Maid of Deception Read Online Free

broad-shouldered and long-limbed, his face alight with interest, stared at me unabashedly while everyone else in the room had the grace or wits to look away. Alasdair MacLeod would no doubt be laughing deep into his miserable Scottish ale after this debacle.
    Well, he could go to the devil. They all could.
    I exited the chapel and found myself surrounded by a gaggle of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. We marched behind Her Royal Insufferableness as if we had been summoned to her presence to discuss the latest dance steps out of France, but I was not fooled by Elizabeth’s carefree manner. Not when she started laughing again with her advisors, and not when she consulted with a bevy of servants to bring us refreshments. Instead I nodded serenely at the other ladies’ exclamations of how lucky I was to enjoy a precious few more weeks in Elizabeth’s court as an unmarried woman. I watched. And I waited.
    “Lady Beatrice Knowles!” As if on cue, Gloriana’s broad tones rang out over the space. She did so love to hear herself shout.
    I turned immediately and curtsied to her, every inchthe dutiful maid. “Your Grace?” I offered, in the excessively respectful tone I’d learned to affect in her presence.
    “Attend me.” She glided into her Privy Chamber, and I followed, not at all surprised to see Cecil and Walsingham joining us, shutting the doors quietly to cut off the clutch of curious-eyed females we’d left behind.
    The moment we were alone in the Privy Chamber, the Queen’s manner changed.
    We had no need of disguises anymore. To all the court, I was with the Queen and her maids and ladies. To all the maids and ladies, the Queen was calling me in for a conciliatory chat. Elizabeth and I both knew better, however.
    The Queen was my enemy.
    She would always be my enemy.
    I suppose we could be nothing else to each other.
    When Elizabeth had come to power last fall upon the death of her sister, Mary Tudor, she had set immediately upon the idea that she would have a group of young women around her—unmarried, of course, that their loyalties be fixed solely on her; and young, that they might be overlooked more easily, or considered stupid.
    She’d immediately named two girls to join this special corps of Maids of Honor: Marie Claire and me. Marie Claire had been the darling of court, a laughing, haughty flirt who’d been as adept as Meg at thieving, and far more knowledgeable than Meg about the ways of the nobility. But Marie had grown too careless, and she’d died because of it, in early spring. By then we’d added three other maids to our number—brilliant Anna, moody Sophia, and murderousJane. And then there was me, the Maid of hidden truths.
    Secrets were my treasure—and had been since I’d been very young, a bright, pretty girl of noble blood shipped off by my father to serve as an elevated companion to young women in other royal houses. Whether he’d done this to protect me from the darkness of my own home or simply because he hadn’t been able to stand the sight of me, I never knew. But the result was the same. In my half servant, half elite role, I’d quickly realized that knowledge was power. In no time at all I’d developed a mental ledger of information on every noble I’d met . . . dozens of them; hundreds, even.
    I’d learned a great deal in those great houses. And in one of those houses, I’d met Elizabeth.
    And oh, to her everlasting horror, what I’d learned about her.
    She’d been only fourteen when I had met her at Sudeley Castle, and I a mere seven years of age. Elizabeth had lived with the King’s new widow, Katherine Parr, and the woman’s even newer husband, Thomas Seymour. Even at that tender age, the princess had been vain and self-serving, prideful and reckless. I’d been assigned as her child-companion, a fetching girl she liked to keep around as a sort of exalted slave.
    However, all was not as it should have been in that household. Thomas Seymour had been a scoundrel and