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Her reward was “Good girl!” and a tightening of Tom’s arm. Her gratitude to him was expressed by her leaning against his strong warm body for further comfort. This resulted in a soft kiss on her cheek before Tom laid her down again, covering her with the sheet that had slipped its moorings during his ministrations.
“Try to sleep,” he told her. “I am going on deck to stretch my legs a little.” He beckoned at his man. “You, too, Geordie.”
“Growing soft, are we, master?” growled Geordie at Tom as they reached the deck. The storm had lifted and the sea had grown calm again whilst they were below decks. “The schnapps did its work right well and the doxy would not have objected to a little—well, you know what!”
Tom’s expression was an enigmatic one. “Oh, Geordie, Geordie—” he sighed “—you would never make a good chess player. At the moment I need her trust more than anything else in the world. Later—when it is gained—might be a different thing, a very different thing!”
Oh, blessed sleep “that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care”, as old Will Shakespeare had it, thought Catherine drowsily as she awoke to feel refreshed. She was not alone. Tom Trenchard was seated on a bench, watching her, a tankard in his hand.
He lifted it to toast her. “You are with us again, dear wife, after sleeping the day away. Your colour has returned, I see.” He drank briefly from the tankard, his brilliant blue eyes watching her over its rim before he handed it to her.
“Drink wife. We shall be in Ostend shortly, and there we may find shelter.”
“Oh, blessed dry land,” sighed Catherine, taking a long draught of ale. “I shall never wish to go to sea again.”
“You were unlucky,” Tom told her, “to find yourself in such a storm on your first voyage.”
“And was it luck that you were not overset like poor Geordie and me?”
“Oh, I am never seasick,” grinned Tom. “I have good sea legs. It is but one of my many talents,” he added boastfully.
Catherine laughed and, easing herself out of the bunk, handed the tankard back to him. It was odd not to be sparring with him. She decided to prick the bubble of his conceit a little.
“Why, dear husband, I vow that you would well match the play wherein I late acted. The Braggart by name—or Lackwit in Love. Which title best befits you, do you think?”
Tom met her teasing look and answered her in kind. “Why, Master Will Wagstaffe may write a play taking me as hero, calling it St George, or, England’s Saviour—and, if you do but behave yourself, you shall be the heroine. A new Belinda, no less.”
Something in his tone alerted her. “You saw me play Belinda, then? At the Duke’s Theatre?”
“Indeed, mistress, I had that honour. And a fine boy you made. I ne’er saw a better pair of legs—not even on a female rope dancer—and that is a splendid compliment, is it not?”
The look in Tom’s eyes set Catherine blushing. He was stripping her of her clothing in his mind, no doubt of it. She swung away from him lest she destroy the new camaraderie that had sprung up between them since he had succoured her in the storm.
After all, they were to live together for some time, although how long or short that might be Catherine did not know, and t’were better that they did not wrangle all the time.
By good fortune, to save them both, Geordie came down the companionway, his long face glummer than ever.
“Bad news, master, I fear.”
“And when did you ever bring me good?” Tom exclaimed. “’Tis your favourite occupation! Spit it out, man. We had best all be glum together.”
“Nothing less than that we may not dock at Ostend. There are rumours that the plague may be back, and the packet’s master has decided that we must risk all and go on to a harbour near Antwerp.”
“And that is bad news?” Tom taunted him, brows raised.
“Aye, for those of us who do not like the sea.”
“Antwerp or Ostend, it is no great matter. I have enough schnapps left to make both you and my dear wife drunk and insensible for the rest of the sea trip should the storms begin again. Tell me, wife, will that do?”
For answer Catherine made him a grand stage curtsy, saying, “I know my duty, husband, to you and to our gracious King, and if I must be rendered unconscious to perform it, I shall be so with a good grace.”
Tom rewarded her with a smacking kiss on the lips as she straightened up. “You hear that, Geordie? I shall expect no less from you.”
“Oh, aye, master. But don’t expect any pretty speeches from me.”
“Certes, no. The next one will be the first! Back to your bunk, wife, to rest. So far, so good.”
He was being so amazingly hearty that he made Catherine feel quite faint—and he was apparently having the same effect on Geordie, who sat grumblingly down on the dirty floor, complaining, “It’s as well that some on us are happy.”
Tom came over to sit on Catherine’s bunk. “And that shall be our epitaph, or, as you stage folk say, our epilogue. Will Wagstaffe himself could not write a better, nor his predecessor, Stratford Will. Rest now, wife.”
So she did, her mouth still treacherously tingling from his last kiss. Oh, he knew all the tricks of seduction did Master Tom Trenchard, and she must never forget that.
