The Wildest Rake

Her eyes flashed, revealingly, to his face, and the colour deepened in her face.

‘All my life,’ she said, her voice trembling slightly. She hated to hear him talk of Andrew. She wanted to scream aloud that he had no right to turn his probing eyes upon her feelings, but she could only wait anxiously for his next remark.

‘Your father praised him assiduously. If his description is only half true, the doctor is another Hippocrates.’

‘He works himself to the point of

exhaustion,’ she flared, her voice shaking with rage. ‘He is always gentle, generous, unsparing of himself. Do not dare to sneer at him—you are not worthy to mention his name.’

His mouth tightened into a thin line. ‘I crave your pardon,’ he drawled icily. ‘I had not realised you were in love with the fellow.’

She tugged free and broke away from him, saying hurriedly to her mother, ‘I am so weary. I must go to bed. It is so hot in here and I have had too much excitement. Good night.’

The other guests called their good nights, smiling round at her, and she walked quickly to the door.

But Sir Rendel was there before her, opening it, bowing sardonically.

Coldly, she swept past him without a word.

Damn his mocking eyes!

CHAPTER SIX

Her mother came to her chamber later, when the guests had gone, to talk to her privately. Cornelia was pretending sleep behind her drawn curtains, but Mistress Brent shook her shoulder, so she yawned and slowly opened her eyes.

‘I must be quick, child. Your father will wonder what I am doing, disturbing you at this hour, but I had to speak with you. It was the same man who accosted us in the street that night, was it not? I was sure you too had recognised him. What did he say to make you so flurried?’ She wrung her hands. ‘I do not like this intimacy between him and your father. Yet if we say anything we may make a bad situation worse.’

‘It is a mad world when attackers get to dance with those they have attacked,’ Cornelia agreed, wearily. ‘Oh, Mother, I would dearly love to see that man punished for his insolence.’

Cornelia laughed involuntarily at the thought, then saw that she had hurt her mother, and quickly touched her hand. ‘Father has too much common sense,’ she assured her.

‘And you, child?’ asked her mother, anxiously watching her. ‘He paid you marked attention. You will not let him turn your head, will you?’

Cornelia’s mouth twisted wryly. ‘No, Mother,’ she said. ‘I will not let him turn my head.’

Nan, who had been helping in the kitchen for this one night, as a favour, came hobbling into the room and stopped, seeing Mistress Brent.

‘Goodnight,’ Cornelia said to her mother quickly. The last thing she wanted was for Nan to overhear a conversation about Rendel Woodham. Nan’s quick mind and sharp tongue had exercise enough over her liking for Andrew.

How had her father come to meet Sir Rendel, she wondered? She had taken his tales of the King’s graciousness with a pinch of salt, but now she wondered if, somehow, Rendel had discovered her identity, and deliberately cultivated her father out of some twisted reason of his own.

How his eyes had glittered when he touched the scratch she had inflicted on his cheek. There was that passing look of ruthless will which had alarmed her tonight. She feared him.

A few days later Alderman Brent spent an evening at Whitehall in Sir Rendel’s company, and came back full of excitement. The King was setting out next day for a progress through the countryside, and the Alderman had seen the lines of wagons waiting to be filled with the Court necessities. He talked excessively of the courtesies shown him by all Sir Rendel’s friends, and said, with awe, that he must be a very rich man, for he had lost at play a ruby of great cost, without so much as turning a hair.

‘Do you praise that, Father?’ Cornelia could not help asking him.

He reddened at this reminder of his puritan views of so short a time ago, but looked irritably at her. ‘We must bend with the wind, child. I do not say I would not rather have back the old Commonwealth. It was a sober, godly time. But we have to take the world as we find it. There would be no gilded leather in our parlour, nor silk gowns for you, if we stood out against the tide in public affairs. They harry old Commonwealth men from pillar to post, and I will not bring your poor mother to poverty for my sake.’

She lowered her head and said no more, seeing it to be useless. When she remembered how he had forbidden her to curl her hair or wear bright colours before Cromwell’s death, she marvelled at his changed attitudes. She had been brought up in a world so different to this one—a dull world, perhaps, but at least in that world she would have had no divided loyalties.

A few days later he bade her put on her best gown to take dinner with Sir Rendel at his house in Drury Lane. ‘And,’ he added sternly, ‘I want you not to look glum nor pert at him, for he has put himself out to be useful to me since we met, and I am in his debt.’

She did not answer, but later, when her mother nervously asked her if she meant to do as her father wished, she answered harshly that she would.

‘I’ll play the hypocrite, if that is what my father desires,’ she said coldly. ‘I’ll smile, and flirt with him, at your command. I have always been an obedient daughter, I hope, whether I was told to be virtuous or otherwise.’

‘When has your father ever ordered you to do what was not virtuous? It is not wrong to be polite to a host. This is not an ideal world. Honest men must live.’