“I think they would.”
“Maugan, it was you who made it a condition that the wedding should be in early February. I hope I don’t hasten it unduly or seem unwomanly to you in my arrangements?”
“No. No, not at all.”
So we talked on for a half-hour. Gradually as this proceeded, our conversation melted the ice which for three weeks had been round my heart. I began to make plans with a new interest. Whatever else, I thought, she will be my wife. God in heaven, what more do I demand?
She was talking on, making more light conversation than I had ever known her do before. “Did you come by the Fields? Yes, then you’d cross Battle Bridge. It’s where Boadicea fought the Romans … The conduit runs for 2,000 yards to Snow Hill. All these fields abound in springs … Maugan, I think you’re not listening.”
“Oh, yes I am, I assure you. Sue …” It had to come.
“Yes? “
“All that time you were married to Philip Reskymer I mean before we met at the landing of the Spanish at Mousehole it was nearly a year after I came home; did you never hear that I was alive?”
She looked at me with slightly narrowed eyes. “What makes you ask that now?”
“Well, I’ve often thought when we met that day outside the burning church, you looked as if you’d seen a ghost. Yet we only lived what? thirty miles apart. Did you hear nothing of my return at all?”
There was a grinding grumbling of cart wheels in the lane outside. “My dear, it was not necessary that I should still think you dead to act as if I’d seen a ghost. It was the first time we’d met. How do you suppose I felt? I’m not made of stone.”
“Then when did you first know I was alive?”
“What’s wrong, Maugan? Why is this important to you now? “
I looked down into the crevasse I had approached and sheered away from it. “Sometimes one wonders these things. You did not write.”
“You did not write to me. And I felt that by my marriage I’d forfeited any claim on your love.”
“It doesn’t happen that way.”
“I’m glad. I hope you are.”
“Yes …”
Silence fell between us. The man outside was calling to his horses.
She said: “I heard first from my aunt. When I went to call on her about two months after my marriage she told me you’d come to see me.”
“Oh … I thought you might have heard earlier than that. D’you remember Dick Stable?”
“No? “
“He was Lord of Misrule during the twelve days of Christmas.”
“Oh, yes. A tall thin boy with a big nose.”
“Yes. He said he met you in Truro one day and told you about my return. He said that was soon after I got back.”
“It couldn’t have been. I wasn’t in Truro for several months after my marriage.” She leant and stirred the charcoal dying in the grate. “But what is the point of this? You haven’t told me. Is it of any value to go over any of that sad time? Aren’t we alive and well and in love? What else is of importance?”
“It has some importance, Sue. Do you remember meeting Dick? “
She frowned into the fire. “Yes … But it was later after Christmas. March, I think. Yes, it would be March. I went with Philip to call on the Robartes; we spent a night there. I bought some gloves one morning and Dick what is it? Stable was passing with another man. He recognized me and I stopped and spoke. He told me you were safely home. Perhaps I may have seemed startled to him, but every mention of your name at that time was like a knell in my ears. I couldn’t bear to hear you spoken of, to think what I had done.” She looked up through fringed lashes. “Does that please you? Are you satisfied now, or have I to sit in the pillory and be stoned?”
“No, my love. No one will throw stones.” As she straightened up I put my arms under her arms and kissed her. These were the lips.
March was the month when Dick had been dangerously ill with the wound in the head after being set on in Penryn.
One of them was wrong. Which, perhaps, I should never know.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
During the next two weeks I saw her only twice. Something kept me away, and she did not press. We saw and took the apartment in Great Carter Lane. It was a good district and the rooms were well appointed. They were better than I would ever have expected, but she would not say what they cost; she said the twelve months’ lease must be regarded as a wedding present.
I went a dozen times to Henry Howard’s, and the work seemed without special portent. The letters I wrote in Spanish dealt with matters of commerce which seemed quite innocent. If they were in a code I could not detect it.
I wondered if Lord Henry in one sentence had not summed up the whole reason of my distaste for him. He said he had taken a fancy to employ me because he detected in me qualities he found in himself. Underneath ordinary reason which vehemently rejected any similarity the likenesses might be there. Not fortunately in any ambivalence towards sex on my part, but in the old ductile qualities of the Killigrews. The twoheaded eagle again.
I had had contact with Spain; I had had contact with Catholicism; and neither had left me as single-minded as before. Nor had the compromises left me unchanged. Nor would the one I was going to make in respect of Sue.
I went about town with Thomas. We sat and drank in the taverns and ale houses, sampling the ales, the Gascoigne wines, the Malmsey, the sack, and eating the soft saffron cakes sweetened with raisins. Sometimes, for the first time in, my life, I got drunk and Thomas had to help me home. We went to the menagerie near the Tower and saw the lions and the tiger, the lynx, the porcupine, the eagle. We visited the bear pits and saw the great brown bears baited, four dogs to a bear and the dogs often getting the worst of it. We saw a halfdozen men hanged at Bridewell, one for rape, one for murder, one for stealing a hat valued 2s. They were sat each one in turn in a cart with a rope round their necks and the cart driven away; then their friends pulled on their twitching legs to help them die the quicker.
So time passed and our wedding day drew near. It was to be February 9th.
We were to be married at noon. I was up at dawn, and for once Thomas was in his element. He liked dressing in fine clothes, he loved music and he loved ceremonial when he was not the centre of the ceremony. In these weeks in London we had accorded better than ever at home where he had been overshadowed by John and Belemus, and I was touched when after breaking our fast he gave me a bunch of rosemary tied with yellow ribbons which I was to wear through the ceremony. Rosemary, representing the manly qualities, was a customary gift, but I had not thought of it.
Since I came to London I had had a wedding ring made, an enamelled hoop with small diamonds surrounding the Killigrew double-headed eagle. Sir Henry had lent me the money for these necessary expenses, but he could not be at the wedding because he was attending on the Queen who was that morning moving to Greenwich. Lady Jael was to come, also my uncle Simon who, to my surprise, seemed sufficiently interested to wish me well, and his son Stephen was to be my bridegroom man.
I went to take my leave of Sir Henry about eight. He smiled on seeing me and said:
“Well, Maugan, this is a happy day for you and a fine one. All is in order?”
“All is in order, thanks to you, sir.”
“I wish I could remember your bride. You say we met some years ago?”
“Yes. But now, living where we shall be living …”
“Of course … And how is your work for Lord Henry? Well enough?”