But if Penelope was truly mad—and Kate had no reason to doubt the woman’s word on that, as she seemed more than a little touched by insanity herself—she needn’t have rational reasons. There was nothing rational about Ned’s death.
Then again, perhaps it was not Penelope. There were more than enough anger and motives for revenge to spread across the whole county. Only the veiled woman accused Penelope, and she had already attacked Kate twice. Her word could not be trusted. The guilty could be the Eatons, or Master Payne, or anyone who hated Queen Mary.
Yet, even as Kate hoped it was not her friend who had done such things, something deep in her mind wouldn’t let her quite deny it.
“I must find that cursed woman,” she muttered. Grimacing with pain, she pushed herself to her feet and let her arm out of its sling. She wrapped her warmest shawl around her and slipped back out to the garden door. Maybe she could pick up the woman’s trail.
But once again it was as if she truly was an apparition. There was no sign of anyone on the twisting pathways, no open doors or swinging gates. It seemed as if the woman knew Hatfield as well as she did Leighton Abbey, all the back entrances and hidden halls, and could slip away.
Hidden halls. Kate spun around to study the silent facade of the house, the way the chalky moonlight turned the intricate brickwork gray. Light burned in a few of the upstairs windows, and a shadow flickered behind the one that belonged to Princess Elizabeth.
Kate closed her eyes and let the chilly air flow over her as she tried to clear her mind of the pain and the residue of Lady Pope’s herbal concoctions. She took herself back to the day she and Penelope had crept through the passageways to spy on Braceton. The way they had laughed together, scared and thrilled at the same time.
A flash of pain rippled through Kate at the hazy memory, and she clutched at her stomach. How could she have been so foolish as to think Penelope was her friend? That they were united in their service to Elizabeth and their hopes for the future? Kate had trusted Penelope, had never looked beyond the surface of their laughter and confidences to see what was truly there. Surely she should have seen it, in the flashes of coldness whenever Penelope spoke of her husband, her past. Kate should have known.
“Nay, there is no time for this now,” she told herself sternly. She needed to find proof that it was indeed Penelope who had done this, proof both to take to Elizabeth and to know for herself. Without the veiled woman to repeat her story, Kate had to find something herself. But where to start?
She thought back again to that day in the passageways. Penelope knew her way around extraordinarily well, knew where every twist and turn lay. And there were boxes Penelope said she kept stored there, to make it easier to fetch and carry things through the house.
Those boxes were as good a place to begin the search as any.
Kate slipped back into the house and tiptoed into the kitchen, where she knew she could find one of the hidden doors. It was quiet there; everyone had gone to find their own beds before the day’s tasks began all over again.
But one person remained. Rob was slumped in a cross-backed chair by the smoldering fire, his head resting on the high wooden back as he quietly snored. His doublet was unfastened, and there was a smear of dried blood where he’d lifted her against him on the road. Elizabeth had said he had carried her all the way home, after removing the arrow, which had saved her life.
For a moment, Kate thought about waking him and asking him to search with her. Yet as she gazed down at him, she saw the heavy lines of weariness on his face. He had already helped her so much.
And her heart could no longer trust so easily.
She reached for a blanket that had fallen to the floor and tucked it around him. Once she was sure he still slept, she took up a candle and flint and slipped into the passageway.
As the door slid closed behind her and the darkness gathered, she had a flash of panic and knew she had to turn back. To flee back to the light. But even as her senses clamored for her to run to safety, she knew she could not. Penelope had already killed. She had shot at Kate while Kate wore Princess Elizabeth’s cloak. She had to be stopped, now, before anyone else was hurt.
Including Penelope herself.
Clutching the candleholder, Kate hurried ahead into the winding passages. She tried to remember the path she took that day with Penelope, where she saw the chests that Penelope pushed aside, but the corridors all looked the same, narrow and brick-walled, piled up with crates that didn’t look at all like the ones she sought. Several times she turned around and switched directions, peeking through doorways to try to decipher where she was.
