Palace of Spies (23 page)

Thankfully, she also asked no questions about this instruction, and received my delayed—and much edited and watered-down—dispatch for Mr. Peele with equanimity. I made certain a few extra coins slipped into her apron pocket for this consideration.

The Kings of England first took Hampton Court Palace to their collective royal bosom in the days of the much-married Henry VIII. They had, as near as I could tell, been driven to improve upon it ever since. As I emerged into the gray damp of Saturday’s dawn, it was to find the gates flung open and workmen arriving in knots and clusters. I wove my way between builders and building materials to quieter precincts, heading toward the long, low brick building at the yard’s western edge that had been given over to the use of James Thornhill and his ’prentices. Smoke from its chimney told me at least one inhabitant was awake within. Francesca’s sketch of the Thornhill ceiling was tucked once more into my sleeve. I planned to show it to Matthew Reade and ask his opinion of it.

I meant to trust him. This was a grave risk, because I would have to tell him at least a portion of the truth about myself, something I found I was strangely reluctant to do. He had offered me friendship, and I wanted to keep it as long as possible. Neither did I forget that a drawing of Francesca was missing from his portfolio. Given my heightened suspicion of everything that had happened to me so far, I could not dismiss that as a small thing.

To compound my worries, I still had neither sign nor word from Mrs. Abbott, and I was at a complete loss as to how to gain information about my attendant. Should I write to Mr. Tinderflint? I might have to. But what on earth would I tell him?

So intent was I on all this worrying and maundering that I did not at first attend to the grunts I heard as I brushed past the corner of yet another timber pile. The yard was as filled with goats, geese, pigs, and their diverse attendants as it was with laborers. Such a noise could have been made by any of them. It was the flash of white and pink in the gloom on the far side of the head-high stack of boards that caught my eye.

There was Sophy Howe, her back to the wall, skirts up, her pink-stockinged legs wrapped around the agitated buttocks of some man in a red coat in a display of agility I would not have credited her with. Both grunted steadily away. Distantly, I noted the red and gold coat was a footman’s livery.

Sophy saw me. Although her eyes were heavy-lidded, there was no mistaking how she looked right at me. Just as there was no mistaking the triumph in her smile. Robert, too busy at his task to be bothered with anything else, did not so much as pause.

I fled. I did not think. I did not reason. Disgust, shock, and a whole host of other feelings wrenched me around and sent me blundering across the cobbles. I could not seem to see straight, and tripped repeatedly over the catshead stones until I fetched up hard against the corner of some brick outbuilding and had to stop, because although I was but lightly laced for the morning, I could no longer breathe.

What is happening to me?
I pressed my face into my hands.
I am losing my mind. I must be
.

I was no prude. I had spent more than one summer in my uncle’s country house. One occasionally came upon an energetic tryst in some corner of barn or stable. Whatever this was boiling now through my veins, it was not some Puritan’s outraged propriety. It was something else, something more violent and less comprehensible.

“Lady Francesca?”

I lifted my head to see Matthew Reade standing in front of me. He’d clearly pulled on his coat in haste and had not even properly laced his shirt. “Lady Francesca, are you well?”

I confess that I entirely failed to return a polite answer to this gentle inquiry. My readers will surely understand how this could have come to pass and forgive the lapse. In point of fact, I suspect I gaped like a fish.

Another young man—a stout, dark-haired fellow with a square and stubbled chin—peered over Matthew’s shoulder.

“It’s all right, Burke,” Matthew said. “I’ll take care of this. Weren’t you just on your way out?”

Mr. Burke returned an unkind leer, but also put a tricorn hat on his head, tugged it low, and strolled out into the courtyard, tucking shirttails into breeches as he went. Matthew took my elbow firmly and ushered me through the door.

The dim workshop was filled with tables that were in turn filled with the tools for preparing paints, canvas, and frames. It smelled strongly enough of sawdust, turpentine, and other unsavory compounds to set my nose itching and my eyes watering. The shutters were closed, which was a mercy. I did not want to be seen by any more people than necessary.

“What’s happened?” Matthew pushed a battered cane-bottomed chair toward me.

