The Virgin's War (Tudor Legacy #3)(11)
Six from his parents—they wrote once a week without fail, though sometimes they arrived together in batches—and three from Pippa. There was only one from Lucie, and it hurt Stephen just to look at her handwriting. Her string of miscarriages had wounded her in a place he didn’t know how to reach, and her letters to him had become almost painfully dutiful.
He laid aside his family’s letters in favour of the last, addressed to him in the distinctive mix of merchants’ scrawl and convent copperplate that announced Maisie Sinclair as thoroughly as her tiny frame or enormous mind.
He couldn’t say when her letters had become so important to him. They started a few weeks after he’d left the Tower. Maisie wrote as she spoke—as though constantly engaged in a free-flowing conversation that made leaps from the philosophy of Erasmus to the science of Galileo to the wars of the Italian city-states to the price of alum on the open market. In the last year and a half she had written to him from Bruges and from Amsterdam, from Cologne and Rheims and Bohemia. She had ventured as far east as Krakow and as far south as Florence.
And though she was in motion and Stephen hardly stirred from Blanclair save for campaigns, he had come to understand that they were both learning to cope with the traumas they’d passed through in Ireland. Communicating with the only other outsider who had been part of the deaths and hollow victories of the Kavanaugh clan was a method of healing. Not as quick at inducing painlessness as the bottle, but less messy in the long run.
He had not heard from her since Kit’s report of her visit to York. Stephen broke Maisie’s seal—a fox, symbol of ingenuity and wit. Shortly after leaving England, she had sent him its match: a ruby-set pin in the shape of a fox. This will ensure you aid any time you may need it from any of my men in Europe.
He opened the letter and read with interest.
3 December 1584
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Stephen,
Why did you never tell me how terrifying your youngest sister is? One would think that in private audience with the Princess of Wales—daughter of the most fearsome monarchs of our age—that Princess Anne would dominate. But it is the quiet ones one has to watch out for, I have found. Because once they start talking…
Well, never mind. It was a productive interlude from a business perspective, so I must thank you for that. I would never have come to the attention of the princess if not for my acquaintance with you. My grandfather always told me that to be successful in business one needed not only financial assets but personal ones. I could hardly hope for a better asset than Princess Anne Isabella. With a significant degree of her business confided to my keeping, I at last have the position I have been waiting for to return to Edinburgh and challenge my brother.
An astute reader—and you are, if nothing else, astute—will notice that I am writing this from Newcastle more than two weeks after leaving York. If I am so ready for a challenge, you may ask, why have I not crossed the border yet?
I suppose if I knew that, I should not need to continue to write to you.
M. Sinclair
Stephen snorted with laughter. If Maisie was waiting for him to enlighten her actions, then she’d be waiting a long time. He couldn’t even illuminate his own. Perhaps that was what they had in common.
He refolded the letter and reached for those from his family. As he shuffled through them, he discovered a small, square missive addressed in an anonymous hand he had begun to recognize. Though he knew what he would find, he still broke the plain seal and opened it to reveal the same thing he had found in every one of the ten similar dispatches he had received over the last six months: a meticulous ink sketch of a bird.
A nightingale.
The English court remained at Greenwich after Christmas, continuing the merriment into Twelfth Night and lightening the early darkness of January with masques and music and dancing. Amongst the guests this particular evening were Sir Francis Drake and his newly betrothed lady, Elizabeth Sydenham. More than twenty years younger than her famous affianced, she spent most of her time silent as Drake and Queen Elizabeth conversed.
With his trademark fervor, Drake extolled the beauties of Buckland Abbey, the grand manor he had bought with the fortune he’d made circumnavigating the globe. Elizabeth’s own share of the prizes from that voyage had been equal to a single year’s revenue for the crown; it meant she allowed Drake a certain freedom in conversing with her.
And she was not averse to his many stories about facing off against the Spanish. Drake’s arrogance might border on being overfamiliar, but he was brilliant at sea. El Draque, the Spanish called him: the Dragon. After being separated from the others of his party during their circumnavigation, Drake and his single remaining ship, The Golden Hind, had raided at leisure along the west coast of South America, taking upward of thirty thousand pounds from Valparaiso alone. With the looming threat from her former husband, Elizabeth knew that Drake’s talents would soon be needed for more than exploration and unofficial piracy.
Drake broke off in the middle of recounting a scurrilous rumour about a Spanish captain in the Caribbean to say, “My, my! I had heard she was back from Ireland. I did not know she would be at court.”
Even without looking, Elizabeth knew perfectly well whom he meant. Eleanor Percy Howard Gage Stafford (she had a gift for outliving husbands) drew male eyes wherever she went, no matter that she was nearing fifty. But then Eleanor had always had the trick of making the most of her assets. Women despised her, and men…well, many of them despised Eleanor, too, but that rarely interfered with what they wanted from her.