soon as Anna was gone from the tiring-house, the door safely shut between them, Rob slumped back down onto the chest. His shoulder felt as if it was on fire, the salve burning as it knitted the flesh back together, and his mind was heavy with weariness after the long night he had just passed.
He rubbed his hands hard over his face and pushed back the rumpled waves of his hair. It had been meant to be a simple task—a quick one. Go to a party, wait until everyone was ale-shot, and find the documents. Compared to what he usually did for Queen and country, it was simpler than crossing the lane.
Only it had not worked out quite that way. He had the papers—but he had also got a dagger to the shoulder.
‘Surely it is time for me to retire,’ he said, and then gave a wry laugh. No one retired from the service of Secretary Walsingham—unless it was in a wooden box to the churchyard. But, God’s teeth, he was growing weary of it all.
He prodded at his shoulder and felt the ridge of the neat bandage there against his skin, which made him think of Anna Barrett. He remembered the cool softness of her hands on his bare skin as she nursed him, the cautious light in her jewel-green eyes as she examined the wound. She smelled of roses and fresh sunlight, and her body was so slender and supple, had felt so warm against his as she’d leaned close. So close he could almost have slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her to him for a kiss …
She was beautiful, with her glossy red-brown hair and pale skin, the lush, full pink lips that seemed to contradict her prickly distance. Rob had long been a great appreciator of female beauty and softness, and the moment he’d met her all those months ago he’d been drawn to her. There was passion under her coolness, a flash of raw fire that beckoned to him.
But she was untouchable. Everyone in Southwark said she had no desire for men, or for women, either. She was above all of them, chilly and glittering, like the North Star. All the men who tried their luck with her were laughingly turned away.
So Rob did not try. There were too many willing women for him to waste his time on other than Anna Barrett. But he did like to tease her, flirt with her, just to see that rose-pink glow rise in her cheeks, feel the spark of her temper. He liked even more to touch her whenever he could, in those rare moments she let him close enough, and feel the heat of her body.
He dared do no more. Anna Barrett was above him, just as that star was, in this sordid world of Southwark, but not of it, and he wouldn’t drag her down into his work. He was not that heartless, surely, not quite that far gone. Not yet.
Yet there were moments, flashes of something he usually kept hidden even from himself, when he wondered what it would be like to have her admiration. To kiss those soft lips and feel her respond to him, open to him.
Given the way she’d run from the tiring-house, today was not that day. And he had to keep it that way. She had to go on thinking he had been wounded in a tawdry quarrel over some Doll Tearsheet—just as she had thought so many times before. She had to see him as the face he presented to the world: a careless brawler.
‘Your careless behaviour endangers us all,’ she had said, and she was more right than she knew. The White Heron was the closest thing to a real home Rob had known for a long time, the Lord Henshaw’s Men his only family now. He had to protect them.
He laced up his shirt, pushing away the lingering pain in his shoulder. He could smell Anna’s rosewater perfume on the linen folds, and he dragged in a deep breath to hold it with him for one more fleeting instant. That bitter weariness was pressing down on him, but he couldn’t rest now, couldn’t take refuge in the softness of Anna Barrett. He had to deliver those papers.
There was a quick knock at the door, and Rob shook away the last of the pain to gather the concealing cloak of a careless player around him again. The two sides were so much a part of him now it was as easy as changing papier-mâché masks on stage. But could it all become too easy? Did he lose his real self in the switch?
‘Rob, are you there?’ a man called. ‘They told me you were hiding in the tiring-house.’
It was his friend and sometimes co-conspirator Lord Edward Hartley. ‘Come in, Edward,’ Rob said. ‘Obviously I am not hiding so very well.’
Edward pushed open the door and slipped inside, closing it behind him. As usual he was dressed in the very height of Court fashion—black velvet doublet slashed with crimson satin, a short cloak embroidered with gold thread, and a plumed cap. He looked like a bright peacock dropped into the drab, dusty backstage area of the theatre.
But Robert knew the steel that lurked behind that jewelled velvet. Edward had saved his life many times, as Rob had saved his in turn. They both served the same cause. With him, Rob could relax his ever-constant vigilance just a bit—just for a moment.
Edward held out a rough pottery jar. ‘I heard tell there was a brawl of some sort this morning. I thought perhaps you could use this.’
‘Word does travel fast,’ Rob said as he reached for the jar and uncorked it. The heady smell of home-made mead rose up in a thick, alcoholic cloud, and he tipped his head back for a long drink. It burned going down, doing its task most effectively. ‘I thought you had gone off to the country with your beauteous Lady Elizabeth.’
At the mention of his lady-love, Edward grinned like a passion-struck fool. ‘Not as of yet. Our departure was delayed for a few days, which is a good thing if you need stitching up after a fight.’
Rob wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘No stitching up required this time. Mistress Barrett mended me well enough.’
‘Did she, now?’ Edward’s brow arched as he reached for the jar to take a drink of his own. ‘And does the fair Mistress Barrett know the true nature of this quarrel?’
Rob remembered the look on Anna’s face as she told him how his behaviour affected them all. He took another drink of the mead, but even that couldn’t quite erase the memory of her frown. ‘She knows I quarrelled over a whore’s payment. Like everyone else.’
Edward nodded. ‘And the papers?’
‘I have them.’
‘Shall I go with you to deliver them to Seething Lane, then? Maybe with two of us there will be no more trouble on the way.’
‘Perhaps tomorrow.’ Rob corked the jar again, and resisted the strong urge to dash it to pieces on the flagstone floor. It was his damnable quick temper that had got him here in the first place. He had vowed never to let it get the better of him again, yet it had led to the bloody fight—and almost revealing himself to Anna. ‘There is something I must do first.’
Chapter Four
Anna bent her head over the ledger books spread across her desk, trying to concentrate on the neat rows of numbers tabulating that day’s receipts from the theatre. She usually loved keeping the accounts—in the end, figures always added up to the correct answer. Unlike human life, they were regular and predictable. She understood them.
Tonight, though, the black ink numbers kept blurring before her eyes. Images kept flashing through her mind, bright and vivid, of Robert Alden and that blood on his shoulder. The solemn look in his eyes as he looked up at her, as if he hid ancient and terrible secrets deep inside—secrets he had only allowed her to glimpse for that one moment before he concealed them again.
‘Fie on
