London - Edward Rutherfurd [342]
With so much going on, she had not had time, she told herself, to think of Edmund. She had heard that his affair with Lady Redlynch was over but in the months after Christmas, when his own hopes were so low, he had not been seen about the playhouse and so they had not met. Nor had she thought about the subject of men at all. Except, perhaps, for Dogget.
It was hard to say quite how he had come into her life. She had seen the young boatbuilder before in the company of Edmund; but some time in January she gradually became more aware of him. He often seemed to be about, and he made her laugh; she was grateful for that. But it was a small incident early in February that had really impressed her. A group of theatre people and their friends had been going to the tavern together, Dogget among them. She had had to stay behind because there was so much to do in the tiring house. Without a word, but with a cheerful smile, Dogget had remained and helped her, sorting and cleaning costumes for a full five hours, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. At which she could not help thinking: would Edmund Meredith ever have done that?
A pleasant friendship had developed since then. Dogget would quite often come by and they would walk out together. She felt comfortable in his presence. Late in February he had kissed her, but chastely, as though he expected nothing more. A week later she had remarked teasingly: “I expect you’ve had a lot of girls.”
“Never one,” he said, with merry eyes; and they both laughed. Two weeks after that, she indicated that he could kiss her properly and found that she liked this too. So that when, near Easter, her mother had mildly observed – “Young Dogget’s courting: you think you’d be happy with him?” – she had answered hesitantly: “I think so. Perhaps.”
Indeed, if she had any doubt, it was because of something so absurd that she did not feel she could set any store by it. It was similar to the sensation she experienced whenever the company set off on the road for their summer tour: a desire to see new places, a need for adventure, like some traveller upon the seas. No such thoughts had ever afflicted the Fleming family so far as she knew, nor could she see the point in them. She decided therefore that they must be nonsense, a fleeting and childish fancy. If Dogget and his boatyard in Southwark did not satisfy this vague craving in her for the unknown, she did not think it mattered. She thought she could be happy with him. Then Meredith had reappeared.
Edmund felt pleased as the spring progressed. The play he devised had a stirring subject: the Spanish Armada. There were noble speeches from the queen, from Drake and other sea-dogs. There would be a long re-enactment of the action, in which it would be necessary to fire a cannon numerous times. It would, he was confident, be the noisiest play ever produced in London. The closing speech he intended to model upon the most grandiloquent language of Marlowe, pointing out how God’s hand had wrecked the Spanish galleons in the storm. “The common herd will love it,” he predicted. “It cannot fail.”
By late May, when the first act was done, Edmund felt even more confident. Once again he began to have a vision of himself making a figure in the world; and with this vision came the pleasant realization that he would like to have Jane at his side. It was time to reclaim her. In the first week of June he gave her a posy of flowers. The next week, a silver bracelet. And if, having been neglected, she seemed to hesitate, it did not worry him.
Jane had been pleased at her calm when Edmund first came to ask for help. Perhaps, she admitted, she had been a little intrigued by the change that had come over him; but then so were all his acquaintances. As for the flowers and the bracelet, she took them as thanks for the texts she had procured and nothing else. If he had meant