‘All the same, Master Hoby, I would rather take my chances on my own. My friends are here and so is Lord Somerville, and I am quite able to look out for myself in company. I shall tell Master Dudley so. Let us say an amicable farewell, if you please.’
‘Etta,’ he said, ‘you cannot do this. Can you not see how it is with me? All this time I’ve longed to be with you again and, now I’ve been given the chance, I find that you spurn me. Is this your way of getting your revenge on fate?’
‘Master Hoby,’ Etta said, crossly frowning as she searched again for Joseph, ‘this has nothing to do with revenge. I am now a married woman and I will not jeopardise my marriage by being seen with you. That’s all.’
‘But I adore you,’ he insisted in a low voice. ‘And now I see how it is. All that talk of not wanting a title. You soon changed your mind on that, didn’t you? Wealth and titles take the place of love, after all.’
‘Stop this talk at once!’ she whispered, angrily. ‘There was never any talk of love between us and you know that as well as I do. If your true motives were discovered, you have only yourself to blame for that. It was my uncle...’
‘Betterton. Yes, I know Sir George well enough. And that’s his daughter over there, isn’t it? Your lovely cousin, eh?’ He turned to look at the group with an expression in his eyes that Etta had never seen before until yesterday, when Master Hoby had revealed only too clearly what was on his mind after being refused an introduction to Aphra.
She felt the hairs on her arms stand up in alarm. ‘You had better go. Now. You’ve said more than enough.’ As she spoke, she caught sight of Joseph’s tall figure making his way towards her with his master’s fur-lined cloak over his arm.
Reaching her, he shook it out and placed it round her shoulders, pulling it together under her chin where its warmth soothed her. ‘His lordship sent me to get it off the barge,’ he said. ‘He feared you might take cold out here, my lady. Who was that?’
Her Uncle Elion had disappeared and Master Hoby was already deep into the crowd as Etta turned to look. ‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘A man I thought I knew. Take me to the others, Joseph.’ A chill stole over her as she pulled the cloak tighter across her body, absorbing the masculine aroma of the fur along with her husband’s concern for her comfort. The bitter aftertaste of her conversation with Stephen Hoby lingered through her meeting with Dr Dee and his obvious delight at being introduced to the assistant of his friend, Dr Ben Spenney. It was only to be expected that he and Leon would have much in common, but they might as well have been alone for all the notice they took of the Queen’s movements and, as an escort, Etta rated Leon as less than efficient. At the same time, she wondered if Aphra might be safer at home for as long as Stephen Hoby harboured a grudge against her father, Sir George Betterton. The thought of gentle Aphra being in danger from such a man was not easily dismissed.
To her relief, they were soon joined by Lord Somerville who, after greeting Etta and the others, led her away to sit with him alone on a stone bench. She intended to thank him for his thoughtfulness in sending for her cloak, but before she could speak she found herself being questioned with some gravity about why the Queen’s fool, a certain Jack Grene, should know so much about their wedding ceremony.
Etta looked blank. ‘I’ve never heard of Jack Grene,’ she said, ‘much less spoken to him.’
‘That’s him over there,’ said his lordship, indicating a smallish man wearing the Queen’s livery generously sprinkled with Tudor roses over his breeches and hose. He was lying on the cold ground beside where the Queen stood, gazing up at her with a miserable expression on his face. ‘Somebody has told him that I was too miserly to give you a respectable wedding, so who have you been talking to?’
Her heart sank as she remembered. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Surely not.’
‘Surely not who?’
‘Lady Catherine Grey.’
‘Oh, well done. That’s all we needed. What on earth possessed you to tell her, after what I said to you? After what Levina said?’
‘Yesterday. Truly, I spoke of our wedding out of compassion, that’s all, because she’d been made to divorce her husband and I hoped to give her some comfort by telling her that ours was not a lavish affair. I said nothing about you being miserly. Nothing even remotely like that.’
