The Spymaster's Daughter (40 page)

“I see that you are chosen for danger time and again. You are trusted and known to be brave.” Her voice would not lift to a pleasant pitch even on her command. “But…the Tower,” she said, the words shivering from her memory of that place of pain, “and you are not healed. You must not do this thing!”

He shook his head, denying her words, his fingers lacing through hers. “We must move fast…. I know you see that. We have no time for another man to slowly rise in their confidence.”

She, too, shook her head, but not so forcefully, knowing that what he said was true.

He tightened his grip on her. “The traitors are ready to act, ready to attack the queen, thinking that Catholics will rise and Spanish soldiers will land. Babington is young enough to believe what he wants.” When Frances did not agree, Robert spoke more urgently. “We cannot wait, sweetest. We must know when they mean to attack the queen
before
and not after. Babington must be pushed.”

She knew he spoke truth. “But why you? Always you.”

“The queen is in danger every day we do not stop them. You know that. They will try to kill her as soon as Mary gives clear orders, mayhap sooner to show their loyalty to her.” He scanned up and down the corridor. No one was coming, and he clasped her to him, wincing a little. “Don't you see that I might get some preferment, and that would put me more rightly in your company?”

What? Was he saying that he was doing this for her? “Robert, Sir Walter Raleigh is begging the queen for advancement; he is most handsome and writes her verse. Yet Elizabeth refuses even him.”

“Am I not handsome?” he whispered, his eyebrows lifting in jest. “And would I not grow in splendor if I saved her life?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head, making herself light-headed, since she had not slept. “Robert, you'll be doing this for naught.” Her heart ached to say it, but truth was truth. Not even love could change certainty. “Philip will be home soon, and that will mark the end of what we are to each other.”

“Never the end.”

Her heart could hear no more. “Good-bye,” she whispered, and slipped from his arms.

As she moved down the corridor to her chambers, exhaustion was sweeping over her like western clouds bringing in a storm. She must sleep. Then she could think what to do.

Meg put her to bed with lavender sprinkled over her pillow
and a glass of wine. Frances refused the touch of laudanum Meg spooned for her and lay with her eyes wide, imagining the sound of Robert's guitar and his low voice singing in the anteroom. Would she hear him all the days and nights of her life? And would it be her only happiness?

She slept nightmarishly, dreaming of the Tower, descending endless stairs that never reached the stone-piercing screams below. When she woke, she parted the bed curtains to see that it was almost dark. Meg had laced her wine with laudanum despite her protest, and for that she should be whipped, but Frances could not order it, since Meg had acted from kindness.

The girl was curled at the foot of the bed watching her. “My lady, shall I send Will to the kitchens for your supper?”

Frances stretched, and her stomach rumbled. She was hungry. “Aye, Meg, I will have some pottage left from the dining hall. What o'clock?”

The case clock chimed eight, and Frances knew that Robert was gone. Even now he could be entering a filthy, straw-strewn cell in the Fleet, chained to the priest.

Meg smiled as Frances closed her eyes. “Mistress, he left this note for ye.”

Eagerly, Frances reached for it before seeing Essex's crest on the red wax seal.

The word
will
was large and splotched, as if the quill were held to the paper hard and the point splayed out.

Now Frances felt the hours drag by to the next day like a chain and heavy weight about her. She joined the queen's entourage the next morning. She went through the activities of her day, little better than a puppet, speaking seldom, craving news, but there was none. As the hours passed, several times she haunted her father's office, where every secretary was quiet and waiting.

Phelippes whispered to her, “Another cipher has gone to Mary from Sir Anthony about the priest sent to the Tower with a man known to be of your household.” He grinned. “They are breathless with the possibility of making Pauley a double agent to know exactly what your father knows of them and what he plans.” He grinned, then sobered. “But—” He clamped his mouth together on the rest of his thought.

“What?” Frances questioned, taking hold of his doublet.

Phelippes flushed and looked away.

“Tell me!”

“I should not worry you, my lady. I know Pauley is your…special friend.”

She straightened, erasing the anxiety from her face. “He is my servant, and his welfare is my concern and duty.”

Phelippes shrugged. “To convince Babington, the priest must see Robert tortured, refusing to speak or renounce the old faith.”

Her hand flew to her mouth to stop its outcry.

“My lady, Robert knew this. It was his plan to gain their confidence quickly. I promise you we will arrange their escape, and the priest will bear witness for him with the traitors.”

Fleeing to her chambers, she searched for ways to save Robert from the path he had chosen…and found none.