Chapter Three
Oh, the devil was in it that Hal Arlington had decided that William Grahame could best be snared by the wiles of a pretty woman so that, instead of carrying out this mission on his own, Stair was saddled with an actress who carped at his every word. And her every word was devoted to denying him her bed, which would have been the only thing that made having to drag Catherine around the Low Countries worthwhile!
The pox was on it that he had ever volunteered to try to turn Grahame at all! One last such junket, the very last, he had told Arlington and Sir Thomas, having at first refused to oblige them.
“I am seven years away from being a mercenary soldier for anyone to hire. If anyone deserves a quiet life, it is I. I have served my King both before his Restoration and after—as you well know.”
“The Dutch War goes badly—as you equally well know, Stair, and yours are the special talents we need.”
In a sense that had pained him, for were not those talents the ones that he had needed to survive in the penury which exile from England had forced upon him during the late usurper Cromwell’s rule? Cunning, lying, cheating and killing, yes, killing, for that was the soldier’s trade. Leading men in hopeless causes that he had won against all the odds, by using those same talents.
He thought that he had done with it, that he was now free to live a civilised life in peace. Not simply enjoying its ease, but also the pretty women to whom he need make no commitment, as well as music, the playhouse, books and the blessed quiet of his country estates, both in England and Scotland, when he was no longer at Court. Estates most fortunately restored to him when Charles II had come into his own again.
God knew, he no longer needed the money in order to survive. If he did this thing, he would do it for nothing, which, of course, Gower and Arlington also knew and was partly why they had asked him to be their agent in the Netherlands. As usual, the King’s Treasury was empty, and not needing to pay him would be a bonus.
So, he had agreed. Only to discover that they had also decided that he needed a woman to pose as his wife, and a pretty woman at that, skilled in seductive arts, for Grahame had a reputation for being weak where women were concerned.
“As a bird is caught by lime, so will he be caught by a pair of fine eyes,” Sir Thomas had said. “And we know the very doxy who will turn the trick for us.”
In consequence, he had found himself in his own proper person at the Duke’s Theatre, in company with Hal Arlington, trying to test the nerve of the young actress whom Sir Thomas knew that he could blackmail through her indiscreet and foolish brother.
And nerve she had, no doubt of it, by the way in which she had refused to let his unsettling jests with oranges, posies and gloves disturb her. She had also displayed a pretty wit, which she was now constantly exercising at his expense—except when she was seasick, that was.
Sir Stair Cameron, to be known in the Netherlands only as Tom Trenchard—Trenchard being his mother’s name, and Tom his own second Christian name—was leaning disconsolate over the packet’s side as it neared land, musing on his fate.
He lifted his face to feel the rain on it. Blessed, cleansing rain. By God, when this is over, he vowed, I shall refuse to engage in such tricks ever again, but now I must go below and help my disobliging doxy to ready herself to be on dry land again.
Tom did not reflect—for he never allowed the possibility of failure to trouble him—that having to take a young, untried woman with him might put his mission in hazard, even cause it to fail. He had made such a point to Gower and Bennet but they had dismissed it. And so, perforce, had he to do the same.
All the same, the idea was there, very like a worm that secretly eats away at the foundations of a seemingly secure house until at last it falls.
He shrugged his broad shoulders. No more mewling and puking over what was past and could not be changed, he told himself, no looking backwards, either. Forwards, ever forwards, was the motto his father had adopted on being made a baronet, and he would try to live up to it, as had always been his habit.
The day was growing late, and it was likely that they would not dock until the morning. Once on shore they would travel to Antwerp where they might, please God, find Grahame and finish the business almost before it was begun.
Time to go below to wake his supposed wife from her schnapps-induced sleep.
“Aye, that will do very well, mistress, very well, indeed,” announced Tom Trenchard approvingly. Catherine had dressed herself in a neat gown of the deepest rose. Its neckline was low and boat-shaped, but was modestly hidden by a high-necked jacket of padded pale mauve satin, trimmed with narrow bands of white fur, which reached the knee and was fastened with tiny bows of fine gold braid.
Round her slender neck was a small pearl necklace, and her hair, instead of being arranged in the wild confusion of curls popular at King Charles’s court, was modestly strained back into a large knot, leaving a fringe to soften her high forehead.
This had the effect of enhancing rather than diminishing the delicate purity of her face and profile.
For his part, Tom had also changed out of his rough and serviceable clothing. Although he was not pretending to be a bluff and conventional Dutch burgher, he looked less of a wild mercenary captain and more of a man who was able to conduct himself properly out of an army camp as well as in it.
