The Silver Skull (31 page)

"Just know that all my days are directed towards discovering what happened to jenny, and every action I make in my work will, in some way, illuminate the path to knowledge," he told her.

Finding the truth about jenny. It was the bond that united them both, on which her love for him had been built, and the thing that separated them both from the world. Her only fear, and it was one that nagged at her in the dark of the night, was that when the truth about jenny was known, the truth that they both so desperately needed, it would destroy them. The bonds shattered. Hope for the future gone. Belief in life destroyed. Was that an overreaction? She always told herself it was, but in her heart she wondered.

With the afternoon sun beating down, it was hot and stifling under the stinking sacks. The wagon bounced along the road for an age, until every part of her ached. After a while the noise of the street traffic died away and she could hear only the sound of the birds. She was half tempted to peel away the coverings so she could look where she was going, but she was afraid of Carpenter's reaction.

After a while, the bark of deer echoed nearby, and she heard the splash of oars; somewhere near the river, to the west of London. The wagon eventually moved off the rutted road onto a more even surface-flagstones, she guessed-and a few minutes later, Carpenter brought the horse to a halt. The sacks were torn from her and she shielded her eyes against the blast of lateafternoon sun.

When her vision cleared, she saw a grand brick facade, two towers flanking an imposing gatehouse, rows of mullioned windows, and a hint of the great Italian style in the lines and symmetries. All around there was rolling green land, with hawks swooping in the blue sky.

"Oh," she said, surprised. It was Hampton Court Palace, the old king Henry's great joy and source of pride.

"Grand enough for you?" Carpenter said acidly, offering her a hand to help her down from the back of the wagon. Though his tone remained gruff, his features had softened a little, as though he had been considering her and her plight during the long journey.

Hampton Court Palace was one of the most modern palaces in the world, sophisticated in intent and magnificent in design with sumptuous decor that could still impress even the most jaded member of the court. Few could understand why Elizabeth preferred to live in smoky, foul-smelling London; few, Grace knew, understood her desire to be at the heart of government.

The palace had running water, transported from Coombe Hill three miles away via the lead pipes that Henry had interred when his vast reconstruction of the palace was finally realised in 1540. It had extensive kitchens that were the pride of the nation, an enormous dining hall, a chapel, pleasure gardens filled with perfumed flowers and herbs, tennis courts, bowling alleys, and a hunting park that sprawled for more than a thousand acres. Elizabeth still visited regularly, when she wanted to escape the pressures of the city, or to stage her fabulous court masques, or the great dramatic presentations that had become the talk of London. Grace had been allowed to visit with her mistress for some of the festivities, but much of the palace had been off-limits to her.

With her hood pulled over her face, they passed through the gatehouse into the courtyard where servants wandered lazily around with no monarch or aristocracy to keep them on their toes. As Carpenter had anticipated, they drew no attention.

"Nobody will know you are here. You are safe," he said.

"Why could I not stay at the Palace of Whitehall?" she enquired. "If I am in danger, it is filled with guards and spies and all manner of defences to protect the queen."

Carpenter smiled tightly. "If an enemy seeks you, why draw them to the home of our queen and the greatest in the land?"

Grace suddenly realised she was dispensable. They would keep her as safe as they could, but not at the expense of any of the other great men of the land. It was something she knew instinctively, but which was shocking to have confirmed so harshly.

Grace paused briefly before the great clock tower bearing the seal of Cardinal Wolsey, from whom this fine palace had been stolen by Henry when he fell from favour. Everyone had their place, she recognised, and some people were worth more than others.

Carpenter studied the clock briefly with an odd expression of unease: it not only showed the time, but also the phases of the moon, the star sign, the month, the date, the sun, and the season.

"What is it?" she asked.

He shivered, didn't reply, and urged her on into the palace.

