The Wildest Rake

One of the ribbons with which the loving-cup was traditionally tied had fallen into her bodice. Before she could remove it, Rendel had fished it out, his fingers cool against her flesh. The guests had shouted in half-drunken amusement, adding lewd suggestions to which, blushing, she had shut her ears.

Rendel had grinned, a rakish insolence in his handsome face, and replied in kind, bringing a fresh wave of laughter, but she had seen no smile mirrored in the grey eyes. They remained hard and expressionless.

Her father could walk and talk again, but his illness had left him with a slight palsy, a trembling of his head which he could not control, and his mouth was oddly askew, dragged up at the left corner in a queer simulation of a smile.

He used a stick now, bent like an old man, but he had been able to resume trading, taking a young man into the household as his assistant.

Rendel had spent some hours closeted with a lawyer before their marriage, and Cornelia knew that he had straightened out her father’s affairs. She must be grateful to him. But the gratitude was a bitter burden. She felt that it imposed upon her the necessity of trying to like him, trying to please him. She ought to do so. She must do so. But it was harder than anything she’d had to do in her life.

They had been married in St Stephen’s Church, shivering in the damp chill of the stone walls, the light falling dustily from high windows, through the grey shadows which filled the church.

The words of the service had sounded far away, as though she heard them under water, but she had made the correct responses. Only Rendel knew that, as he placed the ring upon her finger, she shuddered briefly. His narrowed eyes had shot to her face. She had felt his gaze and, vulnerable, white, tried to smile.

They passed in procession back through the church, the organ playing loudly, triumphant. Andrew was at the back of the church. Her feet stumbled slightly as she saw him in the pew, but she quickly recovered. Rendel’s hand tightened on hers. She glanced up and met his watchful, comprehending eyes.

Enemy, husband, friend, she had thought then, with a grim sort of amusement.

A strange combination.

He seemed, always, to be able to read her mind, almost to know, before she did, what she would say or do. Her feelings towards him were so complicated that she had ceased, in despair, to try to make sense of them.

During her father’s illness Rendel had been a constant visitor, bringing fruit and wine, sitting with the Alderman and reading to him from the street broadsheets he bought for him, playing cards and amusing the family with the latest songs upon the lute. He proved to be thoughtful, considerate and good company under circumstances which might have been expected to bore him to distraction.

When they were alone he maintained a fraternal kindness which she found a great relief. Now and then, though, they stumbled into the old armed conflict; he teased, taunted, infuriated her.

Once, touched by some generous gesture towards her father, she had begun to apologise to him for her old distrust. His features had grown cynical, his eyes bored.

‘I do it for my own reasons,’ he had snapped. ‘You need not thank me. Do not read any high moral value into a small gift.’

She had scowled at him, at once repelled.

He remained inscrutable.

Cornelia could not reconcile all the different faces her bridegroom assumed and discarded at will.

She knew him for a rake, a gamester, a roaring gallant of the Court. She had seen him gentle as a woman with her father, lifting the old man’s inert body from the bed as though he were a mere feather’s weight. She had heard him sing merry children’s songs to her mother, watched as he mercilessly teased Nan into a reluctant smile.

That there were yet other aspects hidden beneath his smiling, tormenting mask she was convinced, but she was also sure that he would never reveal them to her willingly. Whenever she chanced upon some thread to the labyrinth of his secret mind, he rapidly drew down his shutters and excluded her again.

Once, coming into her father’s chamber while Rendel watched him, she had found him reading. He laid down the book while he lit the rushlight. The chamber was dusky with the coming of twilight.

She picked up his book and was surprised to find it a volume of poems, sonnets by the writer Shakespeare.

Rendel, turning, had taken the book away and pushed it out of sight, his face expressionless.

‘I have never read those verses,’ she had said curiously. ‘Should I like them, do you think?’

‘I will read them to you one day,’ he had said, oddly, a thickness in his voice.

She had sat down in his chair. ‘Read some to me while I watch my father,’ she had invited. She loved to hear poetry read aloud.

He had turned away, shaking his head. ‘No,’ he had said. ‘Not yet.’

When he had left she found the book and glanced through the poems again. They were strange, archaic, queerly exciting. Her reading had ranged from the high dignity of Milton to the light flippancies of the Cavalier poets, but she had known nothing like these. They set her senses jangling and made her tremble without knowing why.

That Rendel should like them aroused her curiosity. She might have expected him to enjoy the crude humours of the new poets, the roistering gallants of this Restoration age, but the Shakespeare sonnets had a strange depth, a weight, like the body of an old wine, potent with sediment from the past. He puzzled her in this as in much else.

Looking at him now, from under her eyelashes as they danced, she thought with a sense of excitement of the night ahead. He had not so much as kissed her hand since the day they plighted their troth.