W
HITEHALL
P
ALACE AND THE
T
OWER

T
he queen gave Frances leave to come to Whitehall Palace with her father. Frances, ahorse, was happy to miss the dust and tumult of Elizabeth's train of carts and wagons holding all the sovereign's furniture, bedding, and her two thousand gowns, which was even now leaving Greenwich behind.

It was unusual for the court to be in London during the late summer, but this was one season that had seen no late outbreaks of plague or sweat. The Thames did reek to the heavens, but noses were the only human part assaulted.

The queen had insisted on coming to her capital just in case the Spanish king dared send an armada against England now that Sir Francis Drake had attacked the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine in the New World. Mr. Secretary thought Philip II might take advantage, if not this year, then surely in the next. He
urged Elizabeth to see to her fleet. Reluctantly, the queen had agreed with her spymaster, spending some of the Spanish treasure from ships captured by her piratical sea rovers. Captains Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher contented her with one-third of all the silver and gold they liberated from the lumbering, high-castled galleons of King Philip.

Frances left the unpacking of her gowns to Meg and disappeared into her bedchamber, dropped to her knees, and sent heavenward a desperate prayer for Robert. She tried to erase from her mind the horrifying images of him under torture, but she succeeded only in growing them by denial.

Though Robert had made this choice, she feared he had done so for her sake in the hopes that his service to the crown would allow them some future nearness of company. Was this heart's pain heaven's payment for her unchaste behavior? Yet Philip had not paid for loving Stella, for still loving Stella. Did God really hold men to be favored above women, as she had been taught and had not wanted to believe?

Still, Frances prayed for heavenly forgiveness, though she was careful to make no future promises. She could not promise faithfulness to that hollow marriage and add another broken vow to her soul's burden. Philip had been able to live a lie, thinking love excused all unchastity, and having written that it did. Perhaps it did for him, for a man. Never for a wife.

She clasped her hands tighter.
Punish me, not my love
, she begged.

Frances searched her heart, looking for a better outcome for Robert. But she could find none, only the memory of cold, dank walls and the screams of the tortured. She was nearly faint when she tried to stand. She gripped the bedpost, demanding courage from her heart, enough to match Robert's in the bowels of the Tower.

P
ushed along the corridor by the Tower guard using the butt end of his pike, Robert nearly stumbled into the priest. He shared his cell with Henry Garnet, who shuffled ahead of him, a victim of Richard Topcliffe's own invention, a device that had wrenched both his arms from their sockets. He must be in agony, having been tortured but yesterday, yet he had given up no names of Catholic families who would have hidden him in their priest holes in exchange for a Mass. He seemed intent on martyrdom and he would surely find it, if not now then one day soon. Walsingham was eager to accommodate such unwelcome traitor-priests.

Today they would force Garnet to watch, hoping to double his pain and frighten him into talking. Robert did not think the man would ever break, though every bone in his body most surely would. He was going to rescue the priest from that fate, at least for now, if his plan succeeded.

No matter how the walls of a filthy cell or these corridors closed about him, he would keep his purpose well in mind: He must be accepted by Babington and the other traitors. The priest would be his entrance into their number. Robert alone would bring them and the Scots queen to Walsingham's justice; his future would be secured. He had that hope and must keep it before him.

“Move along, papist dog,” the guard growled, giving Robert a final push against the priest.

Garnet was whispering his morning office.

Robert knew he must prepare himself to suffer what was necessary for the queen of England and the queen of his heart. No intelligencer had ever done what he willingly did. If this day's act did not shake a preferment loose from the queen's frugal nature, nothing would: an estate at least, since he dared not hope for a knighthood. Yet his father had been granted a baronetcy by Henry VIII after service with the king in the French wars. He had a faint hope.

If he gained such status, he could be in Frances's company
without question. He could see her, by. God's grace; she would not be banished forever from his sight.

Just to see her would be…no, not enough, but it might keep him from madness.

As he lurched in chains onto the lowest Tower floor, now underground with no light except for torches, he came to a large room equipped as for hell. In one corner sat a huge vat of oil ready to boil to death the next condemned poisoner. That was the sentence for a wife who poisoned her husband, or a servant who served up arsenic crystals in the master's wine.

Although the Thames's damp near overwhelmed their warmth, hot fires burned in braziers set about the room, branding irons glowing red amidst the coals. The dark scents of blood, of burning flesh, vomit, and loose bowels were everywhere. He gagged.