did was look in a mirror. And if, occasionally, aunt Hamilton said, “Bess, my dear, you grow more handsome every day,” Bess put such an unlikely statement down to her aunt’s kindness. Her aunt had mellowed with age, and she and Kirsty were a good pair of flatterers, as Bess frequently told them.
And now Drew Exford was proposing to visit her—if she could believe him. Useless to worry about how she was to greet him. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” she said aloud. “I’ll think about that when he arrives.”
“Damn it, Philip. Why can’t I be like you, unencumbered?”
Drew Exford was towelling himself off after a hard game of tennis against Philip Sidney, who had been his friend since they had spent part of the Grand Tour of Europe together shortly after Drew had been married.
Philip smiled wryly. “Unencumbered is it, dear friend? I think not. I am most encumbered since the Queen took Oxford’s part against me after our recent fracas on the tennis court. I am encumbered by her disfavour and her dislike, particularly since she knows that I am much against her flirtation with the notion of a marriage to the French Duc d’Alençon. I am thinking of retiring to Wilton. Why not come with me? The air is sweet there, and most poetical. But what is it that troubles you? After all, you retain the Queen’s favour, you are your own master and may do as you please.”
Drew buried his face in his towel. Philip was a good fellow, and although his pride was that of the devil he had a sweet nature, and a kind heart.
“If you must know, I am envying you your single state.”
“Eh, what’s that?” Drew’s voice had been muffled by the towel and Philip was not sure that he had heard aright. “I thought that you were single, too. And I am beginning to lament my single state.”
Drew emerged from the towel. “Oh, I was married in a hugger-mugger fashion ten years agone, before we posted to Europe together and spent our wild oats in Paris.” He paused, and made his confession. “I have not seen the lady since.”
His friend stared at him. “Ten years—and not seen her since? That beggars belief. Why so?”
He might have known that Philip’s reaction would be a critical one. Philip Sidney liked—and respected—women. If he had affairs, he was so discreet that no one knew of them. His kindness and gentleness in his relations with the fair sex were a byword.
“She was but ten,” Drew said, almost as though confessing something, he was not sure what. He could not tell Philip that for some little time his adventurous life had begun to pall on him, and the game of illicit love, too. He had begun to dream of the child he had married. Strange dreams, for she was still a child in them, who must now be a woman. A woman who could be the mother of his children. His uncle had railed at him recently for not providing the line with an heir.
“She didn’t like me,” he said, somewhat defiant in the face of Philip’s raised brows, “and she…” He stopped. He could not be ungallant and repeat exactly what he had said ten years ago to his uncle— “You are marrying me to a monkey”—but he thought it.
“And all these years, whilst you jaunted round Europe and sailed the Atlantic, and ran dangerous diplomatic errands in France for that old fox Walsingham, I thought you single! Was she dark or fair, your child bride who didn’t like you? I thought all the world, and the Queen, liked Drew Exford!”
“Well, she did not. And she was dark. I remember at the banquet after the wedding ceremony, she ate little—and rewarded me with the most basilisk stare. I thought that the Gorgon herself had brought forth a child, and that child was trying to stare me stone dead!”
“And did you bed the Gorgon?”
“After the usual fashion. They put a bolster between us for some little time. She turned her back on me, and never looked at me again. For which I was thankful. She was not pretty.”
“Poor child!” Philip’s sympathy for Drew’s neglected child bride was sincere. “And where is she now? I suppose you know.” This last came out in Philip Sidney’s most arrogant manner, revealing that he thought his friend’s role in this sad story was not a kind one.
“At Atherington House, in Leicestershire. Her father died; her uncle acts as a kind of guardian to her in my absence.”
He strolled restlessly away from Philip to stare across the tennis court and towards the lawns and flowerbeds beyond. He remembered his anger at the whole wretched business. His uncle had sprung the marriage upon him without warning, and had expected him to be overjoyed. He had not felt really angry until that fatal morning in Atherington House’s chapel when he had first seen his bride.
An anger which had finally found its full vent when he had been left in the Great Bed with his wife. I have been given a child, he had thought savagely, not yet to be touched, and what’s more, a child who will never attract me. I do not like her and I fear that she does not like me because, somehow, she overheard what I said of her.
Lying there, he had made a vow. In two days’ time he would journey to London to take up his life again, leaving his monkey wife in the care of her father until she was of an age to be truly bedded. Once he had reached London and the court he would make sure that he never visited the Midland Shires again, except on the one occasion in the distant future when he needed to make himself an heir.
Now, in his middle twenties, that time had come, compelling him to remember what he had for so long preferred to forget. For to recall that unhappy day always filled him with a mixture of regret, anger, and self-dislike. His friendship with Philip Sidney had made the boy he had once been seem a selfish barbarian, not only in the manner that he had treated his neglected wife, but in other ways as well.
“Preux chevalier”, or, the stainless knight, he had once mockingly dubbed Philip—who was not yet a knight—but at the same time he had been envious of him and his courtly manners.
Drew flung the towel down, aware that Philip had been silently gazing at him as he mused.
“What to do?” he asked, his voice mournful. “The past is gone. I cannot alter it.”
“No,” returned Philip, smiling at last. “But there is always the future—which may change things again. A thought with which I try to reassure myself these days. We grow old, Drew. We are no longer careless boys. I must marry, and I must advise you to seek out your wife and come to terms with her—and with yourself. The man who writes sonnets to imaginary beauties, must at the last write one to his wife.”
“Come,” riposted Drew, laughing. “Sonnets are written to mistresses, never to wives, you know that, chevalier Philip. But I take your point.”
“Well said, friend.” Philip flung an arm around Drew’s shoulders as they walked from the tennis court together. “Remember what I said about visiting me at Wilton some time. It is on the way to your place in Somerset. Tarry awhile there, I pray you.”
“Perhaps,” Drew answered him with a frown. For here came a page with a letter in his hand which, by his mien, was either for himself or for Philip. He stopped before them to hand the missive to Drew.
“From my master, Sir Francis Walsingham,” he piped, being yet a child. “You are to read it and give me an answer straightway.”
Drew opened the sealed paper and read the few lines on it.
“Simple enough to