He was wearing jacket and breeches of well-worn, but not threadbare, black velvet, trimmed with silver. His shirt was white, not a dirty cream, and he sported a white linen collar edged with lace that, if not rich, was at least respectable. His boots, as usual, were splendid. He had also shaved himself carefully so he looked less like the wild man of the woods, which Catherine had privately nicknamed him.
His hair was, for the first time since she had met him, carefully brushed and fell in deep red-gold waves to just below his ears. He carried a large steeple-crowned black hat with a pewter buckle holding its thin silver band.
The whole effect was impressive. No, he was not handsome, far from it, but he had a presence. The French had a saying, Catherine knew, that a woman of striking, but not beautiful looks, was jolie laide, which meant an ugly woman who was pretty or attractive in an unusual way. It could, she grudgingly admitted, be applied to Tom, who was better than handsome.
It did not mean that she liked him the more, simply that his brute strength attracted her more than the languor of the pretty gentlemen of King Charles’s court did. She had held them off when they had tried to tumble her into bed, and so she would hold off Tom. She would be no man’s whore, as she had told Sir Thomas Gower.
“Deep in thought?” offered Tom, who seemed to be a bit of a mind reader. “What interests you so much…wife…that you have just left me in spirit, if not in body?”
She would not be flustered. “Nothing, except that this morning, for the first time, I feel dry land firm beneath my feet again.”
Forty-eight hours ago they had docked at a wharf on the coast well outside Antwerp itself, which by the Peace of Westphalia was closed to shipping. Antwerp was not Dutch territory, being situated in Flanders, territory still under the heel of the Austrian Empire, and it was always known as the Austrian Netherlands. Being so near to Holland, it would be a useful place to work from—if one were careful.
Once safely on land again, Catherine had found the ground heaving beneath her feet as though she were still on the packet. It had needed Tom’s strong arms to steady her.
Today, however was a different matter. The inn at which they were staying was clean after a fashion that Catherine had never seen before. Its black-and-white tiled floors were spotless. A serving maid swept and washed them several times a day. The linen on her bed was not only white, but smelled sweet, as did the bed hangings. It was a far cry from the inns in which she had slept on the occasions when the players took to the roads in England.
The furniture in the inn was spare, but had been polished until it shone, as did the copper, pewter and silver dishes that adorned the table and sideboards. In the main inn parlour there was a mirror on one wall, and on the other hung a tapestry showing Jupiter turning himself into a swan in order to seduce Helen of Troy’s mother, Leda.
Few private houses in London boasted such trappings as this inn in Antwerp. Tom had told her that everywhere in the Low Countries might such wealth and such cleanliness be found—“We are pigs, by comparison, living in stys,” he had ended.
And now they were to visit the man whom Tom hoped would be their go-between with Grahame, one Amos Shooter, who might know where he was to be found. Early that morning, Tom had visited the address of the house that Sir Thomas Gower had given him as that of Grahame’s lodgings, but had been told that no one named William Grahame had ever lived there!
“Not true, of course,” Tom had said to her and Geordie, who was also tricked out like a maypole—his expression. “But this business is a woundy chancy game.”
Game! He called it a game! Catherine was beginning to think of it as a nightmare.
“Now for my second man. One I think that I might—just—trust.”
“Thought you trusted no one, master,” sniffed Geordie.
Tom ignored him. “We must look well-found,” he had ordered her. “Not as though we are beggars come to cadge money from a rich friend. Do not overdo matters, though. That would be equally suspicious. Do you not have a small linen cap that you might wear, mistress? Bare heads are for unmarried women.”
Catherine shook her head. “A pity, that,” he sighed. “Well, a good husband would be sure to buy his modest wife one, so we shall go to market tomorrow. Too late to go today!”
So, here they were, knocking at the stout oak door of a respectable red-brick mansion in Antwerp, not far from the market place, which was lined with medieval guild houses. It was opened by a fat, red-cheeked serving maid who bustled them through into a large room at the rear of the house, which opened on to a courtyard lined with flowers in terracotta tubs.
“Amos has done well, I see,” Tom whispered in Catherine’s ear as they followed the maid, for the house was even cleaner and better appointed than their inn. “I had heard that he had married wealth, but had not realised how much wealth. Ah, Amos, my old friend, we meet again,” he said as Amos, a man as large as Tom, came to meet them.
Amos’s welcome was warmer than Tom’s. He threw his arms around him and embraced him lustily. His wife, a pretty woman, plump and rosy, greeted Catherine much more sedately.
