The Beckoning Dream. Paula Marshall
Читать онлайн книгу.
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