‘Speak to nobody,’ he warned. ‘Confide nothing.’
‘Why?’
‘It is a sensible precaution. Master Chaloner told me that this house has ears. I know that to be true.’ He moved in closer and looked into her face. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Sick with grief.’
‘Retire to bed.’
‘How can I rest on such a night as this? What sleep do I deserve? I killed Simon,’ she said simply. ‘I killed him.’
Nicholas was firm but gentle. ‘That is nonsense and you must not even think it. What you did was to give him an excellent reason for living. Remember the times you shared together and reflect on what they meant to him. Master Chaloner was deeply in love and that is the stoutest armour of all. He died ignobly but he also died happy. He had you.’
‘I could have been kinder to him.’
He shrugged. ‘Let us talk again in the morning.’
‘Do not pack me off to bed, Nicholas. I am not ready. I am not disposed.’ She took his hand impulsively. ‘Stay with me for a little while yet. I need you.’
‘My presence here occasions some disquiet.’
‘You do not wish to stay?’
‘Nothing would content me more,’ he said, feeling the warmth of her hand, ‘but I would not make you the object of comment. You thought it improper for your betrothed to stay beneath the same roof with you. How more unsuitable am I?’
‘Nobody could be more suitable.’
He looked down into a face almost haggard with fatigue.
‘Then I will stay.’
‘I want your guidance.’
‘Call on me for anything. I am here.’
He released her hand but she did not move away. Emilia continued to stare up at him. Her eyes were still awash with grief but he saw something else in them now. Nicholas was touched. What he caught was a signal that she was ready to trust him more completely, to let him closer than she had ever dared before. Simon Chaloner had been her confidant in the past. Now that he had died, his mantle was being handed to Nicholas. The book holder reached out boldly to take it.
‘Tell me who wrote The Roaring Boy,’ he said.
‘I think you already know.’
It dawned on him at last. Emilia Brinklow loved the theatre. She visited London regularly with her brother to watch plays. When Nicholas had asked why she did not feature as a character in The Roaring Boy, she was not coy or evasive. She gave him a sound technical reason for her absence from the dramatis personae. The play was far more than an obsession for her.
‘You are the author.’
She smiled quietly. ‘Women do not write plays.’
‘One of them wrote The Roaring Boy and that makes the achievement all the more remarkable. I have read hundreds of plays in my time. Yours is not disgraced by any of them.’
‘I wrote from the heart.’
Nicholas gazed at her with a new admiration. Emilia Brinklow was a talented woman. Her brother might have been a genius in the sciences but she had the talent for the arts. She also evinced rare courage in forcing her way into such a closed world. Theatre was an exclusively male preserve. Plays were written and performed entirely by men. For a woman even to attempt to emulate them was an act of bravery. To succeed in the way that Emilia Brinklow had done was quite astonishing.
‘You see now why the author had to vanish,’ she said.
‘Clearly.’
‘Who would even read a play penned by a woman?’
‘I would,’ he reminded. ‘And I did.’
‘Only because you thought it the work of a man. That is why I needed Edmund Hoode’s assistance. He not only made the piece work on the stage. His name lent it credence.’
Nicholas Bracewell understood many things for the first time. His anger at having being misled was quickly smothered beneath his increased respect for her. Emilia Brinklow was not just a beautiful woman with a self-appointed mission. She was also a professional colleague. The implications of it all were not lost on him. She was in immense danger. Because he gathered the material for the play, Simon Chaloner was murdered. Because he reworked the drama, Edmund Hoode was imprisoned in the Marshalsea. Both had suffered from their association with The Roaring Boy. If its true authorship were revealed, Emilia would be hunted down without mercy.
Nicholas felt that it was his duty to protect her.
‘I will stay until this affair is over,’ he said.
‘Here in Greenwich?’
‘This is where it begins and ends.’
‘My house is at your disposal.’
‘There is nowhere that I would rather be.’
She gazed wistfully at him until a tap on the door told them that Agnes had returned. Emilia moved away and kept her back to them. The maidservant had prepared a room for the guest and waited to conduct Nicholas up to it.
He turned to Emilia to bid a polite farewell.
‘Good night,’ he said.
She acknowledged him with a faint wave of the hand. He went out with Agnes and the door was shut behind them. When Emilia swung round to look after it, tears of remorse were running freely down her face.
***
The bed was soft and the linen clean but Nicholas was quite unable to sleep. His mind was exercised by the events of the day. The murder of Simon Chaloner was paramount. There would be no adulterous lovers waiting to be caught this time. The law officers of Greenwich would have to make their enquiries without any help and that made the likelihood of an arrest virtually non-existent. Additional men might be drafted in to assist them but there was no way that they would ever follow the tortuous path that led back to Greenwich Palace. Nicholas had to work alone, a daunting prospect until he remembered that he did, after all, have some associates.
Emilia Brinklow herself was more than a friend. Tragedy had yoked them together. A mutual affection which had been sown at their first meeting had pushed up its first shoots in unpromising soil. He felt it somewhat unseemly to have such warm feelings about a woman so soon after the death of her betrothed and he tried to put them aside but they remained beneath the surface. Only a woman of singular determination could have waged the battle that she had. The fact that she had actually made her own ammunition-The Roaring Boy-impressed him even more. Thomas Brinklow had created wonders in his workshop but his sister’s invention came from the laboratory of her mind.
Valentine was a useful if unprepossessing ally. The gardener’s nocturnal habits had paid dividends. Nicholas not only knew who had dragged the corpse up to the front door, he believed that he had unmasked the informer in the house. In the morning, he would confront another spy. Orlando Reeve had penetrated Westfield’s Men to learn their plans. Nicholas Bracewell was looking forward to giving the musician a message from the whole company. In their own ways, Agnes and Reeve might turn out to be valuable associates as well.
His mind turned inevitably to Edmund Hoode. It was the playwright who was bearing the brunt of the punishment. Having been imprisoned in the Counter himself, Nicholas had some notion of the miseries of confinement. He had withstood them but Hoode was a weaker vessel. Nicholas wanted to rush back to London to bend all his energies to secure the release of his friend but it would be a pointless journey. The only way to liberate Hoode from the Marshalsea was to solve a second murder in Greenwich.
He was still contemplating the possibilities of the day ahead when he finally drifted off to sleep. An hour or more drifted by in blissful slumber. A clicking noise brought him awake. He opened his eyes but the darkness weighed down in them. When he sat up, he could still see nothing. What he did do was to catch her light fragrance. Emilia Brinklow had come of her own volition into his bedchamber.
She moved in silence across the room, then gently peeled back the sheets. Climbing in beside him, she lay quite still. He heard her breathing deepen as she fell asleep. Nicholas was moved. She had come to share his bed. Emilia wanted nothing more than his company and the protection that it conferred. The moment she was beside him, she was able to relax. She trusted him.