The Doublet Affair (Ursula Blanchard Mysteries) (26 page)

“It might be as well,” I said to Dale, after Jennet, having taken her time while warming my sheets with the pan, had reluctantly departed, “if Thomas did get married, though obviously not to Jennet. Dale, you
can go and sleep in Brockley’s lodging tonight. I . . . shan’t need you here.”

“Oh, ma’am! I did wonder . . .” Dale’s eyes were warmer than they had been for some time. “I mean, he’s your husband, isn’t he?”

“You attended the wedding,” I said dryly. “Yes, he is. God knows in what frame of mind he will come here tonight, but I expect him, yes. You go and sleep in your husband’s bed. I expect you’ll find him slipping in with you at daybreak.” As an afterthought I handed her my posset. She was sure to be worrying, and even though she didn’t care for herbal drinks, I said, it just might help her to sleep.

• • •

As the house sank into stillness, I waited for Matthew alone, fully dressed, sitting on my window seat, with a single candle, placed so that it would light the room. He was a long time in coming, so that I wondered if he had really meant to come, or whether he meant to leave me sleepless and disappointed. Yes, disappointed. Desire was stronger than fear. Well, if necessary, I would wait the whole night through and then appear in the morning looking as though I had slept well, and cared nothing. I had my pride. If he thought he could hurt me by withholding himself, well, I would disappoint
him.

And then my heart began to hammer, for somewhere a door had opened and closed softly. I strained my ears but I never heard his footsteps and only knew for sure that he was there when the doorlatch lifted and he stepped noiselessly in.

He, too, was still fully dressed. He closed the door
after him and stood with his back to it. The candlelight showed his strong, dark features, his long chin and dramatically slanting eyebrows. His nostrils and eyes were pools of blackness.

“I’m here,” I said. “On the window seat.”

He picked up the candle, holding it so that the light could fall on me. “Ursula! I thought for a long time that I’d never see you again, or ever want to. Are you well?”

“Very well. As you see. Tell me,” I said in social tones, “how do you happen to know Dr. Wilkins?”

“He used to be a parish priest in Sussex, not far from my house at Withysham. He still visits old acquaintances in that district. I met him at a dinner party last year.”

“I didn’t know where his parish was,” I said.

“Does it matter? Why the devil are we talking about Wilkins? When your first letter reached me, Ursula, I did not know what to think or feel. Even now, I’m not sure whether I want to make love to you or throttle you.”

I sat with my back quite straight. “You wrote to say I could come to you.”

“And
you
wrote, saying that the Queen would not release you until May. Do you need her permission to join your own husband? Ursula, why in heaven’s name didn’t you set out for France at once? The weather’s been passable for sailing—I managed it! Our letters crossed the Channel! Why couldn’t you?
Why?
” As though he had suddenly lost control of his feelings, he strode across the room to stand over me.

I shrank away. “Matthew, don’t . . .”

“Why not? Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t strike you or strangle you. Do you take me for a plaything?”

“No, I do not! Never that!”

“All right. Don’t be afraid of me. I shall do you no harm. Ursula, when I leave for France again, are you coming with me?”

“I don’t know! I never thought to find you here. Does Wilkins know you are my husband?” I asked.

“Why do you keep talking about Wilkins? Yes, of course. You are the reason why I wanted to come to Lockhill with him. I ask you again: will you come back with me to France?”

“That depends,” I said.

“Depends on what, may I ask?”

I was rigid with the effort of remaining aloof, of not flinging myself into his arms, crying his name, and swearing to forget the past if he would forget it too, but there was a question which had to be asked.

“Matthew, there is something I must know. A few weeks ago, did you try to arrange for me to be brought to you from England?”

“Did I . . . ? What are you talking about?”

I had the letter with me, the letter which might be a forgery, which had led me to get into that boat with its Charon-like boatman. I took it out and gave it to him. “Did you send me this?”

He read it, holding the candle so as to see the writing clearly, then he turned to me again. “I did not write this. Someone has imitated my hand. I would not have dreamed of saying that your servants should not come with you. As my wife, you are the lady of
the Château Blanchepierre. I would never ask you to travel unescorted. Did you do what this says?” He handed the letter back to me. “What happened?”

