An Assassin's Guide to Love and Treason Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Virginia Boecker

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Howard Huang. Cover design by Marcie Lawrence.

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: October 2018

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Boecker, Virginia, author.

  Title: An assassin’s guide to love and treason / Virginia Boecker.

  Description: First edition. | New York ; Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 2018. | Summary: “Two star-crossed assassins in Elizabethan England must go undercover as actors in one of William Shakespeare’s plays in a plot to kill the queen”—Provided by publisher. | Summary: In the early sixteen-hundreds, two star-crossed assassins, nineteen-year-old Toby and seventeen-year-old Kit, go undercover as actors in a Shakespeare play in a plot to kill Queen Elizabeth.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017051338| ISBN 9780316327343 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316327312 (library ebk.) | ISBN 9780316327282 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Assassins—Fiction. | Actors and actresses—Fiction. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Authorship—Fiction. | Great Britain—History—Elizabeth, 1558–1603—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.B6357175 As 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051338

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-32734-3 (hardcover), 978-0-316-32728-2 (ebook)

  E3-20180828-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Toby

  Chapter 1: Katherine

  Chapter 2: Toby

  Chapter 3: Katherine

  Chapter 4: Toby

  Chapter 5: Katherine

  Chapter 6: Toby

  Chapter 7: Katherine

  Chapter 8: Toby

  Chapter 9: Kit

  Chapter 10: Toby

  Chapter 11: Kit

  Chapter 12: Toby

  Chapter 13: Kit

  Chapter 14: Toby

  Chapter 15: Kit

  Chapter 16: Toby

  Chapter 17: Kit

  Chapter 18: Toby

  Chapter 19: Kit

  Chapter 20: Toby

  Chapter 21: Kit

  Chapter 22: Toby

  Chapter 23: Kit

  Chapter 24: Toby

  Chapter 25: Kit

  Chapter 26: Toby

  Chapter 27: Kit

  Chapter 28: Toby

  Chapter 29: Kit

  Chapter 30: Toby

  Chapter 31: Kit

  Chapter 32: Toby

  Chapter 33: Kit

  Chapter 34: Toby

  Chapter 35: Kit

  Chapter 36: Toby

  Chapter 37: Kit

  Chapter 38: Toby

  Chapter 39: Kit

  Chapter 40: Toby

  Chapter 41: Kit

  Chapter 42: Toby

  Chapter 43: Kit

  Chapter 44: Toby

  Chapter 45: Kit

  Chapter 46: Toby

  Chapter 47: Kit

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  For my brother

  December 20, 1972–March 26, 2017

  Prologue

  TOBY

  ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, LONDON

  7 JANUARY 1602

  12:02 AM

  It is not the usual interrogation.

  There are no manacles, no dark chambers, no threats, at least not those that involve chains or whips or whispers of bad things to come. There is, however, Richard Bancroft, bishop of London (BA, MA, DD, all from Cambridge—he would want you to know this), though it could be said he does nothing but whisper of bad things to come.

  It takes place in the chapel in the crypt below St. Paul’s, with its cold walls and grave lighting and it takes no great skill to reason why they’ve chosen this place. It’s a reminder of the persecution of years past, heretics brought here to be toyed with words and tricked into confession before being marched into cells then strung up for treason. It’s empty of guards and courtiers and people who come and go, empty of eyes and ears and mouths that would bear witness to what comes next.

  There should not be witness to what comes next.

  Sir Robert Cecil (secretary of state to Queen Elizabeth I is his official title, spymaster his unofficial. See also: Privy Councillor, former Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Member of Parliament, and Keeper of the Privy Seal—he would want you to know this, too) makes a big show of laying out his book before him, fat and leather-bound, treachery and lies spilling at the seams. This time, most of them mine.

  What we’ve covered thus far: my name (Tobias Ellis to them; Duke Orsino to him); my occupation (watcher and cryptographer to them; player and playwright to him); my reputation (tarred and painted; this to everyone).

  What remains uncovered: everything else.

  “Who is he?”

  “That depends,” I reply, “on which he you’re referring to.”

  Cecil’s disdain is a shroud. “There is the one who was stabbed onstage, the one you named as the assassin, and then there is the one who got away. You tell me, Tobias. With which he would you like to begin?”

  It doesn’t matter; any one of them is enough to end me.

  “Let’s start with the one who got away.” Cecil decides for me. “What did you say his name was?”

  “I didn’t.” The ministers exchange glances. This balance I am walking, the line between ignorance and impudence, grows narrow. “He was called Christopher Alban. Went by Kit.”

  “Kit,” Egerton repeats. (Thomas Egerton, Solicitor General. BA Oxford, QC Lincoln’s Inn, Master of the Rolls, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. His eye is sharp as his tongue and he is no fool.) “Interesting coincidence. What else?”

