What I told him was an edited account of what had happened, from the constable’s starting the fire to his smashing the lock on the cabinet and going to search the upstairs. ‘I’m fairly sure he didn’t find what he was looking for,’ I finished.
‘No more would he. There was nothing here for him to find.’ From his tone I could tell that he wasn’t protesting his innocence, only saying he had better sense than to leave any evidence lying around. ‘So he came back downstairs. And what then did he do?’
‘Nothing, really. He drank some of the wine that I’d brought him,’ I said very carefully, ‘and then he left.’
‘And only that.’
I nodded, and I saw a flickering of warmth behind his eyes. ‘You must ask Jack to school you in the art of telling lies, for plainly you have not yet learnt the trick of it.’
I raised my chin. ‘It’s not a lie. He didn’t touch me.’
‘I am close enough acquainted with the constable to know that he has other means of doing harm.’ He didn’t press the point. Instead he said, as though he meant it, ‘I am sorry that I was not here.’
‘It’s just as well you weren’t. You might be up now on a charge of murder.’
‘Yes, I might at that.’ And with his smile the deadly calm that had been hanging round him broke and fell away. ‘And do I have to call my brother out, or has he been behaving like a gentleman?’
‘He’s been behaving.’ Mostly, I suspected, because of where he had discovered me, in Daniel’s bed. Jack Butler might be reckless, but that didn’t make him fool enough to trespass on what he would have believed was ground belonging to his brother.
‘I would find that most unlikely,’ Daniel said. ‘And you forget I have the evidence of my own ears against it.’
I’d forgotten what he’d overheard as he came in – Jack’s offer to escort me up to bed. And Daniel’s answer. I surprised myself by blushing. I had lived so long in Hollywood I’d thought that there was nothing any more that could embarrass me. I covered it by saying it had only been a joke. ‘He was no more serious than you were.’
‘Was he not?’ The smile held, and in that moment while he looked at me I swore that I could feel the air between us as though it had come alive. Perhaps it had.
But then he looked away again and everything was normal. ‘You have done well with Jack. It does appear that he accepts you in your role, and does believe you cannot speak.’
‘Yes, well, it wasn’t all that difficult. Your brother talks so much himself I doubt I could have got a word in edgeways if I’d wanted to.’
I had never heard him laugh. I liked the sound of it. He asked, ‘When was it he arrived?’
‘This morning. Through that window, actually. I’d locked the doors.’
‘And if you should be here and on your own again, I trust you’ll do the same, and keep them bolted fast till one of us returns. Nor should you hesitate to use the hole to hide from an intruder.’
‘What hole?’
‘The priest’s hole.’ With a glance at my uncomprehending face, he asked, ‘Is it not used in your own time?’
I shook my head. ‘We don’t have any need to hide our priests.’
‘No more do we. But such a hiding place does still have uses. Come.’ He took a candle from the table and led me from the kitchen, through the hall and halfway up the staircase to the broad half-landing with its panelled walls. ‘The tale is that the building of Trelowarth happened not long since King Henry had defied the Pope and set aside his queen to marry Anne Boleyn. The times then were as troubled as our own, and men who kept to the old faith were forced to say their prayers in secret, and to hide their priests whenever the King’s agents came to call.’ His fingers found the corners of a panel with a sureness born of practice and he gave a single push, and with a quiet click the spring gave way. A length of panel nearly my own height, hinged like a door, swung neatly outward.
In the space behind, a man could stand – or sit, if he grew tired – but he couldn’t do much more than that. It would be dark and close, but safe.
‘You pull it shut with this, when you are in,’ said Daniel, showing me the metal ring attached to the inside, ‘and none will find you.’
‘Have you ever had to use it?’
‘On occasion.’
It would be an uncomfortable place for a man of his height, and I said so, but he only shrugged.
‘I had rather stoop here for an hour than be stretched at the end of a rope.’