‘Well, thanks to your compassion, my lady, it’s now all round the court that you were not allowed the wedding you wanted because I was too mean to spend on it.’
Covering her face with her hands, she wondered what else she would have to contend with that day. ‘I said nothing like that,’ she muttered through her fingers. ‘Nothing, nothing like that. Why would she tell the Queen’s fool such a tale?’
‘Because she knows he has a wide audience and that there’s nothing the court likes more than juicy titbits of that nature. You can no doubt guess how he’s embroidering it with some salacious personal details, just for laughs.’
‘Surely Her Majesty would not allow that?’
‘She allows anything so long as the jests are not about her.’
‘Forgive me, my lord. It was my wish to have a simple wedding, not yours. What can I do? Shall I go and speak to this Jack Grene fellow?’
She would have liked nothing more than for him to take her hand and smile, and reassure her that they would face the ridicule together. But he neither smiled nor took her hand. ‘I must stay. You shall go home,’ he said.
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t send me home because of this. The Queen actually spoke to me, didn’t she? That’s a start.’
‘I can take the crude jests, but I don’t intend for you to stand and listen to them. You go back to the Sign of the Bridge with the others and take Dr Dee with you. Prepare a dinner for everyone and I’ll join you later. It’s time we all ate together, for a change.’
‘And you’ll come, too? Really?’
‘You look pleased,’ he said.
‘Of course I am. Will the Queen release you?’
‘She won’t need me. She has a French deputation coming to woo her.’
‘Then I shall prepare a feast, my lord, and we’ll have a merry evening.’
Still he did not smile and Etta suspected that this latest annoyance had made him more angry than he had admitted to her. She had been generously provided for in every way and meanness was the last thing anyone could accuse him of. Perhaps, she thought, those friends who knew him well would put a stop to such ridiculous jibes. She would have made some kind of gesture to show her regret at their last night of celibacy, a kiss, or a squeeze of her hand on his, but his grasp of her elbow closed the conversation with some abruptness, steering her back to the group where, after inviting Dr Dee to sup with them that evening, he walked off without another word to Etta.
It was a detail that did not escape Aphra’s notice. ‘He’s preoccupied,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose for one moment that he intended to attract her attention like this. He cannot refuse her command, Etta love.’
Even as they watched, Aphra’s words lost their comfort when two of the younger Ladies-in-Waiting came forward to meet him with smiles of welcome, their arms linking with his to take him to the Queen. Etta would have gone to warn them off, but Aphra stopped her. ‘No, don’t. It’s nothing. It will embarrass him. Let him go.’
I don’t want to let him go. I want him here by my side.
His lordship did not look back, leaving Etta with the empty feeling that those two could, between them, make sure he forgot to return home in time for dinner, that the life of pleasure at the royal court could easily change a man’s mind and make him forget his duties at home. It had already happened to Robert Dudley. ‘You go with the others,’ Etta said to Aphra. ‘Here, take my lord’s cloak and wait for me at the garden stairs where we came in. I must find a house of ease.’
The Queen’s entourage had move
d off towards the palace, giving Etta a fair indication of her direction in relation to the river and its many jetties, so she ignored Aphra’s reservations and offers of company and set off alone to find one of those nooks built into the thickness of the wall for the relief of ladies. The pungent smell of waste matter usually led one to their location, though men usually relieved themselves in the bushes or a deserted corner of the outer wall marked for such purposes. As convoluted as a rabbit warren, the narrow whitewashed passages divided and sub-divided into a maze where Etta soon began to doubt her orientation until, hearing the high squeak of a woman’s laughing protest, she moved unsurely towards the sound. A man’s indistinct voice joined in, causing Etta to hesitate for fear of disturbing a private moment.
But the urgent needs of her body combined with her curiosity, moving her on round the corner where, at eye level in the dim light, she saw two velvet-slippered feet and bare legs jerking madly from the depths of an alcove where a man was bent over a woman, his arms holding her against the cold stone sill of a window. His white shirt hung half out of his breeches, and the back of his sandy-haired head obscured the woman’s face, their panting and laughing making them oblivious to Etta’s presence.
