Martin Stephen - The rebel heart

'Because you're my ward!' he said. 'I took you in as a child. I'm like a parent! I have a duty towards you, a responsibility. What sort of man is it who has a power over a woman that has nothing to do with mutual attraction or consent, and uses — abuses — that power to lure her into bed? It'd be like a father bedding his daughter!'

'Parents realise when their child has grown up,' she answered vehemently. 'Do you think you're the only one with power? I've got power too, haven't I?. The power to decide who I love. What if instead of you taking, I choose to give? What if as a wild little girl I fell in love with you for all the wrong reasons, because you were so brave and so handsome and you came out of nowhere like the knight in shining armour in the fairy tale and took me off to a magic land? Then ignored me? Ignored me so I started to hate you, thought you hated me, but found after all that I still loved you? And fended off awful men with greasy hands and fat promises and leery eyes because I'd decided long ago that if I couldn't have you I didn't want anybody? That I had to give in to the inevitable?'

'The inevitable?' answered Gresham. He felt like a sailor surrounded by a storm that had come suddenly and with incredible violence, but which in some way was not sinking the ship.

'That I was in love with this irritating, distant, impossible, patronising, stupid, infuriating man, whether I liked it or not. You're not abusing your power! If you did what I want you to do, you'd be listening to me for the first time in your life!'

She moved forward, until there was less than an inch between them. He felt her breath on his face, warm, sweet-smelling.

'I'll take and treasure your ring. But will you give me something I need? Will you see me as a woman and not as a child?'

The world seemed to implode on him. They fell onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and he gave up any sense of control.

Afterwards, when all was quiet and even their breathing had returned to normal, she turned her head towards him.

'My Lord,' she said, 'please. No torturings or agonising. I gave to you and took from you nothing I didn't wish to give and to receive. Nothing will change. I'll move into any chamber you wish except your own. I'll visit you at night, but leave by morning, if you so wish, or not visit at all if that's your choice.'

She had been a virgin. How much had he hurt her? He did not wish to hurt her.

'Marriage,' he mumbled. 'I must marry you.'

'Nonsense,' she said. Deftly she climbed off the bed, rearranged her clothing, put on the items they had torn off so recently. 'No true friend of yours, no one who knows you at all, would imagine you were ready for that. Did you think I wanted to trap you?'

He recognised that at the back of his mind, even as he had fallen on the bed with her, there had been exactly that fear.

'My Lord,' she said, and was prim and courteous now, 'what's happened is between us. And only us. With your permission, I propose to make it both secret and private.'

He sat on the edge of the bed.

'Keep anything from the servants?' he said. He was not at his most articulate.

'My Lord,' she said almost pityingly. 'The servants have had us sharing a bed these two years past, whatever the truth might have been. And been loyal enough to keep the news to themselves. It would be better if you left first,' she said, matter-of-factly. 'And if the right buttons were in the right loops on your doublet.'

He started and, rather guiltily, buttoned up his doublet correctly.

'Look,' he said, 'I know where we've been, but I don't quite know where I am yet. One thing only: no more "My Lord". If you have to use something, make it… oh, I don't know… sir?'

'Why, yes, sir,' she said, bobbing a curtsy like a simpering little parlour maid, with a wicked smile lurking at the corner of her mouth.

What did it mean when you left a girl you had just slept with, and found her even more beautiful after the event than you had beforehand? He had not wanted this to happen, or at least had persuaded himself so, but like her something in him had recognised a strange inevitability about the whole thing.

He spent the rest of the day in a daze. Mannion kept an impassive face and said nothing. That night, when he had gone to bed and the embers of the fire were flickering, there was the merest whisper of a door opening, and she stood by the bed. Hesitant, confused as he had never been before in his life since the night he had lost his own virginity, he drew back the cover. Jane slipped in.

Next morning when he woke she was gone, leaving no trace of her presence except for the slightest indent in the pillow and a lingering perfume. When Mannion came, they started the ritual of dressing as first light was coming up over the rooftops. If Mannion smelt a slight fragrance in the air, he said nothing.

He remembered these days as a strange interlude in his life. Outwardly, nothing changed with Jane, except they rarely argued. Once, when she had complained that the cook was paying too much for fish and she suspected the relationship between her and the fishmonger was not entirely restricted to fish he had responded by saying that as far as he was concerned the fishmonger could be going to bed with a school of whales. She had said that he ought to care more where his money went, and he had said it was his money… all like the old times. Just when they were about to start going at each other she giggled, and he stopped in his tracks. ‘What is it?' he said.

'It's your image,' she had said. 'Cook does look very like a whale! And she puts her lips together and blows out with a sort of — "Harumph!" noise. Just like the books say a whale does. And,' she said, getting carried away, 'the books also say that the breath the whale expels smells awful, and cook can smell awful at times.' Looking at her for the first time with the scales pulled from his eyes, he saw her life force, her exuberant energy. Ruby was the right jewel for her.

At night she came to his bed, and it was strange and new and unlike anything he had ever experienced. Sometimes it was gentle, sometimes almost violent and at other times they did nothing except talk to each other, in stage whispers as if Mannion who slept outside the door did not know what was going on inside. And for the first time in his life he talked to someone other than Mannion about his childhood.

London was convinced that rebellion was imminent the day after Grey assaulted Southampton. As it so often was, London was wrong. The apprentice boys, so frequently the source of riot in the crowded streets, slowly stopped working with half an ear cocked for disturbances, ready to down tools at a moment's notice and start to break some heads. The guards at Whitehall went back to normal manning levels, and it was rumoured that late one night cartloads of muskets and small arms rumbled and rattled their way back into the armoury in the Tower of London, whence they had been summoned to reinforce the guards at Whitehall.

And then the storm broke, one Saturday after what George would undoubtedly have described as Gresham's revelation in an attic.

Gresham was in deep thought when Jane came to see him. There was a purse on the table in front of him, open where he had just taken money out to give to an informer who had skulked in through the back door of The House. It was early morning, and the man had given Gresham much food for thought.

'Sir!' she said, breathless and flushed, 'there's something very strange happening at the Globe. One of the delivery boys was full of it this morning, and I've checked and it's true. Something I think you ought to know.'

'Tell me,' he said, only half interested, his mind churning over what he had just heard. News from a delivery boy did not seem likely to change the world.