“I, erm, nothing. Nothing, really.” Except it was not “nothing” that had so disordered my wits. I could find no name to put to the distressing internal phenomenon that had overtaken me. It could not possibly be, for example, jealousy. Jealousy would be nonsensical. But a single day ago, Robert had professed heartbreak and self-harm—at least to the girl he thought I was. I had believed those feelings to be genuine. For the briefest moment while I was with him, my fickle and lonely heart had wished in vain that I were Francesca, who could command such feeling in a man. Now I found my oh-so-clever self deceived, and I was angry, shocked, and frightened all at once. None of this was lessened by the fact that he was with spiteful, snippy, petty, pretty Sophy Howe. She had been gone yesterday. Where? Had Robert been with her? What had they been doing?

But surely I wondered that because of the wager and because Robert was so very concerned with keeping Sophy quiet. I was not in the least jealous. Oh, no. That could never be.

A far more vital fact dropped like ice into the center of my heated emotion. Robert had clearly lied about his regard for Francesca. His declaration that he intended to take me—her—safe away from here to his friends in the North could be yet another lie. He could have used her for some Jacobite purpose and then killed her when that use was done.

If Robert was her murderer, he knew I was a counterfeit. He could have told Sophy the truth in a bawdy scene that ended in the flagrant display I had happened upon. He and Sophy together could be planning how to finish me off.

For a moment, I genuinely thought I was going to faint.

“Tell me what this is about,” said Matthew. “Please, my lady.”

I looked up at him helplessly. I took a strangled breath. I had already made the choice to trust him, but now that the moment had come to do so, I found it absurdly difficult to begin.

“There’s no drawing of Lady Francesca in your portfolio,” I said at last.

I was walking blind. I might have just ended everything short of my life. But Matthew Reade’s troubled gray eyes remained steady. When he did turn away, it was only to kneel by one of the two cots standing in the far corner of the workshop. He pulled out a clothes press, raised its lid, and lifted up its trays. From the bottom, he drew a paper. This he handed to me.

There was Francesca, very much as she had been in Mrs. Abbott’s miniature: cheerful, mischievous, looking at her cards as if she meant to tell a delicious secret. But there was another study too, this one drawn in profile. In this, Francesca gazed at some distant point, and I felt the fierce and desperate hunger in that gaze. No, more than hunger. Matthew had drawn Francesca with an expression of pure and unadulterated greed on her lovely face.

The sight of that greed touched a nerve deep within me, and I shuddered. I did not doubt for one instant that this was genuine; some unguarded moment witnessed by a person who was overlooked because he had no name or power. It took a long moment for me to see beyond that and to note how clearly one could see the differences in the line of my jaw and Francesca’s, and in the slant of our cheekbones. These were distinctions that powder and paint might obscure, but not completely hide, and that no amount of lost weight could explain.

Matthew Reade had known I was not the person I claimed to be, probably from the moment of our first meeting in the gallery.

I moved to hand the paper back to him, but he waved it away. “You keep it. My gift to you. You should perhaps burn it, though.”

I looked at it, and my throat constricted. “It is too fine a piece of work for that.”

Matthew’s smile sparked a fresh light deep within his eyes. “Never fear. I’ve another. One that I think is much better done.” And he handed me a second paper.

This new sketch showed my face as clearly as my glass did on any given morning. Matthew had drawn me without powder or patches. Lines of concentration etched my forehead, and a tiny smile curved my lips. I was planning something or about to make a telling argument. It was like Francesca’s portrait, but not quite. My eyes were harder than hers, but less showily saucy, and my features less refined and coy. It was not perhaps a completely flattering portrait, but I could not deny it was true to the original.

I swallowed, and reluctantly laid both drawings down on the table beside me, face-down, so I did not have to see either pair of eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked.

Matthew shrugged. “What do I care for who does what among the fine folk of the court? Their intrigues are nothing to me.”

His words struck home, but perhaps not in the way he meant them to. I was reminded that he was an apprentice, with a place to maintain, one that he could lose as easily as I could lose mine.

“You’re right. Of course you’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t want to cause you trouble. I’ll go now.” I started for the door.

