The Silent Woman by Edward Marston

an invisible lover lying beside him. Anne Hendrik had merely shared him.
    Nicholas resumed softly. ‘What has happened between us under this roof has been very dear to me, Anne, and I treasure those memories. I did not dissemble. You saw me for the man I really was.’ He offered a tentative hand. ‘I would not be exiled from you for all the world.’
    ‘Then I will put you to the test,’ she said, ignoring the outstretched palm. ‘Remain here.’
    ‘How so?’
    ‘When the company leaves tomorrow, stay with me.’
    ‘But I am bound to Westfield’s Men.’
    ‘A second ago you were bound to me.’
    ‘I have given my word to Master Firethorn.’
    ‘You gave it just as easily to me even now.’
    ‘He and I came to composition.’
    ‘We have done that, too, often enough.’
    ‘I travel with the company as far as Bristol and then strike on alone to Barnstaple to … to …’
    ‘Go on, go on,’ she said. ‘State your true purpose.’
    ‘To settle my affairs.’
    ‘While I sit here like patient Griseld to await my lord’s return. Is that your hope?’
    ‘Anne,’ he soothed, ‘please hear me out. Imagination plays tricks on you. Be steadfast as before. Do but trust me until I return and I will—’
    ‘No!’ she snapped. ‘This house is barred to you from this day forth. I ask you to account for yourself and you cannot. I ask you to stay in London and you will not. There is only one thing for it.’ Her tone was icily dismissive. ‘Go to her, Nick.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘That creature who lies with you in my bed.’
    ‘You talk in riddles.’
    ‘The silent woman. Run back to her.’
    Nicholas felt a stab of pain that made him reel. At a time when he desperately needed Anne’s love and support, it was being withdrawn completely from him. He stood rooted to the floor as she mounted the stairs, and he suffered another spasm when he heard the door of her bedchamber slam behind her with an air of finality. It was minutes before he found the will to creep furtively up to his own room, to gather up his belongings, to take one last valedictory glance around and then to slip out into the black wilderness of a life without her.
     
    Midnight approached rapidly and Edmund Hoode quivered with anticipatory joy. It was the appointed hour when he and his beloved would come together at last and drown the weeks of enforced separation in the turbulent water of passion. He felt truly elated for the first time in years. At this stage in most of his romantic attachments, he would be suffering the cumulative humiliations that afflict those who are perennially unlucky in love and who are singled out by fate as objects of scorn and mockery. Jane Diamond had redeemed his earlier miseries. In encouraging his advances, she had given him a confidence he would not have believed possible, and in succumbing to his desires – nay, replicating them with her own frank yearnings – she had lent a touch of arrogance to his manner. He was a new man.
    Hoode deserved her. He had earned his good fortune by the sustained fervour of his devotions. Letters, verses and gifts had been showered upon his mistress. Every time she watched him perform at the Queen’s Head, he wrote additional lines for himself in a code that only she could comprehend. Every time they saw each other in public, she replied with secret gestures that were meaningless to anyone but him. Jane Diamond was not simply a vision of loveliness with a disposition to match. She was the finest creation of Edmund Hoode, poet and playwright, the character he had delineated for himself in his robuster fantasies, as near to perfection as a human being could be and with one quality that outshone all the others. She was his.
    He lurked in a doorway opposite her house and listened for the midnight bell. Only one minute now kept them apart and he used it to reflect on his newly acquired strength of mind. That very afternoon, Lawrence Firethorn and BarnabyGill had launched a two-pronged attack