The Tudor Conspiracy Read Free

arms with deliberate nonchalance, hiding my disquiet.
    “Elizabeth is in danger,” he said. “Grave danger, according to these reports.”
    I took a moment to meet his gaze. I found no deception there, no conniving. He looked both troubled and sincere. Then again, he was a master at hiding his motives.
    “In danger?” I repeated. “And you have an informant at court who told you this? Who is it?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He untied the leather cord binding the sheaf. “These reports started arriving a month or so ago-all anonymous, all in the same hand.” He extended one of the papers to me; as I took it, he added, “That’s the last one. It arrived about a week ago. You can see the paper is a common grain, like the others, but I believe the man who wrote these reports must be employed at court. His information indicates proximity to the events he describes. Look at the handwriting: It’s orderly but not overly literate; a secretary or notary, perhaps.”
    I scanned the report. The writing reminded me with a jolt of the neat lettering I’d often seen in the castle account ledgers kept by Archie Shelton, the Dudley family steward. Shelton had trained me to be his apprentice. He also first brought me to court to serve as a squire to Lord Robert Dudley, plunging me into danger.
    I tore myself away from the memory. “I don’t understand,” I said, looking up at Cecil. “This is an account of Queen Mary receiving a Spanish delegation to offer the Emperor Charles V’s congratulations on her coronation. Why is that unusual? The emperor is a fellow sovereign.”
    “Turn it over,” he said. “The page. Turn it upside down, and hold it up to the light.”
    I went to the windowpane and pressed the paper against it. I had to focus, but then I began to see them: translucent white lines, surfacing like ghosts between the inked ones.
    There was another letter, hidden within the letter.
    I squinted. “I can’t make it out. The words are too faded.”
    “The special ink he used is activated by lemon juice,” Cecil explained. “It’s a familiar ploy, and I’m ashamed to admit it took me a while to figure it out. Clearly this is not the work of a trained spy. At first, I thought someone was playing a trick on me, in rather poor taste, sending me reports of seemingly innocuous events at court. But as they kept arriving, I started to get suspicious. Fortunately, Lady Mildred always keeps on hand the juice of preserved lemons from our orchard.” He met my stare. “I have transcribed everything for you here, on this paper. What that invisible letter says is that unofficially, the Spanish delegation brought Charles V’s secret offer of marriage to his son, Prince Philip.”
    “Philip?” I started. “As in, the prince of Spain?”
    “The same. And the emperor is more than a fellow sovereign: He is the queen’s first cousin, whom she’s always treated as a family confidant. She relies on his advice. Should she accept his offer of marriage to his son, one of the terms of the betrothal will be returning England to the Catholic faith. Charles V will tolerate nothing less. It also goes without saying that a rapprochement with Rome would be calamitous for every Protestant in this realm, and most of all for Elizabeth.”
    He picked up the page on which he’d transcribed the invisible words from the reports. “See here. ‘Her Majesty heeds exclusively the imperial ambassador, Simon Renard, who deems Elizabeth a bastard and heretic, and menace to the queen.’” He glanced up at me. “They’re all in this vein: two or three secret lines per report, yet taken together they present an undeniable picture.”
    My heart started to pound. Cecil might be a liar, but when it came to Elizabeth he was nothing if not thorough. She meant everything to him; she was the reason he persisted, the beacon that guided him through the shoals of his disgrace, as the fall of Northumberland had been his fall as well, for