The Spymaster's Daughter (2 page)

B
ARN
E
LMS
, S
URREY

A
t the sound of rapid hoofbeats drawing closer, Frances, Lady Sidney, lifted her head from a forbidden cipher book. She pushed away all the paper on her writing table that she'd used to break the hidden meanings of the
Steganographia
and ran to her bedchamber window. On the road from Mortlake, dust swirled behind a royal post rider bringing mail for her father, the queen's spymaster. And perhaps for her husband, Philip.

It was the possibility of Philip's mail that urged her toward her bedchamber door. He was hiding something. She suspected the truth and had set herself to discover it no matter what the hurt. Better a short pain than a long, dark ignorance. She paused only long enough to throw her shawl over the books she had taken without permission from her father's library, books that, according to him, should never interest a lady wife.

Hurrying into the corridor above the great hall, Frances heard her aunt Jennet's angry cry from below. “Frances, your lord husband requires your presence for dinner!”

Her old, foolish hope was smothered. Philip
required.
He no longer
desired
her presence anywhere. She doubted he ever had.

Frances sank back into the shadows of the corridor outside her bedchamber. If she meant to intercept the royal post rider, she must hug the shadows until she could get away. “Anon, Aunt, I am now to the privy in some urgency,” Frances called, her fingers crossed against Satan's hearing the lie. Not even her aunt Jennet could deny her the privy's comfort. And Frances knew that her aunt, who had been her nurse when she'd been young, was not so angry as she sounded, merely given to the reproachful manner that afflicted many a graying woman, unmarried and with no prospects but the continued sufferance of her powerful family.

Casting aside all other thoughts but the post, Frances sped down the back servants' stairs toward the sound of horse's hooves on the graveled carriageway approaching Barn Elms. She did regret deceiving Jennet—she knew the pain of deceit, being deceived herself by her own husband. Did one deceit justify another? The fleeting question slowed her steps for a moment, but she pushed through concern for her soul and ran on down the steep servants' stairs.

Philip had once written in his famous sonnet sequence:

That particular verse haunted Frances…
Stella's face
. Frances knew that she was not Stella, nor ever would be. Where Philip's real
inspiration was petite, blond, with o'erflowing breasts, Frances admitted to being tall, raven-haired, and small in the chest. Though some had called her a beauty, she always wondered whether their opinion was shaped by the desire to earn the favor of her father, the queen's spymaster.

Yet she refused to become the unknowing, cuckolded wife! Better to know and learn not to care.

Dashing through the flesh pantry to the surprise of sweating cooks bent over their steaming pots, she held her breath against the strong scent of hung, aging hare brought down by her father and his hounds. She ran out the open door and on down the wide path. Before her the summer sun sparkled on gravel wet with morning rain, until tall yew hedges hid her from curious eyes. A bit breathless, she waved the post rider to a stop. “I am Lady Sidney come to take the post to my father, Sir Francis Walsingham…and, of course, to my husband, Sir Philip.”

“These are official from Whitehall Palace, my lady,” he said, bowing in the saddle but not reaching toward his post bag. “I am instructed to deliver them into the lord secretary's hands.”

“As my father's daughter, I am quite aware of that.” Her fingers still crossed, she made her voice as arrogant as the man would expect, though arrogance was an attitude new to her and as yet not easily come by. “Would you rather I called my father and husband from council on Her Majesty's urgent business? Trust me, sir, you will receive no thanks for it.” She allowed herself a half smile. “Yet, if you so command me…”

“My lady, I meant no command and humbly beg pardon,” the rider said, hastily drawing one packet and a single letter from his bag.

Frances nodded, saying no unnecessary word, as she was learning to do. She smiled as the post rider whipped his horse back toward London, kicking his mount's flanks to speed it. She would yet
make a good intelligencer for her father. A threat implied and a certain scorn were better than too many harsh words that could reveal less assurance.

Concealing the post under her tightly laced kirtle, she ran back, stopping at the privy, to turn her lie into partial truth, and raced up the back stairs to her chamber, throwing her father's packet on her bed. The writing on the single letter addressed to her husband was flowing, familiar. She sniffed at the lavender scent and sat down at her writing table. This was the same scent that she had detected on Philip's doublet after his last trip to London as a maid had taken it for brushing and airing, a mix of sweet lavender and the musk of a woman who gave her body fully and often to a man. Or, it was rumored, in the case of the Baroness Penelope Rich, to many men.
Stella!
The name seemed to have lost its haunting quality. Frances smiled at the thought.

Locking her door with a trembling key, Frances pulled one of the candles on her writing table close. She had never opened one of Philip's letters, lifting a wax seal and replacing it undetected, though she'd developed the skill on sealed letters of her own making. But these past days some secret had been on Philip's face and in his every quick glance away from her. She must not be caught unaware, only to dissolve in hot tears in front of all, to beg, to be disgraced by open pity. She was a Walsingham, and would never again expose her heart or suffer the amused sympathy she had already seen in the faces of Philip's friends.

