gratitude, pulling a greasy forelock and offering her a bobbing bow.
The whole effect was spoiled a little by his bulging cheeks and eyes as he stuffed more bread into his mouth. Plainly Master Tom Trenchard did not feed his servant well.
Tom accepted the ale she handed him as his due—waving her to a seat by her own fireside as though the house were already his. From what pigsty had he graduated to arrive at King Charles’s court? If he were from the court, that was. His rank and standing seemed dubious to say the least.
By his clothes he was virtually penniless, some sort of hireling, called in to serve the nation’s spymaster—for that was surely Sir Thomas Gower’s office. Yet Sir Thomas had treated him almost as an equal, and he had not hesitated to mock at Sir Thomas. Sir Thomas had said that they would pose as merchants. He seemed an unlikely merchant.
So, was he a gentleman down on his luck? And what matter if he were not? These days gentlemen were as nastily rapacious where women were concerned as their supposed inferiors, and at Whitehall the courtiers, led by such debauchees as m’lord Rochester, were the nastiest of all. No woman was safe with them. It would be as well to remember that.
“You are very quiet, wife? What ails you? A silent woman is a lusus naturae—almost against nature.”
“I mislike sentences which assume that all women are the same woman. Men would not care to be told that because some men are dissolute rakes, then all must be so.”
“Oh, wittily spoken—good enough for Master Wagstaffe, I vow. Tell me, my dear wife, does reciting the well-found words of learned playwrights result in your own lines in real life becoming as witty as theirs?”
Catherine widened her eyes. “La, sir, your intelligence quite overthrows me! Let me try to enlighten you. Am I, then, to suppose that Sir Thomas Gower and Lord Arlington’s wisdom must transfer itself to you when you frequent their company?
“I see little sign of that; on the contrary, you maintain your usual coarse mode of speech. From this I deduce that my wit is therefore my own, and not the consequence of mixing with the geniuses who frequent the Duke’s Theatre, be they actors or scribblers.”
Tom was laughing as she finished, and before she could stop him he had put a large arm around her waist and hefted her on to his knee. “Shrew!” he hissed affably into her ear. “It is a good thing that you are not my true wife or you might earn a lesson in civility. As it is, let this serve.”
He tipped her backwards and began to kiss her without so much as a by your leave, just like the rapacious gentlemen whose conduct she had just been silently lamenting. First he saluted each cheek, and then her mouth became his target.
The devil of it was that she would have expected him to be fierce and brutal in such forced loving, but no such thing. His mouth was as soft and gentle as a man’s could be, stroking and teasing, rather than assaulting her, so that her treacherous body began to respond to him!
Fortunately, just when Catherine’s senses were beginning to betray her, he loosed her a little to free his right hand, and her common sense immediately reasserted itself. Wrestling away from him, she broke free—to slide from his lap to the ground, and found herself facing his man Geordie, who wandered in still chewing as though he had not eaten for a week.
“I gave you no leave to do that, sir,” she told him severely.
“Oho, that were quick work, master,” Geordie announced, spewing crumbs around him, “not that one expects slow work when an actress is your doxy.”
Catherine picked herself up from the floor and slapped the face, not of her unwanted would-be lover, but of his servant.
“Fie and for shame,” she cried, “after I have warmed and fed you. I gave him no leave to kiss me, nor you to call me doxy.”
“Bonaroba, rather,” suggested Tom from behind her, using Alsatian slang to describe a whore.
Enraged, Catherine swung round and boxed his ears, too. “We might as well start as we mean to go on,” she announced. “I will not allow liberties to my person at your hands, nor liberties about my person from his tongue. You, sir, are a hedge captain, and your servant is naught but a cullion who needs to acquire a wash as well as manners.”
Tom was openly laughing at her defiance. “Well, I at least am clean,” he told her smugly. And, yes, that at least was true as she had discovered when trapped on his knee. His clothes might be shabby but his body smelled of yellow soap and lemon mixed.
“Oh, you are impossible, both of you,” she raged. “Like master, like man. How am I to endure this ill-begotten enterprise in such unwanted company?”
“By accepting that, for the duration of it, we are man and wife, and Geordie is our only servant.” Tom’s tone was suddenly grave.
“I may not take my woman with me, then?”
“Indeed, not. The fewer who know anything of us, the better.”
“But Geordie—” and Catherine’s voice rose dangerously “—is to be relied on?”
“Very much so. We have been to the wars together, and he has twice saved my life.”
To her look of disbelief at the mere idea of such a scarecrow saving anything, Geordie offered a brief nod. “True enough, mistress. Only fair to say that he saved mine more times than that.”
“I trust him,” said Tom belligerently, “and so must you. Your life may depend on it.”
“Oh, in this ridiculous brouhaha everyone’s life depends on someone else,” declaimed Catherine bitterly. “Mine on you, yours on me, and both of us on Geordie, and poor Rob’s life depends on all three of us. It’s better than a play. No, worse than a play, for no play would be so improbable.”
“You’re the actress, so you should know,” was Tom’s response to that. “In real life, my dear, everyone does depend on everyone else. ’Tis but the condition of fallen man.”
Fear, impotence and anger, all finely mixed together, drove Catherine on. Her tongue turned nasty.
“Oh, we have turned preacher now, have we? Not surprising since we are to pass as canting Republicans. Canst thou whine a psalm through thy nose, preacher Tom? Or is that a trick to learn on the way to Antwerp? Pray learn it quickly so that you may leave a poor girl’s virtue untouched as a good preacher should.”
To her own surprise Catherine found herself half-laughing as she finished, and Tom’s powerful face was also glowing with mirth. Geordie was watching them both with his rat-trap mouth turned down.
“Loose tongue,” he muttered, “may loosen heads on shoulders, master. Because you have allowed your tongue to wag in the past and paid no forfeit for it, doth not mean that you may escape punishment for ever.”
“There,” exclaimed Catherine triumphantly, “even your servant can teach you common sense.”
“Oh, is that what he is muttering at us? Come, mistress, we must have a council of war, but only when you have sent your serving maid to market to buy our supper for us.”
This shocked Catherine a little. “You intend to stay here tonight?”
“Aye,