At last she found a slightly wider space that seemed familiar. When she pushed open the hidden door, she saw the foyer where she and Penelope had watched Elizabeth and Braceton argue. She remembered a small blue chest, decorated with vines.
The trunk was no longer there. Kate shoved the other crates and baskets aside, peered inside each one, but the painted chest was gone.
“Perhaps it had nothing to do with this at all,” she whispered. She pushed her loosened hair back from her forehead, ignoring the pain in her shoulder as she studied the jumbled space. It could very possibly be just another storage chest, one carried away for a multitude of reasons.
Yet something told her it was not simply another box. When she closed her eyes she could see the flashing image of bright paint, the way Penelope touched it, much more carefully than she handled the others. It had surely been hers, and now it was gone.
Penelope would most likely be in the princess’s chamber for a few more hours at least. Kate slipped out of the door into the foyer and hurried up the main staircase until she found the corridor at the top of the house where Elizabeth’s ladies had their chambers.
Kate seldom went to Penelope’s room. When they wanted a gossip, or to practice a new song, they sat before the fire in Kate’s sitting room or walked in the gardens. But she knew where it was, at the very end of the hall with windows looking in two directions.
The corridor was silent, no laughter from maids staying up too late to whisper together. Penelope’s door was unlatched and open an inch, as if she had departed in a hurry. Kate entered, pushed it closed behind her, and examined the small space.
The narrow bed was hastily made, bedclothes pulled crookedly over the bolster and skirts and sleeves piled atop them. Ribbons and combs were scattered across a dressing table, and muddy shoes were on the floor. Clumps of dirt littered the polished floorboards.
Lady Pope would have a fit if she could see such a mess, Kate thought as she picked her way through the jumble. And why were Penelope’s good shoes caked in mud?
Her eye was caught by a painted miniature on a stand, tucked amid the clutter on the table. It depicted a woman in a fine blue velvet bodice that matched her startling blue eyes. A small smile curved the painted lips as she looked at a child cradled against her shoulder, a blond-curled beauty in white lace. Her mother, before the smallpox came? Before madness closed in around them?
Kate noticed a tiny set of initials at the bottom of the painting. MJ. Master John. She remembered the man, a fine artist who did portraits for the court of Queen Catherine Parr and then traveled to families connected to the queen to paint them as well. Including the Greys at Bradgate Manor. Penelope and her mother must have been close to the family indeed to have this miniature painted. And they must have worked for them a very long time.
She replaced the painting on the table and went back to studying the room. For a mere lady-in-waiting to a princess in exile, Penelope had many belongings, several baskets and chests, but they were all unpainted.
Finally, Kate found the one she sought, tucked under the bed where a truckle would usually be. She immediately recognized the blue paint, the curlicues of flowers. She drew it out and cautiously pried open the lid, which surprisingly wasn’t locked.
Inside was a folded dark cloak spattered with mud at the hem. There were books—an English Bible like the one in the tower
room at Leighton Abbey, Queen Catherine’s volume of prayers, the Lady Jane pamphlet that had landed Kate’s own father in trouble. And a long, plain wooden box that held arrows.
The purplish feathers gleamed in the candlelight, and Kate choked on a sudden, ragged sob. It was right there before her, the proof she had hoped against hope wouldn’t be found. Had hoped didn’t exist. But she could not deny it. There were the mates to the arrow shot at her, the arrows that had killed Braceton. Penelope’s own mother said they hated the enemies of the Greys—and that madness had a hold on their family.
Yet perhaps Penelope hid them for someone? A lover or a friend? Maybe. Kate had the awful feeling, deep down in her heart, that was not the case.
She closed the trunk and pushed it back under the bed. Elizabeth would have to be told, and very soon, before the arrows could be moved again.
Suddenly the door swung quietly open, and Kate jumped up to find Penelope standing there. Penelope took in the sight of the intruder in her chamber with one glance of her cold, flat violet-blue eyes and smiled.
“Ah, Kate,” she said softly. “I did truly hope you would not be here.”