She attempted to make small talk as he guided her to the quarters Walsingham had arranged to be set aside for her use, but his mind was elsewhere, and all she got were short, dismissive replies. She wasn't surprised when he refused to discuss her questions about the threat she faced and the rumours of the Spanish invasion, but she didn't like the way his voice grew harder when he spoke of Will. Something lay between them; if Grace were Will she would not want Carpenter at her back.

He led her on a long walk through the palace to a small room overlooking the formal gardens, which was usually reserved for the servants of visiting dignitaries. It was plain but comfortable.

"I will be safe here?" She examined the wide-open spaces beyond the window.

"In our work, we have found it is sometimes better to hide something in the open if it is in a place where no one is looking," Carpenter replied. "Only a handful of people know you have been transported from Whitehall, and they can all be trusted. No one here knows who you are.

Stay still, and calm, and let the background swallow you, and all will be well."

"And you?"

"I will be near at hand."

"How long do I stay here?"

"Until Lord Walsingham grows tired of wasting a man, or your friend-" The word rang with contempt. "-has decided the danger has passed."

"No one will give me a good answer why I would be in danger."

"There is no good answer." He shrugged, and left her alone.

The hours passed slowly. She watched the gardeners at work, drawing the weeds and deadheading the roses, and a man and woman from the kitchens grabbing time from the heat and the steam to court, walking together along the lavender path, hands behind their backs, heads down in quiet, intense conversation; it was a gentle love, slowly building upon pleasant foundations, that she didn't quite understand.

Food was delivered to her, and left outside the door. It made her feel like one of the prisoners in the Tower. She paced the room, sat on the bed and dreamed, tried to make sense of the shifting patterns of her life and the world in which she existed, and then as the shadows lengthened and merged into the encroaching grey, she returned to the window to watch the beauty of the silvery twilight drawing in.

At some point she fell asleep, only for a short while, for though the moon was bright in the sky, it was still not yet wholly dark. Long shadows reached across the grey, quiet gardens.

Nothing moved. Grace was oddly out of sorts; she hadn't felt tired, or even felt the encroachment of sleep, yet there she was, head on her arms on the small table by the window.

Stretching, she rose and decided she could not bear to be in the room any longer. The palace was quiet, the servants returned to their quarters, the few highborn people drinking in the drawing room, as they always did after dinner.

Opening the door cautiously, she checked for any sign of Carpenter, and when there was none she stepped out with an odd tingle of excitement. She stifled a giggle; it felt like she was trespassing. Humming quietly to herself, she moved along the interconnecting corridors, secretly hoping she would encounter one of the servants so she could have even a passing conversation.

She could pretend to be someone else! That excited her even more.

But as the time passed and she met no one, nor did she hear even the vaguest sound rising from the bowels of the vast building, she started to feel unsettled. It was as if everyone had vacated the palace during her short nap.

After a while, her wanderings brought her to the Long Gallery. She paused as she entered it, realising where she was and recalling the disturbing stories that had passed through the entire court. No one came to the Long Gallery after dark. It was only a year since William Grebe had been driven mad with terror. On that night, in high summer, he had seen the ghost of the old queen Catherine Howard running through the gallery, screaming, as she had done in life when she had begged Henry to save her before the guards had dragged her away towards her imminent death.

There were ghosts all over the palace. Jane Seymour haunting the staircase near the room where she gave birth to Edward. Even Anne Boleyn and Henry himself.

Drawing herself up proudly, she stepped into the gallery. Ghosts did not scare her; there was nothing on the other side of life that did not match what she had experienced during her years in the world. But as she reached the halfway mark along the room, she heard, or thought she did, faint words carried on the night breeze rustling under the doors. The insubstantial voice seemed to say: "Death is not the end. "

She hurried on, relieved to leave the strange mood in the gallery behind her, but as she passed through a deserted room with windows overlooking the twilit countryside, something caught her eye. In the row of black trees along the river's edge, she was sure a shadow had swept along at ground level, like the smoke from a bonfire caught in a strong wind. It had gone now, but as she stood at the window to be sure, there was a burst of flames in the trees, and another, and another. Torches igniting? she wondered. Something in those dancing fires made her unaccountably afraid. Hugging her arms around her, she watched them moving slowly, wondering who held them, why it mattered, and then, just as quickly as they had burst into life, they winked out, one by one.

