery. No one would consult a ledger from two years previously unless they had reason to do so, and she mustn’t arouse the least suspicion.

She entered the gallery above the hall and noticed immediately that the level of noise was much diminished. She looked down and saw that the hall was rapidly emptying, guests summoning their servants to call for barges, horses, or carriages.

Princess Mary’s departure would be the signal for the party to break up and Pen saw that the princess and her ladies had indeed left, which meant that the royal barge would be gone from the water steps. Mary disliked late nights since she was up at her prayers well before dawn. She would not have worried about leaving Pen behind, simply assuming that she would remain under her mother-in-law’s roof overnight.

Pen had no intention of seeking Bryanston hospitality even if it meant she would have to jostle for a place in one of the public barges. The crowd at the water steps would be huge and she could expect to wait for at least an hour before the public conveyances could get close enough to take on passengers.

Unless Robin was still around. He would escort her home even if he was on horseback and she had to ride pillion behind him. She examined the thinning throng but couldn’t see him, and then she became aware of Miles Bryanston’s upturned countenance from the floor just below. He was looking at her but she couldn’t be certain he either saw her or recognized her. He was well in his cups, his great moon face crimson, the little brown eyes bloodshot and unfocused. She ducked back into the shadows and hastened down the stairs to the hall, hoping he was sufficiently befuddled to have been unaware of her.

Owen had seen the princess’s departure and noted Pen’s absence from the party. He stood in the small hallway that separated the great hall from the front door, a space designed to keep the frigid outside air at bay. The door stood open now as people crammed the small hall and pressed through the doorway, yelling for servants, huddling in furred cloaks. It was no longer snowing but the ground was covered with ice that cracked like glass beneath booted feet.

A group of chattering men and women emerged from the great hall behind him, eddying around him as they grumbled at the cold and the difficulty of the journey home. Pen was among them, pulling the furred hood of her cloak over her head. She saw Owen, in fact if she thought about it she would have said that she felt his presence the instant before she saw him. He smiled at her, and without volition she smiled back. He took a step towards her but a couple pushed between them, and Pen made no attempt to resist the tide of humanity that carried her out of the hallway and into the bitter night.