The Thorne Maze Read Free Page B

carried little Elizabeth to the nursery down the hall, Mildred closed the door to her bedchamber to mute further noise. At least little Robert was sleeping, but she could hear her eight-year-old Anne, squealing at some game of tag or bowls outside.
    Mildred strode to the oriel window that overlooked the spacious gardens of their London house. She felt cooped up here, but her lord must keep close to the queen, ever at her beck and call. The court had moved upriver to Hampton Court, and he’d gone with her, leaving Mildred behind to oversee shifting her household to their northern home at Stamford ninety miles north of London, lest the plague increase here. Too bad it would take years to build a great house on the new land at Theobalds, for that would be much closer, even if it might never have her husband’s heart as Stamfbrd—and his son Thomas—did.
    Always queen’s business, the kingdom’s care calling her lord, Mildred fretted, hitting her fist on the window frame. She hated herself for begrudging her husband’s work for their realm and religion and their brilliant and bold Protestant queen. William Cecil thrived on it all, and his wife had been so proud of him, but lately it all dragged her down.
    God help her, Mildred thought, her children, whom she loved like her own life, annoyed her, too, even her innocent babes, but especially her twenty-two-year-old stepson Thomas, whose voice she could hear now entwined with Anne’s.
    Peering out the window, she could not see Anne, whom they yet called Tannekin for her early childish pronunciation of her own name. “I’ll tell my lady mother!” the girl screeched.
    Doors banged. Footsteps sounded, coming closer, closer in the house.
    “Ha, I’ve got you now, you ninnyhammer—you little tattale!” Thomas’s voice boomed.
    “Just you shut your trap! You pushed me in the rose bushes, and my gown’s all snagged. I’m going to tell on you no matter what you say.”
    Anne burst into the room, but her first impassioned words blurred in Mildred’s ears. The slender girl was red as a rose with sunhat askew, tendrils loose, and her skirts snagged indeed.
    The handsome, tall Tom looked as if he would chase and harass her the more. But when he saw his stepmother, he halted and, crossing his arms nonchalantly, leaned in the doorway as if to flaunt his fine face and athletic form.
    “I’d admonish you, Thomas,” Mildred said, “to torment someone of your own size and sex, but I know that you do that too in your caperings and scrapes about town.”
    He shrugged. “She’s the one who begged me to play with her. I can’t help it she darted into the privet hedge. And don’t bother to give me a dressing-down, as I’m sure Father will when his little Tannekin tells him I’ve been picking on her.”
    As charming a young man as Thomas could be, Mildred marveled that he could make himself so disagreeable. From the first, no love had been lost between them, for he oft placed on a pedestal his dead mother, who died when he was so young he could surely not recall her. Mildred sighed inwardly again, wanting to say something to soothe and forgive, but that’s not what came out of her mouth.
    “Your hard-working, disciplined, God-fearing father,” she declared, “is driven to distraction by your wastrel ways, as am I. Here he was this past winter, trying to make a fine marriage match for you while he sent you to the Continent to study, and you—”
    “And I spent his coin and chased other sorts of doxies besides this one, eh?” he said with a sharp laugh and wink at his stepsister.
    “Mother,” Tannekin cried, “I’m not a doxy, am I? What’s a doxy?”
    “Go downstairs and have Cook give you something cool to drink,” Mildred ordered the girl, who obeyed, though she flounced from the room most unladylike.
    “I’ll give you good day and a view of my backside, too,” Tom clipped out before she could scold him. “I don’t need a pious lecture from you if I’m in