For a moment longer, she watched intently, wondering if anyone would emerge from the tree line, but there was nothing. Were they watching her watching them? she wondered briefly, before discounting the idea as ridiculous; no one could see her at that distance.

Yet for all her rationalising, she felt a sudden urge to find Carpenter. Worried now by the lack of activity, and the silence, in the palace, which was unnatural at that time of the evening, she picked up her pace. Her heels beat out an insistent rhythm on the floorboards. She desperately wanted to call out, but was afraid of attracting attention to herself.

In a large room, where the queen sometimes held a reception for foreign guests before one of the masques, she came to a halt before a long mirror. She didn't know why. For a while, she stared at herself, spectral in the half-light, and had the strangest impression she was looking at someone else, someone who had spent time shaping themselves to resemble her, but who couldn't disguise the malign thoughts that lurked in the features, in the set of the mouth, or the narrowing of the eyes. It felt as if the glass wasn't there, and that she could reach through the space. But then the other Grace would grab her wrist and drag her in. She half realised something about the mirror mesmerised her, was holding her fast, and she forced herself to move on, but not before she caught sight of a shadow on the edge of the mirror following her.

She turned suddenly, but the room was empty. The shadow had been in the mirror and not in the real world, though it was gone now. It must have been a trick of the moonlight, for there was no other explanation. She decided as she hurriedly left the room that she didn't like mirrors at all.

Her feet pounded louder on the floorboards as she raced through the silent rooms, no longer trying to keep her presence a secret. Doors slammed open and shut. Corridors rang with the echoes of her passing. After a while she called out, "Hello?" but there was only the sound of her voice returning to her after a journey around the palace.

Her uneasiness mounted, like the stem of a rose being drawn up the skin of her back.

Where could they all have gone? Had the alarm for the invasion sounded and everyone had fled to the security of London's walls? Could she really have missed it? Would Carpenter have forgotten to rouse her?

In the room where the palace elders usually gathered to drink into the evening, there was no one. The guards' quarters: empty. No sound rising from the servants' quarters, where she would have expected singing and laughter, perhaps even a fiddle.

She found herself at a window with a view over Henry's great clock, the colours a dull grey in the gloom. Instinctively, she knew something was wrong, but in her anxious state her thoughts skittered too wildly across the details of what she saw. After a moment, it came to her: the clock was running backwards. She watched the gentle judder of the minute hand as it shifted counterclockwise and shivered, although she was not sure why.

Its workings are wrong, she thought. That is all.

The season now showed winter, the month December.

Overcome with the compulsion to search the darkening countryside around the palace, she ran to another window overlooking the approach. At first all was still, but then came another brief burst of fire, closer than the last one she had seen, and another way across to the right, gone almost in the blink of an eye.

The fires were hypnotic, and she waited for another while she considered what could possibly have caused them. Instead, she saw grey shadows bounding sinuously across the fields towards the palace, like foxes only larger. She tried to count them, but they moved too fast and were soon out of the moonlight and lost from view.

She stepped away from the window, her heart tap-tapping.

The kitchens! she thought suddenly. Everyone would be gathered there, telling stories, servants and gentlemen together, in the warmth of the ovens. It was the only explanation.

Focusing on the hope rather than the nagging feeling that such a thing could never be true, she hurried for the stairs that led to the great kitchens underneath the palace.

Down the winding stairs she went, and down again, deep, deep down, leaving the stark regiment of the palace for the sumptuous underworld. She could hear the crackle of the fires under the ovens and the hiss of the pots boiling on the top, the clank of their lids as they were lifted by the steam, smell the aromatic after-scent of the evening's dinner, the capons boiled in a broth of oranges, sugar, mace, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon, rich and powerful, intermingling with the strong notes of the strawberries soaked in red wine and ginger.