Jane Feather - The Accidental Bride

Cato gazed at his wife’s back with astonishment. The hooks at the back of Phoebe’s latest revelation were missing several connections, and those they had made were not all correctly paired.

Cato slipped a casual arm around her. “If you’d excuse us for a minute, Rothbury…” He moved Phoebe away, his hand sliding to the small of her back as he steered her towards the library, concealing the middle of her back view from the occupants of the hall.

Phoebe shivered at the easy intimacy of his touch. She had no idea what he was about, but she was not complaining.

In the library, out of direct sight of the hall, Cato put his hands on her shoulders, keeping her back to him. “Why didn’t you get your maid to help you with these hooks?”

“Why? What’s the matter?” Phoebe peered over her shoulder.

“It’s more a question of what’s right,” he said, beginning to unhook the gown from the top.

Phoebe felt the air stir the thin cotton of her shift. “Oh dear, are they done up wrong?”

She stood on tiptoe as she continued to peer over her shoulder as if the extra height would enable her to see better. “I was afraid they might be,” she added dolefully. “It’s very difficult if you don’t have arms like an octopus.”

“Which is why you have a maid,” Cato pointed out.

“I was trying to hurry. I knew Lord Rothbury was coming; I saw him on the road when I was coming back from the village, and I wanted to be able to greet him dressed properly.”

“As against dressed for digging up cabbages,” Cato said sharply. “For God’s sake, girl, why can’t you find a happy medium? This gown is as inappropriate as the blue vel-that other one.”

“But it’s very elegant,” Phoebe pointed out.

“It depends who’s wearing it,” Cato said with a hint of savagery. He finished fastening the hooks and placed his hands on her hips as he checked that he hadn’t missed one.

Phoebe felt the imprint of his hands on her skin beneath the silk. Each finger seemed to burn against her flesh. She stood very still.

Cato’s hands dropped from her hips. “So,” he inquired, “how many more of these sartorial surprises am I to expect?” The sardonic edge was again in his voice.

“I don’t have any more money,” Phoebe said simply.

“On which subject.” Cato reached into the pocket of his britches and drew out the three rings. “If you ever visit a pawnbroker again, madam wife, you will rue the day.”

“You redeemed them?”

“Of course I did. You think I would permit some thief of a pawnbroker to hold my property?”

“I thought they were mine,” Phoebe said softly. “They belonged to my mother.”

“And neither will I permit a pawnbroker to hold your property,” Cato said acidly, tossing the three gem-studded silver circlets onto a sidetable. “If you let them out of your possession again, you will forfeit that possession. Understand that.”

He left the library and after a minute Phoebe scooped up the rings and dropped them into her bosom. It seemed she had her currency returned.

The Rothbury clan was ready to leave within the hour as Portia had promised. The countess of Rothbury was accustomed to military maneuvers and could marshal a brood of children and nursemaids as efficiently as she could a troop of soldiers.

Phoebe held her in a tight embrace and whispered urgently in her ear. It was her last chance for concrete advice.

Portia murmured, “If you can’t tell him what you want, duckie, you’re going to have to show him.”

“How?” Phoebe whispered with the same urgency as before.

“Use your poetic imagination,” Portia responded, her green eyes alight with mischief.

“Easier said than done.” Phoebe gave her one more convulsive hug, before stepping back to give Olivia room for her own farewells.

“Are you working on your play, Phoebe?” Olivia looked up from her books at the table in the square parlor. She realized that Phoebe hadn’t spoken a word in a very long time, which was unusual.

The house seemed very flat in the wake of the Rothbury party’s departure. Ordinarily Phoebe, who had little patience with moping, would have made an effort to lighten things, but she was so absorbed in her work that she’d barely raised her eyes from the page for several hours.

“How far have you g-got?” Olivia persisted.

“It’s not a play anymore, it’s a pageant,” Phoebe said, nibbling the end of her quill. “It’s to be a midsummer pageant, I’ve decided.”

“What about?” Olivia closed Catullus over her finger.

“Gloriana. Scenes from her life.”

“Queen Elizabeth, you mean?”

“Mmm.” Phoebe’s voice grew more animated. “In verse, of course. I’d like to stage it on Midsummer Eve, if I can have it written by then,” she added, looking down at the scrawl of lines in front of her. “There are so many parts. But the three important ones are Elizabeth, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth’s lover, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.”

“Who’s to take them?” Olivia got up and came over to the window seat where Phoebe was sitting cross-legged, heedless of the creases in the red silk.

“Oh, all of us, of course, and for the minor parts members of the household and the village. I have it in mind to include as many people as possible. The village children and of course your little sisters. I hope it’ll cheer people up, give them something other than gloom and doom and war to think about. Oh, and you’re to be Mary, Queen of Scots, and…”

“Am I to lose my head?” Olivia clapped her hands to her head in mock horror. “Shall I g-go around with it under my arm?”

“You could, I suppose,” Phoebe said doubtfully. “But I hadn’t thought to stage the execution. It might be a bit too difficult to do convincingly.”

“Well, who’s to play Elizabeth? It had better be you, don’t you think?” Olivia sat on the window seat and picked up a sheet of vellum already covered in Phoebe’s black writing.

“Although Portia has the right c-color hair…Oh, I like this speech of Mary’s! You’re so talented, Phoebe.”

She was about to declaim when Phoebe snatched the paper from her.

“It’s not finished,” Phoebe said. “I’m not satisfied with it yet. You can’t read it until I am.”

Olivia yielded immediately. She knew what a perfectionist Phoebe was over her work. “Well, are you going to play Gloriana?” she repeated.

