The Deserted Bride. Paula Marshall

hands or lips, for Tib and the others had worshipped her from afar, how was it that she knew how to drive a man to distraction?

      For Bess had no doubt that that was what she was doing, and even as she led him on with one ploy her busy mind, obeying her body’s urgings, was driving her on to another. Some time in the future he would force a reckoning on her, she knew that, and her body throbbed at the very thought. But he was answering her and she must attend.

      “Now, that I already know,” Drew murmured, “that you are not Griselda. But are you Mother Eve who has already tempted—and taken—a man to lie on your breast, so knowing are your arts?”

      “I have no arts, husband, other than those which Mother Eve gave me when I was born. And no man has known me either. I am as untouched as Eve was when the Lord God took her from Adam’s side.”

      Could he believe her, so frank and free was she? He was not to know that all of the Atherington household was watching their lady with the deepest astonishment. They had never seen her behave like this before. But then, she had never sat beside her husband before. Drew, trying to maintain his self-control, shrugged. He would pursue the matter of Tib, and his wife’s familiarity with him, in private.

      “Leave that, wife,” he told her curtly. “We have other, more pressing matters, to discuss. After this meal is over we must have an accounting, you, your Council and myself. I shall be most interested to hear an explanation from you all as to why I was never informed of Sir Braithwaite’s incapacity.”

      One thing was plain to Bess. For all his easy surface charm—and there was no denying it—her husband was like a determined terrier with a rat in his jaws who would never let go, however much he was distracted, when he had set his mind on obtaining an answer to something which puzzled him.

      “Oh, I think that you are mistook over that, sir. These mistakes will happen, will they not?” And now it was Charles Breton, sitting on her left, who received her charming sidelong glance.

      “Oh, aye, indeed,” returned Charles, with a humorous duck of his head. “Most like the letter was lost, either on its way to us, or perhaps, after it was received.”

      “Very helpful of you, Charles,” commented Drew, his voice dry. “I scarcely think, though, that my wife needs your assistance in explaining away the odd circumstances which appear to surround Atherington’s affairs.”

      Thus rebuked, Charles smiled and changed the subject. It would not do to provoke Drew so hard that he lost his temper. Drew scarcely ever did so, but he had been a rare sight on the few occasions when he had lost control of himself. He wondered what it could be that was disturbing his cousin so strongly. Knowing of Atherington’s stalwart Protestantism, he asked a question to which he thought Drew could make no objection.

      “Are there are many gentry families around Charnwood, Lady Exford? I had heard in London that there were—and that a number of them held to the old Catholic faith.”

      Even as Bess began to reply, Drew swung around sharply to watch her as she spoke. Charles, he was sure, had no knowledge of the real reason why he was visiting Leicestershire, and was therefore, unknowingly, doing him a favour by raising the matter. It would save him from needing to ask such a question himself. He listened with interest as Bess agreed that there were a large number of gentry families in the county, some of whom were Catholic.

      “But not so many, I believe,” she ended, “as in Derbyshire, where the Babingtons, my distant relatives, who are settled at Dethick, still hold to the old Faith. Most living hereabouts, though, are Protestant.”

      “And are those around Atherington mainly Protestant, and therefore loyal, madam?” asked Drew, apparently idly.

      “Assuredly.” Bess answered him eagerly; she wanted him to know that there were no traitors in Leicestershire. “We are all, Catholic and Protestant alike, loyal subjects of our Queen.”

      Drew knew this to be true in the main. There had been many plots against the Queen designed to assassinate her, and replace her by her imprisoned cousin, Mary, the Catholic Queen of Scots, but few English Catholics had been involved in them. They had mostly been hatched abroad. This lay behind Walsingham’s uneasiness over the reports he had received, for they seemed to hint at a purely English conspiracy—a most disturbing development.

      Bess had, quite deliberately, spoken to be heard by all, not simply her husband, and as a result all heads had nodded in agreement when she had finished speaking. Her Comptroller, Walter Hampden, sitting not far from them, raised his goblet of wine and said, “With your permission, my Lord of Exford, I beg that on this auspicious day of your arrival we may all rise to toast, not only our good Queen Elizabeth, but the Protestant Faith.”

      Drew rose and held his goblet high. “With all my heart, my good sir. I give you Good Queen Bess and the Protestant Faith. Drink up, I beg you.” He threw his handsome head back and drained his goblet to the lees.

      The whole room echoed him, but Walter had not finished. He called on the servitor to refill his goblet, saying, “Again with your permission, my lord, I ask that the company may now be allowed to toast both you and your good lady, who has guarded Atherington’s interests so bravely on your behalf.”

      Now, what could he say to that, but, “Most excellent and all good cheer to you, sir. I will allow your toast—but only if you will omit any salutation to me so that I may be allowed to drink to my lady wife also.”

      A hum of delight ran round the table. Some of Atherington’s people, watching their new lord, had feared that he and his lady might be at odds, but such a statement cleared their minds of worry. As for Drew’s followers, including Charles, they were noting with some amusement that their master was using his notorious charm to win over his new subjects.

      Bess, somewhat nonplussed by Drew’s apparent change of heart, smiled up at him as he bent down to kiss her on the cheek before he led the company in the toast to her. “Is this reconciliation, my lord? Or have you some other aim in mind?”

      Oh, she was a clever minx, his wife! She did not trust him in the least—as he did not trust her. He whispered in her ear as he sat down again, “It is not to Atherington’s benefit for your people to think that we are out of humour with one another—even if we are. Smile, my lady wife, as I do—and thus we make our world happy. We may pursue our real ends when we are alone together.”

      Alone together! The mere thought of it had Bess quailing inwardly. No doubt about it, he would be the terrier and she would be the rat. But if so, why, as well as fear, did she feel a strange exhilaration? It was as though she had never lived until she had met him. She was on fire—and knew not why. She only knew that her husband was looking at her strangely, his blue eyes growing larger and larger as they drew nearer and nearer to her.

      Panic rose in Bess’s breast. She was sailing into unknown waters, a mariner lost in the steep Atlantic stream of which the poets wrote. To break his spell, deliberately woven, she was sure, to snare her, she turned away from him to see her great hound, Pompey, sitting up before one of the arras, his liquid eyes begging her to feed him.

      “Oh, Pompey,” Bess exclaimed, “I have quite forgot you in this hubbub.” She snatched a gnawed beef bone from the great platter before her, turned and tossed it to him, anything to escape her husband’s compelling eyes. Pompey, snarling, leapt upon it, and laying it before her, began to worry at it.

      “The hound which licked me yesterday, I suppose,” offered Drew smoothly, showing no sign that he had been thwarted in his desire to bend his wilful wife to his will. A line fit for a poet to use, he thought—so many meanings were there in it.

      “Aye, husband, and a faithful one. He honoured you, for until yesterday he chose to like none but myself.”

      The moment she had spoken she wished she had not made such an admission, for he pounced on it immediately. “An omen, think you, wife?”

      Before Bess could answer him, Pompey picked up the bone, now meatless, and trotted over to lay it at Drew’s feet.

      “Oh, traitor hound,”