  “He came from the country.” I bypass the bait and continue the lie carefully, carefully. “Plymouth. He is young. Inexperienced.” I want to swallow the words, keep them to myself. But I cannot give them nothing if I do not give them something.

  “How did he get so far, then, if he is as young and inexperienced as you say? To the main stage, a principal role with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to a place before the queen, holding a knife, a goddamned knife?” Such is Cecil’s power that his blasphemy does not evoke the ire of the bishop, who has not taken his eyes from me since I walked into the room.

  “Letting him get that far was the plan,” I reply. “I can hardly ensnare a would
-be assassin if the assassination is not attempted.”

  “Yet this would-be assassin is gone and here you are instead.” His stare, a dark and heavy thing, weights me to my chair.

  Above me, outside this room, and beyond this cathedral lies London: the whole of the city sprawling and reeling and still recovering from the Twelfth Night revelries. Mummers’ plays and music, wassail and Twelfth Night cakes, sticky with butter and sugar and pressed into my hand with a gleam from saturnine eyes and a whisper from a voice sweeter than it all:

  If you get the clove you’re a villain.

  If you get the twig you’re a fool.

  If you get the rag you are a tarty lad.

  Which one are you?

  Chapter 1

  KATHERINE

  ST MAWGAN IN PYDAR, CORNWALL

  25 OCTOBER 1601

  A sound, sudden and echoing, wakes me from sleep.

  At first I think it’s a dream, as I am often woken by nothing and for nothing: jolted awake believing someone is beside me or above me but no one ever is, their absence never a relief so much as a reprieve. But no, there is the sound again, someone hammering on the front door, insistent. A quick glance out the window tells me it’s sometime in the middle of the night. I could be asking myself who is it, what do they want, can’t they come back in the morning, but I don’t because I already know the answer to all of it.

  I know.

  I am out of my bed at once, snatching up my dressing gown and then my coat, because the fire has died in my fireplace and it is so chilled in my chamber I can see my breath. I rush to the window, swipe the frost from the pane before sucking that cold breath right back in. Flickering flames bob across the night sky like fireflies, not the warm glow of candles but the aggressive heat of torches held high. They stretch past the gates that surround Lanherne, my home—belonging to my father and his father and his father before that, the seat of the Arundell family—into the marshy moors of Cornwall, as endless as the Celtic Sea.

  We are surrounded.

  Every sense I have tells me to run and hide. In this house, with its three floors and thirty-four rooms, there is no shortage of places I could tuck into and wait until this is all over. But that is not the plan. We have been over this, Father and I, what to do if this happened, if they finally discovered who we were and what we were doing. If and when they finally came for us.

  My father—Sir Richard Arundell, receiver general of the Duchy of Cornwall—is to remain in his chamber, as if he is unaware of what is happening, as if it is wholly unexpected. Ryol—Father’s manservant who is not really a servant at all but a priest—is to gather his vestments, vessels, altar furniture, and other incriminating items and slip into his hiding place, a small chamber accessed through a panel beside the chimney in the drawing room. Peran, Father’s valet, is to answer the door, alongside at least one but not more than two maids in attendance. Enough to give ceremony but not enough to show fear.

  I am to slip back between my sheets and wait. When the accusations come—and they will come—I am to appear at the top of the stairs, wide-eyed and tousle-headed, as if I could not be more surprised by their appearance, as if I have not been waiting for it nearly all my seventeen years. I am to inquire in a tiny, little-girl voice, Is there something the matter, sirs? This is to remind them that my father is a family man, that he has a daughter and once had a wife, that he is a nobleman and I am a lady. To make them forget what we really are:

  Liars, criminals, heretics, and traitors.

  I creep to my chamber door, finger the cold brass knob, and pull it open. From here I have a full view of the hallway and the staircase that winds below, all the way to the dark, empty entry and the front door that still groans under assault. I should turn from it, crawl back under my now-cold bedcovers and feign sleep, though it would be an impossibility. Instead, I close my eyes and begin to count backward from five in Cornish. It’s a trick Father taught me as a way to manage my fear, a way for me to give in to it and let it have its way with me, but only for five seconds. After that, I have to let it go.

  I’ve reached dew—two—when I hear the sharp tap of footsteps, hard soles on a lacquered floor. One servant’s shaky light follows another as candles are lit and move down the hall toward the door, more rapidly than they should do, I think. A whisper of skirts, the clucking of worried tones in Cornish, then Father’s reassuring voice replying, “Ny da lowr,” which means “It will be all right.” That is one—no, two—deviations from the plan I have known as long as I was old enough to know it, one I could recite as faithfully as if it were a catechism. From his place in the hall below, Father turns his head up to me, as if he somehow knew that’s where I’d be.

  “Back to bed, Kerensa,” he says. His endearment—the word means “love”—was his childhood nickname for me and is meant to soothe, but it doesn’t.

