The Game Read Free Page A

was imprisoned in the Tower and awaiting the queen’s pardon. She had received no other word from her father or her stepmother in five and a half endless years.
    And the truth of the matter was that Katherine was afraid.
    The prayers were finished. Katherine crossed herself, murmured “Amen,” and rose. She hung back, allowing the other ladies to file out ahead of her. They were all noblewomen like herself. Some were widowed, others were too poor to make marriages, or were one daughter too many for the family to bear. Silk and brocade gowns rustled as the ladies left the chapel. Outside it was frigidly cold, and Katherine gripped her worn, fur-lined mantle more closely to herself. She paused in the courtyard as the noblewomen entered the dining hall, where fresh breads and warm cakes, meats and cheese, and ale and wine were being served.
    “Will you do it?”
    Katherine turned, shivering, more from her nervousness about what she had to do than from the cold. She faced her dear friend and only confidante, Juliet, who would leave the convent in February, in spite of the winter weather, for her guardian had ordered her home to Cornwall. “Yes.”
    Juliet, startlingly fair of skin but dark-haired with a full, rosebud mouth, looked Katherine directly in the eye. “Surely the abbess will give you permission to leave now. How can she refuse you yet another time?”
    Katherine’s heart pounded harder. Immediately she took Juliet’s hand. “I am afraid she will refuse my plea again,” she admitted. Katherine had already petitioned the abbess twice before for permission to go home. The abbess had refused, explaining that not only did Katherine not have her father’s permission, she had no escort, either.
    Juliet smiled. “It would be wonderous to travel together. Oh, how I hope the abbess listens to your plea and judges fairly!”
    Katherine flinched. She was very desperate, but she was not hopeful. Although the abbess was kind and well intentioned, and generally of a soft nature, she was a firm administrator, as she must be to oversee a nunnery filled with ladies entrusted to her care by rich and powerful families. But Katherine’s will had never been stronger.She must convince the abbess that she should return home now, even without her father’s permission. She had prepared her arguments. It was 1571. A new year. A time for new beginnings.
    The two girls crossed the courtyard, Katherine too preoccupied to speak or even notice the bitter winter chill, while Juliet chatted about how happy she was finally to be going home to Thurlstone. The dining hall rang with laughter and good cheer as the ladies enjoyed their first meal of the day. The gems in their rings glinted as they gestured to one another. Servants, many of whom had come with the noblewomen to the nunnery from their homes, waited upon them so that they did not have to rise for any reason. Lady Montaignier, the countess of Sur-Rigaud, had four small dogs panting with expectation at her feet. Ruby brooches in the form of small ribbons adorned their curly-haired heads. Indeed, all of the ladies were so well dressed and so thoroughly bejeweled, so catered to, so pampered, that had a visitor not known he was at an abbey, he would have thought himself to be in some great noblewoman’s hall.
    Katherine herself was one of the few exceptions. Her gowns were old and extensively mended. She had had nothing new since her fifteenth birthday—the year the funds she had arrived with had run out.
    Fear slid over Katherine again. The abbess had been paid handsomely upon her arrival six years ago and had expected more funds to be forthcoming, as needed for Katherine’s upkeep. When Katherine’s pension was gone, the abbess had written to Katherine’s father, but her subtle request for monies had been ignored. The earl had not bothered to respond to the abbess’s letter. Other, more direct requests had gone unanswered. Fortunately the abbess had generously allowed Katherine