Princess Elizabeth's Spy

poor Anne Boleyn. Jane Seymour, too. Queen Elizabeth I. Charles I, maybe? King George III …  Oh, stop it, she told herself firmly. This is no way to start your first night.

“Hello?” she called, her voice echoing down the hallway.

The figure turned and stared at Maggie approaching in the dim light, the taps from her leather soles echoing in the frigid air.

It was a man, she realized. Tall, very thin, wearing a RAF-issued shearling jacket. He was standing, hands clasped behind his back, staring at an empty gilt picture frame. Without looking up, he began speaking. “There used to be a Rembrandt here,” he said. “At least, that’s what I remember. Damned war’s changed everything.…”

As Maggie walked closer, he turned. In the dim flickering light, she could see he was young, around her age, with close-cropped golden curls, dressed in brown corduroy trousers and a wool sweater with twisted cables and honeycomb under the shearling jacket. His face appeared handsome. And yet, as Maggie approached and he turned from the shadow of the wall, she could see that one side had been horribly disfigured, transformed by angry red scar tissue and rectangular white skin grafts. His left eyelid had been reconstructed, and some gauze and tape were visible on his neck. As much as she tried not to stare, for a long second she couldn’t help it.

His face broke into a crooked smile. “I don’t bite, although it may look as though I might. Souvenir from Andalsnes, I’m afraid.”

Maggie nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“I’m a bit lost, actually.…”

“It isn’t hard to lose your way here.”

“I’m Maggie,” she said, holding out her hand. “Maggie Hope. I’m going to be teaching Princess Elizabeth maths. How do you do?”

He enveloped her small hand with his scarred one. “Well, hello Maggie, Maggie Hope. It’s a pleasure to meet you. You’re cold,” he observed.

“I didn’t realize it was going to be quite so drafty.”

“Samuel Pepys declared Windsor to be ‘the most romantique castle that is in the world.’” He shrugged. “Must have visited in the summer.”

“I’m trying to find the Octagon Room and I’m lost. I’ve just arrived, you see. I really feel as though I should have been issued a map, or a guidebook, at least.”

“Street signs at the juncture of the corridors?”

Maggie smiled. “Exactly.”

“Well, I happen to know the way to said Octagon Room.” He offered her his arm. “May I escort you?”

“I’d be delighted.” Maggie took the proffered arm. “By the way, you never told me your name.”

“Gregory. Gregory Strathcliffe … Le Fantome,” he added to himself as they walked.

“You’re much, much too substantial to be a phantom,” Maggie said, squeezing his arm. Le Fantome de l’Opera was one of her favorite books.

“Then La bete. La belle et la bete.”

“I’m only beastly in the morning,” Maggie quipped.

He raised one eyebrow. “I can see we’re going to get along, Maggie Hope.”

Endless corridors, staircases, and sudden turns later, they were at the double doors to the Octagon Room, in the Brunswick Tower.

As they stood in the outside doorway, Maggie could hear the meal was already in progress. “What’s the worst they can do—cut off my head?”

“Oh, we haven’t done that here for, well, at least a few hundred years,” Gregory answered gravely.

Maggie grasped the rose-and-dragon brass doorknob and opened the ornately carved wooden door.

It was a dark cavern of a room, with a high vaulted Gothic ceiling and the dim light from tapered candles glinting off the silver table service. Seated around the long, linen-covered table were Ainslie, Alah, and at least twenty other people with pale faces—the men in white ties and black dinner jackets, the ladies in long gowns—in the middle of their soup course. A black marble fireplace roared orange at one end of the room, which was, in fact, octagon-shaped.

One of the men, short and slender, with an Edwardian center part and a bulbous red nose, dabbed his lips with a linen napkin, then rose to his feet. “Miss Hope, I presume?” he boomed in a port-wine voice.

“Yes,” she said, taking a step inside. “Sir.”

The other staff members paused in their conversations to listen, and a tense silence fell over the room.

“You. Are. Late!” he intoned.

“Well, I’m here now,” Maggie said.

“I am Baron Clive Wigram, Governor of the castle. Meaning the Keeper—the Keeper of Time, among other things. We are all, always, on time. We”—he took in Maggie’s simple frock and coat —“dress for dinner. Do you understand, young lady?”

It had been a long day. Maggie was cold and hungry. And she wasn’t in the mood to deal with a pompous idiot. “I am dressed, Lord Clive. And I should think you wouldn’t be so quick to point out my supposed fashion faux pas. Wasn’t it Queen Victoria herself, here at Windsor Castle, who drank from her fingerbowl, when one of her dinner guests did by mistake? Obviously, she understood the difference between good manners and slavish adherence to etiquette.”

“Well, Miss Hope, I—I …” Lord Clive spluttered. At the table, there was soft whispering. One of the footmen standing near the wall, a tall young man in a powdered wig, gave her a discreet wink. From behind her, Maggie heard a snort, and then Gregory stepped into the room.

Lord Clive colored slightly. “Oh! Lord Gregory!” he said, in a much more cordial tone. “I didn’t see you there.”

Gregory gave a brilliant smile, which pulled at his scar tissue, causing it to turn white. “If you don’t mind, Lord Clive, I think I’ll take Miss Hope for a bite in town.”

“Why, Lord Gregory,” Maggie said, playing along with him, “that sounds just lovely. Since I’m already late. And not dressed for dinner.”

“Oh,” said Lord Clive, “oh, I didn’t mean …”

“No, of course you didn’t,” Maggie said. “Thank you so much, your Lordship. Ladies, gentlemen— bon appetit.” And with that, Maggie took Gregory’s arm and walked out of the room with him.

“My hero!” she exclaimed, after the heavy door clicked closed.. “Although now I’m hungry enough to gnaw on a table leg.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Gregory said. “Let’s get some real food and a pint—and then I’ll draw up a map of the old pile for you.” When he smiled, his scars were less noticeable. “Come on, then.”

Chapter Seven

They walked through the middle and lower wards, out the Henry VIII Gate and down the cobblestone walk to narrow and picturesque Market Street. It was another side of Windsor—as much as the castle belonged to the Royals and their community, the town was full of a different history: Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, the house where “pretty, witty” Nell Gwyn trysted with King Charles II, Christopher Wren’s Guildhall, the Crooked House.

At the Carpenters Arms, Maggie refused to let Gregory take her coat. “I don’t think I’ll ever be warm again,” she told him, trying to make herself heard over the cacophony of the crowd, as they walked over the worn red-flowered carpeting through the smoky warmth and past the throng at the long dark wooden bar, where a bartender in a white apron pulled on one of the taps. Next to him was a sign proclaiming “No Guinness. No Sausages. No problems.”

“It’s a good walk from the Upper Ward of the castle, true,” Gregory said. “Still, better than dinner with that crew. More snobbish than the Royals themselves, if you ask me.” He found them a rickety wooden table near a fireplace outlined with ceramic tile painted with red and pink roses.

Maggie sat down and watched as Gregory removed his overcoat. A young waitress with a blond bun made