The Tudor Secret - C. W. Gortner [56]
I sounded like I was lying: I heard in my own voice the terrified justification of a man caught in an illicit deed. She of course knew it. It was why I was here. Whomever she believed I was had frightened her enough to have me followed, abducted, and, if I didn’t find a way out of this nightmare soon, killed.
Nevertheless, I’d caught her attention. “A foundling?” she repeated. “Tell me this, were you truly left in the priest’s cottage near Dudley Castle?”
Without taking my gaze from hers I nodded, a shard in my throat.
“Do you know who left you there? Do you know who found you?”
I swallowed. A dull roar filled my head, like an ocean in my brain. I heard myself say as if from across a vast distance, “I don’t know.… Mistress Alice, the Dudleys’ housekeeper and herbalist, she—she found me. She took me in.”
I gleaned something in her eyes. “An herbalist?” Her stare was a physical instrument, a probing device in my sinews. “A small woman with a merry laugh?”
I began to tremble. She knew. She knew Mistress Alice. “Yes,” I whispered.
The duchess of Suffolk took a jerking step back. “It can’t be. You … you are an imposter, tutored by Cecil, paid for by the Dudleys.” Her next words issued in a scalding torrent. “Because of you, they forced me to hand over my daughter in marriage to their weakling son. Because of you, I am humiliated in my God-given right!”
She paused, her voice horrifying in its resolve. “But I am not so easily fooled. I’ll see this kingdom destroyed before I let that Dudley woman and her spoiled brat triumph over me.”
And as I hung there by my arms, all of a sudden it made perfect, dreadful sense.
Stokes let out a gleeful twitter. “Why, Your Grace, I do believe he speaks the truth. He truly has no idea of what they’re doing with him. He doesn’t know who he is.”
“That remains to be seen,” she snapped. She angled her cane level with my face, clicked the handle. A sliver slid from its bottom tip—a concealed blade, thin enough to pop an eye out.
“See how fine it is? I can slide it between two sheaves of paper without leaving a mark. Or I can cut through boiled leather.” She angled the cane down until it grazed my groin.
I heard Stokes giggle. I met her stare. I had one last chance. Ignorance might save me.
“I do not know of what Your Grace speaks. I swear it to you.”
For a moment, doubt blurred her expression. Then the savage cunning returned, and I knew it was over.
“They’ve taught you well: You play the innocent to perfection. Maybe you are what you say, a wretched unfortunate trained to be used against me. Cecil could have told Lady Dudley the story, seeded the idea that would give her the weapon she needed.” The duchess’s chuckle rattled in her chest. “He’s capable of that, and much, much more. It’s a devious game they play, each to their own end. They’ll die for it by the time I’m through with them. They’ll regret having ever crossed my path and made a fool of me.”
She went still. The expression that came over her was unlike any I’d seen—a dark mask lacking empathy or compassion. “As for you, it doesn’t matter who you are.” She swerved to Stokes. “I’ve wasted enough time. When will it be done?”
“As soon as the tide rises. The court will be on the gallery watching the fireworks.” He snickered. “Not that they’d know. No one’s been down here in years. It reeks of papist vice.”
I saw it then, in all its clarity, each thread a part of the whole. While the festivities in honor of Guilford and Jane Grey’s nuptials distracted the court, Robert—deprived by his father of what he believed was his right to win a royal bride—would meet with Elizabeth. Deluded and misled, blinded by his overwhelming ambition, he had only empty words to offer her.
The duke had no intention of letting him wed the princess. Jane Grey was his weapon now, a perfect pawn of Tudor blood, bride of his malleable youngest son. Two hapless adolescents were to be England’s next sovereigns, while Elizabeth and her sister Mary were slated for the scaffold.
The henchman swung out his arm,