Embraces over, Amos held Tom at arm’s length, saying, “Old friend, you are larger than ever, and the world has treated you well enough, I see. And this is your wife? I thought you vowed that you’d never marry, Tom. Not after the beautiful Clarinda deceived you so!”
“Aye, Amos, but ’tis not only a woman’s prerogative to change one’s mind. This is my wife, Catherine, and yes, I thrive—a little. But not like you,” and he gave Amos a poke in his fair round belly. “You carried not that when we were comrades in arms together, nor were you so finely housed and clothed!”
“Oh, but that was long ago. I am quite reformed these days. I am a respectable merchant now—and it is all Isabelle’s doing.” He threw his arms around his blushing wife and gave her a loving kiss.
So, the beautiful Clarinda—whoever she might be—deceived him, did she? thought Catherine. She must have been a brave lass to manage that! But she ignored this interesting news for the time being, concentrating instead on talking of polite nothings in French to Isabelle.
Polite nothings, indeed, seemed to be the order of the day. Amos bade Isabelle see that food and wine were served to their unexpected guests, and then began a loud discussion of long-gone battles and skirmishes with Tom, as well as memories of comrades long dead.
Tom had volunteered to her earlier that the greatest virtue a successful agent needed was patience. It was, perhaps, just as well that Catherine had learned it in a hard school, for at first Tom talked of everything but anything connected with their mission. It was very pleasant, though, to sit and laze in this well-appointed room, drinking wine and eating what in Scotland were called bannocks, well buttered.
Was Tom lazing as he laughed and talked and drank the good red wine? Or was he picking up hints and notions from his idle gossip with his friend? Catherine could not be sure. Names were flying between him and Amos. Tom had told her earlier, before they had left the inn, that Amos had no true convictions and had always signed up with the side that paid him the most. “Republican or Royalist, Turk or Christian—all were the same to him.”
“And you?” she had asked him. “Were you like Amos?”
“Oh,” he had told her, giving her the white smile that transformed his face, “you shall tell me your opinion of that when this venture is successfully over.”
He was as slippery as an eel—which in this kind of an enterprise was almost certainly an advantage. Seeing him now, one booted leg extended, wine glass in hand, one might have thought that the only care he had in the world was to gossip with an old friend, chance met.
“And William Grahame,” Tom said at last. “What of him? I had heard that he had set up his household in Antwerp these days.”
Was it her imagination or did something in Amos Shooter’s bland, amiable face change? Did it harden a little so that something of the severe mercenary soldier that he had once been peeped through his genial merchant’s mask? If so, the expression was so fleeting that it was gone almost before Catherine had seen it. He was laughing again.
“William Grahame, Tom? I had not thought that you knew him. Not your sort of fellow.”
“True. I know him not. But I was told that he might be a useful man to make a friend of.”
“No doubt, no doubt. He lodges but a mile away from here. He wanders, I am told, from town to town. About his business. Whatever that might be.”
Did Amos Shooter truly not know aught of Grahame but his possible resting place? Both Tom and Catherine were asking themselves the same question, and getting the same answer. He did, but for whatever reason he was not admitting that he did.
Tom took a deep draught of wine—and changed the subject. The rest of the afternoon passed without incident. Mistress Shooter showed Catherine around the courtyard, and then took her through a little gate into a garden where herbs and vegetables grew, and, in summer, fruit on a sheltered wall.
Before they returned indoors, she said in her fractured English that she had learned from Amos, “Your husband should not trust this man Grahame overmuch. I tell you for your own good.”
“Why?” asked Catherine, trying to look innocent, and succeeding. After all, she did not need to be a great actress for it to appear that she knew nothing—for that was true.
Isabelle Shooter shook her head at her. “I cannot tell you. I should not have said what I did. But you seem to be a good girl, even if your husband is perhaps not quite the jolly man he pretends to be.”
Like Amos, then, thought Catherine cynically. But I would never have called Tom jolly. But, of course, he had been a jolly man this afternoon.
She said no more—for to know when to be silent is as great a gift, if not greater, than the ability to talk well, her Dutch mother had once said—which had the result that, when they returned to the big living room, Isabelle was holding her affectionately by the hand. She said to Tom as they left, “You have a pretty little wife, sir. Take care of her, I beg you.”
“Now what brought that on?” Tom asked her once they were on their way back to the inn, Geordie walking behind them. He had spent a happy few hours in the servants’ quarters, and was rather the worse for drinking a great quantity of the local light and gassy beer, although he was still able to walk.
“What?” Catherine asked, although she knew perfectly well what he meant.
