‘You do me wrong,’ he said softly.
‘Then I repay you in kind, Nick.’
‘The situation is not as it may seem.’
‘Enlighten me.’
An awkward pause. ‘I may not do that.’
‘Because you do not care enough about me.’
‘I care too much, Anne, and would not wish to hurt.’
‘Is that your ruse, sir?’ she said tartly. ‘You beguile me freely until your past begins to overtake you, then you pretend it was all done in order to protect my feelings. I have been misled here. I have been abused. Why?’
‘I do not know the bottom of it myself.’
‘Go back to the beginning,’ she suggested. ‘Why did you flee from Devon?’
‘I have told you before, Anne,’ he argued. ‘I sought adventure. I did what thousands of young men do when they hear the call of the sea. Drake was leaving on his voyage around the world and it was too great a temptation for my questing spirit. I left Plymouth in the Pelican. When we sailed back into the same harbour three years later, our ship had been renamed The Golden Hind.’
‘That was not the only change you suffered,’ she said levelly. ‘It was Nicholas Bracewell, the son of a Barnstaple merchant, who set sail. He came back to be the book holder with a theatre company in London.’
He nodded soulfully. ‘You are right, Anne. The voyage wrought many alterations. I saw and endured things I do not care even to think upon now. Anybody would have been changed by such an experience.’
‘Why did you never go back home?’
‘I chose to remain here.’
‘Who is now sending for you from Barnstaple?’
‘I do not know.’
‘Is it a man or a woman?’ His hesitation was all the proof that she required. ‘Even so! It is a woman and one who still has much power over you that you race to obey, even though her call has brought murder in its wake.’ Anne was now glowing with indignation. ‘And this is the man I have allowed to share my house and — God pardon me! — my bed! Well, ride out of London tomorrow but do not expect to lay your head here when you return.’
‘Anne, wait!’ he implored as she turned on her heel. ‘We must not part like this. You judge me too harshly.’
‘Then where is your denial?’ she said, rounding on him once more. ‘Tell me all and put my mind at rest.’
‘That is beyond my power,’ he admitted sadly, ‘but I will not have you believe that all that has passed between us has been a pretence on my part. It is not so! Some of the happiest moments of my life have been with you. And if you wish to know the true reason I prefer to stay in London rather than return to Barnstaple, then it stands before me.’
His plea was so heartfelt and genuine that her anger cooled for a second and she saw once more the man to whom she had ineluctably been drawn. Nicholas Bracewell was indeed a loving friend to whom she had willingly yielded herself. He had many sterling qualities but contemplation of them only served to embitter her again. As a result of an undelivered message from Devon, she lost an honest man and gained a duplicitous one. While enjoying her favours, he always had an invisible lover lying beside him. Anne Hendrik had merely shared him.
Nicholas resumed softly. ‘What has happened between us under this roof has been very dear to me, Anne, and I treasure those memories. I did not dissemble. You saw me for the man I really was.’ He offered a tentative hand. ‘I would not be exiled from you for all the world.’
‘Then I will put you to the test,’ she said, ignoring the outstretched palm. ‘Remain here.’
‘How so?’
‘When the company leaves tomorrow, stay with me.’
‘But I am bound to Westfield’s Men.’
‘A second ago you were bound to me.’
‘I have given my word to Master Firethorn.’
‘You gave it just as easily to me even now.’
‘He and I came to composition.’
‘We have done that, too, often enough.’
‘I travel with the company as far as Bristol and then strike on alone to Barnstaple to … to …’
‘Go on, go on,’ she said. ‘State your true purpose.’
‘To settle my affairs.’
‘While I sit here like patient Griseld to await my lord’s return. Is that your hope?’
‘Anne,’ he soothed, ‘please hear me out. Imagination plays tricks on you. Be steadfast as before. Do but trust me until I return and I will-’
‘No!’ she snapped. ‘This house is barred to you from this day forth. I ask you to account for yourself and you cannot. I ask you to stay in London and you will not. There is only one thing for it.’ Her tone was icily dismissive. ‘Go to her, Nick.’
‘Who?’
‘That creature who lies with you in my bed.’
‘You talk in riddles.’
‘The silent woman. Run back to her.’
Nicholas felt a stab of pain that made him reel. At a time when he desperately needed Anne’s love and support, it was being withdrawn completely from him. He stood rooted to the floor as she mounted the stairs, and he suffered another spasm when he heard the door of her bedchamber slam behind her with an air of finality. It was minutes before he found the will to creep furtively up to his own room, to gather up his belongings, to take one last valedictory glance around and then to slip out into the black wilderness of a life without her.
Midnight approached rapidly and Edmund Hoode quivered with anticipatory joy. It was the appointed hour when he and his beloved would come together at last and drown the weeks of enforced separation in the turbulent water of passion. He felt truly elated for the first time in years. At this stage in most of his romantic attachments, he would be suffering the cumulative humiliations that afflict those who are perennially unlucky in love and who are singled out by fate as objects of scorn and mockery. Jane Diamond had redeemed his earlier miseries. In encouraging his advances, she had given him a confidence he would not have believed possible, and in succumbing to his desires — nay, replicating them with her own frank yearnings — she had lent a touch of arrogance to his manner. He was a new man.
Hoode deserved her. He had earned his good fortune by the sustained fervour of his devotions. Letters, verses and gifts had been showered upon his mistress. Every time she watched him perform at the Queen’s Head, he wrote additional lines for himself in a code that only she could comprehend. Every time they saw each other in public, she replied with secret gestures that were meaningless to anyone but him. Jane Diamond was not simply a vision of loveliness with a disposition to match. She was the finest creation of Edmund Hoode, poet and playwright, the character he had delineated for himself in his robuster fantasies, as near to perfection as a human being could be and with one quality that outshone all the others. She was his.
He lurked in a doorway opposite her house and listened for the midnight bell. Only one minute now kept them apart and he used it to reflect on his newly acquired strength of mind. That very afternoon, Lawrence Firethorn and Barnaby Gill had launched a two-pronged attack on it, but his defences held. In the evening, it was the turn of Nicholas Bracewell to remind him of his commitments to Westfield’s Men, but not even his friend’s promptings could turn him aside. Hoode refused to struggle his way around the provinces. London could offer him a far more exciting tour for he sought no other stage on which to perform than the pillowed scaffold of Jane Diamond’s bed.
The bell chimed, the lighted candle appeared and Hoode went skipping across the dusty street to tap lightly on the door. It was inched open by a whispering maidservant.
‘Is that you, sir?’
‘It is.’
‘My mistress awaits you.’
‘You serve us well.’
He dropped two coins into her waiting palm then the door swung back to admit him before creaking back into position again. She turned a key in the lock. By the light of her taper, he could just make out the thick iron bolts. Before he could ask why she did not bolt the door, she led him off towards the stairs. Once the ascent began, all thought of security left him. He was inside her house and inside her heart. The sweetest penetration of all now awaited him. He would be able to drink his fill from the finest wine in the vintner’s cellar.