It was not the first time he’d implied he earned his living in a way that wasn’t legal, and I called him on it. ‘Is the law so merciless with free-traders?’
He took the question in his stride. ‘The law, in my experience, is more strict in its word than in its practice. And the constable does line his pockets well by his arrangements with the free-traders who choose to make their harbour in Polgelly, and does please himself to look the other way while we unload our cargoes. No,’ he said, ‘’tis not my free-trading that so concerns the constable. He would see me hang for something far more heinous in his view.’
‘For treason.’
Daniel swung the panel shut with a decided click, and turned. ‘Is that what he did tell you?’ He seemed curious, not angry, but I didn’t have the courage to repeat the words the constable had said to me, however much they resonated in my mind.
I didn’t need to. Daniel said, ‘And did he tell you that you would be damned yourself for comforting a traitor to the Crown?’ He smiled slightly without waiting for an answer, and a hardness touched his eyes although I knew it wasn’t meant for me. ‘I can but guess what words he used when he did phrase that speech. I am no traitor, Eva.’ With a level gaze and even voice he faced me. ‘I am loyal to the rightful King of England, as my father was before me, and will be so for as long as I do live.’
I knew that he was saying he was loyal to James Stuart, still across the sea in exile, and I could have told him that there was no future in that loyalty because the Stuarts never would regain their crown, and all their dreams of restoration would be killed on battlefields and paid for with the blood of countless Jacobites. But if I told him anything, I’d interfere with what was meant to happen, maybe change what was to come, and that might have a far more devastating consequence.
He must have seen the conflict of emotions on my face, but he misunderstood their cause. ‘I promise you,’ he said, ‘I will let no one do you harm.’
I couldn’t hold his gaze. I looked away.
I hadn’t realised he was close enough to touch me, but he did. He reached a hand to lightly take my chin and turn my face back round so that our eyes met, and he said again, more quietly, ‘I promise.’
I couldn’t speak.
Which probably was just as well, because at that same moment I heard Fergal coming back with Jack, and making noise enough to let us know it.
Daniel smiled, and let his hand drop. ‘Damn the man,’ he said, without an ounce of violence. ‘Even now he is developing the instincts of a brother.’
He was right. For it was Fergal, in the end, who saw me safely up the stairs that night and checked in all the corners of my room before he left me, and stood waiting in the corridor until I’d put the key into the padlock he had given me, and turned it to secure the latch.
And next morning it was Fergal and not Daniel who instructed me on how to do my hair.
He brought a looking glass and pins into my bedroom, sat me down beside the window, and with hands that were surprisingly adept and gentle, showed me how to wind the strands in curls and pin them into place.
I asked him, ‘Is there anything you can’t do, Fergal?’
‘Likely not.’ He’d moved to stand behind me and I saw him now reflected in the looking glass that I was holding, with his head bent, concentrating. ‘Though I’ll have to warn you this may not be in the latest fashion. I’ve not done this for some years, and even then I doubt I did it well. Ann used to say I made her look more like an ill-made bird’s nest
than a lady.’
‘Ann?’
He’d caught himself, and in the mirror his eyes briefly flicked to mine, then down again. ‘Ay.’
‘Daniel’s wife?’
‘Ay.’ Silence for a moment, then, ‘When she grew too ill near the end to attend to her own hair I helped her, for she was determined that he would not see her as less than she wanted to be.’
I was holding the hairpins. I fingered one thoughtfully. ‘Was she ill for long?’
‘Ay, for some months. It started as a cough that would not leave her, and it wasted her away, and by the summer’s end we’d lost her.’
I was silent in my turn, because essentially that was how I had lost Katrina too. I knew the pain of it.
‘He’ll have my head for telling you,’ said Fergal.
‘Fergal?’
‘Ay?’
‘Could you … could you do my hair a little differently than you did hers?’