Shocked by the brazenness of the act, she stifled her cry with one hand, swivelling round to run back the way she had come, taking turn after turn towards whatever light was showing. With a thud that hurt her shoulder, she collided with a man’s body and swerved to escape as his arms caught and held her, pushing her hard against the wall. ‘Hold it!’ he said. ‘Who’s this, then? Well, if it isn’t Somerville’s woman. What are you doing here, my lady? Eh? Looking for a bit of light relief from your skinflint husband? Is he so mean with his attentions, too? Well, I can show you some little tricks.’
‘Let me go! You are impertinent, sir. I am looking for...’ she knew not to give him this private information when his disrespect showed him to be no gentleman ‘...the garden stairs to the jetty,’ she said, squirming inside his embrace. ‘Let go of me!’ Rather than let her go, he placed himself in her way as she beat frantically at his chest with her fists.
During those weeks of preparation, Lord Somerville had taught her how to use a dagger, but she had not brought it with her and now she blamed herself for being foolishly optimistic about the intentions of well-dressed men who appeared to turn into lunatics as soon as the Queen’s back was turned. One other thing he had taught her, however, was how to disable an attacker, so now, without a second thought, she brought her knee up high through all the layers of petticoat, farthingale and overskirt, jabbing hard into her assailant’s groin and using all her strength to make a connection with his codpiece. She heard his screech of pain, then felt the sudden release of his grasp upon her arms, dropping away to clutch at himself as he doubled up, gasping obscenities.
Fired up by that success and by the outrageous events, she recalled her husband’s next instructions to catch her assailant’s ears tightly in her fists and to swing his head hard into the nearest object. The stone wall was at her elbow, so she slammed him into it as she’d been told, realising for the first time how much harder it was to perform such unladylike defences than to have them described to her in a more dispassionate moment. His head, with shoulders attached, seemed to weigh a ton, but the crack as it hit the wall brought a wave of nausea to her throat.
Leaving him crouching on the floor and moaning in agony, Etta stepped over his legs and ran like a hare along the passageway, half-blinded by the fear that she might once again be running into danger. A noise ahead made her swerve and flatten herself against the wall as a hand-linked chain of people ran towards her, feeling the uncomfortable bounce and pull of her wide farthingale as they knocked it askew. Two burly young courtiers in velvets and silks held a young white-aproned woman by each wrist, her linen coif hanging round her neck to reveal brown hair tumbling around her shoulders. She threw a laughing glance of helplessness towards Etta who could only stare and watch, horrified, as they disappeared round a corner.
For a moment longer, Etta wondered how she was to extricate herself from this nightmare and how she was to avoid meeting that man again, who would certainly seek some revenge for his hurts. She leaned against the wall to stop the trembling, then froze again as a long shadow slid round the corner ahead. Another man. ‘Joseph! Joseph...oh, for pity’s sake get me out of here!’ Her voice was hoarse with fright.
Concern was written deeply in the young man’s face as he took the last few yards at a trot. ‘I was worried, my lady. What’s happened? Are you all right?’
‘No...yes...I’m lost, Joseph, and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.’
‘I’ve just passed it, my lady. Down here. Come this way. Are you sure you’re all right? You’re upset.’ He took her hand, too familiar, but comforting.
She could not tell him what had happened or what she had witnessed, for Joseph would be obliged to tell his master and that would almost certainly be the end of her visits to Whitehall Palace. To add to the problem, the man who had earlier declared his love for her, who had taken on the role of her protector against what he believed were predatory males, was the same man she had just seen with the woman in the alcove, apparently wearing his disappointment too lightly for it to matter.
