"You would deny me the opportunity to wish you well as you embark on one of your dangerous missions?" she said sharply.
"This is not the time for one of our lively debates, Grace."
"Did you think I would lock myself away because you told me to?"
He sighed. "No, Grace. You would never do anything I told you to do. I know that."
"What, then?"
"These are dangerous times. I would see you safe, that is all."
"From whom?"
"From yourself, mostly," he said with exasperation. "Your capacity for recklessness exceeds that of any other person I know."
"You say reckless. I say fearless. I am not afraid. Of anything."
"As always, this conversation goes nowhere, and I have urgent matters that require my attention-"
Calming herself, she chose the words she knew would stop him walking away. "I could not say farewell to jenny and I have regretted it ever since. I will not be denied this by you."
He hesitated, softened. "I am not your sister."
In the subtle attenuation of his smile, she recognised the ghost of his true feelings. "You wear your masks well," she said quietly, so no one else could hear, "but I know the true you, as you know me. You are not my sister. Because you live still, and jenny is dead-"
The blaze in his eyes scared her a little.
"Dead, Will. I spent long months yearning for answers, like you, but I have slowly come to an accommodation. I still need to know who took her, and why, and then I can rest. Then we both can. On that warm, starlit night in Arden, by the churchyard, with the owls hooting and the bats flitting, you told me you had been given the tools to discover the truth, and you vowed to me that the answers we both sought would be forthcoming. I ask now, though you always say one thing with your mouth and another with your eyes: is this mission the one that will allow us to find peace?"
"No." A moment, then: "Perhaps." Frustration laced his words. "Jenny is in my every thought and every deed, Grace, but these things are not as easy as you would believe. Now-"
She caught his arm to stop him leaving, and though he feigned irritation, she could see his affection, though whether it was for her alone or for her long-gone sister she did not know. The drunken man watched their encounter intently, and then, out of embarrassment or boredom, dragged open the carriage door and lurched inside.
"Let me accompany you," she pleaded.
"And do what?" he said incredulously. "Carry my sword? Distract the enemy so I could more easily strike the killing blow?" His mockery was faint, but her cheeks still reddened. "No, Grace," he continued, softening, "you must stay safe from harm's way."
"You wish to protect me because you could not protect my sister," she said defiantly.
"I could say the same of you." He gave a confident smile, a slight bow, and walked towards the carriage.
"A fine pair we are," she called after him, flushed with the heat of her frustration. "Both trapped in a dead woman's snare and neither able to release us."
As Will climbed into the carriage without looking back, Nathaniel hurried over. "Make haste back to your room, Grace-I must depart with Will. These times are too dangerous to be abroad at night, even in the Palace of Whitehall."
Nathaniel hurried to the carriage and soon the iron-clad wheels were rattling across the cobbles. Grace watched it leave with mounting defiance. She would never go as jenny went. Nor would she lose Will the same way, if it was in her power to prevent it.
CHAPTER 7
o some, it was a monument to the globe-spanning power of the Spanish empire. Others saw a tribute to the power of God, a tomb, a menacing fortress, one man's grand folly. San Lorenzo de El Escorial, twentyeight miles northwest of the Spanish capital of Madrid, was all of them. Within the vast mountain of worked stone, its vertiginous walls punctuated by more than twelve thousand windows, seven towers reaching to the heavens, lay both a palace and a monastery, temporal and ecclesiastical power in perfect union.
Cold, empty, echoing, the sprawling complex was a perfectly sombre reflection of the man who directed its construction: King Philip II. At a cost of three and a half million ducats, it took twenty-one years to build, with a floor plan that also had a secret face. Many believed its design was chosen in honour of its patron, Saint Lawrence, but the truth was that it had been constructed to echo the Temple of Solomon, as described by the historian Flavius Josephus.
Now Philip retreated behind its forbidding walls, cutting himself off from advisors and family so that his relationship with his God could be so much more potent. A distant, deeply introspective man who rarely spoke, Philip preferred to dress in black to show his contempt for material things. Always extremely devout, as the years passed he had become hardened, listening so intently for God's voice that he was ripe for direction from much closer quarters than heaven.
Inside the monastic palace, Spain's riches from the New World and the Indies provided great works of art-statues, paintings, and frescoes-the finest furniture, the most lavish building materials-coral, marble, jasper, alabaster. Yet the long corridors and lofty halls rang with an abiding silence that was only intermittently interrupted by the soft, steady step of cowled monks or the deliberate murmur of priests. No hands of friends touched Philip, no warm words eased his frozen thoughts.
He lived, and died slowly, for his religion. His extensive library, which could have held the greatest literature of civilisation, contained only religious works. In the great church at the heart of the complex, second only to Saint Peter's in Rome, were seven thousand relics of saints in the reliquary in the Royal Basilica, not just shards of bone, but heads and entire bodies, magic symbols designed to ward off the evils of the world and point the way along the road to salvation.
As dawn broke across the mountains, Philip could be found where he spent a good deal of his day, kneeling in prayer before the altar. Lean, with a soft, gentle face, his dark eyes revealed only lonely depths. At sixty-one, his arthritic joints ached, but he forced himself to continue his devotions before struggling to the secret door beside the altar that led to his private rooms.
The sound of no other feet echoed here. It was Philip's sanctuary away from the rigours of the world, austere, chill, dominated by an office with a table before a blank wall where he spent the rest of each day and much of the night, signing the constant stream of papers from his government and planning the great enterprise that had dominated so much of his thoughts in recent times. The suite was silent and still and empty.
Padding across the cold flags before the fire blazing in the hearth, he smelled her before he saw her: the unusual heady aroma of sharp lime and perfumed cardamom, with a hint of Moorish spice just beneath. Heat rose instantly in his belly. He felt embarrassed by his body's earthy passion, which suggested troubling unexplored depths of his mind that he always thought well sealed. How did she do that to him, when nothing else in the world could stimulate him?
"Come out," he whispered.
As he turned slowly, he caught a flash of a reflection in the ornate mirror she had installed on the walclass="underline" a hollow-cheeked, bone white face with redrimmed eyes glaring at him with such malignancy he was overcome with terror. But it was gone in the blink of an eye, an illusion caused by his troubled mind.
Light shimmering off the glass blinded him, and when his eyes cleared, she stood before him, ageless, a beauty that burned like the sun and was as mysterious as the moon, dark brown hair cascading over bare shoulders, her eyes filled with a sexual promise that made his breath catch in his throat. She wore only a thin dress tied just above the curve of her breasts, clinging to her hips, her thighs, as she moved, barefoot, towards him.