  “Father—”

  “Ny da lowr,” he repeats. “I promise.”

  I nod but I don’t obey, tucking myself into the shadows so as not to be seen. There’s a hesitation, a deep indrawn breath, then Father turns back to the door, opening it to the sea of faces on the other side.

  “John.” He nods to the man in front of them all: Sir Jonathan Trelawney, the sheriff of Cornwall. I’ve seen him before; he is a friend of Father’s and a regular visitor, though usually in daytime hours. “It’s a bit late for a game of one and thirty, is it not?” He peers over Sir Jonathan’s shoulder. “At any rate, you’ve brought too many men. It’s a game for six, not sixty.”

  Father tries for levity, but his voice is as pinched as his face and for a moment, I see him. Not the quiet, devout man who raised me as gently as he could, despite my arrival heralding the death of my mother and the loss of another chance at the male heir he so desperately needed, but as others might. Black velvet breeches, black cloak trimmed with sable, flat black cap pulled resolutely over red hair, the same shade as mine. The most important man in the county. Only now he does not look hard, the way he does when he rides through the duchy collecting taxes or visiting tenants or doling out payment to the soldiers he maintains on behalf of the queen. He looks the way I do when I catch a reflection of myself unawares, when I forget to school my features otherwise.

  He looks afraid.

  “Would that I were here for games,” Sir Jonathan replies. “But unfortunately it’s for something far more disagreeable.” He passes off his torch to one of many waiting pairs of hands and steps uninvited into the parlor. He does not remove his cape and the servants don’t offer to take it. They have already scattered like mice, vanishing into the shadows—deviation number three.

  “It’s late, John.” Father tries again. “Not even I do business at this hour. Not unless I’m in the cups and it is far past that hour as well. Perhaps tomorrow—” He attempts to usher Sir Jonathan back out the door, but the sheriff is unyielding.

  “I am here to arrest you for countable crimes committed under the Act Against Recusants,” he says. “Refusal to adhere to common prayers, sacraments, rites, and ceremonies of the Church of England. Refusal to swear allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen as the supreme governor of the Church of England. Possessing materials banned within the Commonwealth of England. Harboring a man known or suspected to be an agent of the bishop of Rome.”

  I don’t move, but I am not still: Every part of me shakes. It is true, what he says, every last word. But to hear it out loud, the accusation, is to understand the severity of our crime all over again.

  Father explained it to me like this: Our Protestant Queen Elizabeth feared the pope wanted to reclaim religious authority over England, the way he had before the queen’s own father took it away. The queen was afraid that in order to get it back, the pope would unite Catholic Italy with England’s Catholic enemies France and Spain, that they would form an alliance and, with help from England’s prominent Catholic families, plot to overthrow her, put a Catholic on the throne, and restore Catholicism to England. She feared this so much she made all of
us swear an oath stating our allegiance to her, her authority, her religion. Any family refusing to attend her Protestant services is suspect. Any family holding secret Catholic Mass is suspect. Any family harboring Catholic priests is suspect.

  It is more than suspect: It is treason.

  But Father does not admit guilt so easily. “You have no cause for this.” He waves the sheriff’s words away as if they were moths. “I do not wish to cause strife, John, but I answer to a higher power than yours, and that is Her Majesty’s. And unless her word has ordered you to my doorstep, I’m afraid I’m going to have to bid you a good evening.” Again, he tries to prod Trelawney out the door. But Trelawney reaches into his doublet to produce a scroll of parchment, rolled and sealed with a royal badge along the bottom that even from my place in the shadows I recognize.

  ER.

  Elizabeth Regina.

  Elizabeth the queen.

  This is my last chance to do something, to act; it is my last chance to play my part though everything else is uncertain. I throw off my coat, which I wouldn’t be wearing if I just climbed out of bed, tighten the ties of my dressing gown. Then I step into a puddle of moonlight that falls through the windows and onto the dark floor of the hallway. I pretend I am standing in the choir stalls the way I do every Sunday, attending Protestant services to keep up appearances, readying myself to sing before the congregation. This helps to calm me.

  “What’s happening?” This line is new, and not part of any plan, but I can hardly ask if there’s something the matter since clearly something is and it has already come to confrontation.

  “Katherine.” Father turns his head to look at me, as do Sir Jonathan and the row of red torchlit faces in the doorway. “Go back to your chamber. This doesn’t concern you.”

  Sir Jonathan doesn’t agree. He snaps his fingers and two men from the front line burst through the door and clamber up the stairs, making their way to me. I know that to run would be to admit guilt, so I allow them to take my arms and pull me down the stairs and up before the sheriff. He looks at me and I look right back.

  “Katherine Arundell,” he says. “How do you respond to the charges leveled at your father and his household? That of recusancy, and of unlawful adherence to the Catholic faith?”