* * *
On the journey back to the jetty at Puddle Wharf, Etta was silent and thoughtful, her head reeling with the events of the morning, so unlike anything she had expected. On the one hand, the Queen had spoken to her at last and, although not exactly friendly, had not forbidden her to return. She ought, she supposed, to be thankful for that, yet she had hoped for a less frosty reception. Now it looked as if the Queen found Lord Somerville to be of more interest than herself, and that, by insisting on appearing at court, she herself had put him in the difficult position of having to spend time there without her. And by the look of things, it was not only the Queen who wished for his company, either. The women in the Queen’s retinue were all, without exception, beautiful, witty, magnificently dressed and young enough to be flattered by the attention of the wealthy, handsome and titled mercer. Who could blame them for taking advantage of his wife’s absence? But was it really her likeness to the Queen that was having the opposite effect from the one she had intended? Etta had been warned, but surely the royal confidence could not be so shaken by the appearance of another Tudor woman? The idea was ludicrous.
So far, Lord Robert had done little to help except by including her in his archery team. Tomorrow, she would explain to him that the assistance of the man she had misjudged so badly, Stephen Hoby, would not be needed, for had she known what kind of a man he was, she would never have called him her friend. The scene came back to her in full detail, but then begged for comparison to her own passionate encounter with his lordship in the banqueting house by the river, in daylight, differing only by being legal and on their own property. Now, watching the oars make silver ripples on the water, she began to experience again that terrible emptiness as her lord had left to go with the two alluring women and to realise, perhaps for the first time, that what she felt was the pain of being in love. That ache. That need. The longing. Why did it hurt her so to compare that scene of her husband’s departure with the one in the passageway where two laughing men pulled a pretty girl with them?
Only moments before, Stephen Hoby had expressed love for her and, instead of laughing it off as ridiculous, she had been angry without realising that her anger had been because it came from the wrong man. Admiration, pleasure in her body, desire, and every other expression of satisfaction, but never love. What if he did not return when he’d said? How could she pretend not to care that he preferred the company of other women to hers? How could she convince him that she could become a suitable courtier, after all the embarrassments of the day? And how would she bear the wait till he came home to her?
Chapter Seven
At the Sign of the Bridge there was less
opportunity for thoughts of love’s pain, for they had a guest and meals to organise, and a household to run after their absences at court. Because it was Lent, the menu contained his lordship’s favourite fish, crabs and lobster, plaice and trout, and as many fruits as Etta could find at this time of the year to supplement those dried over winter. Cheeses, sauces, pasties and platters of salmon covered the white linen cloth laid with the best silver and glass tableware in Dr Dee’s honour and, as darkness fell, Etta’s expectations rose in anticipation of his lordship’s arrival.
Dr Dee and Master Leon would not have noticed if the supper had been delayed for hours, but Etta and Aphra could not allow the food to spoil so were obliged to interrupt the talk about the controversial role of rue and to promote instead the uses of dill and fennel with fish. Laughing about the fine line between medicinal and culinary, the men clattered into place at the table just as Etta was handed a note by Joseph, arrived by royal messenger, he said. Etta knew before she read it what it would contain.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said, keeping her voice light. ‘My lord will be delayed. He asks that we start without him. How disappointing. Come then, we must make the best of it and leave enough for him to eat later.’ Trying hard to give him the benefit of the doubt, to believe that it was not his fault but the Queen’s, Etta nevertheless found it hard to forget the manner of their parting.
Aphra understood the effort her cousin was making to be the perfect hostess, being to her the support she needed with both the duties and the conversation, but her heart ached for Etta, after all the effort she had made. When the men’s talk showed no sign of waning, Aphra suggested leaving them to it. ‘Do we have a chamber for Dr Dee?’ she said to Etta. ‘It looks as if they’re going to stay and wait for his lordship. We can’t send him home at this time of night, can we?’
‘No, indeed we cannot. I’ll have the little chamber next to the counting house prepared. Shall you tell him?’
Taming the Tempestuous Tudor Page 15