“I got into a boat with a man I didn’t know, who said he was going to take me to you, but wouldn’t even let Brockley come with me to see me safe into your hands. He took me,” I said shortly, “to a lonely boathouse and left me there. He said I would be fetched to you in due course and then he left me there. I had rugs and a few days’ supply of food and water. Fortunately, Brockley had followed us and got me out.”

“It had nothing to do with me. That I swear.”

Relief flooded through me. He could not know that Brockley had recognised Wylie. If Matthew had been involved, there was no real reason why he should not say, yes, I did try to have you brought to me, but my wishes were misunderstood, my arrangements went wrong.

And then I would have known, for sure, that he and Wylie were linked, and therefore, assuredly, that he was involved in this business, whatever it was, that I was trying to investigate. As it was, I could still hope that he was not, that his acquaintanceship with Wilkins was no more than the coincidence it seemed.

Oh God, I said inside my head. Let it be so!

“And now?” Matthew said. “I asked you a question. You replied with another, which is hardly an answer. Will you come with me to France? Or,” he added, with bitterness suddenly invading his voice, “does your excessive obedience to the Queen mean that you have had second thoughts about me? Did you come here at her bidding, for some reason?”

“No! I had been ill.” I held on to the story that the Cecils and I had prepared. “I came here for a rest. The Queen allowed that. She wouldn’t let me sail to France because she thought the seas too dangerous at this time of year.”

“How am I to trust you? I am a wanted man in this country. I have to travel under an assumed name. Will you send Brockley for the parish constable in the morning? So that I can be committed to the Tower and the scaffold?”

“No, Matthew, no! When I fled from you last year, I waited a day in London before I reported what I knew, to give you time to realise your danger and make your escape. I gave you a chance, and no one was more thankful than I when I knew you had taken it!”

“Oh God, Ursula.” Setting the candle down on the window seat, he turned away and leant his forehead on the wall. “Why did you do it? How could you betray me like that?”

“I had to betray someone; I had no choice. You were part of a plot which would have endangered the Queen and the whole English nation! What else could I do?”

He straightened and took the candle up again, once more holding it so that he could see my face clearly. “You are so beautiful,” he said wonderingly. “To behold, you are so sweet, so womanly. You wrote so tenderly. But if you loved me, you couldn’t have left me as you did.”

“Wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Yes. I do love you. I did then, too.”

So much so, that from the first day I met Matthew, Gerald had begun to recede over the horizon of the past. After I fled from Matthew, Gerald’s memory had revived for a time, for what had been between Gerald and me had never been sullied, and thoughts of my first marriage were therefore balm and comfort. To recall Matthew, on the other hand, meant pain and bitterness. But from the moment that I heard from Matthew, Gerald was once more one of the regretted but buried dead.

Matthew said nothing, and I spoke again. “What do you imagine I really felt, when I decided that I must leave your side in the name of—in the name of integrity, I suppose? Do you think it wasn’t a struggle? I tell you, I tore my heart out of my body and stamped on it! Do you think I didn’t want—long—yearn—to stay with you?”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Haven’t I just told you that?”

“Because you had to put the Queen first? Why? You are a woman. For all that salty tongue of yours—which I loved you for, if you remember, and have missed—you are a woman. Women—wives—follow the lead their men give them. Women are not asked to put the outside world, matters of rulers and realms, before their husbands. No one expects that of them.”

“It’s expected of them every time their men march away to war!” Brockley had said that, more or less. “Women are more than you think.”

“You can’t justify what you did and still claim that you loved me.”

“I can. I do. In memory, I have treasured those few
days and nights of our marriage. They are my Eden, from which I was driven by—”

“Elizabeth with a flaming sword?” said Matthew sardonically. Matthew was essentially kind. That he could sound like that, was a cruel indication of how badly I had hurt him.

“I suppose you could put it like that,” I said, “but she needs loyalty in her servants.”

