Free The Girl in the Glass Tower by Elizabeth Fremantle Page B

they provide a distraction from the thicket of woes that seems to have encroached upon her.
    She’d thought she’d known Lady Arbella, or at least had a clear sense of who she was, but there is so much she didn’t know. She never spoke of her youthful obsession with Essex, nor the way she was irrevocably shaped by her grandmother’s rules, nor had she ever mentioned the all-pervading sense of danger that coloured her youth. But Lady Arbella was not a woman to talk of her past or of her feelings, and that was part of her enigma. Ami
had
known of her courage, for she saw it first hand, but what girl, when held up at gunpoint on the road, is more concerned with the welfare of her horse than her own safety?
    As she reads and untangles, she begins to sense a curious new affinity with Lady Arbella, for although they may have always been separated by position, they were both women denied the destiny their upbringing and education promised. Until darkness falls, she picks her way on through the pages, eager to find the places where her own story intersects with this one, feeling sure that these scrawls will eventually offer up the answer she has been searching for.

Wingfield
    I crept silently through the upper corridor, feeling my way along the walls in the dark, finding the indent in the panelling marking the door to Grandmother’s study, lowering my hand down and across to meet the latch. Its click sounded loud as a gunshot and I stood, breath held, to make sure I was alone.
    Embers glowed in the hearth; I fumbled for a candle and touched its wick to them, grateful for the vague light it threw out. Grandmother’s desk was a mass of papers and somewhere amongst them was a letter from my cousin James of Scotland. Dodderidge’s whispered words repeated in my mind:
It is in the pile of correspondence to the far left
. He had said there might be something of interest for me contained in that letter but that he had been unable to get his hands on it without arousing suspicion.
    In the five months I had been at Wingfield my universe had shrunk to the size of a dolls’ house and, like a dolls’ house, the front of my small world could be removed and its inner workings thoroughly inspected. I was watched constantly: Grandmother watched me and Cecil watched her watching me and the Queen watched Cecil watching her watching me. I supposed that the Catholics intent on spiriting me away watched invisibly too. That threat was to lurk interminably in my life.
    Under this regime of scrutiny I felt impelled to shed light on events obscured from me. My secretive nature blossomed and I became adept at spycraft, seeking information, listening to the servants’ gossip, loitering outside half-open doors, finding ways to cast my eye over Grandmother’s frequentprivate correspondence with Cecil before it was balled up and tossed into the hearth.
    Dodderidge, who believed it my right to know what was being arranged on my behalf, helped me in this espionage, acquiring information on Grandmother’s paperwork for me. She occasionally enlisted his services for letter-writing, giving him access to her private papers. My security was much discussed, and my education, as was the question of who was to pay for it.
    I shuffled through the stack of letters, listening with one ear for sounds outside, eventually finding the royal seal of Scotland. I scanned my eyes down the neat paragraph:
The Lennox inheritance will remain under my jurisdiction
– he referred to my father’s bequest, which by rights should have come to me years before –
for the time being. It is not without problems … there are others who might be have equal right to it … the Lady Arbella is not of age … It is a Scottish title and she was not born here in Scotland so the inheritance is problematic …
    It would seem he intended to continue withholding my patrimony. Perhaps he felt it was a way to pull my strings. But I perceived an irony at the heart of his words, for the fact