Phoebe shook her head. “Hardly. I’d be a laughingstock. I’m too short and plump and I don’t scintillate. The virgin queen was dignified and elegant and she definitely scintillated.”

“When you’re not untidy, you c-can be elegant,” Olivia said seriously.

“Well, thank you for those few kind words,” Phoebe said. It seemed like a backhanded compliment to her.

“It’s true, though,” Olivia insisted. “People aren’t the same, Phoebe. You know what they say: one man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

“I suppose so,” Phoebe said, suddenly remembering her conversation with Meg. “Have you ever heard of women who like women more than men?”

“Oh, you mean like Sappho on Lesbos,” Olivia said matter-of-factly. “Although the Greeks were mostly known for men who liked men, or boys. It was part of the c-culture.”

She grabbed up a book from the table. “And then of course there were the Romans. This passage in Suetonius about the minnows… little boys that were trained to act like minnows in the Emperor Tiberius’s swimming pool. Look, here it is.” She began to translate the scandalous passage.

“And some of Sappho’s verse is really passionate.” Olivia jumped up and went to. the bookshelf. She took up a book and flicked through pages, then came back to the window seat. “See, here it is.”

Phoebe looked at the hieroglyphics on the page and was at a loss. “I can’t read that.”

“No, but I c-can. She’s saying how sweat pours down her and there’s a fire beneath her skin when she’s with this woman…”

“Well if that’s not lust, I don’t know what is.” Phoebe turned sideways and glanced down at the rear courtyard below. Cato in riding dress was crossing towards the stables. Her gaze drank him in.

Afire beneath her skin. Oh, yes, it was a very precise description of passion.

What if she wrote Robert Dudley’s part for Cato? She would write the love scenes, put the passion into Cato’s mouth… And she would play Gloriana opposite him…

Phoebe nibbled her pen as the impossible idea took hold.

“Dammit, what’s that?” Later that day, Cato raised his head and sniffed the wind. It was bitterly cold; the earlier sunshine had given way to snow-laden clouds. Cato’s instincts for approaching trouble were well honed, and Giles Crampton stiffened in readiness.

They could hear nothing, yet Cato was convinced danger lay close by.

“Run for it?” suggested Giles. It went against the soldier’s grain, but there were only two of them, and the first flakes of snow now fell onto his mount’s glossy coat.

“Aye,” Cato said shortly. He put spur to his horse-but it was a moment too late. A party of yeomanry in the king’s colors broke out of the trees. In grim silence they spread out across the narrow path, blocking the horsemen.

Cato’s horse reared as he was about to break into a gallop. Cato steadied the charger with one hand as he drew his sword. Giles had his musket in his hand in the same instant. For a long moment there was an impasse, the line of men with swords and pikes holding steady across the road, the two horsemen watching them, every nerve stretched.

Then one of the yeoman raised his pike, and in the same moment, Cato spurred his horse straight at the line of men. Giles, with a skirling yell of pure gleeful exhilaration, charged alongside. His musket cracked and a man went down to the path beneath the hooves of Giles’s mount.

Cato’s cavalry sword flashed down from side to side. Blood spattered onto his boots and britches. A man went for the charger’s neck with his pike. Cato wrenched the beast to one side and the animal screamed as the point tore a superficial cut in his hide. He reared, using his hooves as weapons, and it was men who were screaming now.

Giles unloosed his pike and drove it into the upturned throat of one of his assailants the same instant the man raised his musket. The gun wavered and the ball exploded into the air.

Then they were through and the path ahead was clear under the now thickly falling snow.

“Well done,” Cato said, his teeth flashing in a smile that was as exhilarated as his lieutenant’s. “Quite a scrap.”

“Aye, m’lord. That it was.” Giles nodded complacently. “Reckon their insignia was the King’s Own Foot. They’ve been a right menace these last weeks, patrolling the road between our headquarters and the city.”

“Well, maybe we gave them something to think about,” Cato said cheerfully, leaning over to examine the scratch on his charger’s neck. “Doesn’t look too bad.”

“Ted’ll patch ‘im up at home,” Giles said. “A rare wonder ’e is with injuries.” He pulled the brim of his hat down against the driving snow, and they galloped the rest of the way in silence, anxious now only to get out of the worsening blizzard.

It was close to six o’clock and Phoebe was standing at the window in the hall looking out at the white flakes swirling ever more thickly from the sky. Even on a clement evening the roads were too dangerous for nighttime travel unless in the company of an armed cavalcade, and Cato had gone out only with Giles as escort.

“Did Lord Granville say how long he’d be away, Bisset?”

“No, Lady Phoebe. But I doubt his lordship will return for supper now. Will you take it in the dining parlor or in the little parlor abovestairs?”

Phoebe glanced again at the long-case clock in the hall. The pendulum swung inexorably as the hands approached six o’clock. If Cato hadn’t returned at six, he wouldn’t return tonight. And if he didn’t return tonight, she didn’t know whether she’d ever have the courage again.

Then as she hesitated, she heard the sound of hooves on the gravel sweep before the front door. Giles Crampton’s robust tones carried through the oak. Where Giles was, Cato would be also. Her heart beat fast and she wiped her suddenly clammy palms on her skirt.

“In the dining parlor, Bisset,” she said in her most stately tone.

Cato came in, his face reddened with cold. Snow dusted his black cloak. “Damned March weather!” he announced, taking off his hat and shaking snow from its crown. “Brilliant sunshine this morning and now it’s readying for a blizzard. Put supper back for half an hour, Bisset, and bring me a tankard of burned sack into the library. I’m cold as a corpse’s arse.”