“Wait. I . . .” He stopped. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Margaret,” I said, with my hand on the latch. “Margaret Preston Fitzroy. Peggy, mostly.”

“Peggy Mostly Fitzroy,” he said, and I smiled weakly at the jest. “It was not Lady Francesca I offered friendship to, you know.”

I couldn’t turn around. I did not dare. If I turned, I would see his gray eyes and kind face. I would see the man I had so very much hoped would be my friend. “You don’t know who I am.” The words tasted of gall as I forced them out. “Not really. You should keep your friendship for those who won’t drag you into trouble.”

“I thank my lady for her advice,” Matthew replied with tremendous dignity. “But as a freeborn son of England, I’ll bestow my friendship where I choose.”

I blinked. “You read poetry, don’t you?”

“What of it?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” I took a deep breath. I should not do this. He deserved so much better than to be mixed up in . . . in whatever this morass would ultimately prove to be. Yet, even now, he offered his friendship and offered it freely. I might not know him any better than he knew me, but I knew the value of such a gift. How could I disdain it now?

“I did come to ask for your help, Mr. Reade.”

“I’ll do what I can.” He stopped again. “As long as you don’t require me to deliver a love billet or some such.”

In that moment, he sounded so much like a peevish boy, I laughed. “Nothing like that. I promise. But I do need a letter taken to St. James’s Square as soon as may be.”

“What about your maid?” He stopped. “No, I’ve seen your maid.” He paused, considering. “Your timing is good, at least. Mr. Thornhill requires some additional supplies for the princess’s ceiling. Possibly I can arrange to be the one commissioned to fetch them.”

It was a less certain answer than I would have hoped for, but my choice of messengers at this time was strictly limited. There was a torn paper and a charcoal pencil on the cluttered table. I appropriated both and wrote quickly.

To Lady H. Not the Thames bridge Friday. Hampton Court Palace, the king’s courtyard, Thursday
.

“This is for the maid of the house, Templeton. Tell her it is from the cousin.” I folded the paper and scribbled down the direction. I could not possibly risk the message going directly to Olivia. Uncle or Aunt Pierpont might very well be having her letters watched. Perhaps I was being overcautious. Perhaps palace intrigue had begun to taint my blood, but I did not want to take the chance. “You can read it if you want,” I said boldly as I handed it to him.

Matthew was looking at me oddly. Sizing me up, perhaps, so I could be rendered once more into charcoal or pastel. What would that new sketch show, if taken at this very awkward moment? But whatever he saw or thought as he eyed me, he still put my note in his pocket, unread.

“What happened to her?” he asked. “Lady Francesca?”

“I don’t know.” I faced him squarely. I had gone this far. There was no turning back. “But I think she was murdered. I’m trying to find out who did the thing and why.”

Matthew’s hand moved in an uncertain gesture that ended in him brushing his hair from his forehead and then pressing a knuckle to his mouth.

“You don’t have to go on,” I told him. “I can just leave now. I know you won’t give me away.”

Matthew lowered his hand to his pocket and shook his head. “No. I’ll take your note, and a promise as well.” I held my breath and waited. “As soon as we can make shift for time, you will tell me the whole of your story.”

“I promise.” I fumbled with my sleeve where Francesca’s sketch waited. “Indeed, I—”

But I was too late. The workshop door opened, and Mr. James Thornhill, resplendent in a blue coat and black velvet breeches, strode into the workshop. He extended his long arm toward Matthew, his mottled finger pointed and ready to accuse. It was only after he opened his mouth that he recognized me.

“Why, Lady Francesca! Good morning to you!”

The mask of maid of honor came down with dizzying speed as I made my curtsy. “Mr. Thornhill. I was hoping I might find you here.”

My smooth greeting caught him entirely off-guard. Clearly, he and this Burke had been expecting a very different sort of scene. “Then I am sorry to have kept you waiting,” Mr. Thornhill said stiffly. “Indeed, I was already at work when I received word”—he glanced over his shoulder at his unshaven and much-chagrined apprentice—“that Mr. Reade was entertaining a woman in my workshop. There was no mention that it was
you
, my lady.” These words held the clear implication that the offending tale-bearer would be grinding paints for at least the next week.