CHAPTER 24
Kate slowly rose to her feet. She kept the bed between herself and Penelope, even as she realized what a foolishly poor defense it was. In her rush to discover the truth, she had run right into the lion’s den. Time seemed to slow down, the minutes inching forward in heightened awareness. The colors of the room brightened and sharpened. Every tiny sound, from the creak of the floorboards to the brush of the wind past the window, was magnified in her ears.
She thought she should feel frightened, but found she wasn’t at all. A still, cold calm had lowered over her. When she looked at Penelope, she marveled that it was like looking at someone she had never seen before. All the time they had spent together waiting on the princess, laughing, worrying, seemed to be as nothing. A stranger stood before her.
A dangerous stranger.
Penelope’s violet-blue eyes were steady and cold as she looked across the room at Kate. She closed the door softly behind her and made no other move. Kate was reminded of the times she had walked past the woods and felt the prickle of watchful eyes on her skin, like a rabbit under the speculative gaze of the hawk. She felt that now.
But she was tired of being the rabbit.
“You did this, Penelope?” she said, her voice strong. Even then, facing the icy coldness of Penelope, the certainty in her eyes, she dared hope there was some other answer. That her faith in people was not entirely misplaced. “Or are you helping your mother?”
A surprised laugh escaped Penelope’s lips, and for an instant she looked like Kate’s friend again. Then the icy mask slid back into place. “My mother? I fear she is weak. Her loyalty is such a frail thing. I have had to be strong for both of us.”
Kate gestured to the arrows hidden under the bed, such beautiful, lethal things. “Strong enough to kill?”
“Oh, Kate. My sweet friend. Have you not learned yet? ’Tis kill or be killed in this world. We choose our side and we defend it however we must. My husband knew that as well, in a way my poor, mad mother never could. He died too soon, but at least he taught me his greatest skill before he left, and I have made use of it.”
“‘Greatest skill’?”
“Archery, of course. He was a bowman in King Edward’s army, and died fighting with the Duke of Suffolk against the Scots. A great waste, yet I daresay I have done much better without him. He had such—firm ideas of a woman’s proper place.”
“And where was that?” Kate asked. She had the instinct that she needed to keep Penelope talking, distracted, until she found out all she could—and had a chance to make her escape.
“At home, of course, sewing his shirts, having his babies. Men are such deluded creatures, are they not? They never see that women are so much stronger than they. Cleverer.”
“Is that how you lured Lord Braceton to his death? By being cleverer?”
Penelope laughed. She suddenly moved, striding across the chamber to unlatch the window and throw it open. Kate turned to watch her, keeping her closest attention on Penelope at every second. Cold air swept through the room.
“It was not hard to be smarter than the likes of him,” Penelope said, leaning back against the edge of the window. “He was much like my husband. So sure of himself, always underestimating everyone around him. Always blustering his way through things he couldn’t understand. He never even saw me, except as a pretty backside he could pinch in the corridor, a woman he could threaten into his bed if he wanted to. But I always knew who he was.”
“One of the men who condemned Lady Jane Grey?” Kate said quietly.
Penelope’s eyes widened. “So you do know. I wasn’t sure how much you discovered at Leighton.”
“I found out your mother served the Duchess of Suffolk.”
“She more than served her—she was devoted to the duchess and her family. Devoted to their Protestant ideals. She went to the Tower for them, and was scarred by the smallpox, as well as scarred in her mind. It’s the duchess who pays for her care at Leighton, even though she and Lady Eaton were once friends. The Eatons have also been cheated of their fortunes.”
“And it was the duchess who found you a place here?”
“So she did. She has always been most kind to us. She is undeserving of the vile reputation her enemies have given her. It wasn’t enough for them to kill her husband and daughter; they have to besmirch her name as well.”
“And you repay the Greys by bringing chaos to Princess Elizabeth’s house? Their own kinswoman?” Kate said, her anger burning even hotter.