His hands stopped, and again his eyes met mine within the mirror for an instant, and he nodded understanding. ‘I was thinking that myself, I was. Come, put that glass down and I’ll teach you how to do this back part, for we’ll not be fooling Jack for long if I’m here in your chamber every morning doing this.’
‘Where is Jack?’
‘He’s gone to fetch the horses back. Whenever we’re away we loose the horses in the paddock at Penryth where there’s a farmer who can see they’re fed and watered.’
I hadn’t even thought of the horses. They might have been starving in their stalls within the stable, and I wouldn’t have known. But when I confessed as much Fergal just said, ‘Well, you had other worries, I expect. And no harm done.’
I barely recognised myself when we had finished. All my hair had been piled up and fastened daintily, making a circlet on top of my head with a few curls escaping as though by pure chance. ‘I’ll never be able to do this myself.’
‘Ay, you will,’ Fergal told me. ‘’Tis nothing to facing down Constable Creed. Now then, put your pinner on your head,’ he said, handing me a modest-looking cap of soft, white linen, ‘and we’re done with this fussing and on to the next of your lessons.’
‘What next lesson?’
‘’Tis sure any sister of mine should know how to cook mutton without setting fire to it, and at the least, how to season a stirabout. Our ma,’ he informed me, straight-faced, ‘would be scandalised.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Sally didn’t lie at anchor long. Next morning Jack was off again in his turn, and I stood with Daniel on the hill below the house and watched the sloop’s white sails pass by the harbour of Polgelly far below us, heading east.
‘Where is he taking her?’ I asked, but Daniel only glanced at me and answered non-committally, ‘I cannot say.’
‘Because you still don’t trust me.’
‘Because,’ he said, ‘’tis best that you do not concern yourself with certain things.’ I felt him glance at me again although I kept my own face turned towards the sea and the departing ship. ‘Are all the women of your time so curious?’
‘The women of my time are many things,’ I told him. ‘Doctors, lawyers, heads of state. We can do anything a man can do.’
I couldn’t tell if he believed me. ‘Heads of state? Well, we have had a queen ourselves, till lately.’
‘Not only queens. I mean elected heads of state, leaders of parliaments.’
‘You jest.’
‘You don’t believe a woman’s capable?’
He seemed to give the matter thought. ‘’Tis not that I dismiss a woman’s capability,’ he said, ‘nor her intelligence. ’Tis only that I would be fair amazed to see society permit it. I would think that she would find herself opposed by members of my sex, and ridiculed by members of her own.’
I had to smile. ‘Yes, well, that does still happen sometimes. But at least the opportunity is there. We can be anything we choose to be.’
I looked away again. The Sally’s sails had grown much smaller now, a little blot of white against the rolling blue of the Atlantic.
Daniel was still thinking. ‘If in truth there is such freedom for the women of your time, then you must find it difficult to be here.’
I actually hadn’t thought that much about it. I’d only been here for short periods, and I’d had more on my mind than my freedoms and rights. But if I were to stay here forever, I thought, he was right. It would not be an easy adjustment.
To know that my opinions would no longer count for anything in public, and that all the legal rights I’d come to take for granted were no longer mine; to be dependent for support on someone else because I could not earn my living.
Daniel watched my face a moment, then he turned his own gaze out to sea and said, ‘My brother sails to Brittany.’
It was an open declaration of, not just his trust, but his respect.
I turned to look at him as he went on, ‘There is a harbour there where he has friends who keep him well supplied with wine and silk and wigs for trade, and where there are young brides whose husbands are too often gone off to the fishing. ’Tis most likely more than one child in that town does bear a passing likeness to my brother.’ He was smiling when his head came round. ‘No doubt the women of your own time would be too wise to fall such victims to his wicked ways.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. There’d still be some who’d swoon.’
‘But not yourself.’ His tone was sure. ‘My brother did remark upon the fact that you did seem unmoved by all his charms.’
‘Was it a blow to his confidence?’
