To Kiss A Spy Read Free Page A

barely literate and she’d never seen him open a book. Even his mother, for all her sharpness, couldn’t add two and two or do more than scrawl her name, and now that Philip was gone she relied on a chamberlain to manage the family’s affairs.
    She entered the chamber, glancing over her shoulder as she did so. There was no one around to see her. The servants were all busy with the revels below.
    She closed the door softly and stood with her back to it, looking around the room where she and Philip had spent so much companionable time. She was not the scholar he had been, but she had grown up in the care of a mother who was as learned as any man, and Pen knew well the pleasures of a still and silent companionship disturbed only by the rustle of turning pages or the scratch of quill on parchment. She could almost hear those quiet sounds now, almost see Philip at the big oak table, his fair head bent over the tablets he always carried with him in case the muse struck unexpectedly.
    Suddenly she was hit by a wave of grief. It was a familiar occurrence although it happened less often now, three years after Philip’s death. But it was as sharp, as piercing, as ever. Dry-eyed she waited for it to pass, for the tightness in her chest to ease, the great ball of unshed tears to dissipate.
    If only she had his child, the child they had conceived in so much love . . .
    Her expression cleared, her mouth set, her hazel eyes focused. There were no more shadows in the chamber, no more memories. Only purpose. The hard-edged driving force of her existence. A child had been born. Somewhere in this room among ledgers and Bibles there would be some record of that birth. Even a stillbirth had to have its place in family records.
    She had been so ill after the dreadful labor, her body racked with fever and pain, her spirit with inconsolable grief. Her mother and stepfather had arrived and removed her instantly from the Bryanston home in High Wycombe. It had taken close to twelve months under their loving care for Pen to overcome her illness and to put her grief aside, although she knew it would always be a presence in the deepest recesses of her soul. This evening marked the first occasion she had been under a Bryanston roof since the birth. It provided her with the first real opportunity to look for some record of her son’s birth. The Bryanstons behaved as if it had never happened, and her mother and stepfather encouraged her not to think of it, to put it behind her. But Pen could not accept that the child who had grown inside her, who had kicked and hiccuped and been a physical part of her, a child she had labored so sorely to deliver, could be so utterly dismissed from the world.
    And neither did she believe that the child had been born dead. She had heard him cry.
    This was her obsession. This was what drove her as she returned to the princess’s household and the life she had known before her marriage. To all intents and purposes Pen was her old self, but below the surface raged the conviction that somewhere her child lived.
    Her eye fell on the great family Bible on the lectern in the window embrasure. Births, deaths, marriages were all recorded there. She stepped quickly across the chamber, hurrying to the lectern. The Bible was open at the Book of Psalms and she feverishly turned the wafer-thin pages to the front of the volume. The pages stuck to her fingers, which had grown damp in her haste and eagerness. She wiped them on the gray damask of her skirt before continuing. The front of the Bible carried no record of the stillbirth of her son on July 7, 1550. The date itself was not inscribed. She looked down the long list of marriages, births, deaths. Her marriage to Philip was there. Philip’s death was there. Miles’s ascension to the earldom was there. In bold letters, bigger it seemed than any other entry. But, of course, Miles was the favorite son. The son his mother was convinced should have been her firstborn and always treated