“Kinswoman?” The icy facade of Penelope’s beautiful face cracked and a spasm of fury twisted her mouth. “Elizabeth has never helped the Greys, and she never will, for she knows the throne should rightfully be theirs. They are legitimate where she is not, and Lady Katherine Grey should be the next queen. That is how I repay them. That is how I get my own life back at last.”
And suddenly all the shattered pieces that had been floating through Kate’s mind snapped together. These acts were not merely to avenge Lady Jane’s death, but to remove Elizabeth to make way for the Greys to return to power.
Kate could understand Penelope’s reasons. She and her mother had lost so much in their service to the Greys, had seen so much injustice done. Suffering could become twisted into something ugly and wrong. Seeing the men who had carried out the death of Lady Jane, the disgrace of her family, could surely drive someone to madness.
Yet there was one terrible thing Kate could not fathom. “What of Ned? He could have had nothing to do with this game of crowns. Yet you killed him as well.”
A flicker of some emotion crossed Penelope’s face, a swift crumpling of her brow, a flash in her eyes. But it vanished as quickly as it came, and she shrugged.
“I did not want to do that,” Penelope said. “I heard from my mother of Braceton and his friends’ scheme to seize Leighton Abbey, on the pretense that they were devout Catholics and servants of the queen and the Eatons were traitorous heretics.” She gave a bitter laugh. “As if men like Braceton value their eternal souls over their earthly fortunes. I wanted him to see the hypocrisy of his words. I tried to kill him once, cleanly and quickly, but it didn’t work, and I saw there was a reason for that. Killing such a man required something—dramatic. Something frightening and vivid. And Ned was so trusting and simple. He never would have been happy in this life. I did him a mercy, just as he did me a service for the greater good.”
Kate had read of such things, of cruelty to the innocent, but now that she was face-to-face with it she feared she would be sick. It was so very appalling. Surely this was all some nightmare. But she knew it was very real. That evil was so close she could reach out and touch it. “And Master Cartman? Did he do you a service as well?”
“Of course. But he grew greedy in the end. The play was part of my plan to let Braceton see that someone knew what he had done, tha
t someone would soon come after him. And it worked, did it not? You saw how furious he was. How frightened.”
Kate had seen it, the raw terror that she now knew was realization on Braceton’s part. The realization that someone knew the part he had played in Jane Grey’s death and the official concealment of its true purpose, that someone unseen and ruthless was bent on revenge. All planned by Penelope, carefully, quietly. The consummate deception.
“But you also killed innocent people, Penelope, along with Lord Braceton,” Kate whispered, her head still whirling with the terrible truth. These events had happened right under her nose, and yet she hadn’t seen until it was too late.
“Innocent?” Penelope snapped. “Lady Jane was the innocent. She only wanted to be left alone with her studies. She never sought the crown, even though it was hers by right. She never would have risen against the queen. And I saw her die there in the Tower. I saw the blood. They left her body there for hours.”
Kate shook her head, choking on a sob. “I saw Ned’s blood! There on the holy altar. How does more blood, more death, make a wrong a right?”
“Oh, Kate. You are so innocent as well. Surely you have been in this world of the court long enough to see you must destroy your enemies before they destroy you? You must be strong, ruthless. The Lady Elizabeth knows that, and you must learn it if you stay in her service.”
She never wanted to be strong like that. “Is that why you tried to kill me in the road?” Kate said.
“I did not try to kill you. I thought it was her—Elizabeth.”
“And you were making room for Katherine Grey?”
“I told you, Kate. You must be strong; you must do a wrong sometimes to make something right. Queen Mary will soon be gone. Jane Dormer came to bring Elizabeth some of the royal jewels, which means even the queen knows the end is near. Katherine Grey should be the next queen. I had to act quickly. Too quickly, I see now. I never meant to hurt you. I swear it.”
Kate stared at her, and for an instant she thought she saw the Penelope she once knew, or thought she knew. The friend who had shared this life in exile. But then it was gone, and the murderous stranger stood before her again.
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