‘Likely. Though he claimed that his purpose in telling me was to set my mind at ease, for his own mind has leapt to a certain conclusion since he did discover you in my bed.’
I wasn’t used to the dark light of mischief that flared in his eyes, and not knowing him well enough to know the way to respond to his flirting, I treated it lightly.
‘Well, at least it won’t happen again. Fergal’s given me padlocks.’
‘Has he now? Thoughtful man.’ He’d have said something else, but a sound from the road to the back of Trelowarth distracted us both – the hard clop of a horse’s hooves, coming along at a purposeful trot.
Daniel motioned me to step towards him and I didn’t argue, knowing that his size and strength, together with the sword he carried, would give me protection. It was not his sword he reached for, though. Instead he took the dagger from his belt and held it as he’d held it that first day I’d faced him in the study, with the blade all but concealed within his hand.
His other arm he offered to me as the rider came in view and I could see that it was not the constable, only an ordinary man on a high-stepping grey horse. I felt relief, but Daniel didn’t drop his guard. ‘Stay beside me.’
As we climbed the short slope of the hill towards the house, the rider turned the grey horse off the road into the side yard, and dismounted. From that distance I could only see that he was lean and wearing a white wig beneath his hat, and that his clothes looked to be fancier than those I’d seen here so far. This impression grew stronger the closer I got to him, and owed as much to the fabric his clothes had been cut from as to their design. His long jacket was dark-green brocade, with an elegant sheen to it, and his high boots were so gleamingly black that they looked as if they’d hardly been worn.
But his face, when he turned, was plain-featured and didn’t quite match the effect.
He ignored me completely, and nodded a greeting to Daniel. ‘Good morrow. I wonder if I might impose on your kindness. My horse has a shoe loose.’ The accent was hard to place. Scottish, I guessed, though it held a faint trace of the Continent.
I could feel Daniel’s shoulders relaxing. He said, ‘’Tis a dangerous road.’
‘So I’m told.’
For a moment the men faced each other and waited, and then the newcomer offered his hand with a smile. ‘The name is Wilson, Mr Butler, and I do bring with me the good wishes of our mutual acquaintance.’
&n
bsp; ‘I am glad to have them, Mr Wilson.’ Daniel sheathed the dagger in his belt so neatly that another person watching would have missed the motion altogether and not even known that he’d been holding it. He shook the stranger’s hand and, looking up the empty road, he asked, ‘You travel on your own?’
‘I did arrive with my man yesterday. We took rooms at the inn at St Non’s, and I charged him to stay there and wait while I came on alone to you here.’ He had noticed me finally. His eyes held polite expectation as he looked at Daniel and waited.
‘Forgive me,’ said Daniel, as though it had been an oversight and not protective instinct that had kept him from bringing me forward. ‘Mistress Eva O’Cleary, a guest of my house.’
Wilson bowed. ‘Mistress O’Cleary, your servant.’
I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I did what I’d seen women do in the movies – I made a deep curtsy, and hoped that was right.
To my relief, Wilson turned back to Daniel and asked, ‘May I stable my horse?’
‘In the back.’
There was nothing uneven at all in the horse’s gait, confirming my impression that his mention of a loose shoe had been part of a script, as had Daniel’s reply – like two spies trading passwords to make themselves known to each other.
I guessed, too, that their ‘mutual friend’ was most likely James Butler, the 2 Duke of Ormonde, who according to the reading I’d done earlier would still be in England, waiting to learn what the House of Lords would do in answer to the charges brought against him of High Treason. He would be impeached, I knew. And soon. But no one here was yet aware of that.
‘How fares our friend?’ asked Daniel.
Wilson, if in fact that was his name, was walking several steps ahead of us, the horse’s bridle in his hand. ‘He is quite well, though incidents of late have tried his patience, as you likely can imagine. It has been suggested to him he might seek to cure his restlessness with travel.’
‘If he has a mind to travel he has but to say the word and I will put my ship and crew at his disposal.’