Her hand still trembling, she passed the baroness's letter just far enough above the flame and exactly long enough to loosen the edges of the red wax seal. Frances frowned with concentration. Philip was still in love with Lady Penelope Rich, the Stella of his sonnets. She knew it, felt it with every beat of her heart, but needed only one clear proof that he was still deceiving her. All England knew that he had once been engaged to Penelope before she had rejected him for Lord Rich, a man of vast wealth. A year
later, Philip had accepted Sir Walsingham's offer to be his heir and take his young daughter, Frances, to wife.

She had hoped that he would write sonnets just for her. Instead, he had learned to be considerate, treating her with only slightly less distant affection than he gave his favorite hunter carrying him faithfully through the Barn Elms deer park.

She laughed, but stopped abruptly, unable to bear the harsh sound. It would be unseemly to be jealous of a horse.

During their first year, she began to understand that Philip wanted a son of her body, but not her, nor her dreams of being the new Stella. Over that year and the next, her tears unshed, she had discarded her dream that Philip Sidney, famous throughout England as the symbol of a young man's intense love, would love her as deeply.

Frances was learning to forbid woe to assail her. Sadness must be banished from her heart or she would soon have the same tight-lipped face as Jennet, showing the world she was aging and unloved. She, a Walsingham, the daughter of one of the most powerful men in the realm, would not invite such pitiable feelings.

Philip was kind to her and furtive enough to keep her from the open humiliation visited upon other wives. She would not complain, but neither would she continue yearning for his love. She must rid herself of all such foolish hope. Her husband had most of what he wanted from her, having become her father's heir, though not yet achieving a son of his name. And someday, by the rood, she might, nay,
must
have what she desired. Someday she would prove her worth to her father and be named an intelligencer, helping him to keep England safe.

She almost laughed at herself for her girlish fancies, yet what was youth for, if not wonderful dreams. Since she was denied a soldier's sword, she would have another ambition worthy of a Walsingham.

Though she had eagerly given Philip her body and love, he
had given her what he could, and more than that she no longer expected…or wanted. She clenched one hand with the other and knew her girlish dreams of love's complete contentment were gone, and in their place had come a dream of achieving her father's ambition for a son to join his work. That dream now replaced everything.

Frances held the letter steady, shuffled through her cipher worksheets, and found the sharp penknife she used to trim candle wicks and quill nibs. She heated it just enough and slid it deftly under the softened wax seal. She paused to steady her hand. Was this wrong? Philip was not her enemy; he liked her well enough. Didn't he come to her bed often?

Often enough so that she now refused to be too timid to know the truth.

Covering her heart with one hand, she quieted its pounding, then carefully opened the heavy vellum page that was folded into quarters, and whispered the words on the page aloud, some deep part of her vainly hoping to prove her suspicions wrong:

He was leaving? Going to war? And Penelope had been first to know it! Frances dropped the letter and clung to her writing table, fighting for air, her throat tight.

She took a deep, calming breath. Philip was going to war and had not told his wife. She tightened her hold on a goose quill until it broke into brittle pieces. A visit would have been bad enough, but it was not all. She was no longer a silly girl to believe in Lady Rich's innocence, or in Philip's.

The woman dared much to use that name from Philip's great love poem
Astrophel and Stella
, even if she owned it. His long sonnet sequence had not yet been published, but it had been copied and recopied in manuscript until all the court and most nobles in England boasted of owning the manuscript, and those who did not pretended to it. As every person of consequence knew, the Baroness Rich had refused many times to marry Philip throughout their long, four-year engagement. Neither would she ever quite let him go. Frances searched her heart for any residue of jealousy and, finding none, slowly folded the vellum along its original creases. Reheating the wax seal, she gently pressed the edges into the very same place.

Undetectable!

Satisfied that her work was perfect, she waved the letter in the air to cool it. She did not have her husband's love, but she had a valuable skill to ease her hurt. If only her father could see her ability, the equal, she vowed, of Arthur Gregory, an intelligencer who specialized in lifting wax seals, carefully opening dispatches meant for foreign ambassadors so that the tampering remained unknown. Was she really as good as he? She must know. And what other skills could Gregory teach her? Secret writing? That was Thomas Phelippes's special skill, along with being the chief cipher secretary for her father. How she longed to learn what she did not yet know. It would fill her life with meaning and give it great purpose. And it would be enough, or almost enough.

Somehow—her hand became a fist—somehow she must convince her father to take her to court. Once she was there, she would find her way into his work. She was his only child; she knew he loved her dearly. There would come a time when he would not refuse her.

“Frances! Anon has most assuredly come and gone.” Jennet was at her door, a foot tapping impatiently.

“At once, Aunt,” Frances said, grabbing the post packet for her
father from her bed, carrying both packet and Philip's letter to the door with no time to smooth her skirts.

“What were you doing for so long a time?” Jennet asked, her tone scolding. “You have not changed your gown. I suppose you were at your books. Did you not hear the case clock strike the hour of noontide?” Jennet took a much-needed breath. “Well, no time for your long tale. Swiftly, now.”

Frances took her aunt's hand and used her child's name. “Dearest Jenney, I am sorry for your trouble.”

Jennet's face yielded up its annoyance. “I dare not think what your husband will say if you go on—”

Frances rolled her eyes. “Go on studying mathematics and ancient cipher texts. It is said Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, does the very same, translating Latin into Greek for an evening's relaxation.” And probably for the same lonely reason, Frances thought.