“Does she? She’s an unnatural woman, Ursula. Why does she refuse to marry? When I was at court last year, there were whispers that she wanted to marry Dudley, but there was another set of whispers, too. There were those who said she would never wed anyone: some said she was a faery creature who was too ethereal for the marriage bed, and some said she loved only power and was too cold of heart to love any man. I think that may be true. I also fear that your heart resembles hers; that you have a point of ice at the centre of it.”

“The Queen isn’t cold of heart,” I told him, and then, wishing to defend Elizabeth, I repeated to him what she had once hinted to me. “She fears marriage. When she was two, her father had her mother beheaded. She was too young then to understand what it meant, but when she was eight he had her young stepmother Catherine Howard beheaded as well. The one illuminated the other. Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard both saw an adoring husband turn into the monster who sighed their death warrants. Elizabeth will not forget.”

“What nonsense. She is a queen in her own right. Who would sign her death warrant?”

“Mary Stuart,” I suggested. “Or her advisers.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ursula! That salty tongue of yours again! Are we back again to the plots and politics that made you abandon me? Why can you not leave them alone?”

“I want to, but . . . tell me something, Matthew. You say you came to England to complete some business, and you are riding on somewhere with Wilkins tomorrow. What is the business you have in hand?”

“Oh really, Ursula. Does it matter?”

“Yes, it does. You said yourself: I am your wife. There are things I have a right to know.”

“For the love of God! Last year, I had to get out of England in rather a hurry, if you remember! Various matters I had in hand had to be left unfinished. Practical matters! I had left money in the hands of various people—one of them was Wilkins—to buy seed, farm animals, stone and timber, for Withysham. I was repairing it and stocking it. I had to leave transactions half-settled and in a state of confusion. I have come over in exasperation to sort out the muddle, and—I hope—to take some of my own money back with me. Is that enough for you?”

“After last year,” I said quietly, “can you blame me for fearing that you are once again caught up in some political plot?”

“To hell with plots! To hell with this passion you have for nosing out intrigue! There is no intrigue! I’ve got a herd of cows grazing in another man’s pastures, and a dispute to settle over whether I did or did not actually buy a pair of draught horses!” Even in the flickering light of the single candle, I saw his eyes blaze. “Satisfied? I am tired of this kind of talk. We’re
man and wife, joined by a priest in the presence of witnesses!
Ursula!
Ursula . . .”

The first time he spoke my name, it was a cry of exasperation. The second time, it was a groan.

“Ursula . . .”

The third time, it was a prayer.

Setting the candle down once more, he came and sat on the window seat next to me. I could feel the warmth of him. The night, the pool of candlelight, encircled us, closing us in.

“I’m as weary of plots as you are,” I said fiercely. “Why can’t we just live together and be happy?”

“We can still be happy,” said Matthew. “Now, this minute, we can still be happy.”

He pulled me into his arms and his mouth came down on mine. I yielded without resistance, and let him pick me up and carry me across the pool of light to the dark cavern of the curtained bed.

He laid me down and moved away briefly to blow the candle out, then he came back to me, jerking the curtains closed, shutting us into a deeper blackness than ever. In it, we fumbled with each other’s clothing, undoing ties and buttons, pulling and pushing until at last we were free and our two bodies were together without barriers or hindrances.

We held each other gently at first, exchanging caresses, but my betrayal and desertion still lay between us, and when the gentle caresses suddenly turned savage, I knew I had half-expected it. I did not care, though, for my spirit was as wounded as his. I, too, had a core of savagery in me. Let him grip and bruise; let him bite; let him thrust. I could give it all
back and with interest. My fingers dug deep into his shoulders; my nails tore his back. My teeth scored his smooth skin and padded muscle, and when he drove, my loins rose in reply; until the cleansing flame kindled at last, and cauterised the suppurating rage and pain in us; and rose like a fiery wind and hurled us out of the world, back into our lost Eden.

We fell apart at last, aching, gasping, exhausted. And then we were turning to each other, this time for comfort, holding one another, giving way helplessly to what, through it all, was still love.